Week 31

Nuts

There wasn’t much space in there now. There was a time when the little one had an expanse of fluid to play in - to swim about, to bungee on his cord, to throw starfish shapes, to practice his karate kicks. Not now. He was growing, and Jas’ belly was straining with it. It was big and round, and there were no longer any soft or spongy belly bits: it was as tight as a proverbial drum. It was as though Jas had swallowed a massive macadamia nut, and it had lodged – whole – right beneath her belly button. With these space limitations, the blueberry’s movements were limited to constricted wriggling and pushing against Jas’ bones, much to her discomfort.

Being squashed up in there, his movements were becoming more obvious. Stronger. His hiccups were easy to feel now: it was a bit like a frog trying to bound its way out of a bag. His rolls and slides reminded me of how cats gleefully rub against your leg, those long slow rubs that start with their chin pressed against you, then their cheek and their neck sliding against you. Watching Jas’ bump as the baby is writhing about is reminiscent of watching someone’s eyeball move underneath their closed eyelid; it’s a bit spooky. Then there are the other rather violent movements that - rather comically – can have Jas air-borne from the shock of them, and feels rather like a salmon trying to buck its way out of a fishing net.

All this activity was enjoyable for me to experience, but more and more, the pronounced movements kept Jas awake at night. Inconveniently, he felt the need for regular nocturnal wriggling, sometimes violently so, with “WAKE UP, MUM!” type kicks. I was naturally sympathetic to Jas’ stilted sleeps, but then Jas began lying at night so that her belly pressed against my back, and the kicks started waking me up! Clearly this wasn’t on, so I asked Jas to roll over. I was not meaning to be inconsiderate, but there was no point in him waking us both up, eh?

Submerged

So what was it like in the womb? The little one could apparently hear and see and the uterus is almost transparent and filled with salty fluid. Like a little ocean. Was it like being suspended underwater, in the sea, near the shore, at night, near party boats, with the muffled noises of music, surf, and fish farts, with random flashes of light from the bobbing boats?

I googled “what is it like in the womb”. Apparently bright light can enter the uterus, and it is supposedly quite noisy “in there”, being awash with the noise of Jas’ blood and digesting food making their way about. Loud noises potentially can surprise him so much that he pees! Note to self: don’t shout so loud when Arsenal score.

Week 25

The pregnancy literature typically marks each month of pregnancy with what can be expected in the mum & baby: together with the aches, cramps and growth spurts there has always been “continued absent-mindedness”, which Jas has marvellously shown on numerous occasions. However, in month seven we can apparently expect “increasing absent-mindedness”, which I found mildly disturbing...and Jas gave an excellent reason for me to find it mildly disturbing the same day that I read it. I came home from work – before Jas did - to find a candle in our bedroom burning away; Jas had lit it in the morning – 11 hours previously – and duly forgotten about it. I began to wonder how our house was going to last the full term! Our thoughts of having a home birth might be limited to a marquee with a camp fire in the garden beside our blackened abode. Perhaps I should start to child-proof the house now and hide all the matches...

Humorously, I did the same thing the next day. Ha ha. We had a few candles lit in the bathroom in the evening...Jas found one of them burning early the next morning. Naturally, I was just making Jas feel better about her absent-minded incident. 

If I might be so bold, I’m getting quite knowledgeable with this pregnancy business. When Jas was telling me about a colleague of hers who had given birth by caesarean (“through the sun-roof” as my father-in-law beautifully describes it), I asked if the incision was vertical or horizontal. Jas looked at me as though she was about to ask the being who had just entered my body to kindly leave, but instead asked “Why?” Well, apparently it matters for future births – it’s better to go horizontal than vertical.

I’d also started diagnosing Jas’ ailments. When she complained of a brand new kind of cramp, I promptly indicated that it was probably Braxton Hicks contractions. She looked at me questioningly (really, I think she needs to spend less time baby shopping!), and I explained that it was a temporary tightening of the uterine muscles, getting practice for the heavy duty contractions that will be squeezing our little one into the world.

    

Anyway, enough of the medical malarkey. We’ve been playing with our little one. Jas’ bump has quickly become as round and tight as Roseanne Barr’s fitness ball during a workout, and occasionally she pops it out to play with when we’re bored. Our little one seems to respond to a spot of belly rubbing or poking, and wriggles about to our touch. Maybe we’re just annoying him and he’s trying to get more comfortable! Whichever it is, it’s entertainment for us... 

The little one also likes to play. With balls. During one of Jas’ pilates lessons she was lying side down with a small ball under the belly. As soon as the ball came in contact with the belly, little “Beckham in a bag” started kicking vigorously at the ball. Was this coincidence? Jas rolled onto the other side for the same exercise...as soon as the ball touched the other side of his dome, he thumped the ball again! If he was reaching the other side with his foot, maybe he was practicing his overhead kick. Maybe we have a future Arsenal player in the making. It’d be the most likely way I'd get a season ticket!

Week 24

Manners

In the early hyperemesis days, Jas had a bad train trip to work, where she was forced to stand when she was unwell, and then had promptly passed out. Since then I’d become more aware of pregnant passengers in search of a seat on my daily commute. One day I looked up from my book to see a young lass moving down the carriage with a cargo that looked like it would be delivered before we arrived at London Blackfriars. I stood up so quickly – without thinking - that it was as though I had just sat on something very pointy. She was grateful for the seat, and I hoped Jas would have pregnancy-aware chaps on her train, however unlikely that may be.

On another occasion I was again about to leap out of my seat at the sight of a slightly protruding undercarriage moving towards me, when I checked myself and thought, “Is she or isn’t she...pregnant?” Predicament: Do I stay seated and risk being rude and inconsiderate, or stand up with the chance of being offensive?  

Interruptions

The little mans’ movements is something amazing and entertaining for me, something I can tap into when I want to. But Jas feels it all the time - little jiggles or slides at any time of the day or night. It’s something I find hard to imagine, having something living inside you that can interrupt anything you are doing, wherever you might be doing it, without warning. The closest sensation I could think of was the day after a bad curry. It would be distracting, say, in a meeting at work, or performing something important or precise. I could imagine female laser eye surgeons being unable to work during advanced pregnancy! I heard an exclamation from our bathroom one evening: kicks during a toilet visit. I guess it could help things along.

Research

We’d started doing a lot of online searching for the growing list baby of essentials we had to buy. Well, ok, Jas had...I was just viewing the odd thing of interest, a potential bargain, that she’d found. One day she emailed me a link of an item to have a look at while I was at work. I replied: “Ok, will look at this at home. Checking out breast pump websites at work will probably raise eyebrows.”

And those breast pumps – have you seen them!? They look like something from Dr Who, not something you’d have suctioned against your tender bits. I was certainly glad I didn’t view the sites at work, with the images showing the “operational side” of the devices, and phrases like: “Change your pumping rhythm any time you wish. Relax and enjoy the experience...”

We began to learn that we had certain post-birthing practices to consider. “What shall we do with the placenta?” I asked one day. Jas looked at me as though I’d just told her I fancied having a pet lizard. I told her that different cultures have certain rituals: fathers in Peru bury the placenta in a far-off location so it doesn’t become “jealous” of the attention paid to the baby; some Philippinos bury it with a book to increase the intelligence of the child; I’d heard of some families freezing it to cook as part of a roast for a special occasion (“Afterbirth or gravy, nan?”); in the UK, most hospitals actually sell it to cosmetic companies. Jas said: “Let’s leave it to the hospital to recycle”. Those L’Oreal advertisements won’t ever look the same...

Week 23

Parenthood practice

I think our child was assuming control of my wife, making her do things to prepare me for fatherhood: Jas had been sick; she peed all the time; she woke me up through the night; she needed constant feeding; she needed help getting her shoes on; she cried, without obvious reason, wetting my good shirts with her tears. He was in there, maybe doing a Jedi mind trick with his little fingers, periodically having Jas do something out of the ordinary, unexpected, out of her control, just when I might be getting on top of it all. 

Lightning

Up until this point our babies’ movements could have been kicks, punches, tumbles, cartwheels, hiccups or somersaults. Now, he had no place in the uterus to do much of this, as he got plumper and the tummy tighter. And so I started seeing his movement, not just feeling it. And for once, it was something I experienced before Jas! It first happened on the south side of the mound, on the far side of the dome, where Jas could no longer view. I was amazed when I first saw it. I began to peer motionless at the tight belly skin, unblinking, until a little limb, foot or hand would jab visibly outwards. It was like watching for lightning bolts in a big storm, seeing a force of nature suddenly show itself in momentary flashes. “Did you see that one! That was a big one!” And then suddenly Jas could see, as if he knew he was being watched, and the skin around the navel – further north - begun to bubble. We were highly entertained. We don’t need a TV anymore.

Recycling

Sometimes you learn something that you’re not quite sure that you wanted to learn. Up until recently I had been blissfully unaware that our bub would have a need to pee – inside the womb - despite the fact that we all obviously do this once we’re on the outside. I’d just naively thought of our foetus as something like blowing a balloon up, with stuff flowing in through a little tube, making it grow, nothing coming out. But no; our little one actually drinks the amniotic fluid in which he is suspended...and then, when he has processed it, puts it right back. 

Taking this snippet of information - reluctantly - to the next logical step, I thought: “What about...number two’s?” Thankfully, most of what he “eats”, he uses, and the rest is saved until just after birth. After I googled “baby’s first poop”, I joyfully discovered that a new borns’ first bowel movement is quite a memorable one. Hm, I can’t wait.

Week 22

Note: Rather than clumsily writing “he/she” or “it”, from now on I’m going to refer to our banana-sized bub as “he”. I’ve always thought of him as he (Jas has never been quite sure either way), and I’ve had what I’m sure is a prophetic dream about “him”, when I took him mowing. If I’m wrong, I’m sure our little girl won’t mind the little Arsenal beanie, and will find a use for the football... 

Since I felt our little one move last week, Jas was always alerting me to when he was dancing about so I could try to experience it. But it seemed as though the little thing would stop wriggling as soon as my hand touched Jas’ belly. It was quite uncanny. Jas thought I had a calming influence and my touch was somehow relaxing the blueberry. Nice idea, but if this was true, I sincerely hoped that it would carry through to babyhood when I could merely lay my hand on the head of our bawling bub and lull it to sleep. I’m sure bacon will fly before that happens.

One evening I felt loads of bumps. Like a frog in a sock. The little one was kicking like crazy, as though there was half a football team in there. Sometimes I pictured him floating about, like someone in a space station, playfully tumbling about in the weightlessness, pushing himself off the walls as he bumped about, perhaps like a zero gravity bouncy castle (wouldn’t that be fun!!).   

At five months, the pregnancy literature abandons its fruity comparisons. Now, apparently Jas’ uterus was the size of a basketball.  Jas’ belly really was expanding quickly: as she entered a room, her bump came through the door quite some time before the rest of her. The “linea alba” had also appeared, a line straight down the belly that looked as though someone had drawn on Jas with a brown pencil. Funnily, it wasn’t quite a straight line - as though someone had drawn on Jas with a brown pencil, with their eyes closed.

As I climbed into bed one night, in the dark, some time after Jas - as happened often with Jas getting tired early now - I noticed that my side of the bed had decidedly shrunken. There seemed to be a tall wall of pillows that had encroached on my mattress real estate, with my sleeping wife somewhere on the other side. Had I done something wrong, perhaps? Not unlikely. It took me a while to get to sleep, with my limited snoozing area and with my mind seeking possible reasons for the curious new construction that loomed in the dark. The reason was: lying down with a pregnant belly often didn’t really provide much relief; at times, support was needed to take the weight of the growing little person...thus, a few of the dozen ornamental pillows we had were actually put to practical use.

Week 20 – Boy or girl?

Movement

“My bellybutton looks funny.”

Pre-pregnancy, a comment like this from Jas would have resulted in me looking sideways at her and saying something like, “What are you talking about?” Now, nothing Jas says is particularly unusual. Now, she could have indicated in passing that she was growing a sixth toe. “Oh yeah? Give us a look,” I would say. I took a look at the aforementioned navel. It did seem different: while the outside had moved with the expanding belly, the button bit seemed to have stayed put, some distance inside. Overall it had a slight megaphone shape to it, as though I would be able to hear words of wisdom from our soon-to-be first-born. I put my ear to it: no words, just faint gurgling. 

To those who wouldn’t know Jas was pregnant, it might seem as though she was talking to herself; that she was starting to go a wee bit senile. Not so: from time to time, she just had a few things to say to the blueberry, often when he/she was on the move. One day, from another room, I heard her exclaim: “I know you’re in there!” I looked around wondering what it was I could be doing wrong, but then realised that – thankfully – Jas wasn’t talking to me.

Jas’ sanity might also be questioned by strangers who saw her jump in her seat on the train. She’d be sitting quietly, perhaps reading a book, and then suddenly spasm as though her seat had suddenly grown a few pervy fingers and pinched her firmly on her derriere. Her jolts were responses to the little one moving about; what were once pleasant, bubbly sensations caused by his wriggling had become strong little stabs, as though he was practicing Bruce Lee moves and trying to escape. His kicks always caught Jas by surprise.

More name searching. We had a formative list of names we might fancy. But there were others I found in our baby books that would definitely not make the cut: in the top five would be “Ikea” (!), a girl’s name from Sweden. Whatever we have, I don’t want to have to assemble it!

20 week scan

Technically, we were half way. I was looking forward to seeing the little one in ultrasound action, to see how it had progressed, to see how big it was, to get another nice little profile picture to pop on the fridge. But once the scanner started sliding over Jas’ greased-up bump, we realised it wasn’t interested in showing off or being helpful to the ultrasound lady. He just showed us his butt. No matter how much the scanner slipped and probed above him, all we saw was his back and his butt. Ms Ultrasound even tilted the bed, rolled Jas from side to side, asked us to go for a walk, to jiggle about a bit (Jas, not me), in order to encourage a re-arrangement in foetal position. No luck. It was like he was hanging on to the sides refusing to budge. Jas could have done cartwheels, but - as though he was in one of those big clear spongy balls you could roll down hills in - he’d resolutely maintain his antisocial posture. The only picture we were going to get this day was of two stubborn little bottom cheeks.

What we did see was its internals. It was great. We could see clearly see a beautifully curved spine, kidneys, and a heart bidoomping away. We could even see the individual chambers of the heart, and – when Ms Ultrasound added colour to the screen – the (blue) incoming blood and (red) outgoing blood. Amazing stuff. I wondered if one day it would be possible to attach little screens with inbuilt ultrasound scanners to pregnant bellies so dads-to-be could watch their little ones being “Bruce Lee in a bag”, in the comfort of their own home. Ok, so maybe it’s a bit shallow and wouldn’t be so comfortable for the mum-to-be, but it would certainly beat a fish tank, eh?

We’d spent weeks trying to decide whether or not to find out the baby’s sex at the scan. Essentially it came down to whether we wanted it to be a surprise on birth-day, or whether we could go out and get it a Spiderman jumpsuit and an Arsenal beanie. Eventually, we came to a final, resolute, irrevocable decision: we’d ask Ms Ultrasound to write the sex on a piece of paper and – without us looking - put it in an envelope so we could decide later. Genius! (I thought of it). But at the scan, Ms Ultrasound said she couldn’t do that for some strange NHS-policy reason. So...on the spot we said: “Ok, we want to know.” 

So, without further ado, I can announce to the world that, without a shred of doubt, our child will be: a boy...or girl. Its little butt was in the way, wasn’t it? No undercarriage was sighted!