The waiting starts.

As soon as you fall pregnant, you know that there's a time limit on it. One day, before you see this same month again next year, you will hold another child in your arms. And it's inevitable to always be looking ahead.

Sometimes I wish for the impossible- that there is nobody else in the world who is pregnant at the same time as me.

Sure, there's heaps of comfort in grieving together at the loss of your pre-baby body and all the ailments that come with a body used to working for one start to work for two that we can all share, but there's several frustrations about it for me.

Firstly, the company gained in this life-bearing process also means that the comparisons can begin "Oh, you're so small in comparison to..." (insert name here of someone who's baby is gestationally 3 months older than yours- or worse, someone who is due after you), or even "Sarah's baby was 3 kgs at birth, and yours was 4. It must be because of all those hot chips you ate in the early months" (That one can be attributed to my gorgeous mother, who forgets that she already made this same comment last week.) 

 

Of the frustrations of sharing a pregnancy with close friends, here is the hardest part for me. And a warning to readers- this is a string of highly selfish thoughts I'm about to unleash for you, but which at the moment, I seem unable to control.

Several of my close friends have been blessed by God and given children around the same time as me. But with a distinct difference- the three of us have now travelled through 2 pregnancies together, and with each time, I'm the last one still waiting.

Hayley gave birth to her beautiful second daughter, Zara, yesterday. And I am totally over the moon about this new life God has created. I'm happy for the birth and it brings me heaps of joy to hear about it and I'm sincerely delighted for my gorgeous friend, who has gone through her painful 40 week waiting period herself. Unfortunately, my excitement is also intertwined with a niggling thought "I'm still 10 weeks away."

These 10 weeks weren't that long until yesterday. I could have been pregnant for another 20 weeks and have been happy enough to do it. Now they seem like an eternity away.

What's weird about this is that I love being pregnant. I haven't had severe back pain like my friend, Hayley. I'm still coping well in this pregnancy, even with the 3 weeks of over 33 degree days out here and still carrying small, which helps me lug myself up our stairs at home to the 43 degree rooms upstairs. This new little life isn't ready to be born yet. I'm not yet organised anyway, and still this niggling in my brain has started.

My second friend, Sarah, is due in another 5 weeks for her daughter. Again, I'm sure the distance between March 9 and April 11 will be more than a little frustrating for me. When she was due for the first time with her boy, she was 4 months ahead, which was enough for me to settle down into a "my-baby-won't-survive-if-it's-born-now. It's-good-to-be-waiting." mentality. But only 5 weeks ahead is close enough to stay wishful for an early birth. Especially if this heat doesn't let up and even more pressing, if Avalon gets sick again and requires middle of the night stand up cuddles. I must say though that after having a 41 wk and 1 day pregnancy with Avalon, an early birth isn't really a forseeable probability.

The moral of the story is that I'm going to spend the next 10 weeks praying about being as content as possible. For contentment is of great gain! And even if in the next pregnancies ahead I draw the short straw and have to be the one to wait, hopefully the strength God gives me now will naturally flow over to them, too.

Poo frustrations

I woke up this morning to the unmistakable smell of poo.

My subconscious decided to tag out and let my consciousness deal with this one. Which was a real shame. Waking at 6.30 when your child happily sleeps till 8 is almost torture. I think worse than if said child actually woke you up herself.

So I stumbled into the offending room to see that I hadn't been mistaken, or disappointed by my acute sense of smell. 

Avalon was still sound asleep, but once again, her nappy couldn't cope with the volume of excrement which came out during the early hours of the morning, and as such, her hair, hands, legs were covered in chunky pieces of digested food.

I stood there, gagging and contemplating my options;

1. Go back to bed and delay the clean-up for another couple of hours.

(This wouldn't have worked, I knew I would be too disgusted to even get my mind in the space for sleep, so it quickly became an un-option.)

2.  Busy myself for another few hours and try to enjoy my early morning child-free.

3. Wake her up and bath her and just get it all over with.

Option 3 won. After all, I should treat my child the way that I would expect to be treated. If, unknowingly, I was sleeping in a pile of my own poo, I would hope that someone would wake me and clean me up. I couldn't do anything less than that for her.

So I woke my groggy girl, and held her at arms length while briskly walking to the bathroom. And after removing the saturated nappy, I plonked her into a warm bath. Good morning, gorgeous girl! 

I apologised to her the whole time and explained that she was smelly and needed a bath. I was thankful that despite her sensitive nature, I didn't have to contend with the mess and her screaming. She actually seemed to enjoy the wake-up call and splashed happily while I used a washer and copious amounts of body was to rid her of the offensive odour.

The bath took me 15 minutes until I was satisfied. The poor baby was pretty pink from scrubbing when I removed her to dry her off.

The irony doesn't escape me- I am almost obsessive-compulsive when it comes to dirt, and here I am, cleaning up child number one for the millionth time of these types of incidents, and I want 5 more of these? I must be out of my mind! 

I'm hoping the next 5 don't have digestive systems that only seem to function at night.