Thursday 16 April 2009

Knock, Knock, Knockin' on Baby's Skull


Sorry Internet, I have neglected you. With my Mum being here from Canada my feet haven’t touched the ground for the past couple of weeks! But I was at the midwife with the lovely Lynnette today so I thought I had better give a bit of an update.

Well, the good news is that she said my wee-wee is ‘clean as a whistle’. (Sorry, have just tried to type ‘urine’ and changed it to ‘wee-wee’ and back again; ‘urine’ just sounds plain daft.) This is good news... but in a weird way, completely secondary to the fact that I have absolutely mastered the art of whizzing in the little specimen bottle. I will spare you both the self exaltations AND the graphic description of my technique but needless to say NOT A DROP WAS WASTED, my fine friends. Sure, I may have contorted myself into something resembling a pretzel to get a good eye line of my wee-line... (no mean feat for a planet like me; see above picture and marvel at my current girth) but it was something to behold; have no doubt.

Also, the lovely Lynnette said my blood pressure is spot on. Nice one! Is it wrong to feel a little smug when she says that, do you think? Check ME out and my AWESOME blood! Hehehe.

Up on the couch I go for a bit of a poke and prod – and here’s the headline news! Proctor Baby Number 2 is upside down! Well, it’s no bloody wonder it has inherited its mother’s difficult gene. Yep; baby is currently breech. But the lovely Lynnette says it’s nothing to worry about as there’s still heaps of time for it to flip the right way up. I was breech (see what I mean, genes?) and came out The Hard Way (apologies for that Mum; better late than never eh?) so I hope that it does the sensible thing and starts swimming the other way. I have heard horror stories about babies getting forcibly turned the right way round and HELL NO! So everyone, please send me lots of ‘head-first’ vibes. Thanks!
Did you see my picture? What did I tell you? Shocking, hm? Well, LL says that sometimes when babies are t'other way on, they are a bit more sticky-out than babies that are the right way up. I'm measuring about a centimetre or so big for my dates... hopefully this is a temporary growth spurt which will even itself out over the next couple of weeks. I don't know what I will do with myself if I continue to expand at this wacky rate. What will become of me? Be sure to check the national press come mid-July -- that story about the woman who had to have the side of her house cut off so a man in a cherry-picker could get her out and to the Maternity Ward will be about me.

Lovely Lynnette also showed me how to feel where the baby’s head was. I have often wondered what sort of magical witchcraft she used to be able to determine this cos all I feel are lumps and bumps! But today when she did her tappity-tap-tap-tapping, and said that the baby’s head was upwards, she showed me how to tappity-tap-tap myself and sure enough, I felt the head a bit bouncy-ish as I was doing it! It was totally cool. Now I’m wrestling with a moral dilemma: should I let Jason in on the secrets of the tappity-tapness and essentially let ourselves be entertained by fundamentally bashing our poor, defenseless child about the skull or should I just leave the poor thing to gestate in peace? Eeesh! This mothering lark is mentally exhausting stuff!