Moolies

Another good day for getting nearer...

Nicey nicey positive things!

So, tomorrow is Nov 1st. I leave work on Nov 21st. 3 weeks to go.

We're nearly at 5 weeks to go now. 35 weeks on Sunday. We're going to make it.

Tomorrow is when I / we do the "big shop" - go down to Mothercare in the morning with a list (and more importantly, get fitted for maternity bras - the one thing that I am *not* about to buy sight unseen), then everything else is on the web.

And I read a lovely thing in a pretty good book last night called "Trade Secrets" (a present from a girl leaving work called Jessie, who is a lovely person all round) which seems to be just tons of "handy tips": to get a soft toy and sleep with it next to my skin for a few weeks so that when she's born, it'll smell of me, and she'll feel extra comforted by it. That's the loveliest sort of nice, human thing to do, isn't it. A good thing then that I previously bought one soft toy from the Early Learning Centre which is lovely and soft to touch. Very amusing to be snuggling down with a soft toy after about 25 years.

Have also bought Liz and whoever the helper is on the day their thank you presents, as well as a thank you for Alex and Beccy - although when they'll get here god only knows what with the postal strike.

Nothing negative today that you don't know already so given that it's a lovely sunny autumnal day, I can't be bothered to bring the mood down.

5 weeks, 3 days

Every day is currently being counted off like a blessing.

Woke Mackay up in the night with my agonised groans as I tried to shift in the bed. I couldn't actually get out of bed this morning since the top of my right leg refused to work without eliciting large amounts of pain. Had to sort of push myself out of bed with both legs tight together. It really is intolerable, and yet I have to keep reminding myself that there are many women who have it worse, with eclampsia and god knows what.

So another day working from home. Another isolating day. I did say this a while back didn't I, how much I utterly hate being forced to be on my own. I think I need people.

On top of which, I can barely believe it myself but I actually managed to fuck up an entire day's work yesterday, which I am now beginning to start again. Don't ask: it was such a banal mistake; the kind of awful rubbish that only a tired and not quite concentrating person could make.

Meanwhile, Tom has made me very jealous by being involved with www.mysociety.org which has launched today. Unfortunately dayinalife, my lovely idea I've never been able to manage to do doesn't quite fit in to the category so it couldn't be funded. I'll have to think of other things as I'm going along.

Show no show for launch

You'll have to excuse the following scene:

Aha - actually I've just moved it in to "extended entry" because my brother alerted me to the general grossness of the beginning of the content. At least, i think that's what he meant when he mailed me and said "I'm officially not reading Moolies anymore".

Yeah right, *I believe it!!

A leg end in my own lifetime

Physio reckons it's a vein thing, not a ligament thing. Still hurts - nowhere near as much - the gorgeously lovely ministrations of Claire over the weekend (that and a packet of frozen peas) has reduced the "Jesus! Fuck! Ow!" factor somewhat.

But. I now am the proud owner of a lovely grey NHS crutch, and a pile of "tubigrips".

Just call me hobblin' Hurley.

Quick update on dr sears "REM sleep" discussion

So according to Mackay the expert psychologist (as opposed to Mackay the actor, the astronomer or any of his other perfectly legitimate disguises), those suffering from sleep deprivation experience more REM sleep.

So it's sort of the other way round ie: one sleeps lightly, because one wakes more often, and therefore one dreams more variously, radically and weirdly.

So there you go. Now if I can just use the Buffy marathons to have a few dreams about David Borean... thingummy I'd be very happy, thank you.

A bigger boat?

So my right knee kind of gave up the ghost. You'll have to excuse my language, I have begun to embark on a marathon Buffy viewing orgy which I have promised myself I would do at the end of the pregnancy. Unfortunately this is not the end, but since I can barely walk around the flat, it will have to do.

Imagine if you will the back of your right knee - and things that may be going on just under the surface, such as ligaments, pulleys, levers - the kind of stuff that knees just "do".

Now imagine a ligament or rubber band, if you will, on the left hand ie: inner side of the back. It makes sense that there is one there, doesn't it. Now imagine injecting a whole load of ligament loosening chemical in to your system, otherwise known as "Progesterone".

Now think of the fact that buggeration, you've got what has been described previously as a nest of blue, nasty various veins which have suddenly appeared there. I will persist in calling them various, btw, since I find the alternative, "true name" invokes bad spirits in my head that have a tendency to make me want to start shuddering and otherwise feeling unwell. What does one do to help these various veins disappear - well, use Aesculus Gel, which is a bloody good invention from a bloody good herbalist company, for a start. But one also stretches ones legs out and up at every available opportunity - ankles higher than the heart, right?

Oh yeah, right. And that just happens to put the aforementioned ligament under constant strain.

On Thursday during the day it hurt but I thought, damn - more bloody variousness! Thursday night, performing the usual greasing ceremony and squidged the somewhat acrid smelling Aesculus Gel in to the back of my knee...

Bang.

It kind of went... well...

B'doing, actually.

Next thing I know, a small area of red on the back of the knee, accompanied by a lump which distinctly *isn't* blue. Mackay touched it as an experiment after me screaming and entirely failing to be able to stand up. You could see the hole in the ceiling where I rocketed up within miliseconds.

So. Ah. We have a problem. This time, I'm putting the bloody frozen peas on it. I phone the physio people myself not waiting for Liz. I have an appt at 11am Monday. And, for now, I get a weekend basically confined to the house, whilst a massive magnetic storm swallows half of Canada in huge aurora and stops GPS working properly.

I, meanwhile, order curry, lay on the sofa, wince even more than usual when moving and watch Buffy. Life could be both much better, and much, much worse.

Sleep info

Aha. So Dr Sears yet again comes to the rescue with more information I haven't found elsewhere. This is in the Month eight section. Ok, so I'm only just in month eight (although, you know - it's 6 1/2 weeks to go now, not 7. I'm counting every day down right now).

"Frequent night waking. There are several reasons for night waking in the final months. One is that your sleep cycles change, and you may experience more REM sleep – a sleep state in which you dream more and awaken more easily. Also, your enlarging uterus makes it difficult to sleep*. It presses upward on your stomach, causing heartburn, and downward on your bladder, necessitating frequent nighttime trips to the bathroom. And babies in the womb seem to have their days and nights mixed up as daytime motion lulls baby to sleep. Then when you rest, baby awakens, stretches, and awakens you up by knocking on your insides. Most mothers find sleeping on their side supported by pillows to be the most comfortable. If heartburn is a problem, try sleeping slightly upright on several pillows.

The REM sleep thing though is very interesting - because you wake up every 2 hours or so sometimes it means that you have anythings up to 4 or 5 (on the weekend) very intense dreams, dredging your subconscious for titbits of news, anxieties or detritus picked up during the day.

*No kidding. I don't - well, thinking about it I suppose that it's because of the whole heartburn thing but sleeping on my side is a total non-starter. I have 4 pillows and a V shaped support pillow which I prop myself up on since I get 2 guaranteed heartburn attacks per day - 1 about an hour after breakfast (which I don't understand - gluten free sugar free cereal and goats milk? What is there to give me heartburn in that lot?) and 1 as I'm going to bed / trying to get to sleep. So imagine if you will, sleeping on your side with your wedge firmly in place to keep the uterus from pulling too much, but with your back arched up and your top half draped over a pillow mountain.

So ever mindful of the "sleeping on your back "could" cause oxygen supply to reduce to the placenta (yeah... "could" - in all likelihood won't, but when you've got christ knows how much weight bearing down on these two arteries snaking up your back from your pelvis you kind of think - ok, I'll take this in to consideration), if I sleep on my "back" I am also sleeping basically upright. And I've got used to it, so I can, just about. Slept through till 5.33 from 11 the other night!

I can see that the sleep obsession is not going to leave me - particularly after she arrives. Ach well.

Weird

You know, I'm certain that the seratonin high is beginning to crumble. I can barely believe how unutterably *miserable* I was yesterday. Just, really, horribly negative about a whole lot of things. Couldn't get myself out of it until about 3pm.

Yet today, here I am with exactly the same things bugging me or making me go "Oooohhhh... fuck" in the night (or as is currently the case, making me clench my eyes shut, groan and hold the top of my belly as if hydrochloric acid as escaping from some inner valve), but I feel entirely different. Welllll... fairly different anyway.

Chemical depression. It should be banned!

Yet more promotional material

So it appears that Warren Ellis' very saleable (I always thought) series of 1 off stories called "Global Frequency" have been otioned for a series (see the bottom of this otherwise tedious American media news story) - one assumes in the "Alias" type mold or something. Some gorgeous action bird type as a central character with support action men folk helping her out - that sort of thing.

He's being uncharactistically cagey about it but it's all money in the bank which will help him do other things. I would put links to all Warren['s stuff as he does it but since that would occuply a large part of this blog I leave it to your discretion to wade through the seemingly endless pages of hacking, bloodletting, smart alec remarks and unusual events he spews in to the world on a monthly basis.

Hurt

Looking down - well, actually, I'm wrong, I was going to say "anywhere past my bellybutton" but of course it's now *above* my bellybutton too.