I’m not a patient person.
I don’t particularly like it when people tell me, 10 weeks in advance, “Ooh I’ve bought your birthday present, you’ll LOVE it!”.
I don’t like buying Christmas presents weeks and weeks before the big day, because I get too impatient and want to give it to them straight away.
I especially don’t like waiting 40 weeks to meet the tiny human I am incubating and will be raising for the next eighteen years. It just doesn’t seem fair. ‘Here, have TWELVE WEEKS LESS THAN A WHOLE YEAR growing this tiny human that will kick you relentlessly and make your emotions crazy and you will love it before you even meet it, BUT you can’t meet it yet’.
I thought the waiting between various ‘milestones’ was hard. There was waiting for the 12 week scan, which seemed to take forever, and then waiting for the 20 week scan, which seemed to take even longer. I didn’t think there could be a longer ‘ugh this is taking forever’ period than between 20 and 30 weeks, but since 32 weeks it has been dragging. I feel like every day is taking forever to pass and I’m constantly looking at myself and thinking surely I should be pregnant-er by now.
(Yes, ‘pregnant-er’ is a word. The film ‘Juno’ says so.
You don’t argue with ‘Juno’ on this blog. Glad that’s sorted).
When you’ve never been great at waiting, it’s even harder when the physical act of waiting is getting harder every day. D couldn’t believe how huge I was today – I mean, he said it in a nice way, like that the bump looked big and lovely (and he avoided cheesy words like ‘blooming’, I’m a girl not a daffodil) – but it’s all the same to me, big bump means sore hips and sore knees and more swollen feet… and healthy growing baby (which is always a yay! thing) and generally not being able to walk around a shop without the following three things happening –
a) the bump knocks something over and I can’t bend down and pick it up so everyone sees a pregnant girl standing above a load of fallen inappropriate items (I’m still aiming for condoms for the irony but they’re on a really high shelf and I can’t jump that high with bump on board) and I just have to do that awkward shuffle away as everyone looks at the inappropriate litterbug.
b) I have to say ‘excuse me’ to someone who invariably ignores me, so I clear my throat and say it again, they LOOK AT THE BUMP and continue to ignore me, so I try and push past, knock into them and yep, there’s the death glare. One day I’ll achieve the double whammy and when my massive bump knocks into a grumpy pensioner/smug thin lady/sends a small child flying, my equally massive arse will knock an entire shelf of Durex items over. Crying children, incensed OAPs and lube everywhere.
c) Baby will start trying to engage, get very annoyed when it can’t engage and first it’ll headbutt my bladder, making me have to run waddle to the toilets as fast as I can, and the second one crisis is averted it’ll start trying to engage again, making me feel like someone is stabbing me in the bits so every other step I take I’m either making a weird kind of grunting noise or shouting obscene words, like a penguin with a tic and no bladder control.
This is life now, and I have 6 weeks left of it.
On the bright side, I realised something today, and instantly demanded that D humour me and join me while I ran waddled downstairs and out into the back garden. He was born in 1984, I was born in 1994, and our baby will be born in 2014, and this would’ve made me happy normally, but I think a combination of tiredness and hormones made it seem like the biggest revelation since forever. Still, it’s pretty cool – and it made for this lovely photo opportunity, so I regret nothing!
The Speed Bump 