Ooooh, it’s all terribly exciting!!

Last Saturday, my mum, sister and I went on what even Michael Fish levels of underestimation would call a shopping frenzy. The source of this mass female hysteria was of course Alfie, and this trip was designed as both a female bonding session, and an excuse for certain doting grandmothers-to-be to indulge in a little spot of single handed economy boosting.

I’ve never really been one for the female ritual of shopping, truth be known I have always struggled to see the appeal of turning what can easily be a quick “in and out” (or even better a 5 minute browse online) into a day of meandering debate. As with so many things on this journey of impending motherhood however, something strange seems to have come over me and I think I finally get it. Not in a general sense, or even insinuating that I’m going to want to spend every sale season elbowing my way to the best bargains, but there is a part of shopping, the part where you spend time with your nearest and dearest getting excited about a big life event on the horizon that suddenly seems like a really wonderful way to spend your time.

Anyway, if I tell you the location for our day out was Milton Keynes, I think even those of you who haven’t seen the inside of a church since you were rudely awakened by a priest dowsing you in cold water will be furtively crossing yourselves at this point. Milton Keynes is indeed a mighty place in which to shop, and made even more lethal by the out of town area called Kingston, which in this case hit us with the double whammy of Mamas and Papas AND Mothercare in convenient side by side locations.

Mamas and Papas, in case you are not familiar is the sort of shop that makes you go weak at the knees, not just because pretty much everything they sell is just so gorgeous it makes you wish you were a baby again, but also because just after you have fallen in love with everything on display, you see the price tag and break out in a cold sweat. Fortunately, they also do the best sales in the world and having lost a large chunk of the morning, we all left the shop laden down with so many bags, it was looking for a time like someone was going to have to walk into the town centre to make room in Ammie’s somewhat compact Lupo.

By the time Keith met up with us some hours later we had run out of hands to carry the spoils of the town centre. We were also sat in a coffee shop looking for all the world like we had run a marathon, which I suppose to some degree we had really. Top of my favourite shops at the moment is H&M, who seem to have worked out that not everyone is obsessed by pastel colours and have produced a fantastic range of retro clothes. The sleep suit on the right, (white with brown dogs) has been lined up as Alfie’s first outfit by Keith, which I think is an excellent choice myself.

In other, non shopping related news, I have a few more things to add to the “My Bump Is Too Big To ...” list

Number 2: Reach high shelves. Oh yes, indeed. I tried to get the toothbrush off the shelf in the bathroom the other day and thanks to Alfie’s new found size, I could reach far enough over the counter. After much huffing and puffing I moved the counter and relocated (with even more huffing but rather less puffing) the contents to a more accessible shelf. I have noticed a similar difficulty in preparing veg recently too, where I used to be able to hold carrots over the composting bin to top and tail them, I realised the other day that I am now having to stand on tip toes and lean over the worktop to reach it.

Number 3: move in non linear fashion. Bit of an odd one this, and one that perhaps needs a little more explanation. In the last week, I have figured out that Alfie is now too big for me to change positions in anything but corners and straight lines. The bath was the first to raise its ugly head and bite me because like many people, I had never really thought about getting out of a bath before. My usual technique (I now realise) in the days when the law didn’t require I make beeping sounds when backing up, was to grab each side of the bath, push up and outwards into the room. A standard and sensible way to approach things I always thought. That was until the day I went to get out of the bath and ended up in a now familiar side-clutching-frankie-howard-face-pulling-oooh-moment (tm). A few days later I did the same when executing my usual morning bed dismount which frankly is just not cricket at 5.30 in the morning. I do feel a bit of a fool, but I can’t see any other way round it, other than to conduct all changes of position with the precision of a parading soldier.

Number 4: Sleep a whole night through. Ah, the first two trimesters were a time of such innocence as I scampered off to the loo in the middle of the night, gleeful because it was a sign of the miracle within. Now, I am not gleeful, I am sleep deprived and somewhat grumpy at the fact that it takes heavy machinery to allow me to turn over at night. I have seen whales arcing majestically out of the ocean to catch a seal with more grace than I can muster in the small hours when the aching in my hips has once again woken me up and I am forced to heave myself over. That said, I am feeling much more chipper this week after the most wonderful purchase any mother has ever made for their daughter – a body pillow. Oh yes, those full length huggable pillows may look like someone is having a laugh, but I tell you, using that thing as ballast is an almost biblical experience: So much so in fact, I have actually had to wrestle it from my darling husband.

And finally a quick update after Monday’s midwife appointment: Alfie’s heartbeat is still strong and healthy, and my bump measure 26.5cm, which is on the slightly small side of normal for my dates. Huzzah!

Big Brother Just Got a Big Stick

I was sent a link today which frankly chilled me to my very core.

The new NICE guidelines have recently been published to give healthcare professionals clear information on how to identify abuse to children. I’m glad of that, in fact I think it is LONG overdue and I raise a metaphorical glass in the hope that they will prevent future tragedies.
So why, you might be thinking, would the publishing of such virtuous guidelines chill me to my very core? Well the answer lies here

in section 1.3.11 which states that healthcare professionals should:

“Consider neglect if parents or carers persistently fail to engage with relevant child health promotion programmes which include:

• immunisation
• health and development reviews
• screening”

Still not obvious? Well basically what this clause is saying is that if I refuse to allow my child to follow the prescribed pattern of immunisations, then I am a neglectful mother.

Now I want to say up front that I am not against immunisation per se. I think that mass immunisation has been an enormous force for good and has helped to eliminate a lot of needless death with all the heartbreak that comes with it.

That said, I am not one to go quietly into the night (she says shamelessly stealing Dylan Thomas’ line) and for once, Keith and I have been instinctively single minded on the subject. It is our intention to vaccinate our children – BUT – to do so to our own timetable and for those diseases we see as a genuine risk, because I tell you what, there are a lot of components of these new combinations jabs which frankly, even the NHS struggle to justify in their own literature.

A quick trip to the NHS vaccination site and I can talk in actual examples, rather than fluffy hypotheticals about the jab with perhaps the worst reputation of all, the MMR.

The ‘R’ element of this jab is of course Rubella, a viral derivative of Measles which, according to the NHS’ own site “is usually mild and can go unnoticed“ when caught. The danger of Rubella is to the unborn child which in itself is usually enough to make any responsible adult proclaim loudly about how the unborn child should be protected at all costs. Therefore, the argument goes, we need to immunise everyone to protect these innocents from being at risk of developing Congenital Rubella Syndrome, which I can quite understand, as we are talking about an especially nasty, preventable set of symptoms.

My issue with including Rubella as part of the MMR is this:

According to the NHS site (which I am choosing to quote as any other source might be seen as having a nefarious agenda) “in the five years before the MMR vaccine was introduced, about 43 babies a year were born in the UK with congenital rubella syndrome”. So to put that into context, out of the +/- 500,000 live births in the UK every year, 43 of them were impacted to a greater or lesser degree (we aren’t told) by CRS. I don’t claim to be a great statistician, but I’m fairly sure that works out as around 0.009% infection rate. We are jabbing for a disease with a 0.009% non lethal infection rate.

Surely I can’t be the only one to find that strange.

When I was 13 I, like all my pre MMR peers was given a single jab for Rubella. As it happens, I was one of the very few who’s body take major umbrage at measles of the German variety and I was extremely ill. I lived though, and with no ill effects, but I was 13 years old, with a mature immune system and enough strength to see off the virus.

It also made sense to me, even then, that all of us girls be given the Rubella jab when we were on the cusp of womanhood, because let’s be honest, for once men can’t be blamed for this. If anyone is going to suffer because of Rubella, it is because a mother has caught it and passed it to their unborn child.

So why are we now routinely jabbing both girls and boys in infancy? Why would I want to subject my son to an injection that introduces something so unpleasant into his body when in reality, it makes no difference to man nor beast?

The answer is that I don’t, and quite frankly I could go through the rest of the elements on the vaccination schedule and make reasoned arguments to support my point of view for any one of them. Time was I could do that as a mature adult in a free society.

And that, my friends, is what scares me most.

And so it begins

I knew the day would one day come, it was inevitable really, but for some reason I hadn’t expected it to happen so soon!! I have now had to start the “My Bump Is Too Big To ...” list, and the honour of the first entry goes to “... cut my own toenails”.

I believe I employ a fairly standard approach to cutting my toenails, in that I do nothing more special than placing a foot flat on the floor whilst sitting down, and leaning forward to apply clippers to nail. It being the start of the waning moon the other day, it was time for my regular nail trimming.

As I do every other month I sat on the sofa with a reassigned ashtray (that’s the thing with being an ex smoker, you do have to find new uses for things like ashtrays) and merrily clipped my fingernails to their regulation “cute but practical” length.

Humming cheerfully away to myself I then carried on with my regular ritual and placed the ashtray on the floor in front of me to make a start on my feet. It wasn’t until I was leaning forward grabbing what would ordinarily have been foot but was now thin air that it occurred to me that perhaps I wasn’t as leant forward as I would previously have been.

Undeterred, I shuffled forward on the sofa until I was perched precariously on the edge and tried again. By this point I had attracted a doggy audience from their slumber under the stairs who stood heads cocked and ears forward wondering what all the fuss was about. I was only grateful Keith was occupied elsewhere.

Perching on the edge of the sofa proved unsuccessful so in a final bid to curb the shin slicing potential of my toenails I adopted a position that can only be described as “the crab”. Never has the process of nail clipping been completed with such speed, or such burning shame at FTC.

Falling in Love

There are certain moments on this journey that have had the ability to take my breath away. It still feels like a surreal concept to believe that there is a baby inside my bump, and while interesting to see a scan of what Alfie looks like, it is difficult to really bond with the little fella. Well it was until last week when quite by chance, he did something so incredibly sweet that it made me fall head over heels in love with him: he got his first case of hiccoughs! They only lasted about 10 minutes, most of which was spent furiously scrabbling around on the web to find out what the chuffing hell was happening, but more than any single other moment in this pregnancy, it will be the one I cherish the most as the first real connection I felt with him.

I think Keith had a similar moment a few days ago when for the first time he actually felt Alfie kick. I know it’s a bit late on, but there has been a combination of impatient husband and stubborn baby to blame for that one. Alfie’s usual trick is to wait until Keith has fallen asleep and is snoring gently with his hand still on my bump before putting on his show, which obviously I find endlessly amusing, and Keith does not. I think it was fair to say that Keith was VERY excited by finally feeling his son move and is now looking forward to October with a new found enthusiasm. He even threw the term 'skin-to-skin-contact' into a conversation the other day, entirely of his own volition. After I had asked him who he was and what he had done with my husband, he admitted that he might have been reading some of the books I have left lying about in strategic places. I have to admit I was hugely impressed!!

Why choose a homebirth?

I’ve been meaning to write something about this for a while, but have put it off because quite frankly, I’ve never been one to justify myself to other people. It seems a convenient and appropriate time to set down my thoughts now though.

The most important thing to explain first, I think, is the fact that Keith and I set out on this journey to become parents very much on our own terms. What was most important to me, and fully supported by Keith, was the idea that we wanted to make the process of becoming parents a positive experience. We wanted to write our own story, and for it to be the sort of birth story you read and think the person was clearly on crack because there is no way anyone can think so positively about their birth. That’s not to say either of us is foolish enough to think it would be easy, or painless but hard work and pain aren’t always the worse things that can happen to a person.

It became obvious within about a millisecond of looking into birth options that a hospital birth was just not going to fit any of the desires we had for the birth of our child, and home birthing seemed to become a much more natural fit for what we felt was important. The more I read, the more I liked what I was hearing, and it made me think seriously about what my feeling s were about birth.

My first thought is that I truly believe that birth doesn’t need to be treated as a medical event. In fact, the evidence I have read and heard leads me ever more down the path that says medical births leave women scarred, both physically and mentally. This was something that was borne out pretty strongly by the fact that almost as soon as Keith and I let slip we were trying to have a baby, and even more so when I actually fell pregnant, women seemed to delight in telling me their birth horror stories. I know that us women use talking as a way to process our emotions and thoughts, so I was always grateful to be allowed to share those experiences with the people telling them, but I found it profoundly sad that not one person came to me and said, “You know what? It was hard, and it hurt, but the whole thing was such an empowering experience”.

I don’t use the word empowering lightly, because it is a word I feel has been massively overused and become a bit of a cliché. I think it holds true in this case though, because the sense I got from each of the birth stories I was told, was that the women involved had been stripped of the control that was rightfully theirs and been subjected (another word I don’t use lightly) to what is now commonly referred to as a ‘cascade of intervention’ by the people caring for them.

It doesn’t require a lot of digging in this modern age of the internet to learn how we got to the position where women are routinely taken into hospital and asked to labour in a semi reclined position. The first part is simple: after WWII, housing was in an appalling state, and with the advent of the NHS, a lot of work was done to encourage women out of their “dirty, run down” housing and into “shiny and clean” hospitals, where the chances of them delivering safely were much higher. I can understand that desire, it fulfilled a need at the time, but that reasoning has become lost in the mists of time. What we are left with, in an age with the best standard of housing this country has ever seen, is that women are still educated to believe that hospital is the only “safe” place to give birth.

The second ‘given’ of the post war birth is the idea of giving birth semi reclined. If you do a search of the web on woodcut and midwife, you will see a lot of images of women sitting on various styles of birthing stool throughout the centuries. So why in modern times have we moved away from that idea and towards the idea of lying on a bed? Does this come from a new medical insight into the way the human body works? Nope, the exact opposite in fact. Short of standing on your head, lying semi reclined is possibly the worst position you could choose to give birth. The reason this position has become the standard approach, is this ... ready? ... ease of access for your midwife/ doctor. Well sign me up for that one then!! There is now a veritable smorgasbord of innovative ways to counteract any issues a woman might face from birthing in this position - from drugs to forceps to episiotomies – which to my possibly naive mind, seems a little like that poor bloke who went onto Dragon’s Den with an amazing invention to stop car oil glugging out of the spout when you are trying to top up the engine. If you didn’t see it I will summarise it thusly: He got ripped a new one by the dragons. Not because his idea wasn’t well made and executed but because he had created a solution to a problem that doesn’t exist!! If you want to stop an oil container glugging and covering your lovely engine with amber coloured nastiness you have only to do one simple thing: turn the can on its side. In the same way, I would suggest, us women should have a think about how our bodies are designed and why; perhaps then we might not need all these miracle cures for the ill that doesn’t exist.

All of what I have said above was the starting point from which I knew that I wouldn’t elect to have a hospital birth. One of the most important things for me was to be able to maintain my autonomy throughout the whole experience, and I just didn’t see how I could do that in a hospital. When I thought about what a good birth would look like to me, I ended up thinking about things like:

I want 2 midwives all to myself. I want to help nature along by staying mobile in the early stages of my labour. I want to be able to move around in familiar surroundings. I want to be able to eat and drink from my own kitchen when the need strikes, not have Keith running down the corridor to vending machines or being told I’m not “allowed”. I want to wallow in a birth pool in a room with low, calming lighting. I want to fall asleep afterwards with my husband and my newborn in our own bed.

None of these things were going to be possible if I went into a hospital to give birth.

On a more practical level, there is one last overriding reason which says to me I should stay away from hospital to give birth – hospitals are for sick people, and I’m not sick!! And in current times, when we are told that swine flu is going to cut vast swathes across our population by the time I’m due to give birth, I count that as just one more reason to avoid a place where sick people congregate for the relative sanctuary of my own home.

I know there are a lot of “what if” questions that people often use to scare or dissuade crackpots like me from wanting to try something as crazy as giving birth outside the confines of a nice safe hospital, and while I don’t intend to debate any of them here, I will give you the only answer I am able: we’ll take it as it comes.

Week 24 - A big moment at FTC

I've been holding off making this post because my hormones have finally caught up with me this week and I have been a bit of a mess, crying at pretty much anything and everything, which has not helped my levels of hydration in this weather!!

One of the things most likely to make me cry at the moment is the thought that our little boy is now in his 24th week. And before you raise an eyebrow, and nail a slightly worried look on your face, please remember, 24 weeks is considered the week of viability. In other words, should Alfie decide to come now, or any time hence, he has a very good chance of living.

Of course I'm not planning on giving birth just yet, but it is a real "smack-you-in-the-chops" moment when you realise that from here on in (God willing) you are actually going to be a parent. I have even started being able to visualise the labour and birth now, which I have never really been able to do before.

I suppose that has been helped by the fact that I took delivery of my birth pool this week!! I am more than slightly excited about this fact, and only just managed to resist the urge to unpack it on the spot. Keith was also uncommonly excited about the arrival of the pool, until he admitted his real interest lay in "borrowing" the pool to take down to Bill's house to use as a paddling pool in the back garden. Luckily for him I'm too hot to express any extremes of emotion at the moment (except crying) and he got away with a raised eyebrow and a head shake.

The most important thing I have to do with this post however, is to introduce you to Alfie's best gift so far. This is Little Boy Blue. The reason he is the most treasured toy in the shop is because he was knitted for us by my baby sister Mich, who did the most amazing job, especially considering she has never so much as picked up a pair of knitting needles before now!!! What she doesn't realise is that she has now signed herself up for knitting duty for the next 20 years, because what the point of having a child if you can't cackle with amusement on Christmas morning when they open some kaleidoscopic horror from a relative? Anyone with any especially eye watering jumper patterns, please feel free to send them over!!!