Blobette

In my usual fashion, I have not been very good at regular blogging, so it has been almost six months since our notorious trip to Turkey, and boy how things have changed. At the very least, my body has changed quite a bit. Here I am at about 14 weeks pregnant:

And now here I am at about 24 weeks:

Please ignore the goofy expression. Chris had just told me to picture someone we know dancing, in an attempt to make me smile for the photo.

With only a couple of weeks left of my second trimester, I’m guessing there will be a lot of growth happening soon. I’m still not quite as bumpy as other friends who are at about the same stage.

Although I will promise not to make this into a pregnancy OR a baby blog, it stands to reason that there will be a mention of both here and there when I get around to posting in the coming months. After all, this is a blog of my life and this is the biggest thing going on in my life at the moment.

So I thought I would take this opportunity to tell the story of my pregnancy so far:

About two weeks after we got home from Turkey, I was starting to feel concerned that I was unusually “late”. I wasn’t very worried, but it  was enough that I casually mentioned it to a friend over dinner one weekend. Her response was to ask if I had taken a test yet, to which I pretty much just snorted and said no. But it got me thinking that it mightn’t be a bad idea, if only to put my mind at rest.

The chemists in Norway are, for the most part,  usually open between 9 and 5 on weekdays, so on Monday morning I stopped by on my way to work and just grabbed the first test I came to, without looking at the brand, price, function or anything. I felt pretty silly even buying it, to be honest.

When I arrived at work I did a bit of reading online about results and such, discovering that false negatives were possible early on, but that false positives were almost non-existent. With the test burning a hole in my thoughts, I drank a big glass of water and decided to get it over with so I could get back to my work day. This was at about 10am. Not clever.

I’m sure it would seem comical to me now if I could see my own reaction to the test result. It was a digital test, so I just had to wait a couple of minutes until it beeped and gave me my answer. In our office, the disabled toilet has been converted into a very nice “ladies room” and as such, is quite a large room as far as toilets go. Just enough room, in fact, so that when I read the word “gravid” (Norwegian for “pregnant”) on the test, I gasped and clamped my hand over my mouth in shock and staggered backwards several steps, almost losing my balance and falling into the toilet.

I don’t think I have ever been as shocked by anything in my entire life. Ever.

I don’t know how I managed to walk back down the hallway without fainting, but I made it to a female colleague’s office and in a very shaky voice managed to ask her if she had a moment for some “private girl talk” in the meeting room. The poor girl then had to deal with me very incoherently telling her all about how “ohmygodIjusttookapregnancytestandit’spositiveandohmygodChrisisgoingtofreakout…” and so on.

Luckily for me, this colleague is a very calm and rational person and managed to let me get the news off my chest without freaking me out more. But I still had the entire day to sit through at work before going home to break the news to Chris. To be honest, I don’t know how I did it, but I managed to stay the whole day and distract myself with work.

Without going into excruciating detail, Chris took the news much better than I thought, though we decided not to tell anyone until the 12 week mark so that we both had time to digest the idea ourselves. By the time week 12 rolled around, we were still both pretty freaked out about the whole thing. Neither of us had expected this little event, and we were incredibly unprepared to deal with it. I’m sure this is why the human gestation period is so long compared to other animals.

The next week I went to the US for work, which gave each of us some breathing and thinking room, and a couple of weeks after that I went to Sweden for our company Engineering Seminar. Thanks to my various illnesses over the previous couple of months, it didn’t take much to convince my work colleagues I couldn’t drink because my doctor was concerned about my immune system. It sounded like a pathetically thin story to me, but they bought it nonetheless. What trusting souls.

Unfortunately someone at the seminar had contracted swine flu, and managed to pass it on to about 20% of the 520 or so people who attended, me included. Then I brought it home and infected Chris with it. So our plan to roll out the news to family and friends was somewhat ruined by both of us being bedridden with “bacon sniffles” for two weeks.

Overall, I have been quite lucky in terms of pregnancy symptoms. Despite feeling horribly tired for the first couple of months, and a bit on the queasy side, I never really felt sick and only threw up once. That is, until I started taking tamiflu to treat the swine flu infection. Then it was barf-o-rama for about six or seven days. Not fun AT ALL.

Since then, things have eased up considerably. We’ve gotten much more used to the idea of being parents, and I have been once again free of the worst of the pregnancy woes that some women are hit with. The most I could complain about is a bit of heartburn and some back pain.

At about 17 weeks, we had our first ultrasound:

And since we weren’t able to get a very confident opinion on the gender, we had another one at around 21/22 weeks, at which we discovered it’s very likely that our little “Blob”, as we’d been calling it, is a girl. She is now affectionately known as “Blobette”.

According to the doctors, everything is normal and healthy, and both she and I are growing at a good, healthy rate.

That about brings us up to date now. And before you ask, yes, we have thought of a name, and no, we’re not telling.