29 weeks. Just so you know.

We had the second official ultrasound yesterday. To be honest, the unofficial one was by far the most exciting – back at 12 weeks the baby was baby-shaped and small enough to see all at once, and active. Yesterday, possibly as a result of all the kicking it had been doing in previous days and all the food it had been making me eat, it decided to sleep most of the day. When the picture came up, we got an ariel view of the head, and that was mostly it. We have a couple of head shots showing one eye, but neither of us can really work out the angle as it was explained to us. We saw an arm and a leg and the torso and the heart, and everything’s in the right place and the right size, so that’s great. But it didn’t leave us with much of a sense of the Baby as Person. (I typed “Parson” there first. That would be interesting.)

In fact, even though I’m still small, the baby is measuring ahead of its dates – we were told that the due date according to size, or however they work this out, would be April 29. That’s a little more than a week before the real due date. I’m hoping it’s just a growth spurt and things will even out – I don’t want a gigantor baby, and I really hope this isn’t an indication that I have gestational diabetes. I’ll be happier when I’ve finally done that screening test – next Wednesday – and hopefully ruled it out.

The tech was surprised that we didn’t want to know the sex, and made us look away when she measured the femur, in case there was anything there to be seen. Then she said “So I’m the only person who’ll know…”. Heh. Later, when we got a quick shot of the legs as she swept the sensor over that side again, I sort of thought maybe I was seeing something, um, pokey; but I didn’t look to hard. Still, I think I need to assume it’s a boy, because I’m still not used to the notion that it might be, and I don’t want to be disappointed on the day, if it is. And as the tech pointed out, not knowing will stop me from buying too much stuff, because there’s a lot less gender-neutral stuff out there. This is a Very Good Point, as now that I’ve started buying clothes I’m slightly afraid I might lose the run of myself – and my credit card – altogether. It’s all so cuuuute.

In other news, we bought a bed frame so that the bed will be at the right height for the co-sleeper to be attached to it. It feels very strange to be so far off the ground. And we booked a weekend in Austin at the start of April, in a nice B&B that doesn’t take children. And thus, our child-free holidays will have their swan song.

Also, my hips have started to hurt in bed. It’s very strange and distressing to me that I’m actually sort of relieved when it’s time to get up, because by then I just can’t get comfy. I think there will come a time when I get up and spend the last few hours of the night on the sofa, where I can sort of curl up and thus alleviate the pressure on my hip bones.

My string cheese won’t string. It doesn’t taste as nice if I have to eat it widthwise, like a banana. Have I lost the knack? How do children eat this stuff? Maybe I just got a dud this time; the last one I ate – my first ever – worked fine. I didn’t know one had to watch out for fleecing by the string cheese people too. Life is hard.

This morning, in the especially deep sleep I often fall into directly after the alarm has gone off, when my brain is busy literally dreaming up excuses for me not to have to get up, I dreamt that we kept going places and forgetting to bring the baby. I’d whisper to someone beside me “Where’s the baby?” and they’d say “At home, sleeping.” And then I’d worry because you’re not really supposed to leave them alone in the house, even if they’re asleep. It seemed like a bit of an oversight.

Interestingly for my dream-gender tally, I don’t know whether the baby this time was a boy or a girl. I suppose, since we kept leaving it behind, I never actually got to see it.

Ah yes, I remember what I was going to blog about. The fact that I’ve now been saying I’m six months pregnant for about a month. How can this be, you ask. It makes perfect sense. When I got to 24 weeks, I assumed that meant I was 6 months, because 4 weeks = 1 month. Except, they don’t. And there’s that pesky two weeks at the start of the pregnancy that they count though you’re not really pregnant yet. This is why in the Girlfriend’s Guide, she keeps reiterating that it’s really ten months, not nine. Once you do some elementary division – and really, the multiples of ten make it so easy that why would you not? – you realise that 4 into 40 goes 10 times, not 9, so she must be right.

But next week, I really will be six months pregnant – according to the calendar and everything. In the sense that I’ll have three months to go, and when I say it people can count up “February, March, April” and be right when they assume that the baby’s due in early May.

What a wondrous thing is maths. Are maths. Math. Bah.

This also means that next week I’ll be entering the much-maligned third trimester. What delights await me there?