Letter to Bobbin - 20 weeks

Hi there, Bobbin!

I'm your mama. Right now you only know me as that chick you kick and make puke, but that's OK, we'll meet before you know it and I'll become the chick with the milk.

All of a sudden, I'm just over half way through this pregnancy and I'm not entirely sure how it happened. Sure I could count back the weeks or look at a calendar but I'm more inclined to believe that there is a rip in the space time continuum. It's the only possible explanation, I'm certain. Perhaps your babydaddy is Dr Who and not Map Guy?

Time is flying by so quickly and there are a million and one things to do before you arrive, including give you a name. I've been calling you GlowBaby but you are hereby blog-named Bobbin. 

On a side note, naming a baby is the hardest thing to do ever and I have to do it twice! Bobbin was the first name I thought of when I first found out you were there, and I keep going back to it, so Bobbin it is. 

In some ways this pregnancy is very similar to when I had your brother. You are a now you see it, now you don't, baby. Some days I'm all tummy and others it's still in the food baby territory. Tricky didn't make himself obviously visible until after half way, and you seem to be the same.

But, wow, did you ever make yourself known in ways your brother never did! You sure do know how to make your mama feel sick, little one! And the flutters? You have been wriggling around so much that I could feel it very early on. After a few nights of feeling the teensiest of flutters I leaned over to your Dad and whispered "if I didn't know any better, I'd swear I could feel the baby moving already!".

The flutters from 13 weeks have progressed to full on thumps and kicks now, and your Dad can feel them easily - with Tricky it was hard for anyone to feel them but me because his super squishy placenta cushion was in the way... yours is in the way elsewhere and mama has placenta previa. I'm a bit bummed, but we don't know what will happen so there is no point worrying.

I got to hear your heartbeat a few weeks ago and last week I got to see you... well, I'm told it was you. I could kinda make out some bones and what I thought was a fish, so I will just have to believe the sonographer that it was you. It made me so happy to see you wriggling around in there that I found it really hard to talk and choked up a bit. Mama's hormones are most definitely in a whirl.

The very good news is your heart looks amazing and the sutures in your skull are all open at this stage... they'll have to be checked again before you're born and for a while after too, but I'm sure you won't mind, and I'll make sure it doesn't hurt. We found out your sex, too, but I'll see if I can keep that a secret a bit longer... though we did tell your grandparents because they were dying to know! I'm rather terrible at keeping my own secrets so I don't know how long that will last - a week, maybe?

Keep on kicking and keep on cooking, my little Bobbin. I'll see you in August.

Love Mama xxx

Don't Phunk With My Heart

Wow the first 20 weeks have gone by so fast! We're half way already!

Anyone who has had a baby will know that between 18-20 weeks you have a 'foetal anatomy scan' which, as the name suggests, examines the baby's major structures to look for defects. They check out everything from the brain through to the arteries that supply the kidneys. They can also determine the sex at this scan... but that wasn't the thing occupying my mind.

I am the baby of the family and my sister Penny is the eldest... but for about 18 months in the early 1980's there was a middle child. Jo-Anne was our other sister and she was born with a hole in heart. I don't remember her, I was too little, but we have some lovely photos of the three of us to remind us she was with us for a short while. My family has a morbid sense of humour at the best of times, but when the topic turns to illness or death, it brings out the worst of the jokes, hence my mum always says that she had a rainbow family (way before Angelina Jolie made it cool) because Penny was normal, Jo-Anne was sick and I was jaundiced so she had a pink baby, a blue baby and a yellow baby!

So going for the scan this morning, the foremost thought in my head was concerning Tricky's heart, and if they would be able to detect any abnormalities. Knowing the family history, we were sent to a specialist antenatal sonographer and she spent about one third of the whole visit concentrating on the heart... and I'm happy to say it looks good! The technology today, a full 30 year's after Jo-Anne's birth, is so much more advanced that if Tricky does have a minor hole that was unable to be seen on the ultrasound (a very minor possibility), chances are good that it would be able to be fixed *Insert sigh of relief here*.

So with no phunking of the heart, there were other things that we wanted to know... like the sex of the baby! The sonographer asked us before she started if we wanted to know and we excitedly said that we did. She looked relieved and said “Phew, sometimes it's hard for me to hide the important parts” as if by some miracle Hubby and I could decipher the blobs on the screen. I can see head, legs, arms and a spine... that's about it. I'm still not convinced it's not an alien by the looks of it. So on goes the warmed up goo (ooh that's so much nicer than the stone cold stuff they sometimes use), the hand held part is placed on my tummy and within about three seconds... “It's a boy!”


The relief I felt is hard to describe. I wouldn't have minded either way, but I'd already started calling Tricky a 'he' and planning in my head for a boy. Even on my Christmas card from Hubby he wrote “from your (current) boys” because he was including our dog. What would I have done if it was a girl? The night before the thought of a baby girl had actually kept me awake for a while. I'm sure it would have only taken minutes to adjust... no, really I'm sure... well I guess I don't have to worry. Unless the sonographer got it wrong? Oh dear.