Well after a long period of no blogging i feel we're entering a (short) phase of excessive blogging which will then grind to a halt mid-November and only restart with short snippets of child-boasting ("so advanced......!").
Today I had expected to be housebound as the plasterers were due back to finish what they started yesterday, except they have cancelled and are coming tomorrow. dammit, that's my structure to the week completely thrown! Hey ho. I have a visitor this morning so am baking some cakes now and may then pop into town this afternoon to fill my time. I am enjoying this time off but it is very weird too, feels like school holidays but no-one else is allowed out to play.

I did pop to the hospital yesterday and all was well, I guess I'm allowed at least one moment of paranoia this pregnancy, hopefully all will continue to be fine. Have finished my second piece of knitting paraphernalia, with the successful completion of the first hat. It doesn't go with the scarf I knitted but thats because I don't want to get too cocky just yet. am now working on a pink hat so I have options for baby gender. To be fair the hat, whilst allegedly for a 0-3 month old, looks huge so not sure how useful it will be but I am damn proud of myself, although Paul is wondering what happened to the cool wife he married 12 months ago.....

the midwife told me to rest on the sofa for at least an hour in the morning and afternoon so Jess is delighted at the company for that time. Most of the rest of the time her and Millie and not impressed at my being at home all day as it throws their "lets sleep on the bed all day until one of them comes home to feed us" routine. They wander around the house a little like stroppy teenagers whose mum has woken them up trying to hoover their room. Bless em... their peace will be even more shattered soon.

parenting seems to be simply another word for worry. I'm a pretty laid back person, so have taken this pregnancy with my usual approach to life and have not really worried unnecessarily with the long list of things that I'm seemingly supposed to freak out. Reading the websites and magazines as I have a tendency to do, it seems that it would be possible to completely wind yourself up over this whole process, freaking out about what you should/shouldn't do, what could/couldn't happen etc etc. the lady doing my 20 week scan started the discussion with "please tell me you haven't been researching on the internet have you..." which I thought was quite telling. In these days of information, sometimes knowing too much can be a bad thing.

The problem is that no matter how chilled I am, there is always something to niggle me, and despite my natural optimism that things will turn out ok, and if they won't there's not much I can do about it, I have spent the last 24 hours worrying about the fact that my baby is not moving about as much as I'd like. I blame my mate Emma who was worrying about her baby the other day, and got me thinking too much. I'm sure there probably hasn't been too much change, and that the fact that I have more time to think about it it more the issue that an actual change in movement pattern, but its hard to know, and it what is keeping me awake at 5.30am this morning hence the timing of this post. I guess this is what midwives are for, so perhaps will give mine a bell tomorrow just to put my mind at rest.

Blimey I have another 18 years of this....

It's been a tough couple of weeks really. We'd pretty much told ourselves that come sept we'd get sorted on the baby front, so we we all prepared to go out and buy prams etc when I get a call from my dear boss putting me at risk of redundancy. I apprceciate that I'm not alone in having to face this, and that I have, in fact, put plenty of people through this myself in the past, but to be fair, there are good ways and bad ways to handle this kind of situation..... that's as much as I can say to be honest given the need to be tactful and discreet.

But hey ho, things are now pretty much resolved, I am a lady of leisure slightly earlier than planned and have spent the last day or two getting my head around this fact. My main aim now is to keep well, and start to accept the reality that I'm about to become a mum.... yikes!