Week 21 : She’s a carrot!

According to the weekly update from Babycentre, this week my squishy is roughly the size of a 10 and a 1/2 inch carrot (26.67cm). And this is what she probably looks like, more or less.

They say that soon I’ll be able to pick up a pattern to her movements and they’ll become more martial art like than the flutters I’ve been feeling. Well, I think they might be right – she’s certainly been a lot more active in this last week than ever before. Or should I say I felt it more – apparently these squishies almost never stop moving, we just don’t always feel them when they’re doing it.

I am freaking out a bit about the whole H1N1 flu outbreak we’re having here. I didn’t – I mean flu is flu right? – until this week when roughly a third of the mortalities in SA turned out to be pregnant women. I would like to make this quite clear: If you have flu or any other kind of nasty, stay the hell away from me. If you give me swine flu I will punch you on the nose before I go (if I go, since some pregnant people get through it just fine too). So, I might go…but I will NEVER go quietly. And I also don’t care if it’s your fault or not. To keep my own nose clean I’m avoiding crowds at the moment whenever I can (can you say PARANOID?!).

Mmm, what else has been happening this week? Well, the freaky dreams are back! The past two nights I haven’t really slept all that well, and I am partly to blame for that myself. Friday night when I received the Babycentre email I followed a link to their video archive…it’s a little scary. I watched one showing a natural birth, a C-section and a waterbirth. Of the three the waterbirth certainly looks the most comfortable. I’d still like to teleport mine out? Oi! And can someone please explain to me why you have to support a newborn’s neck and head after they manhandle them like that at birth. It’s a head lady not a handle!

Naturally, Friday night I kept dreaming about giving birth. On a little side note, I had a chat to my gran about birth and so on – she is pretty much an expert since she had six kids herself right? I was a bit worried that I wouldn’t be able to do it since my mom had a lot of problems when she had me and my brother – but my gran assures me she had none at all. In fact she was so quick about it that half the time the midwife didn’t even get a chance to arrive and the closest neighbour had to catch the baby instead.

Saturday night, we had a bit of drama here at home. My mom’s been down with the flu this week – luckily not the swine flu though – and twice during the course of the evening she got so disorientated that she either didn’t know where we were or where she was and how she got there. The last time was after I went to bed already and I woke up with my dad shouting for help and shouting at my mom to breathe! Panic! We wanted to take her to hospital but she refused to go. At this stage I’m in tears, my dad is stomping around, and my mom is battling to catch her breath. My dad said that they were sitting talking and the next thing she just collapsed.

My mom has a blood pressure reader at home, and after hunting down some batteries we took the reading twice with half an hour in between. Suddenly she seems to have high blood pressure. Usually my mom has low blood pressure – the only other time ever she had high blood pressure was the night my brother had his accident, before we even knew. Since he wasn’t home yet – of course I started panicking about him too.

In the end everyone was okay, I guess. My brother walked in literally 5 minutes after I texted him to find out if he was okay and my mom has slept peacefully through the night with no other incidents and this morning has perfectly normal blood pressure and no more black outs. Weird, but good. I wish they would all just look after themselves – I NEED them to be okay.

Anyway, yesterday Tammy and my mom made Liam’s first birthday cake. It’s in the form of Lego blocks – actually looks very cool. I dreamt last night that the world was taken over by Lego men who caught all the people and used them as plastic moulds to make more plastic people! I was the only one left and was hiding in a mall where I got trapped for months. It was a very exhausting dream. I couldn’t save anyone and woke up when I finally escaped the mall and got to my car.

Sheesh! I am ready for a dream with rainbows and ponies right about now. or fish, that’s relaxing right? I’m going to borrow someone’s Finding Nemo DVD and watch that till I dream of fish.