I am in pain. It’s making me a little bit nuts to be honest. The silver lining is that at least it’s better than yesterday. Last night I had back and stomach pains that made it difficult to walk or get up by myself, and today at least the back pain is gone and the stomach pain is at roughly half the level it was last night.
Unpleasant.
Let’s hope it’s not serious, and whatever it is settles down so I can sleep properly tonight.
Hope your week’s off to a better start than mine? 
According to Babycentre my squishy is about the size of a Jicama this week (another root/fruit that we don’t get here!) and should be more or less 16.7 inches long (42.4cm). I am SURE my baby will be a lot cuter than a Jicama. 
They say that she’ll be picking up about a third of her birth weight in the next 7 weeks at the rate of about half a pound a week (226,7g). Well there you go…it’s time for the big swell to commence? Brace yourselves, we don’t know how big this is going to get.
They also say that this week she has fingernails and toenails and either hair or a respectable form of peach fuzz. If this baby is anything like her mother she’ll be born with a full head of proper hair, no fuzz to speak of – but we’ll see what happens.
According to the weekly email update I get, some of the symptoms I should or could be experiencing this week include shortness of breath (check), heartburn (CHECK) and back pain (nope – and thank you for that!). I will say that I am constantly uncomfortable though and that I get funny cramps in my legs and potbelly – which I assume is either squishy squishing my nerves or some sort of braxton hicks? It’s not exactly fun, but I suppose it’s part of the process? Also I am sleeping more than I have ever slept in my life! It’s really hard work growing another human!
If I had to use one word to summarise how I feel now I’d have to go with clumsy. I can’t explain why but it’s actually easier for me to get out of the bath than out of bed. I dropped my house keys (through the security gate) one morning this week as I was leaving home for work – and I wanted to weep! 
Getting them back so i could unlock the door entailed putting everything I had with me down and crawling on my hands and knees to reach them and then pulling myself up again afterwards. Sounds easier and more elegant than it actually was!
Other than that I feel just peachy.
I’m spending a lot of time navel gazing…and not the depressed kind either, actual navel gazing. It’s fascinating to see her rolling around and stretching under my skin.
I’ll be honest: some days I am sooo excited to meet her and some days I am quite frankly terrified. But mostly I am excited. Good thing too – since there are now 8 weeks or less of this pregnancy left to get used to the idea of being someone’s mom.
Family faces are magic mirrors. Looking at people who belong to us, we see the past, present and future. We make discoveries about ourselves. – Gail Lumet Buckley
No passion so effectively robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear. – Edmund Burke
The smallest good deed is better than the grandest good intention. – Dugest
I’m not feeling on top of the world today. It’s a meh day for me…thank goodness it’s Thursday!
I’m uncomfortable and I have some new aches and pains – nothing too severe, just enough to interfere with my sleep and make me a little bit grumpy today. Not to worry, I’m sure I’ll snap out of it by the time I get to work.
Anyhoo, tomorrow is Friday and I’ve decided to reward myself for making it through the week. I’ve been craving real unhealthy deep fried swimming in salt and vinegar slap cafe’ chips all week long – and if I still crave it by tomorrow I’m having it. 
I’ll probably have the mother of all heartburns after, but I don’t care. I want it!
I’ve had a few other peculiar food ideas – seems perfectly fine to me, but when I see how my family pull their faces at it I think maybe not so run of the mill after all. Tell me honestly, what do you think of this: a fresh buttered roll with Nutella chocolate spread and slices banana on it? Sounds yummy right? I don’t know why they’re on about – it was delicious.
The receiver of revenue and I have always been on pretty good terms. I pay my tax, submit my return and when I get my refund I usually go Christmas shopping with it. In general I keep my nose clean with them, and they don’t give me any hassles.
However the last few years there have been some disturbances in the force. It all started in 2006 when I quit a very long standing employment arrangement in something similar to hell and took a few months worth of mental health days.
Then last year when I packed up all my worldly belongings and moved to Cape Town for a year, working for a salary which was probably the smallest I’ve ever had since I started working in 1997! (Still, I learnt a lot there – so as far as I’m concerned it was worth it in the skills I picked up and fantastic people I met).
Then roll around 2009, the economic recession, the inevitable letting go from my new JHB job and then finding out I was pregnant just after I secured a contracting position which has no set income and depends exclusively on how many hours I manage to clock.
The receiver of revenue must be looking at me and thinking I’ve gone off the deep end? Ad to this that I didn’t actually submit a return last year because firstly all my paperwork and tax certificates were still in boxes after my move back to JHB and secondly because I figured that I probably didn’t earn above the level where you HAVE to submit so I’d just rather leave it.
Now from November (20th I think) SARS is getting a bit stricter on tax returns. Apparently they now get to charge you R250 – R16 000 per month for a late return, regardless if you owe them or if they owe you. And they now also have the power to just nab the money from your account if they see it there looking lost and unallocated.
I decided I needed a tax guru – and I needed one fast. It was time to restore my previous good standing with SARS.
Through a recommendation of a friend I found Zander who will now be known far and wide as MY tax guru. The man is simply a genius. I took my sad story and a box full of tax certificates and receipts to him on Monday and he’s already managed to sort out my last two returns, get an error fixed on the return before that and arrange a payout for me that came through this morning (a payout that is roughly 3 times as big as I was expecting on top of that – and I’m not complaining). And everything is completely legit. I don’t mind paying tax – I just mind paying more than I’m supposed to.
It’s nice to be up to date and have a clean nose with the receiver again. I really don’t ever want to be on their bad side, that’s for sure. 
If you need a tax guru I can highly recommend Zander and he’s not even paying me to say that, promise.
