Thanking the sisterhood!

Thanking the sisterhood today for making a woman entering her third trimester of pregnancy feel great 🙂 First, someone at school said (as I bent down to put Charli’s water bottle in the tray, whilst wearing my white, tight, cropped trousers), ‘Wow, you’re looking great, all baby and nothing else. How do you do that?!’, then a woman in the supermarket said, ‘Gee, you look like Drew Barrymore when you smile…’ (I was wearing my over-sized movie star sunglasses at the time and don’t personally see the resemblance, but I was more than happy to take a compliment!) and then a couple of Mum’s at school said, ‘You are such an elegant pregnant lady’ (I must wear heels more often). Ah LOVE you sisters! x

All this made a very pleasant change from the latter end of last week; when at school pick-up four people in quick succession made various comments on my baby bump, ‘Wow, LOOK at your belly!’, ‘Oh, you’ve REALLY popped out!’, ‘When ARE you due?!’ (as though I was about to give birth any instant) and ‘You’re looking REALLY pregnant now!’.

I’m quickly learning which of my pregnant outfits draw the best comments – it’s amazing how one combination can make me look like I’m about to drop any minute and another outfit can be positively deceptive.

I was sharing the less complementary comments with a neighbour on Thursday (who was at the time pregnant, but has since had her baby) and she said the worse she’d been subjected to was, ‘Crikey, you’re looking REALLY porky!’ – and this was from a man (grrrr, need I say more!).

Anyway, comments aside, my neighbour is another lady thanking mother nature this week, as she had the most wonderful third birth on Saturday (her Birthday!). I was on call to look after her girls and, with her due date on Sunday, I was all prepared for action stations any day. I was surprised to get a call over breakfast on Saturday morning to say she was all go. It was perfect timing (as a middle of the night call is always hard – I really am in total admiration of midwives world-wide). She seemed so composed when I called round and said she’d not slept very well, due to mild contractions every ten-minutes throughout the night. She went off to hospital with a smile and I thought she’d be a while….

But, by early afternoon mother and baby are back home! Within a couple of hours she’d had baby in the water and bubs arrived still in the caul – a 1 in 1,000 chance! Fabulous news indeed. It seems third time was a charm for my neighbour and I am hoping mother nature will graciously bestow such a birth on me third time round (are you listening?!).

I have to say I do have moments of feeling incredibly anxious about the birth (my track record isn’t great). I am so fortunate to have great pregnancies, but haven’t had the most natural of births (Charli arrived by emergency c-section after a very long labour, Sophie arrived after a normal length labour, but due to an anterior lip of the cervix and worry concerning the moulding of the plates of her head she was dragged out in haste with an episiotomy and forceps).

However, I have a very experienced midwife this time round and she is renowned for being a strong advocate of natural birth and won’t be bullied into taking medical interventions at the hospital (she even said to me, ‘Don’t worry, the birthing suites have locks on the inside of the doors). When I talked to her about the anterior lip she said she’d managed to relieve one in ten-minutes using acupressure. This was good news to my ears. With Sophie I wasn’t even given the option of getting into a birthing pool to help with the pain and resist the urge to push – instead I was wheeled into the brightly lit room next to the operating theatre (due to having had a c-section with Charli I wasn’t being given much of a chance for a natural birth). After an hour of trying to resist I was offered an epidural – let’s just say I wasn’t feeling very empowered at this point and my mental focus had long gone out the window with the change in rooms. Ah well, this time round I feel like I’m in good hands and I shall just go with the flow and see what’s possible depending on the position and size of baby and how accommodating my pelvis chooses to be!

Thanks sisterhood 🙂