It's a Date

We got the big news yesterday: Betty and Bob are scheduled to enter this world via caesarean at 10.30am on the 17th of April. Less than two weeks away!

And they tell me that there'll be two babies for us to take home at the end of all that. Because that's the thing: despite having months to come to grips with that idea, the layers of disbelief are still falling away, one by one. I'm guessing it won't be until they hand them over that I'll finally say, Holy crap, you mean these are mine? Forever? What the hell are you saying? Being given a date was rather sobering.

So, the knife. Over the past few weeks the two of them have been very acrobatic indeed, resulting in some major jolting and wriggling, and some very bizarre (and painful) belly shapes. Turns out that Bob, previously lying sideways, has now decided that breech is the go after all. And they've completely swapped sides. You wouldn't think that there was room to scratch yourself in there, but they've wriggled and fiddled and somehow made the switch. It explains a lot! But as a first birth, both twins breech is just not considered safe to attempt naturally, so slicey-slice it is.

We landed ourselves a very good doctor at the hospital yesterday who gave an an entire hour of her time to explain everything and answer our questions, and we're both satisfied with her reasoning for both the method and timing of the delivery. The 17th will be 38 weeks 4 days.

So we now have two weeks minus a bit to get unpacked and arranged at this new house, wash all the baby things we've been given, pick up the baby things we're missing, arrange for a dog-sitter for delivery day and after, buy a new fridge (ours died in the move, annoyingly), finish what we both need to do at our respective workplaces, and, and, and.... *phew* We're hoping to be all done by the weekend prior so that we can have one last grown-ups weekend, meaning dinners, movies and so on. That's the plan, anyway.

Belly Update

Perhaps I should change the name of this blog to "Gestational Safari". Or maybe "Cervical Safari" would be better feminista cred. Regardless, a belly update.

Betty and Bob are still in residence in my ever-wearier body. And they're either having a cracking time in there, or anxious to get out, if the bouncing and wriggling is anything to go by. I mentioned their movement last time; now it's even stronger. My regular chair is one of those sprung plywood framed jobs. It moves around with every body shift. Now I can be sitting perfectly still and the squealers' movements will actually set the chair bouncing about noticably. It's quite remarkable.

Once we've finished moving house (more on that later) I'll post a picture of said belly. It's really very impressive. When I see myself in the mirror I find it hard to believe that my body has done what it has. I've put on 30kg during this pregnancy, which takes me up to 98kg, 2kg more than my 6'8" partner. It's a lot for a 5'7" frame to take. No wonder my joints are starting to complain.

Having said all that, things are still going swimmingly, really. I'm tired and riddled with aches but healthy and happy, and as a friend pointed out recently, at least while they're still in there they're quiet and need no attention. Make no mistake, I'm grateful for every day's reprieve I get on that count.

So, the house move. As of Saturday I'll be a resident of The Gap, tucked in the foothills of Mt Coot-tha and Mt Nebo. (Or is that Mt Glorious? I always get them confused.) I've always been a south-sider, so it's a bit of a novelty being so far from the familiar. The house itself... well, it's like your Nana's house, which is good and bad. It does suit our decor, that's for sure. It even comes with a concrete flamingo in the back yard, which will be getting a coat of pink paint very shortly. With southerners swarming in to south-east Queensland like mice into a silo, housing is at a premium right now, so I'm incredibly grateful to have found it at all. We've been searching on and off for months now, and it was starting to seem like a race between finding a place and the babies arriving. Urgh, it's been a stress I could do without. So once we've finished moving in this weekend, and we've unpacked at least all the essential boxes, Betty and Bob can come at their leisure. And at that point we'll be significantly happier.

They're officially due on 3 May, which I find mysterious. That's 40 weeks, but twins are considered full term at 38. Despite this the medicos are clinging to the May date, but always with the twins-come-earlier caveat. So mid-April seems to be the best guess. I'll keep you posted.

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On a slightly different note, a few weeks ago when Lofty and I were out at Mitchelton to look at a potential house, we were checking out the facilities nearby. As we approached the corner of the street he pointed out a well-known cake shop with the comment, "The Cheesecock Shape's nice and close". Whoops. Over to you, Uncle Sigmund.

A New Journal and Pen = A Post

Nothing like a shiny new journal and pen to get a bit of writing inspiration happening. That, and yet another appearance of a tiresome neighbour. I have to leave him to chat to the housemates, you see, because I’m “very busy”. Liam’s not so bad, really, but he does tend to make himself at home with remarkable ease; he doesn’t even bother to knock anymore. He just walks right on in. Helps himself to whatever you’re eating. And seems to have a remarkable ability to turn up at the most inopportune moments. Hardly hanging offences, but at times....

...which segues nicely into something I heard on the radio first thing this morning. Apparently the Merkin army has been finding it a little tough to keep up the supply of bods to hurl at Iraq, and so have decided to lower the standards required to join up. They are now accepting people with a criminal history. Not so exceptional, thinks I, to welcome folks with, say, a minor drug conviction or one for petty theft. In my experience, it would help them settle into the military environment just that little bit better. As the espresso trickled into my cup the story continued, and a few of the allowable offences were read out. They include—and I wish I’d heard this after my coffee--”making a terrorist threat, murder, and raping a child. Consider my gob well and truly smacked. So, anyone serving there may have to place their trust in someone who’s thrust their erect penis into the body of a screaming or drugged six-year-old. And the Iraqi people have to accept such people in their country, and armed. Sounds like a great idea. And this is the government and campaign that our own dear PM won’t hear a word against. I really shouldn’t listen to AM over breakfast.

Anyway, enough of that. Betty and Bob are doing fine, and I’m not doing too badly either. Betty beats Bob on the basis of baby busyness; but my, that Betty is a boisterous bub. At New Year she was head down. Then she shuffled around sideways to lie transverse. During the latest scan a week or two ago she was breech, which brought about a conversation with the doctor involving the C word. “Caesarean” in this instance. Now, after some more shuffling and thrashing about, she’s transverse again. Have I mentioned how uncomfortable all of this lively poppin’ ‘n’ breakin’ is? Imagine if you can being kicked in the (permanently full) bladder from the inside. Now the bowel. Now imagine someone gouging you in the stomach so vigorously that you’re in danger of losing your last snack, and then throw in the sensation of drinking a half a cup of caustic soda. I couldn’t have imagined these things before I’d experienced them, so perhaps they’re lost on you, too.

Strangely though, I’m really enjoying feeling them move around. Bob is tucked away behind his athletic sister, so I don’t know him quite as well. Betty, on the other hand, has become quite familiar. At times I can feel her limbs quite clearly when I press my hands on my belly, and her movements are visible when I’m sitting. Sometimes they catch my eye when I’m reading. If I rest things on my belly—which is a natural thing to do given that it’s now like having a permanent table in front of me—she belts them off. A plate of toast went abruptly flying recently. When, pre-pregnancy, I’d tried to envisage what it would be like to have another little person inside you I’d imagine it being creepy and alien, like having a tapeworm from hell. Or something. But not a bit of it! They’re comforting, agreeable company. I never tire of feeling them jostle about, and become vaguely impatient when I rest my hands on my great ball-belly and find it all quiet.

I wish my Mum were here to share this with. She succumbed to that most trendy of ailments, breast cancer, in October. I’m incredibly grateful that I had the opportunity to tell her that I was pregnant; in fact, it was the last lucid conversation I had with her. She’d always teased Little Sister and I that we were prime candidates for twins, given that most of her family tends to spit them out in pairs. We didn’t learn that we had a double-yolker until the week after her funeral. She would have gotten a real kick out of that. And there’s so many things I want to ask her about when she carried me, about my birth, what it was like caring for a new baby at the age of 22... so many things. In some ways I feel closer to her now than ever before. I miss her terribly. But her death was swift, and can we really ask for more for the people we love?

This is all pretty stream-of-consciousness, eh? I don’t have the energy for anything more disciplined. Creating people takes a lot of creative energy. The only other thing I want to say tonight is that the second baby of the great wave arrived recently: Dorothy Clare aka The Hoffling. She came gently and quickly, and brought a great peace and happiness with her into the family. The Hoffs are among my favourite people, and deserve every good thing. Brendan’s pot roast is due in a couple of weeks—and let’s all hope it takes its looks from its Mama--but I’m not sure who will be next to come after that. Maybe Betty and Bob, or maybe the baby of Anna, sister-of-The-Hoff. Or Matt the Tatt’s brat could beat us both. Then there’s Shayne and Danni’s third little brown lizard to factor in. The bets are on!

(You know, if we all pooled our Baby Bonus money we could buy a great block of land.)

Sprung!

Thanks to Cheryl for dropping me an email to let me know that Thomas Allen had found some comments we made on her blog about his art work. Fortunately, he thought we were funny.

Who is Thomas Allen? I made a gushing post about him myself around the same time as Cheryl's post. I loved his work then and love it no less now, so I have no problem whatsoever in letting you know that he has a book coming out later this year, called Uncovered. Drop by the man himself's blog to stay abreast of the where, when, how and so on.

So, We Talked About The Weather For a While...

Discussion of the weather is unfairly maligned, I say. When it's extreme in one way or another it colours everything we experience, so why wouldn't we want to talk about it?

The weather -- or the temperature, more correctly -- has changed very quickly over the past few days, and is indeed having an impact on daily life. For most of summer so far we've been sitting waiting for the heat to hit; that wait is over. This morning at 10.30am it hit 33°C, after an overnight low of 25°C. 25 sounds quite mild, but at 4.30am it's stinking bloody hot. Still, we've had it incredibly easy so far this year, so it seems ungrateful to bitch now.

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In other atmospheric events, McNaught's comet is giving our skies a bit of glamour at the moment. Or so I hear. For the past week there has been cloud cover in the South West, the area in which the comet is sitting. I'm really, really hoping that the sky clears before the comet disappears.

McNaught Comet photogallery from Spaceweather.com

Cornucopia of Crap

About a month or so ago my housemates, Mr and Mrs Fungus, got Foxtel hooked up here at the house. Lofty and I aren't taking part in the paying for it—quite the waste of money as far as I'm concerned—but it's there, I'm largely incapacitated, so I've been availing myself of the vast array of absolute shite it has to offer.

I watched a bit of Hawaii Five-0 last week, and I confess it was a bit of an eye-opener. Not only were the fellas very caring, sharing Nineties kinda guys (not something I generally expect to see in Seventies telly cops), but the main protagonists of this particular story were very engaging in their own ways. The bad guy, for example. Steve and Danno spent some time telling us just what a hard-arsed, bad news grub he is, so I nearly choked when his mug finally made it on to the screen: it was Luis from Sesame Street! All wrong! And the visiting good guy du jour looked familiar, and his name in the credits rang a distinct bell, too: Gil Gerard. Known later to some as Buck Rogers. All this, and the infinite pleasure of the Hawaii Five-0 theme song. Beautiful.

It's remarkable who turns up on these old shows. Recent episodes of M*A*S*H have turned up Patrick Swayze, Shelley Long, Barry Corbin (better known to me as Maurice from Northern Exposure), Pat Morita, Brian Dennehey and Ron Howard. Spotting them has become a sport.

The creme de la creme of appalling Foxtel dross, though, would have to be Hong Kong schlocker, The Mighty Peking Man. What a hoot! Best seen with a bunch of kitsch-lovers in the mood for a few beers and some convulsive laughter.

But when all is said and done, I still wouldn't pay for any of this guff.

If I Only Had a Brain

Email received this morning:

Do you realise you didn't post a blog for the whole of December?
Man, I’m ripping up my subscription!! Surely it can’t be that hard to knock out some creative genius that titillates the great unwashed??!! Up the duff issues aside, your public needs you. So, get crackin’ slacker!!!

Hmph. Yeah, I know. The trouble is that I have no brain. Seriously. These two "creative projects" I'm carrying about have been sucking my creative energy dry.



There is so much to write about: the death of James Brown; Tony Abbott's allocation of funding to a Catholic organisation for "pregnancy counselling"; severe water restrictions in SEQ while Tarong and Swanbank power stations continue to chew through 55 million litres a day to produce electricity to sell to NSW; Christmas consumption; the sad, sad show that was The Ashes.... but my brain just isn't able to process these topics to any coherant level. Sorry about that.

I've been reluctant to turn this into a pregnancy diary, but perhaps that's what's going to have to happen if anything's to be written. That's all my brain can focus on for the time being. Those not interested can find the door on their own, I'm sure.

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My latest pregancy joy is heartburn/reflux. I've never had it before, but a hot/cold burning in my throat is now my constant companion, particularly in the middle of the night. I don't know where I've put my packet of Tums, a product I discovered whilst in Canada, and now available in Australia, but only in the orange flavour. They make a nice change from the minty products. I must track it down before I turn in for the night.

On a better note, lying in bed Christmas eve I felt them moving for the first time. It was quite exciting. I'd been wondering when I might feel them, and thought I probably had already but not recognised it. That night it was unmistakable. Lying on one side Betty would drum away, roll over and Bob would take a turn. (Have I mentioned here that we have one boy and one girl? I'm not sure that I have.) Then, on New Year's Day, they were boogie-ing away enough for Lofty to feel them, which was a buzz, too. A couple of nights ago I could make out what seemed to be a leg poking up under my skin. It's a very odd experience, but the thoughts of the dinner scene from Alien are becoming less and less frequent.

It was a bit of a relief to feel them being active since I'd had a minor scare a day or two before. I'd had some painful belly cramping, enough to send me trotting off to the hospital to have it checked out. The staff were excellent. They checked me over and kept me in overnight just to keep an eye on things. No great conclusions on what caused it, but everything seems to be fine, and they encouraged me to come back if I was concerned about anything at all. We like to bitch about our public hospital system here--and heaven knows it could do with some improving--but my experiences have been quite satisfactory to date.

The ward they had me in was the actual maternity ward--my window had a nice view of my workplace, hurrah!-- so I was surrounded by wailing babies and their exhausted mothers. One woman who stands out was baggy-eyed and waddling alarmingly down the hall. I don't know the circumstances of the birth she'd had, but I can't say it looked too comfortable. But hey, what comes comes, so there's no point dwelling on it. I'm just trying to avoid birthing horror stories at the moment. I don't see the point in getting uptight about it, despite the world's seeming desire for me to do so. People seem to have a keen desire to get me to blanch or get all wobbly-kneed by telling me horrific stories. Or by laughing when I mention that it's twins. Well, to those in the latter group I say, can it be any worse than dealing with a newborn along with an attention-seeking two-year-old or two? I don't think so. And to the horror story brigade I say this: fuck off. Seriously. Take your morbid, thoughtless stories and jam them sideways. I really don't care that your friend's friend's sister-in-law's neighbours organs all dropped onto the floor just before their dog ate their baby, who had already died of SIDS anyway. Really. Why would I want to hear that story? It doesn't make me fearful, it just makes me think of you as a sad, maladjusted, self-absorbed, ambulance-chasing idiot. So let's just keep that a suspicion, rather than you confirming it, eh?

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This Friday will mark 25 weeks. Although it's beginning to feel as though I've been pregnant forever, it also feels as though it's cracking along very quickly. Good grief, if all goes according to plan, we'll have two squealing pot roasts on our hands in around twelve weeks or so. Ha, and you think my blogging is sad now?