MPJ: The Third Trimester

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Hello everyone!

The Milkmeister is now a whopping FIVE MONTHS OLD!

(Seven and a half by the time I got around to posting this, but I’m not about to rewrite this paragraph, so let’s just pretend.)

She has gone from being a friendly potato to a bonafide tiny human, albeit one who is still shaped rather like a potato. She can laugh! Express emotions! Grasp objects in her tiny hands! Sit up for about 10 seconds before keeling sideways like a tiny drunken Buddha! And many other excellent things that you and I have been taking for granted for years.

 

why is nobody impressed when I EAT A WHOLE THING OF PUREE AND SHIT MYSELF IN THE BATH?

 

However! This is not a post about the Ways of Babies Present, this a a post about the Ways of Babies Past.

Let us make one final journey back through the baby-addled mists of time, to My Pregnancy Journey: The Third Trimester!

This is the last instalment in the trilogy. The Return of the King, if you will. This is the one where Frodo (me) climbs Mount Doom (the third trimester) and casts the Ring (Milkmeister) into the fires below (the capable hands of the on-call obstetrician).

 

"IT'S A GIRL!"

 

Ah, the third trimester. I was about to say “definitely the worst” but they’re all the worst.

The third trimester is the one where your tummy is so big that getting out of your car becomes a three-stage operation that sounds like a pig trying to climb a ladder*, everything hurts, and you can no longer go sideways through gaps you used to be able to go through, which is embarrassing because one minute you’re slipping lithely through a space between two cars and the next you’re bonking your Milkmeister against a wing mirror.

*GRUNT! HEAVE! GRUNT! HEAVE! GRUNT GRUNT GRUNT HUFF HUFF

 

but on the plus side you can take amazing photos like this.

 

The third trimester is also when people start saying that once you have the baby in your arms, the pregnancy fades blissfully from memory, and it will all seem like a dream.

Ho ho ho! A dream indeed. One of those dreams where there’s a Thing at the end of your bed and you can’t do anything about it.

The dream where you can’t walk for more than 10 minutes before your thighs are chafed raw, you can’t stand for more than 10 minutes because of the intense stomach pain, and the only reason you don’t keel over backwards - because you’re arching your back to avoid the stomach pain - is because you’re waddling like a bullfrog to avoid the unbearable chafing.

All while some well-meaning chump is blathering on about how you should Cherish this Special Time, and every time you enter a room someone appears out of nowhere with a tuba and starts playing ‘Baby Elephant Walk.’

 

ok so I did not enjoy pregnancy

 

That isn’t to say it’s not worth it. When your small potato burps and then look around in surprise to see where the burp came from, that cancels out quite a lot of chafing.

But for now, let’s stick with the horrors of the joy of new life. On to the horsemen!

The four horsemen of the Third Trimester are: Insomnia, Movement Panic, Everything Hurts and Even More Weird Body Horror.

1. Insomnia

You may recall from the First Trimester that you must Sleep on your Side when Baby’s Inside!

 

Not Sleep on your Tummy, you Baby-Squashing Dummy!

 

However, in the third trimester, sleeping - On your Side or Otherwise - becomes a thing that you remember fondly, like a warm summer’s evening* or a particularly pleasant family Christmas. Ah, how nice it was. How happy we all were. Perhaps, one day, we shall have one again.

*on a train bound for nowhere. i’m not sorry

In the meantime, you can busy yourself with:

  • Waking up to do a wee, 2-3 times per night.

  • Waking up because your hip is aching unbearably due to the weight of your Pending Milkmeister and you have to roll onto your other side. This also happens 2-3 times a night, but it never coincides with the wees.

  • Waking up because your Pending Milkmeister has decided to Do a Midnight Dance.

  • Waking up for no reason at all, then not falling back to sleep because you’ve come up with some new and creative worry to message your midwife about in the morning.

  • Waking up for wee or hip business and not falling back to sleep because your Milkmeister hasn’t decided to Do a Midnight Dance, so you lie on your side in a mild panic waiting for her to Rustle About so you know she’s still OK In There. It turns out that the best way to get her moving is to guzzle some cold water (because when it hits your stomach she goes “Ahh! Cold!” and wiggles about) - which is a cruel irony because it means you’ll have to get up and do yet another wee.

This leads us neatly into…

2. Movement Panic

Did you know that once you can feel your Pending Milkmeister moving, you’ve got to monitor her movements in case she STOPS?

How terrifying. This is a ridiculously huge responsibility to give someone who is only allowed one coffee a day and can’t remember the word for stapler, and yet it is entirely on you to notice if something has gone wrong with your Milkmeister and alert the authorities.

 

"WHY DID YOU BRING THE DOG?"

 

The generally accepted Method of Milkmeister Movement Monitoring is that twice a day, you set aside some time and make sure you feel 10 movements within 2 hours, and if you don’t, you contact your midwife and she whisks you into the hospital to make sure everything is OK. If, during your 2 hours, you don’t feel her* moving for a bit, you lie on your side and sip cold water and wait for her to get underway.

*the Milkmeister, not your midwife

In practice, this is completely unrealistic because who says, in the middle of a meeting, “Please excuse me I need to go and lie on my side for two hours to make sure my pending baby is still pending?” But if you try and count movements while you’re going about your daily business, you miss them; when you’re busy wandering about doing meetings you only feel the big movements (like a firm boot in the ribs) and not all the little movements that you would notice if you were lying on your side staring at the wall and focusing intently on your wombal region.

Which means it’s impossible to monitor the MM between 6am and 4pm, and that doesn’t really leave all that many other two-hour periods.

 

I was going to monitor her between 4am-6am but that is prime wees time.

 

The two-hour concept also stressed me out because most mornings I would feel the MM wiggle at about 7am, and then halfway through the morning it would suddenly occur to me that I hadn’t felt her move in a bit, and actually, when did I last feel her move? Has it been two hours? Longer?? Oh no!! Milkmeister, are you OK in there?

And, even if I did do the twice-daily two-hour monitoring, what if she stopped moving during any one of the 20 hours of the day when I wasn’t paying attention?

Stressful stuff, I tell you.

So instead of doing this two-hours-twice-a-day business, I downloaded an app designed for something else entirely and logged every single time I felt the MM move.

 

BEHOLD the actions of an entirely sane person

 

My midwife was very interested and said, politely, that she had never had a client who had done this before.

She also asked to see the graph, if I made one*, and asked if I could compare it to when the MM was awake after she had been born, because “apparently there’s a correlation, but I don’t think anyone has ever actually bothered to get the data.”

*of course I made one! Well, I tried. The app had a bug that meant I couldn’t export the data; I even emailed the developers about it but there was nothing they could do. Sorry, scientific baby community. (By which I mean the community of scientists who do science about babies, not the community of babies who are scientists. That community is very bad at science indeed.)

All in all, between November 11th and January 27th, I logged a grand total of 3,732 Milkmeister Movements. This is just in the daytime; I didn’t bother at night because, as you will have read above, I was busy doing wees and rolling about and being an unenthusiastic attendant of the Milkmeister’s midnight dance parties.

I realise this makes me sound like a lunatic but I honestly found the ‘log everything’ system so much less stressful, and much more interesting from a statistical point of view.

 

AFTER ALL, WHO WOULD HAVE A BABY AND NOT DO ANY DATA ANALYSIS ABOUT IT?

 

3. More Weird Body Horror

Did you seriously think the weird body horror got better after the second trimester? Ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho ho. HO HO HO. Ho.

In the third trimester, we welcome two of the most popularised signs of late pregnancy: stretchmarks and fat feet.

Oh yes and seeing your baby move under your skin. You’re never going to be ready for that.

I made the most of the swollen ankles cliche by sunburning my feet three weeks before the MM’s arrival.

 

YOU HAVE NO IDEA HOW MUCH JOY MY COLLEAGUES DERIVED FROM THIS PHOTO of my fat little hams.

 

Stretch marks, weirdly, weren’t as bad as I expected; they are deeply unpleasant, but by this point you just absorb each new, terrible development with a sort of dispassionate interest.

“Huh,” you think, “I suppose that’s my abdomen now. Well, it’s certainly not an improvement, but at least I haven’t burst.”

 

Some women call them “tiger scars” because blah blah BLAH empowerment and motherhood but I feel this is inaccurate as tigers are not bumpy and bright purple.

also the other day i saw a post on linkedin from a woman who celebrates her own "birthday as a mother" every time her child has a birthday and that serves me right for being on linkedin in the first place.

 

Another weird body horror thing is… Seeing Your Baby Move!

I actually loved this. It was creepy and hilarious and somehow quite fetching. It’s like, hello my little pal! There you are! Now let’s say “Watch this” to your dad and high-five your foot as it thrusts, sinuous and entirely alien, out of my tummy!

And he will go “AHHHHHH” and jerk backwards across the couch and then have to do a little apology about his visceral reaction to the horror of the joy of new life.

4. Everything Hurts

I did talk about this a bit at the start but here is a short list of Things That Hurt:

  • Your stretch marks, because your skin is literally ripping to accommodate your vast baby.

 

HO HO HO FUCK OFF

 

  • Your thighs, because there is so much chafing that you start carrying a small tub of Vaseline in your handbag and hoping that nobody asks too many questions.

  • Your stomach, uterine and pelvic floor muscles, because they are holding up your Milkmeister’s House, and it is a Well Built House.

  • Your nethers, thanks to an interesting pregnancy thing called ‘lightning crotch’ which is exactly what it sounds like.

  • Your ankles, because they are the size of the moon and, like the moon, constantly stiff.

  • Your fingers, because (if you’re me) you manage to get gestational diabetes and are pricking your fingertips after every meal to make sure your wholesome yet depressing repast of wholemeal bread (and, if you’re feeling daring, perhaps a little yoghurt), hasn’t pushed your blood sugar through the roof.

And all of this continues until one day you wake up and think “huh, did I do a wee?” but you DID NOT, HERE COMES YOUR BABY and off to hospital you go.

And then you have your Milkmeister, the Pregnancy Journey is over, and the Baby Journey Begins!

 

THE BABY JOURNEY IS LESS LIKE THE LORD OF THE RINGS AND MORE LIKE THE HOBBIT, IN THAT YOU HAVE NO IDEA WHAT YOU'RE DOING OR QUITE HOW YOU GOT THERE, BUT YOU'RE BUMBLING ABOUT AND GENERALLY HAVING AN INTERESTING TIME.

THE DWARVES ARE THE ANTENATAL GROUP

IF YOU DON'T KNOW WHO THE GLOIN IS, IT'S YOU

 

By the way, I am not intending to put you off having your very own Milkmeister, although given the length of the catalogue of pregnancy horrors I can sense that you might not believe me. The MM is an excellent addition to the world (both my world, and the World at Large) and if you’d like to have one of your own then I certainly don’t see any reason why you shouldn’t.

Let’s just hope you enjoy NAUSEA and FARTING and INSOMNIA and PANIC and BOREDOM and SOMEHOW PANIC AND BOREDOM AT THE SAME TIME and CHAFING and BOOGERS and ACHES and FATIGUE and MORE FARTING and WEIRD BOOBS and STABBING PAINS and PATRONISING COMMENTS and FAT ANKLES and COLOSTRUM HARVESTING WHICH WE HAVEN’T MENTIONED FOR A REASON and BRAIN FOG and BLOOD TESTS and MIDNIGHT WEES and CONSTIPATION and YOUR OWN UNRECOGNISABLE BODY and VOMITING and SORE NIPPLES and STRESS and WAITING ROOMS and PEOPLE TOUCHING YOUR TUMMY and STRETCH MARKS and NOT BEING ALLOWED TO COMPLAIN and SHOOTING POORLY and NO SMOKED SALMON.

Sheesh. What a weird thing to do, having a baby. I shall bring this three-part series of blogs to a close in much the same way as I brought the actual pregancy to a close: Well! That was productive! But I don’t think I’ll be doing it again.

—

Have you made it to the end? Well done you. Here is an Easter egg. While looking for a suitable LOTR picture for the very start of this blog, I discovered a sermon about Gollum. It so intrigued me that I wrote a post about it, and you can go and read it here if you like. It isn’t in the regular blog post list, so this is a special treat (?) for dedicated readers such as yourself.