Baby Blogging - Weeks 20 - 24!

My gosh time is flying.

Can you believe I am 24 weeks pregnant?! That time seems to have flown, and mostly in a good way. I mean check out the difference in bump between the first and last pics in this post!

Week started with our 20 week scan and we were so glad to finally find out that Tater-Tot is girl. The full story of the scan is here.

It was great to make it to the halfway point without any drama and feeling good.

The end of that week saw us head to Scotland to celebrate a friends birthday. We had finished work at lunch time on Friday to drive 5 hours from Birmingham to Glasgow where we stayed with my Aunt and Uncle. It allowed us to make an early start on our journey to the highlands the next morning. You can read full details of the trip here: A Weekend In The Cairngorms.

Sadly we had to leave the beautiful Cairngorms, our lovely cabin and our friends on the Tuesday afternoon to make our way back home. I had to be in Reading for a strategy session with my team first thing on Wednesday, that wasn't the sad part, the sad part was cutting the trip short.

Arriving in Reading at 8.30am Wednesday morning I was glad to get to the venue and be greeted by warmed croissants and all sorts of treats, it's fair to say week 21 saw my appetite increase and I was happy to make the most of it.

The two day conference was cut short by warnings that snow was getting worse. Announcements were explaining that 'The Beast From The East' was due to cause traffic chaos so we had a hearty lunch (to prepare for our epic journeys) and went on our way. My team is spread from Glasgow to London, Leicester to Wales and a few places in between. The stories of the journeys made the decision to leave early the right one. It turned out getting to London had been a nightmare.

Thankfully getting the train to Birmingham worked out fine but the local train to Kings Norton involved waiting 20 minutes for a train that wasn't cancelled and getting home from that station took a further hour because the roads were grinding to a halt.

It's been said in more than a few posts that Laura and I LOVE snow but this snowfall had led to our friends from Sheffield having to cancel a visit which was gutting. It also led to us having to postpone at trip to London to see Everybody's Talking About Jaime with them. Thankfully we could get back the train fare and change the date of our tickets.

By week 22 I started to suddenly feel really pregnant. It was so strange that I had gone from barely noticing the growing bump to suddenly being really aware of it. Maybe the appetite has led to the pounds piling on a bit faster or maybe it was that I was starting to feel our little girl moving around. Whatever it was when we went to Ghetto Golf on the 8th of March I couldn't deny I was 5 months pregnant.

Bending down to get the golf ball couldn't really happen, squeezing into the benches for a snack involved a lot of effort to shuffle a long and the bending started to get my back. All things that up until that point hadn't been a thing. In fact only 2 weeks before I had been striding across a snow topped mountain in Scotland!

Work was also starting to get crazy busy as we had a client day coming up and so extra hours were required, it created a perfect storm that made me super tired, kinda grouchy and mildly stressed. I would have been a lot more stressed had Laura not been amazing. She took on everything possible and left me to focus on what needed to get done. Without her the stress would have been way worse. In fact she was so wonderful I blogged about here here.

Thankfully the client day went smoothly, the only challenge was the meltdown I had when I couldn't wear the outfit I had planned. I had wanted to wear a nice form fitting dress to show off my bump but when I tried it on it made by bump look saggy and boobs look weird. I was gutted. It was 11pm and poor Laura had to deal with me pulling numerous outfits out, convincing myself I looked terrible, collapsing in a dramatic heap and then trying on various things until I had assured myself I looked okay.

With the client day out the way we then had a quick turnaround to ready to head to Paris for the weekend. You can read about that trip here. The summary is that we walked 18 miles in 2 days, saw a lot of the wonderful sights of Paris, ate a lot of delicious food, got rained on - then snowed on and had a dramatic journey home.

There has also been other drama that has been happening over the last 6 weeks too. Thankfully not pregnancy related but house related. We had discovered a leak pre-Christmas that we thought had been repaired. It hadn't and after arriving back from Gran Canaria our entire guest room ceiling had water marks on. After numerous calls to insurance and Homeserve and numerous visits by plumbers, surveyors and assessors a chunk of our ceiling was removed, a pipe replaced and we are now mid-restoration which will involve plastering the ceiling, painting the room and laying a new carpet. My Mum has been a wonderful source of support throughout though, coordinating the people, managing the project and making sure I am not involved in any of the stressful parts.

Other than that we are making progress on the nursery, we built a crib and then realised that probably wasn't the best idea as we are actually re-carpeting the room and putting up wallpaper so the room will need to be emptied. However the crib looks great. We also picked the wallpaper and the carpet so work can start soon. We also picked up a highchair from IKEA for £10 after taking peoples advice that one that can be easily wiped down is a great benefit.

We did try Baby-R-Us for a car seat but I quickly got overwhelmed and we left empty handed. We did get to check out 'next to you cribs' though and decided that for the first few months we would use that instead of a Moses basket. That way we can have our girl close to hand and make breast feeding easy. Even better we got a GroupOn deal with £40 off.

In addition Laura's parents kindly sent us a support mat that stops the baby rolling over and we have been gifted dribble bids, hats, handmade booties and cute baby grows so our collection is starting to make progress.

I also got a pregnancy pillow - thanks to Wowcher who had 25% off. It has come in super handy as back pain seems to happening fairly frequently when I have been on my feet a lot- especially in the middle and lower back. Sadly it has not been the problem solver I had hoped when it comes to actual sleep. For the last few weeks I have found that if I sleep on one side for too long I start getting numb legs and pins and needles. If I filmed my sleep I would look like I was on a spit roast spinning every half an hour or so. Add in the once or twice loo visits and it means I struggle to get anywhere near 7 hours sleep. That sadly is leading to me getting tired during the day.

The other fun development is our little girl is now a disco dancer, her main performance happens early evening when I settle down on the couch and I'm super glad as that's when Laura is normally with me so she can sit with her hand on my belly. The movements were initially like ripples but over the last 2 weeks especially they are strong kicks. If she is really going for it they can continue until I fall asleep.

I think this pic might actually include baguettes, beignets and all other delicious French food as I don't look this big a few days later!

In fact, as we head into week 24 she is getting her groove on at various points, including right now as I write this post. My belly is getting some low blows - which is actually a relief as I took a tumble up a flight of stairs. Luckily landing on my hands and knees but it can be hard to realise your limitations at points- such as carrying cases or keeping up with fast walkers who I used to leave in my wake.

I think the next 15 weeks will be a slower pace, other than our up and coming baby moon and a few trips to see friends...oh and the baby shower...the diary is quietening down. Plus we have some more shopping to fit in and I need to find my replacement at work so plenty still to do that we need to find time for.