fightingthecage | Has sir by any chance gone sir-on-one with a troll before? No?

So yes! There is now, quite unexpectedly, home internets. Hurrah! This automatically means that I must bore on about the upcoming arrival of my kid as it has been decreed that that is the only thing I am allowed to think about at the moment. I don't know who came up with that or why I wasn't warned in advance but there you go. How rude. Could be worse I suppose - although what if I can never think about anything else? Like, forever? Or the next eighteen years at least. I may die. I am doing my own head in.

That aside, have a scan pic. I will tell you what I think about scan pictures under the cut. Possibly it is not what prospective parents are supposed to think on first viewing their precious little baby but what can you do?

Clearly, I am going to be giving birth to an alien. This alarms me. Everyone said it was a baby. They lied. Obviously they lied and I will not be giving birth to it, it will burst out of my stomach, chest or similar and leave me for dead while it goes on a mad rampage through the ~~spaceship~~ hospital while only minutes old. There can be no doubt on this. Just as obvious is the fact that whomever made the movie Alien was au fait with baby scan pictures, because a fetus's spine while in utero looks exactly like the Mother alien thingy. All...weird and yuk. Bony and just...yuk. Yeah. Maybe I should name it Ripley in preemptive self-defence against itself.

On a more motherly note, it is pretty cool to see its heart beating. All four chambers show up clearly and it's so small but beating away in a really rather awesome fashion. It almost makes up for the weirdness of the size of the head - I do realise that babies' heads are out of proportion to their bodies when they're very young but still. Its one thing to know it and quite another to see pictures of it.

So that was the scan, which was....uh, almost four weeks ago now. The day before that, I heard its heart beating for the first time when the midwife used her cool little machine to pick up the sound of it. That was brilliant. Really brilliant. So weird when you lie there and then, clear as day, there's the sound of your kid's heartbeat echoing through the room. Had a grin on my face for two days after that, whenever I thought of it. It was cooler than the scan, to be honest.

As for everything else that's been going on vis a vis me and Steve...well to be honest, I dont want to depress myself by going into it in any detail right now. Besides, the weirdness of the whole situation warrants an entry all on its own. In short, it was a nightmare and now it's a bit better given that we can hang out and chat about random stuff and everything's fine as long as neither of us allude to the fact that in three months time we will be parents. Obviously this state of non-communication can't be allowed to continue forever but it's better than the open hostility I received for a couple of weeks so I'm tempted to let sleeping dogs lie for a little longer I think.

Urrr, what else was I going to mention? Oh yeah. Pregnancy becomes a lot more bearable after the doctor tells you you're anaemic and gives you iron pills to sort it out. It means that I am no longer zomie-ing around in a constant state of exhaustion although some tiredness is to be expected. I normally can function perfectly well on five hours of sleep a night - now I'm the walking dead if I get less than ten. It is such a strange phenomenon - I mean, its not even all that obvious to an outsider that I'm pregnant yet. This is partly because I wear loose clothes most of the time and partly because all the weight I lost over the last few months has now be replaced by a baby so I don't look much different to how I did before (how unfair!) but I would have thought that now I'm in the last three months, the bump would be bigger. But I'm grateful that its not because that will be awkward and uncomfortable enough later on, I'm sure - anyway, the point is, it's strange to be so affected by something that isn't even all that obvious. And I won't lie, I'll be glad when its over. I hate the fact that I'm so restricted in what I'm allowed to eat/drink/lift etc (although the perks are undeniably fun - no one at work complains if I go and sit down for a bit or concoct something weird to eat for lunch. And the blokes have to lift everything heavy around for me, ha!) and it's annoying to realise that some restrictions aren't ever going to go away. Like having to spend most of my wages on baby stuff - that's never going to change now, or at least, not for years and years. And I can't just go out wherever I want and live with few consequences anymore and the more I think about that, the more I go WTF?!

...and as I write that, I realise how very lame it sounds. For one thing, I suppose other people grew out of living a consequence-free life years ago and as another thing...well. Quite obviously, not thinking ahead was how I landed up in this mess to start off with. But its OK really - every time I get all 'omgnonoNO' about it I remember that the payoff is...well, a baby. My own baby. And they are awesome things and I will love it to death and thats the end of it really. If I am being forced to grow up then this is, at least, an awesome kind of way to do it.

OK, enough blathering about that. I am off to do chores and then spend the evening revelling in my newly-restored internets. HURRAH!