Saturday 13 August 2016

Hello, blog!

Hello, blog! Ltns, or at least ltn-type. What have you been up to? Me, mostly I've been pregnant. It sucks. I'm so bad at being pregnant. This time is worse than with Little Djinn (who is no longer Cucumber but now a baby Coke Cat. Yeah, we don't know what that is either); with my first pregnancy I felt terrible the whole time but was rarely actually sick (except when brushing my teeth - that was a regular trigger) and this time I spent four months throwing up two or three times a day, eating little and drinking less. It was festive. I'm almost 20 weeks now, and how do I feel you ask? I am living in heartburn central, which is a lot like nauseau central except I've got pills that mostly keep me from throwing up. Except even with the pills I'm feel worse and worse and I've come pretty close to throwing up a few times so we'll see how long that lasts.

The other reason this time has been worse than with my first is that, having had a miscarriage at almost 16 weeks, Chris and I have been pretty much nervous wrecks the whole time. We had to wait to 12 weeks (3 whole months of throwing up and generally feeling like I had stomach flu - which btw, we all had the week before I found out I was pregnant) for the dating scan to have actual proof that there actually was a fetus this time. That was a huge relief, but by the time another six weeks had passed and I could feel it kicking, I was pretty well tied in knots again. Feeling unrelentingly terrible when you know there's something wonderful at the end is very different from feeling unrelentingly awful when you don't. I can't tell you what a relief it is to feel it kicking around in there. 

Little Djinn is very excited to be getting a sibling, though she's less pleased with not being able to fall asleep lying on top of me. She's finding toys "for the baby" and we're putting them aside in what will be the nursery. I remind her a lot that the baby won't be here until after Christmas (3 Jan), and it won't be doing much of anything for 3 months, eating food for 6 months, or walking for a year. In the meantime, she starts nursery on Tuesday and daddy and I are excited even if she's largely not.

She got to be quite the swimmer over the summer, and can now swim underwater, changing orientation on every axis, but she hasn't yet figured out how to lift her face out of the water. Unfortunately, in her increasing confidence, she tried to jump into the pool backwards, leaned forward slightly, and cracked her face against the edge of the pool and went from wanting to go swimming every day to not wanting to go swimming at all. I'm hoping that when we're on holiday in a few weeks that proximity will tempt her back into the water.

She is sorta enjoying watching the Olympics but has firm ideas about which sports she does and doesn't like. She liked the diving, especially the green pool, and she liked the gymnastics and now the trampolining. Tennis is allowed but not badminton, rugby but not football. Speaking of rugby, did you see the rugby 7s final between Fiji and the U.K.? Funniest 10 minutes (opening half) I've ever seen. The U.K., and one presumes every other team that Fiji played on their way to gold, had no idea what hit them. Hilarious. Anyway, she's now playing Olympics with her little cars (one couldn't play with the others because it's not fast enough), which is almost as funny as when she was playing house with them and Mama car kept having to go throw up. I love listening to her play.

I mentioned our upcoming holiday - that has been, uh, interesting. Over a year ago we booked a Disney cruise to see my longest-standing friend and matron-of-honor get married (technically, a vow renewal for their 10th anniversary as they eloped at the time) followed by a family reunion on my mother's side in Florida. Well, thanks to those stupid ZIKV virus carrying mosquitos making it to the US Virgin Islands, one of the ship's ports of call, and me being pregnant we had to cancel the cruise. And then, a week later, those same stupid mosquitos made it to Florida so we had to cancel that half of the trip, too. The good news is that we got a full refund for the cruise and should get a refund for the flights because Disney and Virgin Atlantic are not the most economical options around but both companies value having customers for life over keeping your money today. 

So we looked for a holiday that involved flying in and out of Glasgow between our existing train tickets and hotel reservations and instead we're going to Tenerife (one of the Canary Islands, part of Spain but off of Africa). 

In knitting news, I've only just recently been able to concentrate enough to wrap string around sticks, so there's really been no progress on anything. But I'm back to looking at patterns and dreaming of having beautiful knit things so there's hope for the future.