my bump journey

How precious Saturday mornings have become.

The working week is over, and I survived. It's 3:34pm and I'm still in my pyjamas, but I intend to remain that way until I go out tonight.

My little boy has decided to refuse all food. He is either teething really badly (likely - he has every, single symptom and hasn't got any teeth yet), or he is traumatised by the fact his life has been turned upside down and to control the situation, has stopped eating. I was warned this might happen. It's heartbreaking.

His little fat leg doughnuts have shrunk considerably, almost to nothing - he is skinny again. It's crazy how quickly this happens to babies. Why can't this happen to me?

It's been 10 months, and it hurts to look at these pictures sometimes, but I finally got round to putting together a collage of my bump when I was pregnant.

The Brit took one of my bump every week, every Monday night. From 9 weeks until I was induced at 36 weeks.
The big milestones for me were:

9 weeks: I felt so sick, I remember struggling not to projectile vom over my fellow tube commuters in the morning. And the tiredness was ridiculous, I felt like I would pass out on the spot every afternoon, so I'd need to get up from my desk and walk around the building - aimlessly - just to stay upright.

12 weeks: You can tell everyone, as the most 'risky' stage of pregnancy is over (not with twins, it turns out.) But the morning sickness and tiredness start to go away and you feel 8 000 times better.

15 weeks: I was starting to show (That or they must've been like "Wow. She's really packed it on, hasn't she?), so I told work. I had to hide it the week before when I was with my colleagues in San Francisco at a conference. Where we usually all booze. That was hard. Pretending to booze is hard work.

19 weeks: I suddenly started to get big. Beeg. You could now tell I wasn't carrying a singleton, or many would've assumed I was onto my third child.

20 weeks: The best scan. They didn't look like shrimps anymore, they had arms and legs and were moving and waving and doing funny things like kick each other. Everything looked healthy and normal. We asked not to know the sexes, although I just knew it was a boy and a girl.

27 weeks: I was sizeable, so we thought we'd better go on a babymoon before I couldn't walk properly/actually enjoy it. I was sore, being kicked everywhere, and generally life was getting pretty uncomfortable. I was guzzling bottles of Gaviscon. We still drove to France and had a few days there. Mainly eating.

30 weeks: This was the last scan where I saw Molly alive. By now they were large enough that I couldn't see their whole bodies anymore, only pieces of who they were - heads, chests, hands. All was still normal and healthy, even though Molly (Twin 2) was the smaller twin.

31 weeks: Commuting was becoming the ultimate ball ache, walking was hard work, I was huffing and puffing and generally, pretty miserable to be honest. Everyone else who was pregnant and at the same timeline as me, had neat, compact little bumps and they all seemed very spritely. My bump was heavy and weighing me down. It was time to leave work.

32 weeks: I spent most days propped up by a fortress of cushions on my bed, not lying fat or they'd surely suffocate me, but not sitting upright either.
Molly, up until this point, was breech. They'd been lying yin and yang for all this time, and so they booked me in to have a c-section at 37 weeks and 5 days, on 4 April.

However, she suddenly decided to turn, and in the bath one night, I saw and felt it. It was like something out of Alien.
They estimated that this was the week Molly stopped growing. So when she was born, she was the size of a 32 week baby.

34 weeks: It was sometime between now and 35 weeks that she gave up the fight and died. I didn't notice that she wasn't kicking, as she was always a graceful little thing. She didn't kick the hell out of me directly in my ribs like Sebastian did (he was a boy from day 1. No question about it), she kind of fluttered. She would flutter, it felt like butterflies.

35 weeks: I went in for my final scan, and they confirmed that she had no heartbeat.
I stayed in hospital for a week to have Sebastian monitored.

36 weeks: I was induced. I was in labour for 18 hours, right up until the point where Sebastian got stuck and so I had an emergency c-section.

This was my twin journey.

the things you really need when you have a baby

Just before we jet off tomorrow, there are two things I wanted to do:
1) Go for my last Hartbeeps (songs and play group) class (I might cry. I'm naff. I know all the songs off by heart and I sing them everyday.)
2) Write a post about the items I found most valuable during my maternity leave.

I wanted to leave something helpful on the Internet, in the case a pregnant mummy is Googling a list of things she needs to get before her baby is born and happens to come across this.

I got s twins list. The person who gave it to me had twins, so I trusted that everything on there had to be bought. They were 'essentials' not 'nice to haves.' As a result, before they were born, I had 40 muslins, 20 bibs, 8 bath towels. I still have those things, and I obviously haven't used half of them.

If there's one thing I can suggest: literally buy only the essentials. You won't need or use even half the stuff you buy, even if, like me, you thought you were bringing two home. Trust me.

The things I found most valuable, throughout maternity leave, were:

Without a shadow of a doubt, my new highchair.

You get so many types of highchair; some clip onto the side of a table (if space is an issue), some look lovely (beautifully crafted in wood, painted and have a Victorian feel about them), others look cheap and plasticy ugly but work incredibly, while very few look good and actually do the job.

I wish someone had really put emphasis on this for me. If there's one thing you should spend money on; it's a highchair that works. I went for aesthetics - the East Coast white wooden one. A bitch to clean, funny straps that don't work, he would slip through it, wouldn't sit properly, and become distracted so wouldn't eat. Looked nice, but also took up room.

I've eBayed back to where it came from and got myself a Baby Bjorn. It's small, looks better than you think, and the child is locked in.  Easy to clean, no mess anywhere, no distractions, he sits like a regal aristocrat, and he can push blueberries around the tray easily to pick them up.

My only regret? I never did it sooner. I should've got this when he was just learning to sit, as it helps them to sit upright too.

Tommee Tippee milk feeding bibs

Except I use them for any feeding. They have this dribble/milk soft thing at the neck. So nothing gets past it and seeps through.

All other bibs have a gap between the neck and the neckline. If you have a baby you'll know that by the end of the day, things start growing under there. You'll find everything under there, from last week's brocolli to hairballs to milk goo to unthinkable things. It's a catchment zone, and most bibs don't stop shit from getting stuck there.

Except these bad boys.

A few small, ceramic bowls

I found using my Granny's old ceramic bowls from her dinner service, the best thing for all of Sebastian's meals. You can safely heat them up in the microwave (heating plastic is bad....), and it seems to serve just the right amount for lunch, breakfast and dinner. I also store all sorts of finger foods in them in the fridge.

They've been the most useful things in the kitchen, ever.

Muslins

Everyone will tell you to get tons of these. I was told I needed 80 for twins. I bought 40, and as you might imagine, we are overrun with the bastards. This place is one big muslin fortress.

You don't need that many. If you have five big muslin cloths, or ten smallish ones, you'll be just fine.
You'll use wipes and tissues and everything else too.

I bought some cheap cream muslins off eBay.

Dribble bibs

Different from feeding bibs. (I didn't know these kinds of things when I was pregnant. A bib was a bib was a bib.)
My baby dribbles a lot.  He has been teething for, like, eight years. If he doesn't wear a dribble bib/neckerchief, the front of his clothes are wet within minutes.

They're essential. Seriously. I need to change his over a few times a day.

Sheepskin 

Again, a bit of an investment, but it's wonderful and soft for babies and really helps them sleep in their buggy. It keeps them cool in summer, warm in winter, and you don't need to worry about top sheets and lining blankets.

White noise

Buy this app for your phone/a device you're happy to leave near your sleeping baby. Immediately. I have so much to thank this app for. It would help settle my child and help put him back to sleep at all hours of the night, for months on end.

There are a few sounds to choose from, and in the end he liked the sooothing sounds of crashing waves. But the vacuum cleaner, shushing noise and heart beat were favourites for a while. He couldn't get to sleep without it, and honestly, it really helped him realise it was sleepy time.

Car seat to pram brackets/converters

It means you can put your car seat on the pram, for when you travel. It's genius and it makes life so much simpler, especially when you fly.

Just two little plastic thingies that clip onto the frame of the pram.
We could take our car seat away, and simply put it on the pram frame when we needed to push him around. It became known as 'the travel system,' and this is what we are taking to SA too.

Goes without saying...

....the play gym I was given (things hanging off it and music, flashing lights), and the Baby Bjorn bouncer were lifesavers. Before they crawl you can put them in there while you do stuff. My baby screamed for the first two months I put him down, but after that, these two things were brilliant.

Stuff I didn't need:

Swaddling blankets

Muslins wrap them up so much better, tighter and softer. As long as you have a large size muslin, you can swaddle so much better than anything else marketed for 'miracle swaddling.'

Baby bath

Or a top-to-toe bath. I was given a  baby bath, but never used it as I already had a bath seat I could lay Seb on in the bath. I preferred this, as it was less fiddly, and the baby bath seat lasted a long time, until he could sit up.

Excessive cot and moses basket sheets

For some reason, before I had children, I was under the impression that babies regularly shat themselves throughout the night. They do pooh a lot, but they don't soil through five layers of sheets. Every single night. Especially when they are just drinking milk.

I had fuckloads of sheets, ready for two cots and two moses baskets. I have reBayed these too. You only need two for each cot and moses basket.

Scratch mitts

I was also told by a mother whose child scratched the bejeesus out of his face - never seen anything like it since - it was weird -  and told that if I don't buy at least ten pairs of scratch mitts, he will damage his face with his nails.

I cut his nails. That's what I did. So buy a baby nail kit instead. The mitts really aren't worth it.

Bumbo seat

Some babies/mummies love this thing - swear it's the best thing
ever - hmmm....meh. Sebastian didn't love it at all. For one, his legs were a bit fat to fit into it, so it didn't look helluva comfortable. For two, he twisted back, and wouldn't sit upright in it.

Not an essential, I'd say.

Now if only I could take the high chair to South Africa tomorrow....

rare blood type

Not sure how this hasn't come up once in my 33 years of being alive, but it turns out that I have some fucked up rare blood type.

Most people know their blood types right? If you don't, like me, you kind of truck on through life assuming you're an O (44% of the UK is an O).

Or maybe you really really like needles and you're one of those amazing blood donor type people. I've always dreaded the thought of giving blood, the thought makes me pukey and I'm not even in the chair.
But I've had blood tests for things before and somehow assumed that my blood type must've been on record anyway.

I assumed wrong.

With pregnancy you get about 8000 blood tests. - for Down's syndrome, for Hepatitis, HIV, the whole thing.

And this time, a little brown envelope was delivered through the slit in the door by Postman Pat.

It said that I am Rhesus D Negative, which is less than 7% of the global population. It's a rare and precious blood type which can cause me massive complications when pregnant.

But of course - having twins isn't complicated enough.

It's also a blood that can be given to almost anybody. So it's highly transferable for anyone in an accident or needs a transfusion due to its 'antigens' or unique proteins. That bit is fine. Giving me blood is complicated; I need the same type. My blood also cannot come into any contact with my babies' blood.

Fuck. So all this time.

Lesson here of course is that once I have had my children, I will start donating blood. I'm donating my organs to science when I die, and now armed with this new knowledge of my blood type, I simple cannot not give blood.

The complications in pregnancy are that because it's such a rare type, the chances of one or even both of my babies having my blood type are like 1 in 8000. And if our blood mixes on delivery or even just through their placentas - from what I can tell through all the medical mumbo jumbo - I can basically cannablise my children.
They won't be born with the right antibodies and could die. I could die. We could all die.

....And breathe.

To combat this risk, they will start injecting me with something called 'Anti D' in two months from now and up until after I give birth. It's basically a mini blood transfusion with blood from Canada ("the best, most pure, low risk-for-disease blood." Filled with maple syrup, no doubt?) so that I have the right antibodies in my blood and none of these attack my babies.

Apparently this is also for my second pregnancy (Good one! If all goes right this one, there will be no second pregnancy, ever!), so that my [next] baby has some kind of immunity when born.

I mean WTF.

So yeah. Beam me up with a strapping Canadian's blood. I'm not scared.

In case you have this weird affliction and want to know more - here is a point by point scenario on being Rhesus D negative and the risks to your baby(s).