25-26 wks

25 wks – stress, panic and crying

The to-do-list is stressing me out. I’m afraid I end up having this baby without the proper preparations. Work is stressing me out as well, because no matter how much I do, nothing seems to get done. Whenever I get stressed these days, I cry. But of course not for the right reasons. I cry because I can’t get my omelet to bake the way I want it, because I look fat in that outfit, because the cat won’t come back inside.

That last example is probably the worst one. Let my cats out on the patio, because I want them to be normal wild outside cats by the time the baby arrives. Scout & Louis (my cats, as you’ve probably guessed) are very enthusiastic about this idea. They spent last weekend outside all day and slept all evening, totally exhausted. On Thursday I get home at about 7pm and decide to give them another outing-opportunity before nightfall. My mistake: I fed them first. So Scout & Louis storm out without any vital reason to come back that night. When the sun goes down – no cats. When I call for them, Scout, the nerdy, scaredy cat comes back, but Louis, the crazy-warrior-type does not. I grant him another half hour, then call him again. It’s pitch black out by now. This time Louis calls back to me, and he sounds panicky. When my eyes are adjusted to the dark, I can kind of spot him two yards over, trying to climb a tree that would get him on the wall that would get him home. But he keeps falling out of the tree, because he can’t clearly see where to jump anymore. Finally, he gives up and sits still in the yard, without even answering my calls anymore.

I panic and call a friend. This friend is one of the good guys of this planet. A very good one. He jumps on his bike straightaway to rescue my cat. Or me. He even brings me a brownie! By the time he gets here, though, Louis has quietly managed to get into the tree and hurry home. He’s drinking some water when my friend hands me the brownie.

26 wks - Baby names

Most common Dutch names for a baby boy: Jayden, Milan, Luc, Sem, Thijs, Lucas, Daan, Jesse, Tygo and Thomas.

Most common American names for a baby boy: Jacob, Michael, Ethan, Joshua, Daniel, Alexander, Anthony, William, Christopher, Matthew.

Most common Ghanaian names for a baby boy: Abeeku, Kobena, Kwodwo, Nkrumah, Yaw, Adusa, Akwasi.

Weirdest names for a baby boy: Locadio, Milagro, Juton, Detroit, Beckham, Hardock, Tao.

Which factors to take into account when finding a good name for a baby? This is what I came up with:

· Cannot rhyme with/resemble some very bad nicknames. This might cause some very embarrassing playground moments while growing up. So no Rik, Pepijn or – and sadly – Eli.

· Has to be cute and informal while growing up, but serious enough when thirty something and trying to build a career. No Billy, but no Johannes either.

· Cannot alliterate with last name. Eliminates all names starting with ‘P’.

· I want it to be English, because of my love for the English language, but not SO English that grade school teachers in my town won’t know how to pronounce it properly, so my kid will have to correct his teachers all the time, which is annoying by itself, causing him to eventually give up and be called some kind of pseudo-English-name with a Maastricht accent. So definitely no Jayden or Ethan!

· I like two-syllable-names for boys. I loved the name ‘Noah’ for a long time. Now I love my sister’s son Noah even more.

· I want some kind of link to the past, to people that came before him, whose name he could carry and thus whose stories he will take with him. Doesn’t have to be family in particular. My father’s name is out, ‘cause Noah’s already got it.

· Second and third names are kind of cool, I think, but I’m not crazy about women’s names for boys.

24 wks

Work has been more than crazy lately. We’re opening two new locations at once, and one of them has serious opening issues! Two days before our deadline, we’re all forced to spend the entire day and evening working on the vinyl floor and assembling furniture. I try to help out as much as I can, but after working on two small cabinets my back hurts so much I have to stop. I’m put on babysitting duty for my sister’s kid who’s stranded at the work site like myself. But after a while it’s getting hard to even pick him up. I feel exhausted and no use. Working shifts like these are simply not doable anymore, I finally realise. Another lesson learned.

Like my good old friend overseas pointed out: I’m expanding in all directions at once. My diameter is increasing weekly, it seems. Reminds me of Violet Beauregard, the girl in ‘Charlie and the chocolate factory’ who ate too many blueberry-pie-gum at Willy Wonka’s. Another friend suggested I start keeping weekly measurements to see how fast I’m growing. He’s a guy, of course. As is the friend who told me to look up pregnant Heidi Klum pictures online to see how lean she stayed almost up until the end. Women approach the big-belly-complex much more tactfully: they all tell me how I’m pregnant in a beautiful way, they tell me you wouldn’t guess I’m pregnant when they see me from the back, they feign amazement when I tell them I’m almost six months. I tell you this: it ain’t hard to love the girls these days!

In the meantime, I still have way too much on my to-do-list-before-baby. Still have to buy the buggy, all the baby furniture, most things on the baby-necessities-list. Still have to paint the room, assemble all the stuff, go to the breastfeeding-information-night. Still have to visit the day care centers where I hope my baby will one day be accepted. Still have to finish the kitchen and the terrace so I won’t be in any mess once I’m in another one altogether. Oh, and announcement cards. But first I really have to stay on this couch with my book for a little while longer.

21 - 23 wks

21 wks

Enter the second half of this pregnancy. I get to go to the hospital for the ultimate ultrasound. It feels like kind of a big occasion, so I bring my mom and my sister. Mom has never seen ultrasound images before; she stares at the screen and I’m not sure she actually knows which part of the baby is being shown. But she’s obviously fascinated anyway. We get a complete overview of the baby; the brains first, then the head and the heart, the spinal cord, kidneys, and finally the legs and…

Even though I’ve somehow known I’m having a boy for weeks now, and even though I can clearly see a third – somewhat smaller – ‘leg’ down there, I’m still not confident enough to declare this baby a boy myself. What if it turns out to be a girl after all and I’ve already established the opposite? Would that be my kid’s first prenatal trauma? It seems best to wait for the expert to say it out loud.

‘Well, you’ve probably already noticed…’ the ultrasound lady says. My mom, sister and me say nothing. ‘It’s a boy!’ I smile. It’s a boy. My sister leans over and whispers: ‘you’re having a son!’. My hormones take over and the tears in my eyes make the baby’s legs and genitals all blurry. By the time I ‘m back to normal, the screen is showing Junior’s head in 3D, a little skinny babyhead, eyes closed, but hand touching chin, like he is thinking hard about something. Rodin himself couldn’t have sculptured it any better. There’s a beautiful little baby boy in there.

22 wks

The fact that I’m having a boy means that I am not having a girl. Obvious, of course, but this is something that I somehow needed to process for about a day. Last week I was having a baby, but now I am having a boy. So within a week I lost the possibility of having a girl. That means no dresses, probably no doll houses, no earring decision for the first 10 years at least. Kind of sad. Okay. Bye bye imaginary girl.

Having a boy means picking out the coolest clothes, means broken arms or wrists when playing outside, might mean cars and footballs, knights and soldiers. Slight chance of earring decision in high school. Having a boy means I no longer have to look for names, because I’ve already got one. And it means I can start buying orange kid stuff, which seemed better for a boy than for a girl. I’m having a boy!

The pregnancy books say I will be feeling the baby more and more as the weeks progress. And they are right. He kicks in the mornings and the evenings mostly, or at least those are the times when I’m the most conscious of it. It’s kind of a funny feeling, and it often makes me smile. It makes up for my belly that has exploded over the weekend, thus eliminating some of the few final options of normal-Thessa-shirts I could still wear. It also makes up for being exhausted at the end of a working day. It doesn’t make up yet for the drastic surge in frequency of toilet visits, both day AND night.

23 wks

Annoyed by men staring at your breasts a little too openly? Try the entire population staring at your belly all the time. My entrance is no longer marked by me or my attitude as I walk in, but by my pregnant state of being. It took some getting used to, but I think I’m getting the hang of it. I can now be proud or amused slightly more than being irritated or embarassed. The smile that appears on most people’s faces after establishing the presence of the belly makes up for a lot.

I can’t sleep normally any more. I keep waking up, either because I have to pee, or because I feel sick or because I can’t find a right posture to lie in. I try out different kinds of pillows in different places and finally settle on some kind of pillow-fortress in which I barricade myself. This means I am able to move as little as possible, which is nice. It also meant waking up in horror in the middle of the night, because I couldn’t find the way out of bed to go to the toilet. But the end result: sleep in nice little 2.5-hr-intervals, which is better than no sleep at all. I watch tv on my iPhone in between.

The club of women-who-have-been-there are including me in their midst more and more. I keep getting showered with the most compelling birth stories. The difference between now and 10 weeks ago is that now, I find myself interested. I want to know how all of them did it, experienced it. I want to be put at ease, and with every story I find a way there. You gave birth for more than 24 hours? Well, you’re still smiling AND my baby will probably be as much in a hurry as I was. You sometimes pee a little when jumping or dancing? Well, you have three babies and I’ll only have one or two. Your wife had to stay in bed for 12 weeks? Well, I’m Superwoman, so no worries. They wouldn’t give you the epidural? Well, I know one or two people in the hospital, and I’ve already programmed their data in my Phone.

In the end, everyone tells me, it all comes down to one thing and one thing alone: the moment where you finally get to meet the one that has been living inside you for so long, will make up for every contraction, every C-section, and any pair of stitches. Also, this road is a one-way kind of deal: there’s no turning back. I wouldn’t want to anyway; I’m way too curious already.