I’ve just had a baby! This is the birth story. I was 38 weeks pregnant. With my first baby, I went into labour naturally, 2 days before my due date, and I was hoping for exactly the same experience this time. Last time I worked until 39 weeks, then had a really relaxing week, preparing…
As my maternity leave flies by and work gets horrifically close, I’ve been thinking about the parallels between my job and having a baby. I think being a therapist prepared me for parenthood. I thought I’d miss work but I haven’t at all. I arranged only to take 10 months off, thinking I’d be keen…
Week 1 of hyperemesis:The morning after our wedding, I woke up early, with bad nausea. I had felt sick for a couple of weeks, even before I was 4 weeks pregnant, but this was worse. I ran to the bathroom and vomited. I was pleased. The first miscarriage, I was 31 days pregnant. The second…
(Part 1 here) I set my alarm for 6am, the morning of my wedding. I got up and shaved my legs in the shower. I cut my ankle and it bled quite a lot. I went down for breakfast. Tess was there with her boyfriend. I had less than half of my cereal before abandoning…
Andrew, the World-weary Police detective / Anecdotes about my vagina / Babies / Love and relationships
I was mentally prepared to find it a nightmare having a newborn. Having worked with lots of patients with post-natal depression, and being one of the last of my friends and family to have babies, I had earnestly stored away every single difficult detail I heard. I imagined my baby would be a composite of…
Andrew and I got married in December 2020. He had always been on the fence (at best) about getting married. His main beef was having a day with lots of people, where he is the centre of attention (although I assured him I would be). When COVID came along and only small weddings were allowed,…
I thought I’d start by writing about the birth. I was 39 weeks pregnant, two days before my due date. I had been on maternity leave for a week. I’d spent the week batch cooking dinners to freeze, arranging baby clothes in drawers and overanalysing every bodily sensation. (I also went to the Skygarden in…
Almost a year to the day since my first miscarriage, I’ve just had a baby! Also, Andrew and I had a tiny COVID-compliant wedding, at the end of 2020. I’ve decided to start writing regularly again. I’m planning to write and to catch you up on what has happened between now and my last posts,…
It was 3:40am on a Thursday morning. I was 6 weeks pregnant, and I had started bleeding. I went and got some underwear and put a pad in, and tried to decide what to do. I went into the living room and sat down for a moment, and then went back into the bedroom, and…
Two quite major things have happened since my last post: I got pregnant again Andrew and I decided to get married. My last post described how I got pregnant in August, and the day after my positive pregnancy test, I had a miscarriage. When I spoke to the doctor who had confirmed I’d had a…
At Christmas, Andrew and I decided to have a baby. We’d been thinking about it for a while, but I had been slightly more ready than him. Then, I’m not sure why, at Christmas something clicked for him. We were apart on Christmas Day, but I went to see him at his parents’ house, in…
I’m still not properly living with Andrew yet. The plan was that when I started my new job, which is near Andrew’s place, I’d move in with him. I was planning to start out just taking a week’s worth of clothes on Sunday nights, and go back to mine at weekends. Then, around March time,…
On my last working day of 2019, Friday 17th December, after putting my Out of Office on, I went for a drink with a few work friends. We sat around a table in the pub, sweating next to a slightly too hot, roaring fire, trying not to kick bags of last minute Christmas shopping, bought…
For the last 4-5 weeks, my body has been kind of attacking itself. I’m 99% sure I have coeliac disease, but I’ve never been formally diagnosed with it. I saw my doctor about this a few months ago, and he confirmed what I already knew: I need to start eating gluten again for 6 weeks,…
I have previously written about the state of Andrew’s flat. He is a perfectionist, and this has the opposite effect of what you might expect. You’d think that a perfectionist would have a pristine, immaculate home, and some perfectionists probably do, but there’s actually quite a strong relationship between hoarding and perfectionism. I don’t think…
Dater Analysis 