18 weeks, 4 days

Hello!

Another week has flown by and I have already passed my halfway mark in the pregnancy! I must confess that so far I am enjoying it very much.. probably because I haven’t had many pains and aches (although it’s still very early to say, I know), but I am genuinely basking in watching my belly grow and all of that.

So what’s happened in the last week? I had my flu jab last Friday, and I have to say that the nurse that saw me was the best. She was so friendly and caring! Any other person would have seen me in, done the jab and said goodbye. Jackie (that was her name) was ever so friendly, asking me about the pregnancy (she kept referring to the baby as “Junior” – she didn’t know it’s twins), giving me advise and just being really caring in general. If only she was my midwife! I don’t know why, but she gave me the impression of knowing more about pregnancies than Madeleine… maybe just from a personal experience point of view, but that also counts a lot. And she was so easy to talk to! A real gem of a nurse…

The jab didn’t hurt at all, however, Jackie said that it would get painful and I was allowed to take paracetamol if it got too bad. At the beginning, for the first 5 or 6 hours I didn’t feel a thing in my arm, so I started to think how exagerated the nurse and other people were, for telling me that I might need painkillers… “This is nothing!” I kept thinking to myself. Nonetheless, towards that same evening my arm started hurting. Not a terrible pain as to need paracetamol though… It was more like a bruise pain… It would only hurt when I touched it, or Jon touched it, or I leaned on my arm, etc. The funny thing is that for some unknown reason, for the next couple of days, it just felt like every single thump or bash would go straight to the spot where it hurt the most. Thankfully it only lasted for two days!

Unfortunately I have started having my first official pregnancy related nag: Heartburn. It’s horrible! I’ve had it three times now in the last week, and one of those times it was so bad that I couldn’t go to sleep. The problem is that I have got a thyroid condition, and Gaviscon is not recommended when taking thyroid medication. However, that night that I couldn’t get to sleep, it was so bad that I didn’t care any more about the thyroid and took Gaviscon regardless. It worked beautifully, and within 5 or 10 minutes the heartburn had completely disappeared. I must go to the pharmacy and ask for an alternative product that is compatible with thyroid medication…

And what else… Last night I had a terrible nightmare. It started like a beautiful dream, but it turned really horrible. It’s weird how I rarely remember my dreams, but this one is still so vivid in my head. In the dream I had my babies, a boy and a girl. The girl was blonde with blue eyes, like Jon; and the boy was dark haired with brown eyes like me. The delivery was perfect without any complications and I got home with both babies quite straight away. So far so good. However, it turned nasty when I decided to give the twins a bath and I left the boy unattended for a minute and he drowned. Oh my good, I think I even remember crying in my sleep. Really upsetting… In the dream I got in a nasty depression because I was feeling so guilty for having killed my baby boy.. and I never got to recover from that.. 🙁 Really horrible, eh? But I suppose these are the downsides of parenthood. We will never stop worrying and imagining the worst case scenarios in our heads.. Maybe it’s nature’s way of preparing us for the worst, if the worst was ever to materialise.

But, moving to something a bit more lighthearted. Over the weekend Jon finally finished assembling the furniture for the nursery. It’s a very small room, however I think we have made it work. Hopefully, the children will be okay in that room for two or three years, until we have saved some money for either going into the loft and converting it into another room, or moving to a bigger house. I took a video of the nursery as it was being put together (we will update on this soon) and I showed my boss, who very wittily said “what would you have done if it was tripplets!”.. Oh my, we would be in deep trouble then!! 🙂

I’ve got a slightly different photo today for my weekly bump update. Unfortunately Jon is away in Austria with work, so I only realised last night before he left that I didn’t have my weekly picture. So very quickly, just before bedtime, we managed to get this snapshot of both of us. It’s a shame that the quality is so low, but I love how it has come up 🙂