Happy first day of parental leave to me! Yippee for having finsihed work and now being ready to completely focus on the impending arrival of little Lani!
This post is going to be a bit haphazard in terms of random updates on the pregnancy and the last few months, but haphazard is my new go-to method since the onset of baby brain, so I'm just going to go with it.
I got a voucher for a free 5 minute pregnancy photoshoot and this was the result - rather nice, actually.
My optimism from my last post that the worst of pregnancy was over at 21 weeks was accurate in some ways and dead wrong in others. I have continued to be able to keep food down (thank goodness), but also continued to be naueaous the vast majority of the time right up through today, and I'm nearly 39 weeks pregnant now. That is a lot of weeks in a row of nauseau on top of the months of vomiting. Thankfully I am not concerned about nutrition anymore as I manage to get a healthy diet. To be clear, my stomach is still happiest with potato chips, milk, citrus fruit and fries, but it will tolerate other things now.
There was one exception to this - after at least a month of keeping things down I spent a weekend in the hospital after starting to vomit every 15 minutes in the middle of Friday night. I couldn't keep anything down and started having really intense abdominal pain in addition to the vomiting. We went to the doctor on Saturday morning, fully expecting him to say that it was just more "morning sickness" and instead he said we needed to go straight to hospital as I was (unsurprisingly) much too dehydrated and also the vomiting and abdominal pain could be symptoms of apendicits and we needed to make sure it wasn't that. Thank goodness it wasn't, but they kept me in hospital for 2 days on IV fluids until I could finally keep water, and then food, in my tummy. It was a lousy weekend but I am so thankful for the amazing midwives who took care of me, and for the fantastic NZ healthcare system - we got everything we needed and paid not one cent.
I don't have the energy for a full write-up on maternity care in NZ, but would just like to say that it is amazing. Everyone is entitled to a midwife who looks after them and supports the birth, and that's free of charge. All pregnancy-related appointments at the GP are also free. All emergency hospital treatments are always free here, so that's not different during pregnancy but still very much appreciated. The government funds 26 weeks (6 months) paid parental leave (matching your salary up to $606/per week) that can be shared between both parents as desired. Both of our jobs are also guaranteed for at least a year. Many places, like The Minstry for Primary Industries, where J works, also have their own supports. After J finishes his 4 months of parental leave and goes back to work he will get a 6 week pay bonus. (I think this is more to encourage people to actually come back to work than out of kindness towards babies, but it's still great.) We feel very fortunate that we will be supported to have Lani at home with one of us for the first year of her life, and to live in a place that values that for families.
Lani continues to be growing and developing just as she should, as far as we know. Because everything looked perfect at the 20 week ultrasound, we haven't had another one, so it's been checkups with the midwife at her clinic. We listen to her heartbeat and she feels and measures my baby bump and always says everthing feels perfect. Lani has been head down since about 35 weeks and the midwife says she's down deep enough that she shouldn't be able to turn breech at this stage. So that's one less thing to worry about.
Unfortunately, what I do have to worry about is her increasingly strong kicks and movements! Remember how I thought feeling her movements was so cool? Well, turns out I had no idea what I was getting into. I now have a sprained rib and severe nerve pain from her squirming around in there, and her perfect head-down position puts her in just the right spot to kick that same sprained rib all day long! I had to hold my breath in the above video to keep from wimpering - it hurts so much! The rib pain is now constant and seems likely to stay until she's born and it can properly heal. The nerve pain comes when she moves in certain ways that crush my sciatic nerve and another one that I've forgotten the name of. I can usually get it to calm down by getting on all fours so her weight shifts off the nerve, but the problem is that the pain is so intense it's hard to move when it hits. But I'm getting better at it, and again, it should go away when she's born.
The constant rib pain and unpredictable intense nerve pain feel like the absolute last straw of the discomfort of pregnancy! It has been really hard getting through the work days, moving around to engage with the children, riding the bus to/from work, sleeping, etc. while in so much pain and still dealing with nausea, so I'm definitely ready for all of that to change after the birth.
All that being said, I am so very glad that Lani is strong and healthy, and am always trying to keep that in the forefront of my mind.
A friend of J's from work is practicing to become a photographer and asked if she could do a maternity shoot with us, so of course we said yes. I have been terrible at taking pictures because I'm so uncomfortable and exhausted, so it's nice to have a few to remember this time in our lives.
We went to the Botanic Gardens, where they even had flowers that matched our outfits! Haha! (Full disclosure, the dress I'm wearing was a loan from the photographer. I have zero fancy maternity clothes.)
This one is in a Pōhutukawa - my favourite NZ tree.
I even snapped a nice picture of J before the photographer got there. I hope Lani gets his good looks!
J has continued to be phenomenal during this difficult pregnancy, supporting me in every way and never losing sight of how excited he is for Lani to be born. He is going to be an awesome dad!
And speaking of what Lani will look like... this is me when I was a baby...
... and this is J when he was a baby. So maybe she'll look something like that? We can't wait to see! I keep dreaming that I can see her face through the skin of my baby bump, and in all my dreams she has blue eyes! I have very dark brown eyes and J has hazel/green eyes, so that seems unlikely, but my dreams do what they want.
Also, I had a great conversation with one of my 3-year-olds a few months ago. A group of children and I were chatting about Lani as we often do, and he asked, "But why don't you ever show her to us?" I reminded him that I can't, because she's inside my tummy, to which he replied, "But you could if you just lifted up your shirt!" I figured that was a reasonable point, so lifted up my shirt to show them my belly. His eyes opened so very wide and he just said, "Oooh!" I think it was the first time I'd ever seen him speechless. I suspect that he'd actually thought that Lani was just tucked under my shirt for months, and really needed some time to process that that wasn't the case.
This is one we took at home a few weeks ago at Mom's request, so she could, and I quote, "Show people how huge you are." Haha! I do feel huge, and I am compared to my old self, but strangers also inform me regularly that I don't look big enough to be due in just over a week, so... it's all relative, right? I've gained about 14 kilos (31 lbs), which is considered healthy.
One of the moms at my work recommended taking a picture like this once I felt big, and I'm so glad she did, because it really made me laugh, and I need that these days!
I've been working hard to keep my fitness up during pregnancy, which has been a struggle as I've been feeling so lousy. I did pretty well with biking until about 30 weeks, at which point my belly was sticking out enough that J and I started worrying about Lani's safety, so I stopped that. I feel completely exhausted by just getting through the work day, but my legs don't cope well with taking away their exercise and so some serious Restless Leg Syndrome set in and completely took away my ability to sleep. It quickly became clear that no matter how exhausted I am (or how achy my legs and knees are) I need to get a leg workout every day or sleep is out of the question. Fortunately, we live in a beautiful place, so I started hiking up to Wright's Hill Lookout for my workout.
It is truly stunning, and about a half-hour walk each way from our house, through beautiful native bush, so it's perfect.
I even often saw lots of native birds on my walks, including this beautiful Kākā that hung out with me for a while and let me get so close!
Unfortunately, with my nerve pain sometimes immobilising me now, I can't go for walks in the woods by myself as I worry I'll get stuck. So I'm walking around town, which is fine too. I'm also swimming when I can, as the support of the water helps everything relax a bit. I am getting a minimum of 1/2 hour of leg exercise/cardio per day, which I hope will help with labour (along with all the ab exercises and kegels I do). I often feel really resentful and upset about needing to exercise when I am already exhausted, nauseaous, and in pain, but being all those things all night without being able to get any sleep is definitely worse, so I drag myself out to exercise.
Sharing my pregnancy with the children at my work has been the absolute best part of this whole experience. They are so loving and supportive, and many of them ask how Lani is doing every single day. They ask if she's hungry, sleeping, happy, enjoying kicking my bladder, making me hungry, etc. They are so very excited to meet her and ready to help take care of her.
J and I decided that to acknowledge their amazing support, we'd have them help pick out Lani's middle name. Of course, we gave them two pre-approved names to choose between, otherwise Spiderman would have won by a landslide and that would have been awkward. We talked about and prepared for this process for several weeks by all learning each other's middle names and their significance, and then the voting began. All the 3- and 4-year-olds voted over the course of a week, and in the end, Katia was selected. It was beautiful to see how seriously they took the process, and all the discussion they had around what their choice would be. And then I was impressed to see that none of the children who voted for Nicola got upset that it didn't win - they still just seemed happy to have been able to contribute. I'm so thrilled to always have the memory of these children and their love for Lani represented in her name, and to have given these children a chance to experience democracy in a meaningful way.
Speaking of my work, the manager of my centre resigned at the end of last year, and I was asked to step into the manager role (supporting/supervising 10 teachers and 45 children/families) when she left. It was an exciting opportunity in some ways but also extremely demanding and overwhelming, especially given how awful I've been feeling. I've been in the difficult position of trying to learn a new role while also preparing to leave it, and it's been very stressful and exhausting. However, when I took over in January I set down a plan for what I felt like I needed to get done in order to make sure my team was as well-supported as possible in order for everthing to run smoothly while I am away, and I did everything on my list. I can't actually believe it, as it often felt like a completely unattainable goal, but I really did it - with the support of my team, of course! And I am so thankful to say that I trust them completely and know that no matter what unexpected new challenges come up while I'm away, they will handle them and make sure our children are getting everything they need, so that feels great. I am not usually good at letting things go or turning off my work brain, but I'm really going to do it. Lani and J and I are going to live in our own little world for the next few weeks/months, and the rest of the world can take care of itself.
In conclusion, pregnancy has been an extremely difficult and stressful experience for me, but I am so thankful to have a healthy baby who is nearly ready to come into the world. I am also thankful for all the support we have all around us. Now we just have to wait and see when Lani decides it's time to make her debut!
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