the joys of pregnancy

finally, a shot of me pregnant that I feel is worthy of putting up here...probably something to do with the fact that it was taken on film by my talented husband, while we were on holidays. I'm about 29 weeks now, and feeeling and looking quite large, people look very surprised (and sympathetic) when I tell them how long I still have to go. However, everything is on track, and apparently "normal", and although I feel cumbersome, I don't necessarily feel huge. I think it's just that I'm normally so little, when people see me with this huge bowling-ball belly, they get quite alarmed!

I've had an anxious couple of days waiting to find out whether I had developed gestational diabetes, after my routine glucose tolerance test results were high. I had to go in for a further test yesterday, and thankfully, everything is ok. Of course, when presented with the possibility of having something wrong, straight to the books I go (because, lets face it, I don't look at them any other time), and I found out that having GD can create a "fat baby". Yes, that's exactly the term that they used. Now, I'm thinking that maybe there is a more appropriate way of saying that your baby may become overweight due to excess blood sugar, some way that doesn't conjure up images like this:

The thing that was worrying me most about having said "fat baby"was not the fact that it might be fat, but that it may make it necessary to have a caesarian, a thought that scares the hell out of me, having had two stress-free natural births so far. I really don't relish the thought of medical intervention in any way, having to be on a drip is bad enough. I'll never forget the male doctor who did a five minute appearance while I was in labour with willow asking me if I'd like some pethadine, and upon being told a flat answer of "no", asked me why I wouldn't want to save myself all that pain. Um, I think I'll be the judge of just how much pain I can endure before reaching for the drugs. Needless to say, the doctor disappeared, and the midwives did a fantastic job of delivering our little one with as little intervention as possible. God bless midwives. I just hope that I'm lucky enough to have it go so smoothly again this time around. (Please note, I am in no way against people having pain relief during labour, I realise that it's needed a lot of the time, I just haven't felt that I've needed it myself so far, but I'm open to the fact that all that could change). p.s. I made the holiday dress from an old sheet a couple of weeks ago, it also served well as my "anniversary dress", as I couldn't squeeze myself into my wedding dress for the occasion!