Sewing and mulling

My hunch is this baby will come early. Probably "hunch" is the wrong word since there are a lot of very good clues it'll come early, like it being the first, and it being huge for its gestational age and the fact that I will be induced if my blood pressure goes doolally. But as of Monday I've suddenly leapt into the nesting action everybody told me was the feature of the last month of pregnancy, and I've juuuuuust hit month seven. In fact, I think today is the 28 week mark precisely.

I'm still fucking exhausted, mind you. It's a little bit like a slow version of being on meth - my body knows it's very, very tired, but it's about as restful to launder, sew, clean and prepare as it is to have a nap. Some friends here gave us a shitload (hah!) of decent quality diapers - not quite enough so I sat down and made 10 more using Rita's Rump Pocket design. I've made them for friends before, and they got good reviews, so I'll see how they go for myself. Having saved all that money I felt justified in blowing about a hundred bucks on fancy Japanese merino and "waterproof cotton" diaper covers which I will name and shame, or else name and praise, depending on their ultimate performance, and then on getting some cheap eBay Marimekko oil cloth for a portable changing pad, which by "cheap" I only mean cheap for Marimekko, and not cheap for oil cloth.

I guess this means that I've committed to the cloth diaper route. Hubris? Maybe. And I won't beat myself up too much if we can't hold to it. But considering I switched successfully some years ago to cloth menstrual pads without hiccoughs I'm hoping for the best.We have friends here who did elimination communication. The F-word and I had a brief conversation about that, which went like this:

"Do you want to try that?"

"Er, okay."

"Let's not try too hard."

"Fine."

(We'd just been to their house, where their two-year-old girl had solemnly announced "pee", and then peed on the F-word's foot.)

Besides that, making mattress covers, blankets and wipes. All in super-soft flannelette. I happened to have metres and metres and metres of it lying around because of my boss who disappeared in Central America. Just before he disappeared I'd hit a good enough work/life balance in Belgium that I was sewing a lot, especially for friends who had just had babies. Of course when he disappeared everything went apeshit. So here I am now with about 30 metres of different sorts of super-soft flannelette on my hands, from the best fabric stores in Europe and Canada, which is lucky, given the fabric stores are rather crap here. Sometimes I think Australia is the planet's slight-damage seconds outlet mall without the low prices.

Anyways, just one more thing to thank my disappeared boss for, I guess. I still miss him. A lot. It all seems so unreal now that he was ever not missing - he's been missing, I think, for longer than I knew him. I suppose this happens with loss? That eventually the person who has died (for it's quite certain he's dead) isn't just the person that you loved, or the person that you miss, but is actually a hole in your existence - and that hole, that lack, becomes almost as real to you as the real person was. Then once in awhile a circumstance or a memory - less and less frequently as time goes by - calls them back to mind almost as they were. What a life. 

The miracle that is fat people

I understand, now, why people get so excited about how great the second trimester is relative to the third, which I believe I'm now officially in, though it's hard to tell, since there seem to be subjective goalposts seperating trimesters which I'd always assumed would be split evenly - the fucking mysteries of this pregnancy cult.

Now that the tests have come back pretty clear and I'm relaxing a bit, probably the most provoking thing at the moment is that I'm enormous. I walk up a hill I could run up without blinking seven months ago, and my knees and ankles hurt, and I need a rest. Turning over in bed at night is suddenly a massive physical and mental effort. My flatulence is no longer amusing even to me. How the fuck do fat people do it? How do they manage being this heavy, year in and year out? Don't get me wrong - I'm 100% gourmande and I fucking love to eat. I'll never be a skinny girl. But at this point I'm topping out 200 pounds, and I'm damn uncomfortable. Even sitting on a comfy chair for longer than 15 minutes is uncomfortable because your ass goes all funny.

The F-word explained that most people don't put on massive amounts of weight in seven months when they get fat, so I suppose their bodies and muscles have more time to get used to it, but there is NO WAY being this heavy can be comfortable for anybody, unless they're massively boned and super-tall, and even then I bet their backs fucking kill them. My back is still okay - I mean, I don't have chronic soreness, probably because I'm keeping up with 90 minutes of gentle exercise a day and pre-natal yoga. But once in awhile it threatens to not be okay anymore, and I'm full of sympathy for the men in my life who are, as the French say, bien baraqué. I really love that expression.

Speaking of, the other day we watched Les Intouchables. Usually I don't like my movies inspiring, but I'd seen a few moments of it on some flight or other during my second trimester peregrinations (man alive, now that I feel like a massive fat growth, and I ever glad I did all that tripping around!) and it looked like it would have some good slang. Which it did. It was quite good, I would say, certainly miles and miles better than the other massively overrated French blockbuster of the year, The Artist, which I also watched on one of the flights. And Omar Sy is hawt. Goodness gracious.