Mysterious Max

Not only am I a drama queen these days, my unborn foetus is showing signs of dramatic flair.

There we were, all set for induction thanks to the ageing placenta and low amniotic fluid, and… nothing! Well, close to nothing. The mildest contractions.

For me the emotional effort in getting to the clinic is huge – this time a cocktail of excitement, the prospect of a huge amount of relief to know Max is healthy and happy (as opposed to withering away inside me without my knowledge thanks to aforementioned placenta), and a certain amount of fear (I am a wimp, why can’t we humans just lay eggs and sit on them?).

We took a photo of me and the bump outside the clinic, grinning like idiots. Another of me looking extremely happy just after they put the pitocin drip in to start up contractions… friends called. One promised camambert and an illicit sip of champagne on the other side.

And then, nothing. After a couple of hours I had very soft contractions. At lunchtime my doctor came by and said we could do two things – press ahead and ramp up the dose to force labour that day, or ease off and give him more time. Natural birth advocates, turn away. I felt like screaming at him “Get this baby out now! Get him out!”

Like a balloon losing all its air, I felt my excitement fizz away. Utterly deflated and suddenly exhausted, we agreed to let Max have some more time in there with my sad old placenta. A corner of my mind hoped he’d suddenly kick into action on his own. But no. We spent ages on a monitor… left clinic at 4.30pm and I couldn’t help thinking that with Lola by that time we were only two hours away from seeing her hanging there upside in th real world with us.

I’m happy Max is doing well in there, and more time is good, I’m sure. Also I’m happy Dr E is really trying to facilitate a relatively normal birth instead of a c-section in this very c-section happy part of the world. It’ll be easier to look after them both afterwards without c-section recovery time. And vaginal birth will be good for Maxi’s lungs apparently. So I am practising my “ooohhhmmmms” and focusing on the fact that they would never have left him in there if he was in any danger.

At home that night, a crown fell off my molar, and Lola decided to wake up at 3am, demand a feed, and then throw up all over her new sleeping bag and pjs. After a wrestling session I got her back into another bag and pjs and listened to her insistent chat about ladybirds (she is not attached to ANY soft toy or lovey but seems to now be considering for the role a gaudy ladybird doll which makes all kinds of crinkly wake-up sounds). It took an hour, but she fell back asleep. I didn’t mind really… she’s my baby and I don’t have too much more time to give her my undivided attention. Really, I can’t believe my luck. Thanks to my tweeps who gave me so much encouragement yesterday when we thought we were ready for kick-off!

Drama queen

All this living in Latin America has turned me into a drama queen. At least that’s my excuse, and I am sticking to it. Also, the hormones. The hormones are out of control this time around as a pregnant lady. I weep at Masterchef eliminations. Letters from friends. Lola kissing my belly when I say, “Kiss for Maxi?”. Yesterday I cried because I was tired and the thought of having to spend half an hour coaxing her to eat her dinner was all too much. I think I am actually crying more than my one-year-old at the moment.

I am not coping at all well with having a rapidly ageing placenta (grade 3). I feel like it’s a time bomb inside me. Real world and twitter and blog friends have shared their stories of similar experiences with me, which helps more than I can say. But then this insidious worry creeps back. He doesn’t kick for a while, and I can’t help wondering if the placenta has become so bad at its job that he’s wasted away inside me. It just lurks there, this thought, at the back of my mind. Some of you reading this blog have dealt with far, far worse, and to you I apologise… I know I should be coping better, maybe not indulging this fear.

We have an ultrasound tomorrow, and I am really hoping the doctor will pick a day very soon to get him out. It feels like Russian roulette to me, leaving him in there when my body is not giving him what he needs. If something went wrong, how would I know? At least out in the world we could see if something was happening and help him. Feed him. Make sure he has enough air. Bloody placenta.

Dr Google has been even less help than usual… there’s actually not so much out there about what a grade three placenta really means. Just a lot of other worried women crowd-sourcing an answer to the same questions I have.

Dr E is pretty efficient and hands-on, so I take some comfort in that. He was quite ready to induce Lola the moment she hit 40 weeks, so I guess I should take comfort in his judgment that Maxi is doing well enough to stay in there that little bit longer. Unlike with IVF, we don’t know down to the minute, hour and day when Maxi was conceived. Dr E is as stunned as I am that he even was conceived. The estimate, based on my last period.. which was actually almost my first period after Lola’s birth and therefore a fairly useless indicator if you get what I mean, is that I will be at 38 weeks on Weds. I don’t want to pull him out, undercooked. But then I don’t want to leave him and run any risks at all with his tiny little life.

And one more thing, while I am indulging this drama queen thing… he has refused to show me his face once, in any of our ultrasounds. Lola gave me a big-cheeked full frontal face shot around 32 weeks, which I had propped by my bedside for the rest of the pregnancy. Maxi just gives me butt cheeks. Somehow I think I would feel better if I had seen the outline of his little face.

Maximus is a mini

It took a while to dawn on me that there might be a problem.

The doctor who does our more detailed 4d scans is a jolly fellow and he looked a little frowny as he measured Max’s head at our 36 week scan last week. 

“Is he growing well?” I asked.

“He’s small,” he said, pointing to the weight range graph at the side of the screen. “This is your baby, here,” he said, pointing to the very bottom of the weight range. He’s almost below the bottom acceptable weight for his age. You need to relax. Stop working, and relax.”

“What do you mean relax?” I asked.

“Stay in bed, don’t even go get groceries,” he said. “And eat a lot of good food.”

They can be a little old-fashioned here, doctors. But this scared me.

He asked his assistant for my OB’s number, but apparently Dr E was away for a few days last week. So he said just take it all down a notch and check in with Dr E this week at my scheduled appointment.

I am a little worried. Apparently Maxi is 2.2kg when he should be 2.6kg… so he’s measuring more like 34 weeks than 36. Of course I’ve read that ultrasounds are notoriously unreliable for estimating weight. And this time around we don’t really know the precise conception date because even though I know the date of my last period, it had only just started up again post-Lola, so my cycle was all over the place. So maybe Maxi is actually 34 weeks and we just think he’s 36. I don’t know. 

I stupidly consulted Dr Google and read that one of the things that can contribute to a bay failing to thrive in the third trimester is a neural tube defect. Immediately stopped reading Google. But too late. 

I keep thinking, it will probably be ok. On the balance of probabilities, it should be ok. 

And in the meantime I am eating a LOT. And resting as much as possible. Although I had to take a little walk today or I would have gone mad. There is only so much punishment by left butt cheek can take, lying about like a beached whale. Two sleeps till we go see Dr E and take another look at what’s going in there. I hope I’ll be able to catch a glimpse of his face… he had his face turned towards my spine last time, which is what he should be doing about now, but I so want a glimpse 

Nekked

Lola appears to have naturist leanings.

Yesterday after morning playtime in her cot (ie, she “reads her books” and bangs lego about while mummy drinks that first blessed jasmine tea of the day) I went in to find her naked, except for her nappy. Thank God she hasn’t figured out how to wriggle out of that yet. My mum loves to tell a story (gross alert) about finding me in my crib completely covered in my own poo, and not only that.. I had finger painted it all over the cot and wall. The horror.

There is not a lot of logic to Lola’s streaker tendencies… she LOVES the street. Yet she fights all attempts to put a coat or shoes on her to actually go out into the street. Yesterday I had a long and heartfelt lecture on this very subject from her that went something like this: “Nah nah nah nah nah nah nah nah. Nah…. Naaaaaah. Nah nah.” The last nah nah sounded a lot like “So there”.

Still no sign of the word Mama, or mum, or mummy… just dada, chicken, fish, mariquita (ladybird), caca (a big favourite), poo (you can see this looms large in our lives), and so on. The important stuff.

Away from the cot, I am being sucked into a big ongoing news event here and find myself staking out police stations and courts with my huge belly… it’s actually not a bad technique as people who would normally be a bit stroppy with the journalist hordes are actually quite sweet when they spot the intrepid waddling hack that is me right now.

And this morning we are going to my baby shower. Another one. I am actively embarrassed to be having one, so soon after the last one, but a lovely friend wanted to do it for me, and who am I to say no. I tried to say “no presents please.. maybe just some nappies if they really want to buy something”. But don’t think that message was received. I really meant it though… we have all of Lola’s stuff at the ready, and I know a factory which sells its Pima baby onesies etc for next to nothing if you get them on a good day. So Maxi is going to sleep in pink pajamas, and hit the streets in Lola’s more unisex offerings with perhaps the odd boyish onesie.

Boy’s clothes don’t seem to be nearly as much fun as girl’s clothes, from what I can see. Lola has three tutus, pants with little rows of frills along her butt, a huge collection of bonnets and little hats and beanies, sparkly pants with sequins and the girliest of dresses. Boys just seem to get shirts with an aribitrary tractor or hammer logo. Where’s the joy in that? I am curious to see how people react to a baby boy on the street. When they see Lola it aways triggers big gushy comments and swoops in to stroker her cheek. Do people gush as much with boys? Maybe I will have to gush even more to compensate. This post is turning into stream-of-consciousness, and for that I apologise. The stream of my consciousness is a meandering and strange thing to behold lately. Only 28 days to go till my due date. Still not registering.

Pregnancy brain

Anyone who has traveled at high altitude (and I mean on the ground, not in a pressurised airplane cabin making “oo-aah” sounds at the lovely scenery) will know that it can do funny things to your mind and body.

Landing in La Paz, Bolivia, one of the world’s highest cities, for the first time I thought my head would explode. A friend had once helpfully explained to me the effect altitude has on on the blood vessels in your brain by holding up a potato crisp packet that looked like it was about to explode. We were three-quarters of the way up a mountain at the time and the chip packet had been swelling gradually the whole while. “This is what your blood vessels are doing right now,” she said, gleefully triggering an “oh-my-god-i’m-going-to-have-a-stroke” moment.

Every trip I have done to La Paz has been characterised by a dreamlike quality that is all about the altitude. Sure, the little round women on the street, with their multi-layered disco-coloured skirts, long black plaits and rubber sandals let you know that you are somewhere distinctly foreign. And the witches’ market, crowded with strange ingredients and tiny dried llamas, gives a hint that science has its place, but so does the spirit world.

But the big factor is altitude. And altitude, I have discovered, is a lot like pregnancy. Struggling up La Paz’s steep narrow streets while huffing and puffing is a lot like hauling yourself and your bowling ball belly a few blocks to the shops in the late stages of pregnancy. And altitude and pregnancy both play tricks on your mind, and on what’s achieveable. On every business trip to La Paz I have been under the illusion that my mind was working at its sharpest, that my razor-sharp intellect would carry me through sticky situations. Returning to sea level, I look at my notes and wonder what the hell was I thinking. “Why didn’t I ask that very obvious, and crucial, question?” “What does this half-finished sentence mean?” “Why does that scribble mean?”

With about a month to go before the arrival of Maximum Maxi-Wobble the second, our son, it is dawning on me that my mind is playing tricks on me, in a La Paz kind of way. A crazy amount of work has come my way, and I have said yes to it all. So I find myself flitting between hefty, detail-oriented editing projects, staking out police stations and airports and interviewing small businesswomen in poor, farflung parts of Lima, all with a strange, dreamlike lack of urgency. Deadlines shmeadlines. I’m going through all the motions, but it’s almost like I’m watching myself go through those motions in a film of my life, and I’d rather switch over to that scintillating new series I discovered, Devious Maids. Yes – Devious Maids!!! The shame…

I need to turn back to work now; I just had to get that off my chest. Self-diagnosed pregnancy brain. There is a reason for this wading-through-cement pace of mine right now. I am not losing it, I am just very, very pregnant.

Also, regular readers should know that Lola slept last night the WHOLE NIGHT THROUGH. And yesterday she got into the spirit of this walking business, after racing around for months with the help of a little finger, and launched off by herself constantly. She was doing laps of our living room. Wobbly, drunken laps, but amaaaaaazing to see.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Link

Dare I wade into the minefield of class and ethnic warfare that is naming a child?

I can’t help myself.

Yes, the time has come to choose a name for foetus Max. Poor Lola went nine days without a name because I could not cope with the overwhelming responsibility for picking just the right one for her, and even now I wonder…

Max is Max for the moment because I got tired of calling him Senor X, Dirty Harry or Bruce Lee. And to try to prompt his dad into engaging into this, my favourite pregnancy discussion. Until Rufus suggests something better, I decreed, he shall be Max. Also Max is my friend’s dog’s name, and she helped me come up with this ultimatum. And I don’t want to tell this kid one day that he was named after a Jack Russell called Maximum Maxi-wobble.

What could be better than fantasising about what your future child should be called? What kind of boy will Max be? Rufus apparently thinks there are MANY things more interesting. Angry Birds for example. He is so chilled out, I know he just thinks the right name will present itself when Max himself does. But after Lola, I know better.

So, the list of potentials, to date:

Luca           (My favourite… but does it matter if your kids’ names all start with the same                          letter. Like the Kardashians… they are my definition of a complete waste of                          space. Who ARE those people and WHY does ANYONE care?)

James        (Love, but is common as muck of course, and now the future King of England                      might also be called this, according to the bookies…)

Dante         (Can’t imagine myself in the park yelling “Dante! Dante!” to be perfectly honest)

Fabian        (He will end up being called Fabby)

Hugo          (I love love love and Rufus hates.. also in Latin America he would be “Ugo” and                          people will assume we are raving leftie Hugo Chavez fans)

Sebastian   (I love this, Rufus thinks it’s ok; but more importantly everyone seems to have a                          Sebastian these days. Does it really matter if a name is popular?)

Finn            (Rufus thinks this is just finny because “fin” in Espanol is “the end”. Also that poor                        actor Finn from Glee just died so now this name makes me sad)

Bruno         (I like two-syllable boys names that end with O… they sound kind of cool and                                assured. Maybe Ludo?)

Raphael      (Love this, Rufus is all “meh”. But also last name starts with an R – is alliteration                     a good thing, people? Or bad?)

Felix            (I think this is cute, Rufus not so much)

Darcy          (I like this but can’t get over the Pride and Prejudice association … BBC series,                          Colin Firth striding out of lake all wet and glistening, for those not in the                             know. One of my favourite pieces of TV of alltime, but still, a bit naff to name                         my son after an 18th-century literary hearthrob modelled on a toff)

Gabriel       (Nice but maybe a bit wishy washy?)

Junot          (Grasping at straws but I kind of like)

Jasper        (Kind of cool… but also a wee bit posh twat)

So that’s the current list. Tell me if we are crazy. Other recent input includes Rufus’s dad, who wants him to be called Frank after Sinatra. His half-brother who wants to call him Lars after some heavy metal drummer. And a friend who also has a son with a Latin American just emailed me her thoughts on names that work both ways – ie English-Spanish: Oscar Stefano Dante Mateo Felix Leo Rafael Tiago Valentín Tomás.

So that’s some name possibilities. The politics of naming a child are endless. There was an amusing spat on UK TV recently in which a smug blonde woman attacked people who give their children misspelled (or spelled “orginally”) names. I have to admit I totally agree with her… making up creative spellings of names for your baby is one of my pet hates. It can leave the kid open to a lifetime of spelling out their name or making assumptions about their background (ie, their parents didn’t know how to spell). But then, ALL names say something about the parents, and the parents’ desires or aspirations for their kids. And about their prejudices.

Celebrities call their kids ludicrous things, I think, because they are secure in the knowledge that they are so wealthy and privileged and entitled that their kids will get along just fine, whatever they’re called. It’s like a bit “F*** U” to the rest of us plebs who actually have to wonder if little X Y or Z will be taunted in the playground or bullied or at a disadvantage when they apply for jobs/college/music school. Seriously, who calls their kid Blanket? Was that the first thing he saw when the baby popped out? Maybe I should just stop torturing myself and call him scrubs, or forceps.

http://www.babycenter.com/0_ultimate-celebrity-baby-names-list_3647306.bc

Anyway, even though I get her point I just did not like this woman’s tone. She was being a total snob. And the presenter sitting across from her obviously felt the same way because she dealt her a real body blow when the blonde started in on people who name their kids after places: ie Posh and Becks’ Brooklyn, or the Hilton’s Paris, I spose.

“But… your daughter is called India!” the presenter said, incredulous.

Kapow! Fantastic.

Of course, India is actually a really popular slightly posh name in the UK, probably because it references the glorious empire years. Or maybe that blonde is a bit thick and doesn’t realise that India is a place.

There are also cultural and religious reasons for choosing a child’s name, or family reasons – like X junior or little Arabel (After great-great-absolutely-loaded-with-cash aunt Arabel). And who has the right to go barging in with an opinion on anyone’s religion or culture?

I have a lovely child of hippies friend called Honey, which is not really so out-there. And she ended up meeting a lovely child of Welsh hippies guy called something-from-Lord-of-the-Rings (and this was before the movies came out).

What do I aspire to, for Max? I want him to be a happy little vegemite. I want him to have friends. I don’t want him to be teased. When he applies for a job I don’t want people to laugh at his resume. I want the world for him, like most parents do for their kids. Picking the right name is part of that – perhaps it is even the very least part of it.

Only once did I have a boyfriend whose name I particularly liked. I have lots of friends with names I would never choose for my kids. In the end, the person outshines the name, and if it doesn’t, he can always change it, or use a nickname.

Related articles

• Baby names: 5 tips for naming non-royal babies (metro.co.uk)
• Single Syllable Names for Boys: A to Z (appellationmountain.net)
• Why not a royal baby named ‘Greg Thompson’? Mallick (thestar.com)

Two front teeth

Milestones are flashing by in the most alarming way of late. I feel like I have my head against the window of a fast train, watching them go by like blurry trees and road signs.

Lola’s front teeth are working their way through – she now has two tiny nubs to gnash against her two lower bottom teeth and it’s cute, cute, cute.

She’s also showing us more and more of her personality, and I fear my cleanliness-obsessed mother is in there in the mix. Lola’s current obsession is CLEANING THE FLOOR. She passes over all of her toys to get to the yellow rag so she can scrub her floor tiles. And now she’s applying the rag to her pet giraffe, the wall, the chair, me, Rufus… anything that looks a bit mucky. She looks like a slave child. She also will not rest until her dirty nappy is IN THE BIN. I have to walk her, bare-bottomed, with her grabbing the offending nappy in one hand, so she can deposit it and then wave goodbye.

And then yesterday we bought her first pair of “real shoes” – ie the hard-soled leather kind that are supposed to give good support for walking. She’s been padding about in leather booties for ages now and the ice-cream woman from the park is really getting on my tits with her disapproving titches every time Lola whizzes past… She tells me I MUST put orthopedic shoes on her RIGHT NOW because she’s suffering irreparable harm and will end up pigeon-toed and bandy-legged and crooked-of-spine. Crone.

There was a truly adorable range of super girly shoes on offer, but given that Max will be making his debut in just two months, I am buying “unisex” wherever possible. So she’s ended up with a pair of black bovver boots. Kind of construction workers meets Chanel (there’s a stylish quilting effect around the ankle). They’re also still a bit too big even though they were the smallest available, so they’ll be making their debut around her first birthday, I suspect.

That’s another milestone. First birthday! The stuff of dreams. She’s healthy and happy and beautiful … and here. With us. Even with my new sense of flabbergastment over the arrival of Mr Max, I have still not recovered from the wonder of Lola’s arrival in our lives. 

I think if I was at home in Oz we probably wouldn’t do a birthday party for Lola, as such. One gathering is like any other for her right now. But Peruvians love parties and all her little park friends have had theirs, so the pressure is on. 

And the park is all wet and cold. So we found a place called Chiquitown (sounds like cheekytown, and keeps making me want to sing Funkytown). It’s basically a big room full of smaller themed rooms of toys (supermarket, shed full of plastic power tools, garage etc), a trampoline, a bath-sozed pool full of soft coloured balls, tinny kids’ music, teeny-weeny toilets… heaven for kids, hell for many adults. 

The children shall be let loose and the adults shall partake of cake and sandwiches. 

So that’s it from Lola. Mr Max was given some airtime on the ultrasound this week and is weighing in at 1.5kg already, with a nice strong heartbeat. He’s called Max so far because his dad is not so good at suggesting names… I decreed he shall be Max until he comes up with something better.

Perspective

The past 18 months has given me a very different perspective on life, and I am not just talking about motherhood.

I am a mother, and I am about to become a mother all over again. How can this be? In the distraught days of my IVF treatments and bouncing between doctors, I had to finally accept that it might not just happen for us. The world is not fair. The very best of people may not be able to have children; the very worst of people often do. Life is a lottery – some of us are born into happy families, some not; some of us come into poverty, violence and tragedy, some of us are blessed with happy childhoods filled with good family, friends, green spaces and backyard pools. Some arrive in perfect health, others struggle from the very beginning against great odds.

I knew all this intellectually pre-Lola – we all do! But her presence in this world has helped me deal with my own small struggles with greater grace and optimism and courage. She helps me feel that things are going to be ok in the end. Because one sniff of her deliciousness, one brush of her perfect cheek, one giggle from her – these are all magic remedies. I am going to make things ok, for her sake, and for our sake.

I once wrote here that getting pregnant was the worst career move I ever made – getting pregnant a second time hasn’t really helped either. But I am no longer in that place of panic and fear that I was when she was about to be born. I only just confessed this second pregnancy to my bosses a week ago. A lawyer had advised me to keep it under my hat for as long as I needed to… but I am now 26 weeks pregnant and I was feeling stressed with so much uncertainty. I had arrived in a place where I just thought, “Damn it, if they sack me, they sack me, I just want to know where I stand”.

So the upshot appears to be a change in my contract – moving from a retainer plus expenses/benefits and expenses to a fully freelance basis, with a view to me returning to a full staff position again post-baby, depending on what jobs come up, and where. I will retain full health benefits and the retainer till after the birth. So it’s a six-month financial hit, depending on whether a job really does come up, and how long I take off with the baby.

This will be a blow, but I do feel they are committed to me coming back. And I will get to stay at home with the new baby with a flexible work arrangement in the meantime. So I think that’s a pretty good result in the end. And all those months of worrying led me to think about alternatives as well, so perhaps I will get that restaurant blog off the ground, or end up taking a new career path.

These small troubles of mine have forced me to think about my own value in the workplace, to whether I attached too much importance and too much of my self-worth to my company, and to what I really want in life. We resist change sometimes because it’s scary. I am not risk-averse, but I do not like feeling like the ground is shifting beneath me. But good things can come out of a period of turmoil – this time, Lola and her brother (AKA Bruce Lee, Dirty Harry, or simply X – we are no closer in the great name hunt). That is a dream come true, and that is where I am aiming to keep my focus. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The sequel, ready or not

My inability to wrap my head around this pregnancy is getting to be ridiculous.

I’m 24 weeks along, big-bellied, belching and sleeping semi-upright because of the heartburn. He is kicking away at me even now. But I can’t seem to really believe it’s happening.

In three and a half months he’ll be here. And I just keep looking at Lola, rubbing her cool little cheeks against mine, sniffing her delicious still-baby smell, and feeling sad that I’m not going to be able to give her everything I do now. Who will play tag with her? She has developed a wicked, cheeky little smile to let you know it’s time to chase her about. She shakes her little head when she doesn’t want anything else to eat. She points at things she wants a closer look at. She babbles a lot, and loudly. In a few more months I might not understand all of these little communications. I will be missing the insights that bring them all together.

It’s a very different place, mentally, to how I was with Lola. I fretted a lot during that pregnancy, worried about worst-case scenarios, and I was very very afraid of the actual birth part. But I was also filled with gratitude to be given this wonderful gift. I was constantly struck by the miracle of it all.

This time around I fel a bit disconnected. I forget about the pregnancy until he gives me another kick to remind me. When I am feeding Lola in the evening and she is resting against my bump, he gives a flurry of kicks, trying to mark out a little space for himself. I’m not as afraid of the birth part – I’m more afraid of the many months of broken sleep part, and the separation from Lola.

I haven’t forgotten how incredibly, incredibly lucky I am to be in this position. I thank the universe every day. But I am a teensy bit overwhelmed. Life is like that; so many of the really good things do overwhelm you and make you dig around for resources you never suspected you have.

Having Lola has shown me that I can get up at 4am and still function; that I can deal with broken sleep (not saying I like it), that I can be more patient than I ever thought I could; that my parents are not to be taken for granted; that I’m a grown-up, and white noise is my friend. There’s going to be a lot more, I know. And the arrival of young Bruce Lee/Dirty Harry is going to add to that.

Her name was Lola…

Nine months! Lola is officially tall for her age, “slender” – at the bottom of the healthy range – and her head is growing nicely and in proportion. They have charts for all these things at the pediatricians, and I love a good chart.

Dr S is a fantastic guy, uber patient with all of our questions, and lovely in the way he interacts with her. She gave him a round of applause for his troubles.

But then came the nasty bit – a blood test to check her iron levels etc. I thought this would be a pin prick, but no – these nurses stuck a huge needle in her arm and dug around for her tiny vein, all while I had to help keep her still on the table. Then they didn’t get enough blood so they stabbed her in the finger as well. She was screaming like a banshee and I thought she wouldn’t ever trust me again. She was pretty pissed off with us for most of the day – well, she took it out on her dad, mostly. So for any new parents out there who are advised to get a blood test, if there is ANY way you can possibly avoid it, or somehow get enough with just a prick to the finger, then go down that route.

After that trauma I had to go via another lab to have my own blood drawn for the third time for the Panorama test which detects trisomies with almost 100 per cent certainty. Being 41, my doctor advised I get this test for peace of mind… well, having two failed tests (not having enough cells in the blood sample or some such) has not put my mind at rest.

I really hope this time we have some results. It’ll be pretty bloody late to do anything about them… even though I wasn’t ever convinced I would or could do anything if the baby does have some problem, I wanted to know. I wanted that peace of mind, goddamnit, not that old “Your baby has a 1 in 274 chance of Down’s” malarkey. It’s something I have to confess has been haunting me. In Latin America, you see a LOT of children and adults with Down’s Syndrome, I think because they have a much lower rate of detection, and because even if it was detected, many people would never abort a foetus for religious or moral reasons. Or they simply don’t have that option. I read somewhere that the abortion rate for foetuses diagnosed with Down’s in Europe and the US is pretty high – around 92 per cent – even though no one likes to talk about it.

I’ve gone and said the “A” word now.

I have seen so many beautiful pictures of Down’s kids lately, and it’s wonderful to see attitudes changing with the help of role models like the girl who plays Becky the cheerleader in Glee. But the horrible truth is that every time I see a Down’s kid or adult at the moment, my heart clenches up. I don’t want my child to be anything other than healthy. Of course I don’t. No mother wants that. I have a lot of friends who say they wouldn’t care – that it wouldn’t change anything. But I see those adults with Down’s, so dependent on their ageing parents, and I wonder what will happen to them? I wonder if I could do that.

Now I have gone down a path I don’t know much about, and maybe some of you will clobber me for it. Or offer me some better information or advice.

For now, between these sudden moments of fear, I just tell myself everything will be alright. What else can I do?

Baby no 2 still has no real nickname. We used to call him/her “ajonjoli”, or sesame seed, but we’ve moved into large mango territory now, apparently. These fruit comparisons are downright confusing, if you ask me. The nameless one has recently started kicking me. I think because he/she realises that I need a good kicking every now and then to remind me that he/she is on the way. I still forget sometimes.