Taking it slow

Thank you so much for all the whooping and dancing on our behalves - each little comment I got through my email made me think - Ooh, maybe this really might be happening after all!

I've been on a blog moratorium while I finished writing a presentation for work - it is so hard to focus when my brain is going around in little circles like an excited puppy: "Hmm - I wonder if I'm still pregnant?  What about now?  .... Now?"

Something about this feels real though - definitely feeling nauseous and super-full-body tired. I walked out of the train station the other day and could smell someone's dinner (fish), and then someone else's perfume.  Smells are distinct, separate, detailed.  It feels just like the early days of being pregnant with Haloumi.  Which is a lovely feeling, but also scary.  It's as though there's been a pregnant part of me that's been on-hold for the last 20 months, and I've just gone straight back to 'pregnant normal'.  A part of me wants to leap straight into that certainty that things will work out, that we can start planning, while another a part of me has trouble imagining that this could end up with a living child.

It's now four sleeps until the scan.  I've titled this post 'taking it slow', but I think that is an aspiration rather than a description.  It is so difficult not to tilt forward and start planning or worrying about the future of this pregnancy.  I dreamt last night that I had another baby girl - fairer than Z, with a squished up newborn face.  She was alive, and I was trying to put a cloth nappy on her, but using ordinary sized safety pins.  We were locked in a room with someone with a machine-gun, I was contemplating whether we might be able to hide behind the couch so that we wouldn't be killed.  I though perhaps if I could hide her she'd be safe.  Maybe this is my unconscious brain's clunky metaphor for pregnancy after loss, or maybe I'm just really scared.  I also dreamt that we took her to the pub, where a band was playing - no idea what that means. 

It's a reminder too of all the dreams I had of Haloumi.  Despite me being convinced during waking hours that I was having a boy, in every dream I had she was a girl.  And my dreaming brain was right.   It had a 50-50 chance of being accurate I guess.  Just like trying to conceive, pregnancy is such a huge exercise in uncertainty - but with such a clear timetable of 'successful outcomes' that it feels even more difficult to just take one day at a time.  But we're here now, in this queasy, uncertain spot, and I certainly prefer this kind of uncertainty to the other uncertainty that follows a BFN.