Today I am mostly panicking about: baby positions.
That's right, it turns out that there is an optimum position for Baby to be lying in for the most desirable, Call the Midwife-style, two pushes and they're out form of childbirth which I am hoping to emulate.
And this, despite my jubilation at being told at my 28 week appointment that the baby was "head down," is not the position that Little One is currently adopting. Although he is probably head down, it seems that he is also what is known as "back to back," meaning a more difficult and painful labour could be ahead.
I blame myself. Apparently (so saith the Great Sage of Childbirth, the Internet) this is because nowadays we spend all our time lolling on sofas watching TV and surfing the internets instead of behaving like proper women and getting down on all fours to spend hours scrubbing floors. I have probably never felt so guilty about my total lack of interest in cleaning. Apparently the remedy for this is to spend as much time as possible on all fours, crawling about the house or sitting on a "birthing ball," something which I had up until this point considered a totally useless and co-ordinated flat decor-ruining item.
In other news, not only do I need to be getting around the place via the medium of crawling from now on, but I also need to be eating foods high in iron, as I am anaemic and so far my efforts to extract a prescription for iron tablets from the NHS have been farcical (twice I have been to the GP surgery only to find they have no record of my prescription request. Thank God I'm off work this week. In other work vs. NHS horrors, I am supposed to go for a repeat blood test at the hospital in a few weeks, but cannot make an appointment as bizarrely you just walk in for a blood test, although it has to be between the hours of 1pm and 2pm, which is of absolutely no use whatsoever when you have an employer who wants to see evidence of every appointment. What am I supposed to do, take a selfie in the clinic?)
Lastly, the other main news this week is that I am surprisingly fussy about what I wear in bed, especially if that outfit is likely to be seen by the masses in hospital. Usually I don't wear anything in bed, which is why it surprises me that I have suddenly become so fussy, but given that the likes of my mother and brother probably don't want me strutting around their house in the buff when I am staying with them after the birth (well actually my mother probably doesn't care, given the amount of times she has brazenly wandered around naked, causing my brothers and I to start screaming and covering our eyes-even now when we are supposedly sensible adults. My brother, on the other hand, definitely will care, especially given his reaction to my bump-flashing the other day, when he shrieked "EWWW! What is THAT???" at my bloated belly button).
Due to my need to buy some pyjamas for giving birth, breastfeeding and generally not frightening the horses, I spent much of yesterday trawling around Westfield, where I managed to buy a grand total of nothing-except a thermometer. A must-have, according to the teacher in my antenatal class. One thing the bloated belly now does, entertainingly, as well as provoke reactions from random passers-by "Ooh how cute! What are you having? When are you due? Ooh, SOON!" is ensure that whenever one enters Mothercare, one cannot look at an overpriced pushchair for even a nanosecond without being pursued by over-eager salespeople swooping in like seagulls around a sandwich. Anyway, back to pyjamas. Why is it that they are either too big (M&S), too wintry (giant bunny onesies. Why? Also awkward to get out of when giving needing easy access for giving birth), too see-through or too chavvy (thank you La Senza for the latter. I didn't realise that budding Katie Prices could still actually buy fluffy sequinned leopard print Ugg boot slippers with leopard print velour hotpant and T-shirt sleepwear combos for those all-important "just got out of bed and couldn't be arsed to wear proper clothes" paparazzi shots). When my brother heard I was looking for an outfit to give birth in, he may have unwittingly identified a niche in the market with his comment, "What are you looking for? A Vivienne Westwood birthing dress?"
Please make one Viv. I can only imagine how brilliant that would be.
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