Yes today has been a GOOD one.

Slept well, including one stint of a whole four hours without waking up and headed out to aqua-natal. It was a given we were all having coffee after - brilliant, I haven’t been able to persuade anyone to do that before so it’s obviously improved over the 3 weeks I’ve missed.

During our lengthy chat - very nice and sociable - one woman said I could get free re-usable nappies from the council, I rang and sure enough I am now the proud owner of 4 brand-new medium sized Motherese Rikki outer pants, 4 little pants made by someone else but they look pretty good, 12 terry cloth foldy things to go inside them, 600 biodegradeable liners (!) and a nappy pail. So combined with the stuff I already have that’s another item ticked on the must have list.

Even better, with the ones I have already bought at a car boot - used once, sterilised by the seller and then twice more by me - I now have the prerequisite 24 sets of nappies with a blessed 4 of the terry cloths in hand so yes, I’ve also sorted my muslin squares. All this stuff would be about £230 or more new and I’ve spent the grand total of £7 for £188’s worth and scored the rest absolutely free.

Booyacka!

I guess the moral of this story is that help comes from the most unexpected of places.  Who’d have thought that if you want some free nappies, the thing to do was ask your local council.

I’ve also managed to get rid of the giant computer which was cluttering up my office… god bless Freecycle and all who sail in her! I’ve got at least five takers on that one and I’m very pleased as it means I will have a new place to start storing my boxes of packed stuff ahead of our smashing attic floor-o-rama.

On to my next topic.

Dreams.

I dreamt a lot the other night. I can’t remember all of them but a couple spring to mind, one because it was possibly the bizarrest thing I’ve ever dreamt and the other because I remembered it. I wear a couple of those bead bangles, a brown one - tiger’s eye, a whatever volcanic glass is called (can’t remember) and amethyst. I dreamt I lost them the other day and found them… wait for it…

Yes…

Up my arse!

I had to pull them out and wash them off before I could put them back on.

How fricking odd is that?

I also dreamed some very good looking and most buff hunk wanted to shag me but all I wanted was to shag Mr BC. Mr BC didn’t want to shag me though, which is par for the course, he doesn’t at the moment, I freak him out. He is clearly not into shagging truckers. It’s that kind of wank seance thing, too where you feel like the baby is watching. Even so, he was clearly happy when I told him about it and that despite feeling a bit of nooky would be nice I only wanted it with him.

That said, of course, although I’d kind of like a bit of bedroom action er… on paper, so to speak, when it actually comes to it (phnar phnar) I feel less in the mood for sex than I ever have in my life. I ache too much, if you’ve ever tried to have a shag after some major surgery or at least, when some bit of your bod is really hurting, you’ll know you think it sounds like a great idea until you try and then find it’s not really all it’s cracked (gnurk) up to be.

Sorry. Channelling Finbarr Saunders there.

Please note, the not while you’re eating tab is switched on. Those who are a bit prissy about bodily functions and stuff should leave now.

Yes, today I am going to talk about a night terror so horrific I can hardly type the words…

Are you quaking in your shoes? I know I am.

Here goes.

When I go to the bog in the night, which, being a pregnant lady is practically a hobby for me, I don’t usually turn on the light. I live in a town so there is quite enough light coming through the windows for me to see my way to the bathroom, have a wee and come back without danger of waking Mr BC or Mr Cat, both of whom are light sensitive and once woken tend to stay awake, the one tossing and turning, the other noisily galloping about, after I’ve been.

Neither is conducive to a good night’s sleep and anyway, if they don’t wake me up, the light does. Wee in the dark and it’s all done in a kind of dreamy doze… I never really regain consciousness and go straight back to sleep when I get back to bed.

Since I’ve been pregnant though, another evil has reared it’s ugly head.

(Insert psycho music here. I’m not computer savvy enough to do it for you so you’ll have to imagine it in. )

You see, all these hormones have put my poor bowels in a quandary. Where before you could set your watch by them, these last 7 months or so, I’ve been very irregular. I still do fourteen poohs a week it’s just that there are occasions when I do them all on the same day! So sometimes, I blunder into the darkened bathroom at night and suddenly. It happens.

THE NIGHT POOH

Stealthily, without warning it creeps up on me and I am left to wipe - in a situation when I really do need to see - in the dark.

Worse, there is no dozing back to sleep and erasing the horror from my memory because clearly, having wiped a lot, I then have to go over to the other side of the room and turn the light on to check that I’ve wiped enough.

…And that wakes me up.

Mmm… it’s a tough life. *

* That was irony.

I will be away from my computer for the week, now, but maybe next time, I’ll tell you about Dick Dastardly and the Sharp Poohs… where other children had monsters under the bed, we had…

I’m sure you are all looking forward to that!

Yes, it’s time for another fascinating episode in the catalogue of disasters that is my risible attempt at good housewifery. I’m so shit at this home maker thing. So to warn you up front, for this one the Not while you’re eating tag is turned on. If you have any moral fibre, the smallest sense of house pride or the meagrest standards cleanliness, stop here.

Yesterday I was feeling very chipper and full of beans. This was such a surprise, perenially knackered as I am with the carrying of my lovely - but nonetheless parasitic - foetus, that I decided I would do something constructive… clean out our fridge. Not that it sucks but every now and again, stuff gets to the back… and gets forgotten… and becomes a rich source of free penicillin.

So when I came to check the contents of the cheese keeper…

I lifted the lid and found this…

This is what three weeks does to a fresh goat’s cheese. One of those lovely, very tasty white ones which yes, had I not forgotten about it, would have lasted less than hours in this house.

As mouldy food goes, I have to say, it was pretty cute.

Anyone remember the episode of the Muppets when Gonzo brings in a whole load of singing mushrooms for his act?

Kermit asks them where they came from and Gonzo admits that he had left some… well I think it might actually have been cheese in his fridge when he went away and when he came back it was covered in mushrooms but they were too cute to throw out… so instead, he keeps them and teaches them to sing.

Here’s a close up.

See what I mean, it doesn’t take much to jump from this to say…

This…

You see? You want to take it home with you, don’t you?

I sent it to Mr BC in an e-mail… he thinks it’s cute too. We toyed with the idea of sending it to his Mum but decided she would freak out and never come to stay here again. The untidiness in this house is mostly down to me.

My mum… well, she’d probably have scraped the mould off and made it into a soufflé*… “it’s only been eating cheese, it’s alright if it’s cooked long enough to kill the germs” or some such.

*Actually, she wouldn’t but what with me being a chip off the old block it is the kind of thing she might also find in her fridge.

So there you are.

Whenever you feel your house is a tip or your standards are low just pop over here and have a look at this. You should feel better at once.

The adult content tag is switched on as is the not while you’re eating tag, if I had one the don’t watch if you’re thinking of slitting your wrists tag would be on and all.

Here’s a little video for you.  Sobering, intelligently presented and bang on the money. Not one of Mr Hannon’s catchier songs though.

How can you expect people to respect your humanity if you fail to acknowledge theirs? How can you expect to set up an honourable, incorruptable western style government, if western style governments are, themselves, corrupt? There are basic human rights. You cannot expect others to afford them to you if you do not afford them to others.

To be a Christian and to say you believe in torture, is to be a hypocrite. The two are mutually exclusive. Christian, torturer, you are one or the other.

There is also strong evidence to suggest that information obtained under torture is complete bollocks. People will say anything to make the pain stop. Morally reprehensible AND highly unreliable then. Loose, loose. So why?

Mr Hannon puts it better than I can and since he grew up in Northern Ireland, he knows. Anyone whose seen Ghandi will know we Brits are no better, I guess people like me just naively assumed that our successors would learn from our mistakes rather than replicating or eagerly attempting to surpass them.

Actually, they didn’t. I did. They were well active though. BTW the not while you’re eating tag is switched on so if you are, don’t read to the end!

So, note to self, when you go to aqua natal with a large hole in the top of your thumb take a plaster, this will stop you from bleeding all over the following:

• bra
• pants
• shirt
• towel
• brand new swimming costume
• bag
• lovely tubigrip SPD-countering truss thing

You will then not have to wash them all when you get home. The truss thing, especially, looks like I’ve committed an axe murder in it! Oh dear.

I had a bit of a flop sweat last night. This whole pregnancy thing has to be the biggest conspiracy ever, nobody told me about those but it appears they are normal… some people get them after, too. Please god no!

So I woke up hot and bothered in pyjamas which were actually damp. Ack. Wanted to change them but Mr BC was fast asleep and had a tough day ahead. When Mr BC wakes up, he seldom goes back to sleep again so I felt that condemning him to a night of wakefulness was too cruel. Anyway, I stuck them over the radiator in the bathroom and by the time I had finished having a pee and doing my pressure points , they’d dried.

Yeh, I do the SPD pressure points in my feet by putting my foot on a small round stone positioned on the go point for two minutes a pop but it takes me 5 minutes to find the go point and I usually only remember to do it in the middle of the night. It’s not often I’m glad of something like this.

This morning, clearly, it was change the sheets time. After swimming…

I put the bottom sheet on and went into the bathroom to remove my blood-spattered bra and put a clean one on. Luckily I noticed the blood all over my tit before I bled all over the clean white bra I was about to put on.

Back into the bedroom where I decided red polka-dots were not on and took recently applied, clean bottom sheet straight off again. Clean sheet number two fitted along with a plaster over my no longer painful but copiously bleeding thumb! Never mind, at least I managed to spot it before I damaged the other bra AND I successfully rummaged in the drawer for clean pyjamas without bleeding all over everything in there… Now I call that a result.

On the downside I have applied copious anti-stretch mark product all over my bump, legs and bum… where do I have them? Underneath my tits. That’s a big YUCK going out to all my pregnant friends, may you never suffer with stretch marks underneath your tits. Eugh.

I repulse me.

Ah the joys of being pregnant… and a bit of a spanner.

It could be even worse. I could be able to see them. At least underneath they will be invisible unless I sunbathe topless and how likely is that (not any more).

I used it as an excuse to myself some illicit toys from Woolies to make up for it… they were two for the price of one so it was churlish not to… and last week I bought some way cool shoes! I could throw those in, too. Mmm…

Perhaps I should replace them with a pair of these… then again, what if I had a night sweat, the bed would be full of melted brown goo… and it’d be the middle of the night so I’d be far too disorientated to realise what it was…

I should stop now…

Enjoy.