A meh day.

Ragged.

Last week, well on Sunday and Monday, the Muffin turned. No longer was he lying diagonally across me, with all his weight on the dodgy bit of pelvis he was upside down, the correct way and pain-wise, all was peachy. Hell on Monday I even cut the hedge…

Tuesday… the great conundrum… shall I go swimming or borrow my friend’s hot tub for an hour or two? Seeing as I feel so goddamn good, I’ll swim.

Noooo! That’s the wrong answer! Stupid, stupid, STUPID!

I go swimming, it’s lanes. There are two. Fast and slow. It’s a lie. They are splashy crawl and breast stroke. There is NO difference in speed. Both are fast.

Damn.

I get in and do 15 lengths of backstroke. I have to go faster than I want to because it’s very full and I am holding people up if I don’t keep pace - a pace I’d usually have no trouble with, I might add.

When I get out, I learn two things.

1. SPD and kicking. Absolute no-no! Whatever they say, breast stroke legs probably would be better.

2. At some point in the proceedings, the Muffin has retreated to the bottom again.

3. I can hardly walk to the changing rooms.

Nooooooooooo!

Night comes, pain comes, sleep - or at least deep sleep - doesn’t. I wake up feeling like shit and as if I haven’t slept.

Never mind. I have cheered myself up no end by having a haircut. For the next 24 hours or so I will look like a smart well turned out female. That’s good as for the most part I feel like there are actually three sexes, man, woman and pregnant. It’s great to feel womanly again.

This afternoon… not so great. I had a doctor’s appointment but the SPD smarting a tad I decided to eschew the bike and take my car. I jemmy myself into it, turn the key and what happens. Short of a sad metallic sigh, nothing. The battery is flat. It picks now, for the first time in about three years to die on me.

Arse.

I get out, lock it, admonish it for being a little bleeder and go get my bike. Luckily there is still time. I flee up the hill, or at least, creep up using the granny ring, all the while wheezing like an asthmatic pensioner with a 50 a day high tar fag habit. Just get there on time. Ask the doctor all my questions. She reassures me about the scary ones but there is no easy answer to the SPD. I will be in pain… for the next 9 weeks at least and for anything up to 6 months after the birth possibly ever, depending on whether it knits back right or wrong… oooh a post partum visit to the chiropractor essential I think..

She confirms my suspicions about the Muffin’s unusual diagonal position. Head on the left at the bottom, feet kind of half way up on the right. Unfortunately, the fact he tried two days upright and slipped back after the swimming is most likely to be less to do with the backstroke and more to do with his being comfy like that and therefore, disinclined to move to a less pain-inducing position.

Bugger.

Sometimes, even when life is great, it kind of sucks!

Yes.

Well, at least you won’t have to guess what this post is about. Not too much anyway. It’s about organisation or the fact that achieving a smooth running life actually appears to bear no relation whatsoever to the amount of effort you put into organising it.

I used to watch a comedy TV show called Red Dwarf which is set four million years into the future. One episode is all about luck. The the heroes discover that luck is actually a virus and come across a phial of the stuff.

Yeh, well I reckon organisational skills are kind of similar. Mine only work when I’m planning what I need to do and ordering other people to do the nitty gritty - ie in a job - the minute I personally get involved the wheels fall off big time.

Let me explain…

Once again, I have become an unwitting victim to the pointless tweaking of reality to make life just that little bit more complicated for the rest of us - especially those of us plagued by the bloody chaos fairies the way I am - by the organised tidy bastards. In this case the ones who dick with the clocks, solely, I am certain, to punish disorganised people like me for not being automata such as they.

Why is being organised such a big deal? Why is it in this day and age of equality for all that being organised is considered the holy grail of personal traits ahead of everything else. I don’t punish these anally retentive smeg ends for having OCD and an imagination bypass so what have they got against people like me?

Ok, I’m not organised - I try to be, you know, the way Canute tried to stop the tide - but I’m fighting a losing battle. When I do try to organise my life, you’d be amazed at the lengths I go to to ensure everything runs smoothly and you’d be even more amazed at how consistently I still manage to lurch spectacularly from one crisis to another in a state of perpetual chaos…

Except at work where, by din’t of planning what needs to be done, when and by not actually tainting the process by being directly involved, I was known for my ruthless efficiency.

Sighs…

As you know, I’m pregnant. I am also vague. That doesn’t mean I lack self discipline, it doesn’t mean I can’t - or don’t try to - organise myself, it just means it’s a lot harder for me than it is for any of you. That doesn’t make me dumber or less worthy than anyone else it just makes me different.

So. Every year here in Britain they fuck with the clocks. Twice. First they put them forward in spring, so we get more daylight, then they put them back in winter so it gets dark an hour later. Whatever they say, nobody actually knows why. The official reason given each year is that it’s done so that the kids get to be outside in daylight on their way to school in winter.

Sorry but that’s cock and bull for a start.

It might have been true once but not in my lifetime, not when you have to be in your classroom for registration at 8.30 am and they don’t release you until 4.00 pm.

In the depths of winter here in Blighty, even in the South, it gets light at about half past eight and dark at four so when you’re going to school in deepest, darkest winter you actually do both journeys in twilight and see no daylight, outside break times, at all. So that explodes that theory then.

Trust me, I went to school for 13 years. I know.

On Saturday night, the clocks went back so all of a sudden on Sunday morning, when I woke up, the time that had been 8 am yesterday was 9 am today.

That meant it was time to go round house, checking each and every single piece of electrical equipment, either to move the clock onwards an hour or to press the button to confirm that yes, I notice it has gone forward automatically and yes, I would like to keep it that way.

The most important thing, of course, was my Compaq iPAQ.

This is the machine by which I live and die. I know my limitations, especially at the moment. I’m far too vague to actually remember when and where the legion of health professionals watching over my pregnancy have arranged to see me and that’s why I have an iPAQ to do it for me. I set it to beep at me before each appointment in good time.

Good time being however long I will need to get ready and get to wherever I have to go with whatever equipment, samples etc they require and not be late.

Having turned on the iPAQ on Sunday morning and clicked “yes” on the “all the clocks have changed do you want me to go forward an hour?” button I went to bed on Sunday confident that anything I had scheduled for Monday would not be missed.

Conscious that I had a doctor’s appointment which I’d cancelled and rearranged 3 times, I checked the time and date of that before turning the light out. Wednesday. Good. I relaxed into my cosy covers and slipped gratefully into the land of nod.

Spool forwards to Monday morning and you can imagine how delighted I am when at 10 am, while I am happily hoovering the hall in my pyjamas, the beeper goes on my iPAQ to tell me I have a physiotherapy appointment at 9.30.

Shit!

It would be physio, these appointments are like fricking unicorn poop.

I check the clock on the iPAQ and sure enough it says 10.00. Even the sodding diary knows it’s 10 but the fricking beeper attached to the diary, the beeper I’m relying on, is still running on Grenwich Bloody Mean Fricking Bastard Time.

Yes. It thinks it’s giving me an ample half hour warning to cycle a couple of miles to my local hospital and not miss my appointment… half an hour ago.

Arse.

I ring. Yes. I’ve missed it. I get the next available appointment. 23rd April. Yes that’s right, 3 week’s time.

Balls.

So I’d lay bets a lot of you are more organised then me and your lives run more smoothly BUT. Do you go to the lengths of chaos management I do? I’d bet you don’t. Surely, setting alarms to beep when you have to, get up, again when you have to get ready, when you have to leave and then, finally when you are meant to be somewhere has got to be approaching the outer limits of tidy personesque OCD.

It probably goes beyond… yeh, I’ll bet the most unimaginative anally retentive Bauhaus furnished flat dwelling robotoid doesn’t even do that.

But I’ll also bet, if they do, that the sodding things don’t malfunction like some thousand year old droid with silicone brain rot. And if they do, when they tell other people their plight is met with sympathy and deemed by all to be a very unlucky fault in the machine not, as with me, regarded as a fault in the owner (and greeted with a lecture about being more organised and not checking the machine properly or doing a soft reboot etc etc).

In short. It WORKS for them… and not for me.

Why?

Because they have the virus and I don’t. It’s the only logical reason.

…Bastards!

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!

But in less pain!  Hoorah!

Yesterday was excruciating.  Today it’s back to manageable levels.  I could still sleep for 1000 years but at least I wouldn’t wake up whimpering like a great jessie every time I turned over!  It’s very rare for it to hurt at night, which is where the physio exercises are kicking in I reckon.

Also, I didn’t have time to do my exercises before church and they do tend to set everything straight to start the day, so to speak.

The friend I met in church yesterday also had SPD and was very sympathetic… but I was horrified to discover she got it after she had given birth.  So it looks like I’ll be enduring at least a year of it by the time I’ve stopped breast feeding and my hormones have returned to normal.

Arse!

Not helped by the fact the baby appears to be lying sideways and leaning heavily on my pelvic bone at the front… which is the bit that’s hurting.

I really should shut up about this!  After all, it’s a totally straightforward pregnancy, nothing dire is wrong, no life threatening conditions diagnosed and Muffin is fine… it just smarts like fuck.   More than a bone graft.  A lot more… and at least with the bone graft I was on pain killers… 14 a day, three different types, to be precise.

Then again, the upside is that at the rate I’m going, I won’t bloody notice when I go into labour and if I do, it’ll hardly hurt more.  I dunno if anyone else has noticed this but I find that once pain passes a certain level you can’t react any more however much worse it gets… it’s like you reach reactional capacity.  You swear, get more tired, a bit more bad tempered maybe but that’s all…

Not looking forward to trying to be cheerful and walk miles round the shops with my in-laws next week though.  It’s definitely softened my stiff upper lip and sapped my jollity stamina.  Oh well.  31 weeks yesterday… only another two and a half/three months to go…

However, an invaluable exercise to aid sleep is to get into a very simple yoga position which, sadly, I can’t remember the name of, just before you go to bed.  This will often spread concentrated pain over a larger area making it much duller and easier to deal with and all importantly, sleep through.  Anyway.  Here’s a description.

1.  Lie on your back with your arms by your sides and your knees bent.

2.  Put your feet close in, with your heels say… about 3 inches from your buttocks.  Don’t flop your knees out sideways, keep them sticking up straight in front of you.  Relax.  If you’re doing it right you’ll find it causes your pelvis to tilt and the spine in the small of your back to straighten.  It’s a nice gentle stretch for your lower vertebrae and sacrum.

3.  Lie like this for a few minutes and take some deep breaths.

I find that if I do that in bed, once I turn back onto my side again, the sharp pains at the front have gone.  Whether this is because it kind of resets everything or because it causes the Muffin to subside backwards a bit, I don’t know.  However since it helps, I don’t really care.

Anyone reading this who decides to a comment to the effect that I shouldn’t be lying on my back after 28 weeks should expect a thoroughly abusive reply.

I could sleep for a thousand years…

Yep I’m fucking knackered today. Several missions on the go…

Mission one, should I decide to accept it… bake some edible biscuits. This is proving far harder than it has any right to be. My mother’s biscuits are so fab that I decided I would get the recipe. After all, most mums and babies seem to meet for coffee or tea so I thought that one, I could bake some biscuits which were made with low GI sugar and two, home baked must be more healthy than bought.

I have made rosemary and almond biscuits and two batches of melting moments. None of them bear the remotest resemblance to the things I eat at my mother’s house. To quote Mr BC.

“They’re ok but I wouldn’t eat them for pleasure.”

Spot on.

The only way I’m going to succeed here is to watch my mother making them, so I can see what the dough should look and taste like before I stick them in the oven.

Mission two, make a ratatouille - ok I’m on very firm ground with that one, it’s coming on fine.

Mission three, clean the house. Done. Mwa ha ha haargh… oh sorry did the smug waves knock you out.

Mission four. My father in law has written a book, more a repository for all his memories and stories than anything because he has forgotten so many of the stories his parents told him and realises a lot of this important social and family history will be lost if he doesn’t. Now THIS I am looking forward to. He writes well and the stories I’ve heard are fascinating, amusing or both.

Mission five. Keep upping the number of reps on the physio exercises. The SPD is getting very painful now and you know how when you break a bone the pain makes you really, really tired… well I guess I’m suffering from a dash of that, on top of the fact that pregnancy makes you tired anyway it leaves me wiped most of the time. Bear in mind this is our first weekend home with nobody else here, just hanging out, in seven and the last until the three weekends before Muffin is due.

Idiots? Yes, we are but people keep being 40 and having parties, there’s a wedding, there’s somebody who lives abroad visiting with his wife - we haven’t seen him in 3 years and we haven’t even met her… it’s stuff we want to do but it is tiring the way a whole load of once-every-10-years-if-that style events have cropped up at once, now.

Oh well…

It being Easter Day, today, I went up the hill to the Cathedral to do the God thing. It starts at 10.30 but it was snowing and the snow was up to my ankles.

So knackered and sleepy I spent too long in bed and nearly missed it, at 10.10 I realised what the time was and managed to get dressed, washed, clean my teeth and throw enough cereal down to keep my Muffin-induced ravening maw in check for an hour or two.

Weebled my way up the hill - can’t WAIT until the Muffin inside is outside and I can start to recover from the SPD (I expect I’ll be banging on about rock hard breasts and sore nipples endlessly by then, I’m a born whinger so there’s bound to be something).

Just squeaked it! Got there in time to be wished happy Easter and handed an order of service by a sidesman as the all-stand-the-choir-are-coming-in bell rang.

Found a good seat though, the advantage of being on my own, of course. There are odd seats much closer to the front than there are groups because British people in groups sitting in a row of seats always leave a one or two seat buffer between themselves and the next party.  As I headed over the man on the end of my row moved three seats in!  Result!  Should I need to wee I could waddle off to the loo without disrupting anyone else’s holy thoughts - these services take a while and I only have a short range.

They did Dvorak’s Mass in D. Very nice. Also did the Halleluja Chorus (from Handel’s Messiah) while everyone was taking communion. Splendid, a bit of baroque to improve Muffin’s brain.

Had to nip out for a wee but only once. It turned out the lady behind me - also nipping out to put lunch on - was from my exercise class so we had a nice chat. Asked the sidesman by the door if there was a loo in the cathedral but it was behind the orchestra so fearing entanglements with double basses and other expensive and highly breakable instruments - not to mention things which would make a lot of noise when knocked over. I nipped over the road to the publics…

“I bet that was a relief!” Said the sidesman cheerfully as I came back in.

“It certainly was!” I told him.

The Muffin is lying very low this morning which made leaning forward to pseudo kneel difficult, it made him kick and wriggle and I didn’t want to squish him so I just bowed my head. Actually sitting was hard work but of the three, sit, stand, kneel it was the easier option. I have a kind of period pains thing going on at the moment, mainly, I suspect because low means low. Muffin is RIGHT at the bottom where, frankly, there isn’t really room for him.

The recessional hymn was “Thine be the Glory” sung to a tune called Maccabeus - another Handel classic - which is especially great to sing with a full orchestra plus tympani going in the background. Enjoyed that. Hugely amused by one of the hmm… not sure what you call them, something posher than servers in a cathedral but essentially, that’s what they are.

He was the guy with the incense. Incense is used for high days and holidays in the Church of England. It’s like a small bar-be-queue. A guy fills a pot with charcoal and adds powder over the top which gives off a very pleasant scent as it burns, yep, God’s holy joss stick… with knobs on.

It’s meant to signify your prayers going up to heaven but I reckon it’s left over from days when the great unwashed really were and in order to stay upright and conscious the priests needed something to cover the all pervading stench of the congregation. These were times when the average joe really hummed and nobody wanted to know the words.

The whole shebang is securely fastened in a thing about the size of a teapot which hangs on three chains which are joined to a handle and the tout ensemble is called - technical term here - a “Thurible”. People, you know I couldn’t make a word like that up. It has holes in the top to let the draught in to keep the charcoal briquettes alight and to let out the fancy flavoured smoke. Obviously the more you swing it about, the more fiercely the charcoal burns and the more fancy flavouring you get.

The bloke in charge of it was enthusiastic enough today but when we launched into the last hymn he proceeded to do a series of full, fast loops in the instrumental break between verses. Alone I might have been but I couldn’t help laughing. He was giving it some serious welly, red in the face with the effort and clearly enjoying himself immensely. He was handling it with the deft assurance of the true professional but I couldn’t help noticing that one wrong move and any of his unfortunate colleagues processing alongside, in front or behind him could have ended up out cold. Wisely, they kept well clear.

Glad I went, it was a very relaxing service. Very enjoyable.