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.

Yes they are. A brief hiaitus, I promised, a fermata, small pause… and a week passed… and another…

I’m sorry but I’m having a bit of a why me? Week. Be warned the adult content ie swearing warning system, is switched on.

I’m sure everyone else’s lives are the same as mine, you plan stuff and something goes wrong and you have to do that instead. I’m sure that’s what life is… it’s just that I live under the impression that sometimes, other people’s lives do actually go the way they plan. Especially the ORGANISED ones. The way it looks from here, in the pit of disorganised pandemonium, naturally, they plan, they book, it happens and all is peachy.

When I emulate them, I plan, I book, something else happens, I cancel and all is tits up. No wonder everyone thinks I’m so fucking good in a crisis! My whole life comprises one crisis after another and if they’re not my own, I seem to have this uncanny knack of getting sucked into other people’s.

Sigh.

You know what’s coming don’t you.

Yeh. SOMETHING has happened to the woman THINGS happen to. A family crisis.

So I’ve been trying to sort out the final bits of baby stuff as it’s 36 weeks next week and you never know! Trouble is, SPD being tricky some days, shopping is a trial, plus I can only just squeeze into my car without the aid of swarfega - well actually I can squeeze in it’s getting out I can’t do and if it would stop fucking raining for ONE day when I have to go somewhere I’d take the lid off and all I’d have to do is stand up. Yesterday? Warm. Bright sun. Today, pissing with rain because I have physio. Sigh. But I digress.

Stuff. That’s where I was. Yeh, well, I’m ordering it all off the internet which means, ideally, I need to be at home for at least 7 days after I place each order to ensure I’ll be there to receive it.

Post is fine, it sits in the depot round the corner until I go collect it but with couriers they tend to try once and then bugger off. If you’re lucky they keep it for three days before sending it back to whoever sent it to you but even if you arrive home in time you still have to slog off to their depot, usually about 50 miles away, to pick it up.

Clearly if you’re not home for seven straight working days for two months or more, ordering off the internet turns into a game of courier chicken.  At the moment the couriers are winning.

Sigh.

Two months of visiting strange beds with insufficient or just plain different pillows and I’ve had my fill. It’s not been good for the SPD at night although thank heavens it’s eased off during the day and after four whole nights in my own bed, it’s been much better the last couple of nights, too.

I crave a whole weekend at home. Was off to a 40th birthday this weekend, the last of the once in a life time, I’ve got to do these things standing between me and calm before baby. Then it was a case of 3 blessed weeks without having to go anywhere to order the last bunch of stuff, plan, sort the nursery, pack up my office and generally sort everything out. No nights away looming, no going anywhere, just Mr BC and me in our little pod.

I’ve been looking forward to it.

So what happens? Yep, Mum in-Law - who lives six hours away - has fallen and broken her leg. It’s pretty grim, she’ll be in hospital for a week so we’ve binned the 40th birthday in favour of whizzing down to Wales for a few days to help her settle in when she comes out. That’s more working days away though (slightly panicky timbre in BC’s voice here). We’d have to be a special kind of shitty to even think of not going, though. They are lovely and they genuinely need our help.

It’s a 6 hour drive though.

6 hours. That’s a lot of pee breaks.

We’re going on Saturday after my first anti-natal class. Tuesday we come home. Mr BC has meetings the length and breadth of the country. If we can find a station, he’ll drop me off and I’ll get a train to Birmingham where I can go shopping - now there’s a thought - and as the last one is there, he can pick me up on his way back, seeing as that’s where he’ll end up. That would be good and if I can find a commodious bed shop possibly even restful…

We’ll have to go back to Wales again though. I think possibly in week 38 which is getting really, uncomfortably close to the wire… Doubts surround the straight 7 working days then… still the day shopping in Brum might sort that.

Poor Mum (in-law), it’s not her fault and at least it’s happened now between the chronic SPD and actual scheduled poppage so in theory I might actually be able to be of some practicable use to them! In fact, if Muffin arrives when due - which I did - then she’ll be up and about and on the mend by that time and we can rest easy in our own chaotic time knowing she and Dad are ok.

On the up side. Since it’s happened to my own Dad, before, at least I can reassure them and think of things that might be useful to take down there, a non slip bathmat, a plastic patio chair for the shower (with wet exes round the legs so they don’t scratch the bath). Some books for her to read or maybe some puzzle books, crosswords and stuff like that for her to do.

It’s a bit of a worry though and people keep telling me I need to take it easy and relax. In fact if I hear that one more time I’m going to do somebody an injury!

Sometimes, duty calls. They need our help. It’s just a bit of a worry they need us now… especially as I’m sure it’s breech, I have a number of minor but significant if ignored complications and I’ve heard things about the Welsh NHS that would make your blood curdle…

On the unrelated up side. We got a major purchase out of the way yesterday. We had identified a pushchair/travel system we wanted but it was £500! I kid you not! However, I found a second hand one which had only been used for about 7 months on Ebay. Usually on Ebay the second hand ones go for about £450 - hardly worth it. However, if you can find a pick up only one, they usually go for less, in this case for £200.

It belonged to somebody just down the road from my parents - who turned out to know them. Ok so if I lived near the Wirrel I’d have got one for less BUT my Mum and Dad, who were intent on buying us a pushchair, took delivery and paid for it, bless em! I’m so pleased to have got it for £200 - it’s still too much but at least I’ve saved them a bit of cash as they were intent on buying it for us new!

The woman dropped it off last night - so although I have to go schlepping down there to collect it I’ve successfully given them scope to feel indulgent and generous without costing them too much (wish I could have got it for £150 though, I hate my parents spending that much money).

The £500 price for a new one covers a car seat as well but the girl told my Mum that I should forget that and buy the bog standard mothercare one which fits. Which car seat have I managed to blag, free?

Drum roll… wait for it…

Yes! The bog standard mothercare one. So potentially, they’ve scored us the whole £500 system for £200!

Result!

So things are ok, if a little more hectic than I need or want them to be - more hectic than they are when I’m not pregnant and going at life like a bull in a china shop, frankly. Never mind, when the baby comes. It will feel like fucking peace at last after all this!

Oh yes. Everything has an up side if you look for it.

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!

*on and on and on.

I’ve definitely been over guilding the lilly on the social front. I knew this was a bad time to get pregnant but hadn’t quite hoisted in just how bad… until now.

Put it like this, my best friends from school are all 40 this year, all before me. That’s good because I’ll get to their parties but bad in that… well… we have the last three weekends free before the baby is due. Guess how many weekends we have free before that?

Yep. That’s right. The number is round and o-shaped.

So… really taking it easy up to the birth (not) especially as we are talking parties with a capital P, the kind of parties I haven’t been to since my 20s, with costumes… and dancing… and a lot of booze. Yeh, I’m going to be doing a lot of driving - not that there’s a jot of difference between drunk and over excited BC!

So this was the first of the high stamina party weekends… how did it go?

Hmm…

We started with a straightforward dinner at some friends. Great but late. Stayed over. Very uncomfortable bed resulting in very uncomfortable SPD and very little sleep.

Arse.

The next night I drove from my parents, where we spent the weekend, to a friend’s house about an hour away from them for a pirate party complete with disco, picking up a gang of us on the way. Yes.

I writhed around like an epileptic plugged into a car battery danced and it was cool.

Wahoo.

It didn’t hurt!

Yippeeee!

Until the next morning…

Oh dear.

Lesson 1. If you are lugging a large baby around which, complete with gubbins, weighs an extra 2 stones, not to mention is consuming most of the oxygen, blood sugar etc, get yourself a painful medical condition and then go dance manically all night electing to avoid bed until about half past two in the morning, predictable results will occur, ergo; pain, seized up back and therefore, headache. Monster headache. Not for hours. For days.

Ouch.

The headache lasted all yesterday and most of today and although I am delighted, almost beyond words, to report it has now gone, I am so tired I can hardly keep my eyes open (despite an illicit 40 winks stolen earlier this afternoon).

It makes sense when I look at it rationally, there’s less of the stuff I need to leap about floating around in my body for me because some always goes to the Muffin. That means the stress on the system is greater and a couple of hour’s gentle bopping suddenly impacts on your body like a 45 mile fell run. Didn’t think it would. Not with the Tuesday night dance class and all the swimming.

Knobs.

On the up side, Mr BC is… well frankly he should be up for canonisation.

My normally very supportive parents were giving me a long lecture this morning about not eating too much as now’s the time I’m going to pile on more weight. Moral, if, during your pregnancy, you start eating biscuits for the first time in about 10 years, don’t mention it to anyone.

I’d thought, despite putting on all the weight recommended during a pregnancy already, that I was doing quite well. I’m 5ft, 7″ and when I weigh 9 stones I am a size 8-10 and have that supermodel/Belsen thing going on where your knees are bigger than your thighs.

What I’m saying here is that I’m quite heavy, even when I’m slim… 10 and a half stones at a size 12 or 14 with a flat - concave when I lie down - stomach (and these are British sizes so if you’re in the old US there, take one off).

So I guess I have rather thought that 1 and a half stones for a “normal” woman - ie one my height who would weigh 8 stones at a size 14 - would probably equate to two, or possibly a bit more for me.

I’ve been measuring my thighs, arms, ankles etc with a tape measure - this is what I do, rather than diet because I’m such a heavy bastard… The results aren’t bad, I am thicker round the legs but only half an inch or so and the definition on my arms is still good. The cellulite is worse but I guess, since cellulite is a circulation thing, that’s only to be expected.

I’ve therefore been a bit distressed to be told how much bigger I’m looking by pretty much everyone (well I am but it’s mostly tits and bump) and for the size of my legs to be regarded with what was clearly shock and horror by my parents. I’d assumed most people meant that I have got a big bump, which I have. However, now I’m beginning to wonder. A long lecture ensued from my Mum about being careful what I eat, not eating any biscuits or fattening things etc.

This may be partly because I copied out all my Mum’s biscuit recipes at the weekend, thinking that I would rather eat things I’ve made myself than bought stuff as I will have greater control of the GI/additive levels and also, I’ve noticed mums do coffee and tea rather than lunch so I thought I should get prepared.

Anyhow, I was a bit down and upstairs I said to my beloved that it was all a bit worrying when even my parents think I’m fat.

“I don’t think you look any fatter than you did before.” He said. “You just have a big bump on the front!” And then he kissed me.

He deserves a medal.