Julie's Boggle

In between all the building work, we are occasionally reminded of other large events coming up this year. Julie is now at 16 weeks and beginning to show. As promised, here is the first picture of the bump, for comparison with the lithe figure pictured in an earlier post.

We’re not yet into maternity clothes, but Julie is reluctantly beginning to set aside some pairs of trousers which won’t fit her again until after the baby is born.

According to our pregnancy book, the baby will now be about 11cm from crown to rump. It has tiny fingernails and toenails and is growing hair. At this stage it will be practising breathing (inhaling and exhaling amniotic fluid). Assuming Dad’s genes haven’t been too detrimental, it can hear sounds and react to them!

It will also be moving around quite a lot and from now onwards Julie might begin to be able to feel this movement. Highlander fans will be delighted to know that this is known as “quickening”. We know from the ultrasound that it isn’t twins, so all I’ll say to that is, “There can be only one!”

After a chilly night where it was measuring -2°C out the back before bedtime, we woke to find the outdoors transformed into a wonderland of winter whiteness and delicacy!

Only an inch fell apparently (more coming tonight), but enough to make everything look pretty for a while, and disrupt all the trains…

We had our builders round yesterday to make some final notes on the plans we’d given them for our new kitchen. It had been so long since we set the starting date that we’d forgotten that today (Monday) was the day it was all due to kick off!

So the rest of Sunday afternoon was spent packing away everything from the kitchen and preparing to camp in the remaining rooms. Anything not essential for sustaining life (even, yes, the cappuccino machine) was packed behind plastic sheeting on shelves or in the passage.

Then the TV had to move into our room, the fridge(s) into the lounge (we actually let the builders move the big new one), microwave, kettle and toaster onto the dining room table, and all the food, cutlery and crockery we planned to use for the next several weeks into some large plastic boxes which could be sealed off from building dust.

And here’s the results at the end of the first day…

To be fair, I think I got off pretty lightly on the whole morning pregnancy sickness front. It’s definitely been on the way out for the last two weeks, but while I did have it, I found that the only real “rule” I had to follow, was “Keep Eating”.

I hated the grotty nausea feeling, so followed the rule diligently. This had me feeling a bit like an addict going after my next fix at times. Not all foods worked either, but a typical day’s eating / meal-planning regime went a bit like this:

07h00: Alarm goes off. Sit up in bed and eat a Jacobs Hi-Fibre cream cracker trying to keep all the crumbs in the bag. A bit of a chore but very necessary.

07h50: Thanks to the cracker, I’m feeling well up for my big bowl of breakfast cereal and a cup of coffee. (Although I have to confess my coffee ardour, even now, has been somewhat affected by this whole pregnancy thing. Not enough to stop drinking it altogether – but I do prefer it on a full stomach.)

08h45: Wander around the Tesco near work buying the makings of mid-morning tea and lunch, and perhaps ingredients for supper.

10h45: Snack-time. Lashings of peanut butter on a crusty white continental roll. Mm-hmm. I guess you could count this as a ‘craving’ because, usually, just contemplating the fat content of peanut butter sends me haring off in search of something else. But for those weeks, it was the one thing that worked when fruit, yoghurt and cereal bars just didn’t cut it.

13h00: Definitely need lunch now. We didn’t get back our canteen at work until I was almost at the 12-week recovery period, so this tended to be the half-carton of fresh soup with a bagel or roll bought earlier.

16h00-ish: Bit of a struggle in finding something that will work at this point. I can usually squeak by till I get home with a couple of clementines and a cup of rooibos. Those little Babybel cheeses also tend to hit the spot but I need to remember to stock up the fridge at work.

18h30: Back at home. Tom won’t be in for another half-hour and supper will be another 30 minutes after that, so it’s time for a small portion (just 10 — 15g + milk) of microwaved Ready-Brek (instant porridge) to stave off any pre-supper sickness. Like the peanut-butter breadroll, a nice hot serving of thick, milky porridge works pretty well.

19h30: Supper at last. I’m not that hungry (real hunger doesn’t work for me any more because if it gets that bad, I’ve usually lost my appetite in the nausea) but this is definitely a case of eat or else. And as long as I have a good enough meal, that’s me all the way through to bed-time.

23h15: Lying awake thinking about food. All those meals that will send the grotty feelings completely away. Planning my grocery buying for tomorrow’s shopping trip and forcing myself to leave it alone and drift off just as the discomfort starts to come knocking again.

Fortunately, the end of week 12 heralded the return to some form of normality. I still tend to feel a bit off rather than starving, but it’s no real stretch to push past that. Now it’s just the adjusting back to more normal mealtimes and the ongoing debate with Tom as to whether the “bump” he’s seeing is the result of all that peanut butter, or the (still very small) body growing inside!

We’ve had an amazing number of responses to the group mail and blog article with our exciting news. It’s been great to have all your notes of congratulations and good wishes — thanks for all the support, it really means a lot to us.

Yesterday, we finally got around to going to the IMAX film, released last year, of Deep Sea 3D. (I’d been keen to see it ever since I read a fascinating DIVE magazine article about the filming of one of the sequences and how they’d almost had a fatality when a diver’s specialised scuba equipment malfunctioned.)

We chose the Science Museum IMAX, because it’s an easy bus ride from home, and met up with our friend Dale, always a willing co-conspirator in these sorts of ventures.

Verdict: A definite thumbs-up!

Literally the next best thing to actually being there as a diver, and sometimes even better than that, because it takes you up close to so many rare and exotic creatures (and sharks!) that would otherwise take a lifetime of diving to track down. (And even then you would also have to be extremely lucky to see doing them all the antics the film-makers managed to capture.)

The 3D-glasses, as we’d experienced on previous 3D IMAX movies, really do their job. In this case bringing clouds of jellyfish, tiny mantis shrimps and coral reefs, among other things, to almost within arm’s reach. Utterly amazing.

[Aside: After a quick check, I see that South African IMAX theatre's are showing a movie with an identical trailer titled just "Deep Sea"... Probably still worth seeing for the great footage.]

When we wandered out of the museum, lunch was calling loudly, and Tom had the brainwave to take us to a great Chinese restaurant he’d visited on a work outing – The Good Earth. Handily, just a short walk away up Brompton Road.

I did have recollections of Tom raving about the “Crispy duck pancakes” he’d had when he’d been here, and that was clearly going to be our dish of choice for today as well.

We shied away from the “full duck” option, which seemed enough to feed a large family, and went for the “half duck” shared between the 3 of us, with rice, mixed veg and some spring rolls to fill in any gaps.

Fortunately Tom had been around before and could explain what was going on when a chef came over to us with a plate bearing what appeared to be a flattened half duck, waved it before us, and then disappeared with it again in the direction of the kitchen. Apparently, that’s the part where they prove to you that there was actually a fully assembled duck involved in your meal — at least to start with.

And sure enough, when he reappeared several minutes later, the same plate was completely covered with shredded duck meat, along with very tasty bits of shredded crispy skin.

Tom then demonstrated the making of a perfect crispy duck pancake: Open the woven basket containing the perfectly-formed layers of steamed Chinese pancakes (think half-size crepes only with a more delicate appearance), lift one onto your plate and arrange some of the duck on top of that. Spoon on some of the delicious hoisin sauce, add some of the crunchy green bits provided, and wrap up. Eat with fingers as chop sticks are way too fiddly. Wow. A definite Yum!

By the time we were finished the duck, we’d gone through two of the pancake baskets and were onto our second dish of hoisin sauce. And perfectly replete after an exceedingly good meal.

Now the news is out, I can mention one of my Christmas presents from Julie. It was a “Nerdy Baby ABC” set of alphabet flashcards, the brainchild of Tiffany Ard.

Head on over here to take a look at the full set. This child doesn’t know what it’s getting into.

Allow me to take you back to Wednesday 15 November, when the white plastic gadget showed a little blue cross instead of a little blue line.

Well of course we immediately grabbed the camera to record the momentous occasion.

And got a shot of Julie’s waist for later comparison.

Yes, finally, years after you all stopped asking, Julie is in the family way. And after taking all this time to make up our minds – we’re excited. In fact I’m so moved, I’ve taken to writing fridge poetry:

We had our first scan today, which was a slightly weepy moment (not that we let the hospital staff see the watery look in our eyes). And so here it is, our first baby photo (click for a bigger version):

The due date is 15 July 2007. Further profile pictures of Julie to follow if I can get her to play ball .