Julie's Boggle

The next 4 weeks coming up are certainly seeing the bump and me getting around quite a bit. Two international trips in a month — all very exciting!

The first trip coming up is to New York, and I’m leaving tomorrow night!

This one came about because Tom’s calendar is just manic for March and April and he couldn’t find any decent stretch of days between the Alpha course (he’s been helping out with that recently), Easter, and ante-natal classes. So he ended up needing to go over my birthday, and, well… You can see where that one would lead can’t you?

We came out fairly well with my ticket too.

We didn’t have enough advance warning to cash in Tom’s AA miles, but we did manage to find a cheap-ish ticket for me (a lot cheaper than the alternatives at any rate) by having me leave on Thursday instead of Friday evening. A whole extra day in New York, what’s a girl to do…?

(It doesn’t make any difference to the company’s hotel bill because in New York they charge the same for single and double-occupancy.)

So that takes care of Friday, all the way through to Tuesday night when I fly back. And I’m looking forward to a slap-up birthday meal on Monday night :party: — especially since Tom’s half of the bill gets charged back.

Then just over two weeks later, we’re going to Prague for a 10th anniversary holiday. (Gosh a whole decade! And it just keeps getting better. )

The organisation of this trip took a lot of heavy Expedia-surfing on my part. All with the aim of squeezing the most value, hotel-wise and flight-wise, for the amount of money that Tom was prepared for us to spend.

It took some time but eventually I pinned us down a package of flights from Heathrow (the value here is in the convenience), and a decent hotel about 10 minutes walk from the “Old Town” centre. (Read “tourist central”.)

It looks like a really interesting city, steeped in history, so hold thumbs for good weather and no pregnancy inconveniences to slow us down overly much. More details will follow!

Once you actually live in a place, it’s not that often that you get a chance to see it through tourist eyes again. But for 3 days last week, I got to join my sister and her fiancé (Coffee and Bob as their internet buddies know them), in seeing the sights of London…

They were really lucky in having some fantastic weather. Although you’ll see from the beanies that they were finding it cold, we didn’t have any rain all week, and lots of blue skies.

We got through quite a lot I thought. Certainly enough to wear out my feet several days in a row! I dragged them through most of the western parks (great swan-sightings in Kensington Palace Gardens), and down to Buckingham Palace and the Mall, and in turn got taken through lots of toy stores in search of novelty games.

Tom joined us on Thursday for a true tourist day-out to the Tower of London. We’d never been before either – mostly because our visitors tend to feel a little faint when they do the maths to convert the £16 adult entrance fee into South African Rands (R15:£1 last week). But Kris and Wayne were keen, so we finally got to see it.

It was quite interesting, and the entrance fee did include a guided tour from one of the yeomen warders and a look at the Crown Jewels. I hadn’t counted on seeing anything interesting in there, but I’d forgotten that they have one of South Africa’s greatest mineral treasures on display: Cullinan I. Also known as the Great Star of Africa. A seriously impressive chunk of carbon, now part of the Royal Sceptre. (One can only think that the Transvaal government was trying to curry some serious favours with the UK monarchy when they gave that one away!)

I don’t think our guests truly felt that they’d seen as much value out of their hard-earned £32 entrance fee as they would have liked, but we made up for it by eating in that night, followed by a rousing round of a great new game, Killer Bunnies, that Kristy had picked up at our favourite west-end store, “Playin’ Games”.

Friday we took in the 3-D IMAX, and an intense tour of all the interesting bits of Harrods.

Then Saturday came, and we sent them on their merry way back to SA.  Safe in the knowledge that we had done our duty by them, in introducing them to some of the best chains London has to offer: Starbucks, Pizza Express and the Fine Burger Co.

As you’ll know, if you’ve been following this blog, the kitchen was completed several weeks ago. Way back when it started, I posted some pictures of the old kitchen and an “artistic impression” of the new kitchen. Now we can finally compare old, artistic impression and final result:

Old:

Artistic impression:

Final result:

I think you’ll agree it was worth the long weeks of living in a building site.

You can see the entire progress from start to finish in Julie’s kitchen album.

We passed the 5 month mark last week… Just another four to go till our little guy is officially due. Wow.

5 months sounds like a long time, but it seems like it’s gone quite quickly. I suppose because all the real progress has probably been in the last 4 weeks or so.

I feel like I’ve got off relatively lightly so far. Out of the long list of common complaints that most pregnant women have at this stage, I have only got a few check-marks, and they’re all pretty minor.

The bump is definitely progressing. It’s not much bigger girth-wise than the last picture Tom put up, but there just seems to be more of it in a way. Like the widest area is spreading vertically. I’m not going to be able to hold off on the maternity clothes shopping trip for much longer — as well as running out of trousers, I’m now running out of tops that discretely cover the stretching waistband!

I’m also discovering a new set of things that don’t quite work the way they used to.

One of these is the muscles. I made a semi-sprint of, maybe, 150m the other day to catch a bus. And the next day, I was *sore*. So no exercising without warming up properly.

The next is the bending over. It’s not muscle strain that stops me here, but either heartburn (if I keep it up for too long) or just a dull pain in the abdomen if I bend too far. More to squash I suppose. Losing this flexibility has been harder to adjust to.

But aside from that, it’s all pretty good. I’m enjoying feeling the little prods and jiggles from inside (and Tom has been quite lucky and managed to have his hand in position at the right time to feel some himself as well) and everything seems to be ticking along fairly smoothly. So let’s just hope it stays this good for another couple of months!

All the free time of the last two weekends has been pretty much fully consumed with moving into our new kitchen. [Final handover was Monday after they got through the last items on the snag-list.]

It’s been a multi-faceted operation, firstly cleaning every nook and cranny to get rid of the builders’ dust, then transferring all the previous kitchen cupboard contents into their new homes, and lastly, going through the remaining “kitchen” boxes that had come from South Africa. Hoorah! Out came our wedding crockery and the Kenwood mixers.

This is just the sort of undertaking which could very well have taken Tom and me the better part of two months to work through, except that we had a deadline: my sister and her fiancé are coming to stay this week — from Tuesday to Saturday to be precise, so we couldn’t procrastinate anywhere near as much as we wanted to.

As a result, this weekend in particular has been extremely hectic. (This is the first time I’ve sat down at my PC since Thursday.) Hard to say if it’s the pregnancy that’s making it worse, but I’m definitely feeling rather footsore and weary now, for the second day in a row. Ready for a nice hot bath.

But on the plus side, we’ve once again got a functioning guest room, currently about 95% ready, tomorrow night will see the finishing touches  and I’ve got 4 days off this week to spend with Kristy and Wayne before they fly home to SA on Saturday.

09:54 this morning saw us bright-faced and cheery in the queue at the reception of the ultrasound department at Queen Charlotte’s Hospital. 09:55 saw us being cross with ourselves for confusing appointments and subsequently being 15 minutes late for our 09:40 scan.

Fortunately the mix-up didn’t cost significantly and we were soon seen by a friendly sonographer who introduced herself as Sarah. This time, the ultra-sound department were not short-staffed and we had a lovely long scan. The sonographer talked us through the whole thing and we saw lots of our little lad. And indeed that is what he appears to be, we saw the evidence from quite a few angles so it’s fairly certain that it’s a boy.

One thing that became obvious was that the sonographer was very interested in his upper lip. He kept covering his mouth with his hands, but she kept returning to it. So it wasn’t a great surprise when she told us that he has a cleft lip. Poor woman, having to break such news and not knowing what kind of reaction to expect. Little did she know that we were already prepared for the news because cleft lips can be associated with Waardenburg Syndrome which runs in the Brazier family. And of course my mum herself has a cleft lip.

The most immediate consequence of this is that we’ve been elevated to a high risk level and so suddenly all sorts of people are interested in us. And in medical circles this, of course, means a lot of waiting around. We were sent upstairs to the Centre for Foetal Care where, presently, we saw the doctor. She confirmed the diagnosis and wanted us to see the consultant. He eventually arrived and also confirmed the diagnosis.

So the poor tyke will be having surgery somewhere around the 3-6 month mark and possibly another round or two as he grows older. Other than that, everything looks just fine. The medical professionals are slightly worried that the cleft lip may be symptomatic of some chromosomal abnormality. They’ve pretty much discounted Waardenburg because they don’t think it’s associated with cleft lips, but that doesn’t say much as none of them had heard of Waardenburg until this morning. We’re not overly concerned because even a casual Google search turns up plenty of articles which confirm the link to Waardenburg.

But enough about all that, isn’t he cute: