NOJOMO 11 – Going into Labour

In the early hours of the 11th November, at about 4am, I woke up screaming in pain. 

It was one of the most painful feelings I’d ever felt. I literally thought I was giving birth. It felt exactly like the middle stages of labour, I could even feel myself "bearing down" and "pushing". I’ve only touched on it briefly in here, but I’ve been having issues with my lady-parts recently, since I came off the implant I’ve had very irregular periods, cramps that feel a lot like Braxton Hicks and had mysterious pains at times. I was having the Braxton Hicks and the mysterious pains before the implant was out, but they’ve got worse. But nothing like this pain that woke me up from my sleep. In my half asleep state I panicked and thought "I’m actually having a baby" – even though I’ve taken a pregnancy test pretty much every month. The pain was excruciating – looking back, I’m actually not sure if it was more similar to labour or my mysterious arm pain I had for 10 days last year where I had to be admitted to hospital. I was moaning in pain so hard I woke Dan up and he was so worried he said he thought maybe we should take me into A & E, something was clearly wrong. I said between clenched teeth no, that it might be a momentary spasm and it was too sore to move right now. I held his hand and squeezed it whenever another wave of pain came over me, that seriously felt like a contraction. 

After 45 minutes, it started to get better and ebb away. We fell asleep. When I woke up in the morning, I wasn’t having mystery contractions anymore but it felt like somebody had punched me very hard in the womb. It was throbbing with a dull kind of pain like it was bruised on the inside. All day I was wincing when I moved up and down or needed to go to the toilet. 

I honestly don’t know what it was. I’d told my doctor about the pains and the irregular periods and I’m already going for tests, but nothing like this has happened before. I’m worried about putting this out here because I’m going to sound like an absolute drama queen if it turns out that it was the worlds worst bout of trapped wind or something, but it honestly felt like I was going into labour! 

In other news, I told Dan about my inappropriate crush and my guilt and he laughed at me! Great big belly laughs! He then said pretty much word for word what some of you said about the human race not being designed to be monogamous and that my body obviously recognised him as a "mate" and not to beat myself up about it. I asked him if he wasn’t worried that I was getting attracted to other people and he said no, that the fact that I fretted so much about the state of my soul meant that I was actually more trustworthy than I give myself credit for. And then he patronisingly/affectionately kissed me on my head and told me he loved that I was so niave at times! 

Of course he’s teased me ever since. I kissed his neck earlier and he smelled yummy, like soap and aftershave and clean skin so I told him he smelled nice. He’d just eaten a bag of Irish crisps that I brought back from Ireland so he said "it’s the crisps. It’s Irishness reminds you of your hunky genealogist" and I slapped him. 

He also told me that he’d had a similar attraction to a girl on his Princes Trust business course last year. She was setting up a business selling cupcakes and she was slight and blonde, not his type at all and he didn’t think about sexual stuff, just found himself wondering what she’d say next etc. "But then again, all my daydreams were fully clothed and involved her feeding me all her cup-cakes so maybe I was just hungry!" he said. 

All day we just stayed in. We had a cooked breakfast in the morning, ate it all together at the table which was really nice. I had a shower and then sat and did drawings with Cassie. 

Drawing with Cassie was ermm, interesting. I hope you guys don’t mind me sharing her artwork for once. 

First she drew a Crocodile. The pictures on it’s side and I can’t work out how to rotate it, but I think it actually kind of looks like a crocodile shape if you turn your head. 

Cassie then started drawing circles on the page and I asked her what she was drawing and she said "a circle mummy" so I drew a triangle and asked her if she could draw a triangle and she did quite well, then she drew a circle that was slightly rectangular and told me it was a square. 

I then drew a C shape and told her it was a "CA" for "Cassie". Cassie took the crayon from me and drew her own "CA for Cassie". She then said "CA for Cassie and CA for cat!" 

Her "Ca" is that slightly hooked shape in the middle of the page. 

She then said "I draw more alphabets" and this is what we got: 

She drew the top scribble in bold and said "I draw two triangles". I said "Can you draw another Ca for Cassie?" and she drew that C on the right. She then said "I draw a A" and drew that very clear looking a on the left and then she drew the letter underneath and said "That a Duh for daddy!" 

I was so proud of her and a little taken aback because maybe I am just a proud parent and over-reacting but they do clearly look like a’s, c’s and D’s to me or a very good approximation of them. Bearing in mind she’s 27 months old (2 years 3 months), I think that’s a pretty good effort. 

She also picked up her Peppa Pig slippers and pointed out the E in them and said "Eh for Elephant". 

The rate we are going, my child’s going to be reading before she masters potty training. Yeah, that’s still not going well. I’m taking a few weeks off at Christmas and so is Dan and we are tackling it together. 

When Cassie went down for her nap, Dan and I went back to bed too and had some lovely lazy, sleepy Sunday afternoon sex. It was really nice and it was nice to have a twenty minute nap in Dan’s arms afterwards. There’s a lot to be said for only having one child, it means you do occasionally still get time to yourselves, though I know we do prioritise our rel

ationship above other things, like tidying our house. 

When Cassie woke up, we had some quiet time in our bedroom – me on the laptop, Dan on his phone and Cassie on his I-Pad, very technological family we are! 

Not much later on, just playing with the bubble blower outside Dan’s mum’s house, ordering Christmas presents on the internet, tidying the house and doing laundry and then when Cassie went to bed cuddling up in front of the television. We watched Eclipse, we are rewatching all the Twilight films so far in preparation of the last film. We will be going to the cinema to see it, but after that we are going to stay in and be sensible with our money for a while.