12 Weeks

For 10 weeks I have been pregnant plus I get bonus recognition for 2 extra weeks. Most people don't know that when discussing the number of weeks pregnant you are includes the 2 weeks that your body prepared to release it's egg. That means that I'm now 12 weeks pregnant. Three whole months! At this point we should be celebrating the excitement of passing into the 2nd trimester however, the book (http://www.having-a-baby.com/mopb_us.htm) I bought to guide me through this journey says the first trimester is over at 14 weeks when you have actually been pregnant for 3 months. Picky picky... well, no matter, I'm still going to have a mini celebration tonight as the "11th" week comes to an end. Fetushead is roughly the size of a lime, the uterus is roughly the size of a softball and the morning sickness, if I had it, would be waning. Fetushead may be called Yoda from now on since it knows the way of the force in coercing my body to unwillingly travel to Tim Horton's and purchase a breakfast sandwich. All I can hear in my head is "A breakfast sandwich you want, tasty it will be...Herh herh herh". Seriously, before pregnancy I have had 2 bites of a breakfast sandwich and about 2 weeks ago I suddenly had to have a breakfast sandwich. At first I resisted and had none but in the last week I've had 2 plus the egg and cheese on a tea biscuit I made on New Years morning. Yum.

Current symptoms: still exhausted, a little emotional (please don't guess the baby's sex or I might cry), disrupted sleep and 1 or 2 trips to the bathroom in the night which isn't helping the sleep issue.

Grandma Story

Grandma has told me several times about giving birth to my Mom at home. Not her own home but her in-laws home. She said that home births were a choice in 1950 because hospital births were common. If families chose a home birth they were given instructions to prepare the house in advance and nurses would inspect it prior to the estimated due date. To prepare they needed to empty the birthing room of everything except for the bed and a wooden table that could be scrubbed. I asked Grandma if labouring women were given any pain medication back then and she said that she was given something and it made her feel drunk, except she had never drank before. She pictured the feeling as the same feeling that he father-in-law must have been feeling when he drank, and "she'd seen him drunk a couple of times". In fact, she told him she was drunk like he is sometimes. Funny.

Grandma tells the story of Mom's birth with much fondness, she says it was the best birth experience of the 4 times she went through it. She really loved being at home and having family nearby immediately after her daughter arrived. I have a hard time imagining the time, what was it like? What was medicine like? What was Grandma like at that age? All I know is that she was a brave one and a tough cookie.