I joined Emma’s Diary when my wife was 15 weeks pregnant, and we’ve had a few milestones since then, I thought I’d go back to the beginning to give you all a bit of background..
I remember the exact moment I found out I was going to be a Daddy again. It was 5.30am on 26th August 2011. I recall having a real feeling of being watched invading my sleep. I opened my eyes slowly to see a very awake wife looking at me. I patted her as a sort of ‘Alright? ‘. She was holding something very tightly, and she pushed it into my hands. I woke up pretty damned quickly when I realised I was holding a pregnancy test, I held it up to my eyes, it was a big fat positive! Loz had woken up feeling very queasy and as this was a bit unusual taken a pregnancy test. Safe to say, neither of us went back to sleep!
We decided we wanted to let very close family and friends share in our good news, obviously if the worst were to happen it would be good to have their support. Loz did another handful of tests just to confirm, and they were all positive, with the Clearblue Digital saying that we were “3+ Weeks” through. A week or so later we had to register with our local GP to get those wheels in motion, the GP wanted to do another pregnancy test (apparently they test EVERYONE).
It was a very weird time, it’s tricky not to be excited and thinking about how different life could be in 8 short months, but you also have to keep a level head and remember that it might not ‘stick’ (I hate that phrase, but Loz used it a lot!). Symptoms wise Loz was suffering with all the standard ones. As I’ve said before she wasn’t actually sick very much at all, but the nausea just hit at very random times. My usually chatty wife would fall silent and go very white, usually followed by a quick sprint to the nearest toilet until it passed.
The symptom that hit her the hardest was the tiredness, it really was peculiar, usually after we’d eaten, around 7pm, she just wanted to sleep. So for the first 3 months from about 7.30pm onwards I’d be on my own pottering around while Mrs H was spark out upstairs. Whilst I mostly appreciated the extra time to prestige several times on Black Ops, it was a very lonely period. I did occasionally have a ping on Google Talk from Loz at around 9pm when she asked if I could fetch her a hot water bottle, but more often than not she’d be back to sleep again after the kettle had boiled!
The frustrating thing I found was I could really do much to help, you can’t ease the need to sleep, or take the pain and sickness away, you just have to stand by and watch, hoping that it will all come together and it will ‘stick’ *shudder*. The only comfort was that each passing week meant we were slowly creeping out of the crucial first trimester.
Around 8 weeks we went to our local hospital to meet our midwife for our ‘booking in’ appointment with her. She asked us both a tonne of questions about our medical history and had a few pokes and prods of Lorraine and deemed the pregnancy to be ‘low risk’ (Hooray!) We left the hospital with the cursory bag filled with free samples and load of leaflets to peruse, it was starting to feel very, very real now.
The letter arrived with the date of the scan soon after, just 3 weeks till we’d finally get to see our ‘Baby Mosster’, and hopefully find out all was well. The symptoms slowly started to ease up at this point, they were all still there, but levelling out slightly, it meant we could start doing some walking or even go out in the evening. Us both working from home was helpful too as Loz could have a power nap in her lunch hour which would give her a little ‘top up’ to at least see the evening.
The day of the scan arrived, I was very nervous, I wanted to see a healthy ‘mosster’ on the screen, with a nice strong heartbeat, and thankfully, that’s what we saw, a beautiful fidgeting baby with everything as it should be and a very visable heartbeat. It was so clear, I remember being amazed seeing G for the first time nearly 9 years ago, but obviously that’s a very long time in technology! The movement was so apparent and vivid it was such a relief to see!
After 9 weeks of uncertainty it was excellent to know that the first trimester was over and we could start letting everyone know our good news!
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