According to my dates I'm 11+2 today, according to the wheel of conformity I'm 11+6.  Either way I'm ever nearing the end of the first trimester.  Friday is my first scan.

I'm not a very good anything at the moment, I'm a piss poor wife, mother, person and an absolutely piss poor blogger.  There's not even a half decent singular excuse I can pinpoint.  It's more a general yet crippling malaise of existence.  There's the incredible exhaustion coupled with insomnia that isn't helping, there's the absolute and infinite retreat into self that comes with the removal of medication and the instability of hormonal disruption that comes with pregnancy.

I'm unaffected and ineffective.  I don't know where I've retreated to only that you can't find me and neither can I.  I'm unmotivated and stagnant.  The bubble is grey and impenetrable and admittedly lonely.

I have no words and my lips have stopped moving to find them.

I'm immersing myself obsessively into television series watching them back to back, for in them I don't exist.  I don't have to exist.  Reality dissipates and nothing else matters.  It's another world.

I'm angry and sad.  I'm nothing.

I want to be excited and in a small inaccessible corner of myself, I am excited.  Very much so.  The thought of one more final newborn is simply beyond words.  My heart spasms and swells when I let the thoughts out.  I'm having a baby! It's a gift I thought I'd been denied yet the first trimester is not one that I enjoy.  You have the first positive test and then after that you're winging it on a proverbial prayer until that first scan.  Waiting for everything to be okay.  Waiting for everything to all apart.  There is no proof that everything is okay or will be.  There's no reason for it not to be okay.  The first scan is the next piece of proof, of validity, of hope. After that the bump will grow, movements will eventually be felt, the heartbeat can be heard....all the little signs that prove your womb dweller is there.  Yet right now, right here....you're a castaway within the sea of hope and fear.

It's like you're holding a breath, yet in reverse.  To hold your breath there is a giddy sense of adrenalin. you feel alive.  In reverse, you're waiting to take a breath as opposed to letting one go.  You're deflated and empty.

I am excited.

& petrified.

BOGOF! Plan three get one free!

In case the previous post was a tad too cryptic for you (i.e you're far too young to possibly remember Ice Ice Baby....)

So, here's the deal  After begrudgingly coming to term with the fact that The Husband descreed we'd be having no more babies, ever........Just before Christmas, we had shall we say a very unexpected surprise.  I'm pregnant.  Together 13.5 years, married for 9.5yrs, both in our 30's with three planned spawn together and we get a surprise baby.  We weren't even drunk. Who knew The Toddler was part of a BOGOF offer?

Very early days.  Very.  After our early loss before The Toddler, we're all to aware that so much can go wrong yet right now, right here, I'm pregnant.  It deserves to be said, to be acknowledged because no matter what happens, at this moment there is a wee little womb dweller within me.  I'm terrified yet hopeful.  Among the fear, I have a good feeling about this wee one.  The force is strong in this one.

We were going to keep quiet until 12 weeks yet people deserve to know why we're nervous.  I'm terrifically shit at keeping things like this quiet anyway. I first started drafting this post around three weeks ago.   I fully understand and indeed respect those that do keep shtum for 12 weeks but ... I want to celebrate.  Whether you tell or not, shit happens.  It just means that should the worse happen your grief becomes alien and none tangible to others because to them, what you lost never existed. Thus your grief spirals to yet another level of pain, that is a lonely pain.

The terrible anxious first trimester is a roller-coaster, it's never fun to white-knuckle life alone.  It has it's highs and lows and as we all know, it's good to talk.  It's an intense period or time in life that should be documented.

I want this little uteruswomble to know that from the moment we knew they were there, we celebrated.  This is our way of acknowledging them, their existence, right from the start. I will not let fear of past events deny them of this or indeed deny me of this frightfully exciting (yet nail-biting) time.

So, going by the wheel of 'you will conform' doom, I'm 9+6 today (my calculations however, have me closer to 9+2)

Scared? Try terrified.  Excited? Beyond belief!  How absolutely delightful, I get one last baby!

So, baby number four!

The Party of Five is to become The Party of Six!  Oh shit.

But shhhh, we haven't told the spawn yet.