I have been window shopping for an overlocker and I quickly found a Janome machine that met the selection criteria except it was $799. Ouch. I had a budget of $400. Fortunately my desire for an overlocker conveniently coincided with a 20% off sale at one of the large chain stores. They had the model I wanted but 20% wasn’t going to make it mine. Then I noticed a discreet sign that said something like “ask about our trade in discount”. Thinking I might get $50 for my old machine, I asked the sales girl. She basically said that they have enough junked machines already, thank you very much, and I’d be doing her a huge favour by not adding another one to the pile but that I could still have the trade in credit. The trade in credit was $300!!!!!! Then she said I could have the 20% discount as well. So the much coveted $799 machine was mine for $399.20

The universe clearly wanted me to have a new overlocker :)

I set it up tonight and everything was going swimmingly until I broke a thread. We’ve watched the instructional DVD a bunch of times (the acting is wooden, there’s no character development and the plot is very thin, ha!) And as I write this, my husband is attempting to rethread it for me.

Ah, he’s done it. Mr Fixit strikes again ;)

Edited to add: I forgot to mention that the sales girl also through in a neat pair of fabric scissors.

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I started my maternity leave on Monday — it’s weird being home during the day. Yesterday I put a massive effort into a client’s website redesign and only stopped because my feet and legs became so swollen. It’s hard to make fluid retention look sexy. I did try to rest and put my feet up but that’s a whole lot easier said then done. By the time my husband arrived home from work, I’d done some laundry, polished all the timber furniture, cleaned the kitchen cupboards and the fridge, made a pavlova and had dinner in the oven. No wonder my feet were so swollen.

My husband made me promise that I would try to relax today so I scheduled a mani/pedi for 9am then met with a friend for coffee (tea for me) at 11am. While waiting for the salon to open, I stopped in at Big W and found the most adorable baby mobile to hang over the cot. It has safari animals on it and plays “It’s a small world”. Of course I bought it, because it’s a perfect match for the nursery and because I am obviously mental. Why did I buy a mobile for a baby that won’t be coming home from the hospital???

Anyway, my toenails are now the most shocking shade of candy floss pink and I am full of tea and hot chocolate. Gillian and I started our catch up with a quick stop at Lindcraft. I bought two knitting pattern books (both baby clothes because, as already mentioned, I am frigging mental) and the press-studs I need for Nicholas’ burial gown. Meeting with Gillian was good but I was a bit miffed that she didn’t ask at all how I am, or about the baby. We’re both in pretty shitty places right now — a month ago she was diagnosed with a brain tumour and underwent surgery to remove it. She’s now having radiotherapy and chemotherapy but ultimately has a 25% chance of being alive in 18 months and 10% in 24 months. I understand that what she is going through is horrible and harsh and completely unfair; it just would’ve been nice if she could’ve asked me how I am, you know?

I have a hospital appointment this afternoon and came home to have a quick lunch and write this update. And now I have something else to mention. I’ve just started spotting. It’s super super light (two tiny bright pink spots on a liner, but nothing on the toilet paper) and I have absolutely no pain or cramping and I can feel some light movements from the baby. Egads. I am really not ready for this to be over. I phoned my husband at work earlier and he was telling me that it’s horrendously busy there so I won’t bug him with this new development. I’ll just go to my appointment and see what the midwife makes of it all.

Wish me luck.

__________

Edited to add:

I’m home from the hospital.  I saw both the midwife and the obstetrician; neither were impressed by my tiny two blood spots and neither think I’ll be going into labour before my due date.  This week the baby is measuring a perfect 37 weeks so the chunky monkey has bulked up a little since last his last measure.  He hasn’t dropped at all which explains the dreadful reflux I’ve been having – my stomach is basically somewhere over my left shoulder!

I’m just on 9wks now and am guilty of peeing on a stick about twice per week. I bought a pack of 50 cheapo tests on ebay for $20 a while back so the expense of testing thankfully isn’t an issue. The stupid thing is that as the positive line comes up, my inner commentary gloomily reports to me that it would be positive for a while yet, even if the baby had died. I am truly my own worst enemy; why do I keep doing this to myself? I haven’t knitted a stitch since my BFP mostly due to not wanting to knit for a baby that possibly won’t make it, as well as some nausea and tiredness. It’s taking everything I have to rise above the doubt and force myself to be positive about this pregnancy.

Being positive now: This week saw a big milestone; I am past the point of my first miscarriage. I’m booked in to see the professor again on Monday and he said he will do an u/s to check on things (it’s really just to confirm the pregnancy and to do a head count). His u/s machine looks pretty compact and I don’t think it prints images (somehow having an image of the baby will make it more tangible to me) so I have sneakily booked myself in for a proper diagnostic dating scan in the afternoon. I butted heads with my GP this week; she refused to write a referral to my first choice hospital (where I lost my son) on the basis that it’s not a major teaching hospital. I tried to explain to her that based on my history, the ob there said I should be high surveillance this time and she kept talking over me by saying “No, this is a perfectly normal STANDARD pregnancy”. She also didn’t want to do any blood work (the results are required by the hospital when booking in) and furthermore, she told me to STOP TAKING MY PREGGO SUPPLEMENTS! I came home, argued with the husband, had a big cry and a bad night’s sleep. At least I got the u/s referral. In short, I won’t be going back to see her. My SIL keeps recommending her doctor to me so I’m going to book in to see him next time.

I mentioned tiredness and nausea. I’ve been consistently tired since about the fifth week. I wake up around 5.30am, go to work, get home around 6pm, flop on the couch while the husband makes dinner, eat, nod off until around 8 or 9pm, then the husband gets me up and off to bed. Rinse and repeat. At the weekend, I’m generally just too tired to do anything except lay on the couch and watch telly or nap. Remember that quilt I was sewing? It’s still on the dining table, waiting for me to sew on the backing and the binding. Hopeless. I’ve also had a lot of nausea which is a shock since I had no morning sickness at all with Max. Occasionally I’d get waves of ick but that was always associated with odd smells like coffee and cold fridge air. This time I’m feeling sick about an hour after waking or when I move around too much. Normally I like to tackle all of the filing at work in one hit so that everything is up-to-date, neat and tidy. I get a lot of satisfaction in that, rather than just doing a bit here and there which is what the others seem to prefer. Anyway, in recent weeks if I tackle all of the filing in one hit, it means three hours of moving briskly back and forth between the A-Z file sorter on the bench to the various shelves in each of the sections within the compactus. All of that up and down, left and right, back and forth motion makes me so ill that I can barely manage a sip of water without wanting to hurl everywhere.

The FIL asked me a completely random question last week: do I get cravings for strawberries? HUH? I don’t really have any cravings although I’ve been thinking about a big bowl of vanilla icecream for the last few days. And my favourite lunch at the moment is cheese, lettuce, tomato, avocado on multigrain bread. There are plenty of foods that I really don’t want: one is my normally favourite salmon pasta dinner. I love that stuff but at the moment I really really don’t want it. And buttery toast. Blergh. And I’ve really not wanted our favourite dessert treat: icecream sandwiches. It’s not the icecream, but the chocolate biscuit part that I don’t want. The husband is using all these differences in my pregnancies to back up his hypothesis that we’re having a girl this time. My money is still on a boy, because there ain’t nuttin’ but boys in his family. And that’s not a bad thing; I really would love to have another little boy :)

One more thing: depending on how well the next few weeks go, we’re thinking about booking a short holiday somewhere. The husband and I have been stockpiling our ADOs; he’s got about 12 and I have 8 owing. We’re intending to take a week off in September and are trying to decide where to go. Maybe Broome? We’ve even talked about Hawaii and New Zealand since those options are going to cost the same. I think we’ll wait and see if the next few weeks go ok with the pregnancy.

* ADOs = Accrued days off: essentially we work 40hr weeks but are paid for 38; the extra hours accrue to a day off/month.

I did a quick pregnancy test on Friday morning and got a big fat positive almost immediately. The line was very dark, even for a cheap ebay pregnancy test. The husband has been sick so he wasn’t getting up to go to work but that didn’t stop me from barging in, flicking on the light and showing him the test strip. Needless to say, he is very very happy.

I was very reserved with my last pregnancy and although it didn’t end the way we’d hoped, I’ve decided to really enjoy every day of this pregnancy. On Saturday morning we drove out of the city to Cobbity which is a little town south-west of Sydney and walked around their markets in the early winter morning chill. It was very country; there was a lot of fresh produce (carts full of pumpkins, cauliflowers, spinach, etc) and lots of knitting, crochet, quilting, paintings, etc. I bought a circular quilted play mat that has a hidden drawstring around the outer edge so it pulls up into a storage bag for the baby toys. Perfect for a quick pack up when visiting friends and family. :)

I had to go back to the IVF clinic this morning to have my levels tested. The results came back this afternoon: the beta hcg was 3936 and progesterone was 189! I thought I was about 15dpo but I guess I’m further along than I thought. I have another appointment to see the professor in three weeks and he’ll do an u/s then. No wonder that line was so dark! I mentioned my numbers on a preggo forum that I frequent and the general consensus was multiples but I’m trying very hard not to freak the fuck out think about it. LMP was 2 June, I had a blood test on 22 June which showed I’d ovulated but a couple hours after the blood was drawn I had the telltale CM so I don’t think ovulation could’ve occurred all that long before. The betas were done on 6 July. Based on that, I don’t think I was more than 15dpo but I’ve been wrong before so who knows. My previous doctors didn’t order betas before so I didn’t know what was high. The clinic nurse only said that they want to see numbers higher than 100. Based on LMP, EDD is 8 March. I’ll just have to be patient until the ultrasound in a few weeks.

Inevitably I’ve caught a cold and given that I work in public health, I was sent to the influenza clinic to be swabbed and sent home. Apparently there’s a blanket directive to give all health workers Tamiflu on development of flu symptoms. The clinic doctors decided against giving me Tamiflu because I’m pregnant and while they are generally saying that it is safe in pregnancy, there’s not a lot of research to support that claim. I’ll stay home tomorrow again and wait for my stupid swab result.

I stopped by the haberdashery store on my way home and bought some extra green thread so I can use some of my sick days to finish my quilt. Now that I’m pregnant it seems that I’ve got such a short amount of time left to knit all the stuff I want to make for the baby. And uni starts up again in a couple of weeks. Must get cracking!

Once upon a time (about twelve years ago) there was a girl (me). She signed up for an evening college course to learn the ancient and magical art of quilting. Unfortunately for the girl, the weekly class was filled with older (old) women all of whom were members of the quilters’ guild. They took the art of quilting very seriously and stitched the entire quilt together by hand. The girl was a little surprised and disappointed by this. She was very much of the opinion that if there is an easier and faster way of doing something, then by all means it is better to do it that way. However, she perservered with the tedium of cutting out the quilt pattern pieces and hand-stitching each one together. Unfortunately, time as always was relentless and the weeks flew by but she had made precious little progress on her quilt. With two weeks of the course remaining, she spent the weekend hunched over her vintage Waltons Celestial sewing machine (circa 1976) until all of the quilt pieces were joined together. The girl was enjoying working on the quilt and would have loved to continue assembling it but she needed further instruction from the instructor so she packed it away until the next class. On the evening of the class, she hurried in to the room and excitedly unpacked her work-in-progress and waited for the others to arrive. Eventually the other women arrived for the class and the instructor visited each table to comment and give further instructions… until she reached the girl’s table. What happened next would stay with the poor girl for years and years to come. The teacher sucked in her breath quickly and hissed something about her having MACHINE SEWN the quilt instead of using the traditional hand stitching method. Two women at the next table over heard the teacher’s exclamation, their heads turning and gasping in shock. This gasp was also over heard by the women at the following table and they too gasped in disbelief. A wave of gasps and hisses moved through the room until all eyes were fixed on the girl. The teacher declared that the girl would unpick the offending stitches immediately and left the girl to stare dumbly at her beautiful quilt and fight back tears of humiliation. She never returned to the class and the quilt remained in the back of the cupboard until several years later she gave it to a friend of a friend to finish. She never saw it again.

As for the Waltons Celestial sewing machine, it eventually developed a nasty case of incurably bad tension and given its age, it was deemed not worth repairing. The girl’s husband gave her a wonderful new Pfaff sewing machine for her birthday; a special sewing machine that came with all kinds of fancy quilting extras, not that she ever expected to use them. She brought the sewing machine out occasionally, though it was usually to fix a fallen hem.

Fast forward to modern day (last Monday night to be exact). The girl is a little older now (just a little) and a little wiser (what am I saying, she knows everything; just ask her!) and had felt like doing a little creating, or nesting, or maybe just something a little different from her usual knitting. This desire coincided with a 20% off everything sale at her local haberdashery store. After an hour of dragging bolts of fabric around the store to compare colours and patterns, she settled on a selection of quilting fabrics in greens and browns and matching thread. The fabric sat on her dining room table for much of the week while she considered the possible patterns for her future quilt. On Saturday she prewashed, dried, trimmed and ironed all of the fabric and then today she spent the morning carefully cutting many (oh so many) five inch squared umm squares. Next she arranged the squares in various patterns until she settled on one that she really liked. It was almost lunch time and the girl decided to take a break from her quilt to make some pikelets for lunch (her husband’s favourite). After lunch she started sewing all of the squares together and was having such a great time using the fantastic quilting features on her near-new sewing machine until, incredibly, she ran out of green thread! She vowed to buy more thread during her lunch break tomorrow and will finish sewing the last row of squares together, before sewing a brown frame and then a slightly wider green frame around the assembled squares. Then she’ll just have to sandwich the quilt front, batting and backing fabric (a tasty green paisley) and free-motion stitch them together, then sew on the binding and it should be finished!

The end.