Pregnancy Lowdown: Weeks 24 – 28

28 weeks. The start of the third trimester (I think?)

Breech?

I’ve just had my 28 week midwife appointment, and we think the baby is still breech. Which makes sense considering the movements I’ve been feeling, and confirms my gut suspicion that spending hours on end every day with my legs up on the sofa at my ‘home office’, my pelvis tilted the wrong way, is perhaps not the best posture for pregnancy. I know there is still quite a lot of time for the baby to move, and there’s not too much I can do about decreasing my sofa-time until the bulk of my photoshoots are done and edited (which won’t be until late March), but I definitely think it might be time to pump up that exercise ball and concentrate on keeping my legs lower than my pelvis during the moments of the day when I don’t need to be at my computer.

Movement?

A few weeks ago, the baby was having a quiet day, and by the afternoon I realised that I couldn’t recall when I had last felt an active period of movement. I paid attention for the rest of the day, lay down, ate ice cream and drank ice-cold drinks, but didn’t feel any movements at all. By 3am, I was wide awake wondering what the hell do to with Arlo in the morning whilst I took myself off to labour ward for monitoring. Arlo decided to wake for the day at 4.30am, and fortunately so did baby 2. Since then, he or she has been wiggling away as usual, and I have been making a mental note to ‘check in’ with the baby a bit more often and keep better track of movements.

Breastfeeding

I haven’t really mentioned breastfeeding during this pregnancy because I thought I’d have a whole blog post to write on the subject. But so far, pregnancy really hasn’t changed things at all. Arlo is having 1 – 3 feeds a day, my milk doesn’t seem to have changed or decreased (or if it has, Arlo hasn’t mentioned it), it’s not more of an effort in any way, and I’ve had minimal tenderness.

Preparation

I’ve booked onto an antenatal course specifically for second-time parents, the bonus being that it’s incredibly local so hopefully all the mums will live close by and we can form a nice network. I wasn’t going to bother with antenatal classes this time round, due to cost and the fact that there wasn’t a nearby NCT refresher course (no point travelling an hour away to a second-time mum course, with babies and toddlers to contend with I know we’d never meet up regularly). But then I found this course in Crystal Palace – it fits all the criteria I was looking for, and Sam practically begged me to sign up because he’s sick of me moaning that I’m bored and that most of the friends I made when Arlo was a baby have moved away (these days, I’m really starting to feel the isolation of being a work-at-home/stay at home mum on a strict budget). I also have my eye on a prenatal yoga class in Croydon, and I’m even more keen now that I know I need to get moving in order to turn this baby! But this will depend on availability and money (as usual).

Other news

I can no longer button up my coat (hurry up, spring!!)

Boys name = sorted (I think!). I’m still going back and forth between two girls’ names (Sam likes both… I think!).

A two-week long monster of a cold that Sam kindly brought home from work left me feeling pretty run down, but aside from that I’ve had none of the tiredness mentioned in my last update (so it must have been my body adjusting to Arlo dropping his nap and Sam returning to work after Christmas).

The weeks between 24 and 28 weeks went by incredibly quickly. I’ll be in the 30s in a couple of weeks and then it’ll really start to feel like the home straight.

After an unsure start, Arlo bloody loves taking these photos now. As soon as he sees me writing on the frame, he starts demanding to hold his “card” and get the camera.

Pointing to the baby in his tummy: