TTC a 2012 baby - the GRADUATES!

[Carlitawantsababy]

As requested/suggested this is a thread for those graduating from the TTC a 2012 baby -this is our year thread! Bring your BFPs and get yourselves comfy

Ooh love the name Noah! And I love the nn Flick so Felicity is a contender too - and I love the Latin connection. I'd love to go with one of the cooler classical names but am not sure that our offspring can pull off something like that. I love Clio (or Cleo) but I suggested that for mum's cat 10 years ago so it's already in use

And your first choice is jolly lovely!

We already have our boys name picked. Girls names are much much harder.

Kayzr isn't there some old wives tale about it being easier to pick a girl's name if you're having a girl or a boy's name if you're having a boy?

That being said, we had one of each chosen within 24 hours of finding out about ds! Do you have any ideas?

ghost I love Cleo! But you can't use the other spelling thanks to a certain French car and its va va voom.

Not sure about that Fools but with DS1 we had his name picked before we knew he was a boy but it was the day DS2 was born we agreed on his name. This one will be Isaac Henry if it's a boy. Currently going with Rosalie for a girl but I'm sure it'll change.

The old wives tale about heartburn and lots of hair has been true with both of the boys. They were born with huge amounts of hair.

I love Noah too but DP doesn't. I'd love something Latin or Greek. I studied ancient civillisations at A level so I really love names like Athena and Penelope etc.

I absolutely love Daphne but DS1 is Freddie so can't use it. Same with Florence as DS2 is Dylan so people will think I spend too much time watching scooby doo or the magic roundabout.

Love all your name choices! I too am in the knob gang an have extensive lists for both sexes but not going to properly get into it until after our scan when our choices will hopefully be somewhat narrowed!

just a quick hello to say i LOVE noah, but OH last name rules this out as cruel, and i am totally stealing florence, hope you dont mind kayzr [hsmile] still got 2 weeks till my first scan! sooo far away. hope everyone is well

Kazyr I did Latin a level and almost read Arch & Anth or Egyptology at uni so I love the classical idea. Arsinoe (would that be nn Arsi ) or Berenice anyone? Not quite my style, but could be persuaded by Juno or similar!

oh boy this is going to be long - serves me right for being so slack on the updating! No way I can cover everything, but hope I haven't missed out anything directed at me!!

bun I would love (love love!) to write novels like william gibson; futuristic, but believable near future worlds with characters you feel drawn to and believe. But i'm not sure i'm good enough at making the near future seem real; nothing worse than laboured illustrations of a world you just don't believe in (anyone seen Chronicles of Riddick? Made me want to scratch my eyes out with disappointment after pitch black - that's the kind of unbelievable world/characters I don't want to write!!) I have in the past written more contemporary fiction type stuff; family / relationship based drama (not chick lit, or at least I hope not chick lit) but have never really done anything with it. I wanted to do a combined degree, sociology + english language/writing, but the one place I found offering it dropped it due to lack of applications - so I ended up with sociology as it seemed more likely to lead to a job. But tutors and friends (who I know are biased) have over the years said I write well, so I hope that it's something I could potentially do one day, if I can get back into the swing of writing regularly! Plus I've blogged for nearly a decade on and off, but have been shockingly lax since I got pregnant as I have just been too tired.

ghost good lord - that book fair sounds hectic! Love your out of office reply - definitely a good idea! One of the joys of being made redundant was the period between notification of potential redundancy and actually leaving; I stopped doing all the little extra bits that were outside of my job description, got to say (very nicely of course) to people "i'm terribly sorry but I can't help you with that (for the one hundredth time, as you never bothered to learn to do it yourself), have you tried looking on the (comprehensive, written by me) intranet for what you need?" Or, in the last few days a simple, "sorry, no I can't help" - with no elaboration or further comment! My job went from insanely busy & stressful, to relatively peaceful, was actually almost nice, I even took full one hour long lunchbreaks! Was a revelation!

Carlita ooh - 4d scan, some of our relatives have been saying we should do that! When are you looking at getting yours done? They have to be quite late on in the pregnancy don't they?

Bun you're hypermobile!! How funny after the comments upthread! Hope the physio is helping! I too am jealous of the batman knickers, they sound awesome! Just googled finnish paper stars, they look awesome!

davina Happy belated birthday! Did you have a nice meal on Saturday? Your weekend away in the lakes sounds awesome - am very jealous!

carlita my notes - nope, they go to medical appointments with me and from 20 weeks will go in the car with me when I go up to visit family in Surrey (we got snowed in at my parents/then with the MiL for around a week last year - long story, but am v nervous about it happening again!) I'd be mad to try and carry that much extra weight around with me and frankly in 2011 I don't see why the notes aren't computerised and stored at the hospital - at least they could put it on a pen drive to carry about rather than a big folder, surely! But then they'd have to have a decent IT infrastructure in place and // stopping here before i start ranting about the PFI NHS IT contract / spine as I could rant on that for days...
Am very jealous that you got to hear the heartbeat - we still haven't heard ours :( My cousin has her own doppler so i'm tempted to borrow it next time we visit and have a listen!!

Your midwife sounds like an idiot (seems to be a theme here, lots of crap midwives). Perhaps once you've moved you could put in a complaint about her lack of knowledge around PGP? That way you don't have to deal with further sulking/crap from her, but hopefully something will be done about her - some training or something?

davina maternity jeans are a pig! I have two pairs, one is way too loose, might be OK later on, but just fall down right now. The other pair fit, but slide down constantly and make me look like my bottom is melting. They are really not the most flattering things are they...

Placenta - sounds like your consultant isn't too worried - good that they are keeping an eye on it though - fingers crossed it moves and doesn't impede your birth plans!
Another crappy midwife for you too - glad you've managed to avoid her though - I'm simply amazed at how bad so many midwives are at their jobs. But then I've come across enough useless doctors too - is very sad that so many medical "professionals" are anything but.

carlita YAYAYAYAYAYAY!!! Congratulations on selling the flat - that's amazing! Soon you will join us on the south coast where the sun always shines and everyone is happy (OK... I might be overstating that a smidge...)

fools - sorry you had a wobble about your bump - I can totally understand - mine has stopped growing (or so it seems) and has barely changed the last few weeks. It's hardening up and becoming more obvious (my weight isn't dropping as such, but I've noticed I've lost some fat from my midriff which makes the bump easier to see) but in terms of inches around my middle, the figure has hardly changed. I'm 16 weeks tomorrow and hoping that it is going to start growing again soon! I'm so glad of my obstetrician check ups being so regular, I know fuzzy is growing like a weed, so no matter how small the bump seems, I know things are actually OK inside. Twice I have thought I felt something fuzzy based, not 100% sure, but it was right down on the pelvis so entirely possible that fuzzy just happened to kick in a spot where I could feel it. Nothing for about a week though now. Am really hoping to feel proper movements soon though!

Loving all the name lists (especially carlita's comment about being "in the knob gang" - have to be careful not to skim read this thread sometimes!! ) fools I love Tabitha Willow - that's a beautiful name! We have a theo and a noah in our extended family already and a penelope in my immediate family too! Love felix and florence - I gather florence is seeing a bit of a resurgence thanks to "florence and the machine"?
I am still completely smitten with Indigo (Indy) for a girl. We haven't come up with anything better than Arlo for a boy - we find boys names really ridiculously hard to find, Arlo is the only boys name we have ever agreed on (and we've been talking about what we will call our kid/s for the better part of ten years!!) I'd love to find a boys name that I love as much as our girls name and we still have quite a while to go before it becomes urgent so fingers crossed!

Right - that's enough for one post, will update about our "fun" week in a second post!!

Oooh trope Indigo, there's an option! I love the nn Indy and it satisfies the film geek in me (another unwritten rule) but we were leaning toward India - but Indigo might go down better with DH....

GAH - lost my post :( Let's try that again shall we...

So, DP gets up before me to shower, before we have breakfast & he heads off up to London for work each day. One day last week he came back upstairs without showering and said that "something had happened in the living room". It looked like we had been burgled, or there had been a very localised earthquake. Nothing was missing, but the phone and internet weren't working. Looking around we discovered a bit of skirting / carpet had been eaten through and what we assumed was a mouse had gotten in. (We get mice trying to come in at this time of year, usually into the kitchen or bathroom, through gaps by pipes etc). We found some droppings and figured a mouse had gotten into the room, gone a bit nuts (we were quite shocked at the extent of the mess though; vase knocked over, picture frames off shelves, that sort of thing) and gone back out when it didn't find any food. DP did the tidying up as I didn't want to risk it (i'm immunosuppressed from my meds and the pregnancy, so have very little ability to fight off any infection). DP told work he'd be late in and started cleaning up, I showered and went off to buy some lunch for us both. DP rang when I was halfway home; it wasn't a mouse. It was a rat. And it was still in the living room He had moved the unit in front of the phone point and it had run out - it was now hiding under the TV unit... :(

Pest control came out pretty quickly and, er, "dealt" with the rat. We now have poison down in most downstairs rooms, but we've not heard any scratching in the walls so think it was a one off. Our neighbour had one come up through the drains below their house last year (it chewed through concrete to get into her house) and the other side had a rat a few years back, so it's not completely unheard of but YUCK! I'm just so glad that that night was the one night that week when I didn't get up for a wee in the middle of the night (our toilet is downstairs and you have to walk through the living room to get to it). I'm stuck at home today waiting on pest control to come back and check the poison etc. They think it came up through our neighbours drain as it is partly blocked and is missing the grate meant to keep rodents from coming up through it; it appears to have gone along a pipe and up into our cavity wall, before chewing it's way through into our living room. Hopefully it was a one off, but I'm going to have to talk to the water board about the drain; it's on my neighbours property (and she's council and completely skint) so it could be a bit of a faff to get it sorted. I haven't seen her out recently either (she's elderly and has mobility issues) so I think I shall wait till the weekend when one of her daughters usually visit, I don't want to worry her by going around when she's alone. (Well, her son lives with her, but he's less than useless...)

Anyways - the rat and the midwife (I saw her the same day) made for a shitty day, but seeing the obstetrician later that week made up for it! We've had a few car troubles too, but that's too long and boring a story to inflict upon you all!

In other news, I have scaffold up around my house and the builders are due sometime today to start chipping the pebbledash off the front of my house! Travis Perkins just delivered all the building supplies so we are GO GO GO!

And in other more baby related news, I just won a cot on ebay; it's a cosatto one and it's lovely and I got it for a mere £40!!! I wasn't going to buy one this early, but not many nice ones come up near where I live and I figure disassembled it's not that big to store. Progress towards being ready for fuzzy is definitely being made!

Finally - the comedy gigs! Ed Byrne was brilliant I can whole heartedly recommend him. He recently became a dad for the first time, so much of his set is around pregnancy/babies - very appropriate and very very funny. He had no support and was on from 8-10pm with a short interval. By comparison, Reginald D Hunter had a dire support act for the entire first half, then did 45 minutes and no encore. He was £20 a ticket!! He kept losing his thread so it was very disjointed, lots of "put the lights up and let's talk to the audience". He was doing the being controversial thing, which is fine if it's funny, but a ten minute justification on why he calls fussy things and things he doesn't like "faggotry" really left me cold. I'm of the "words are important" school of thought and don't like those justifications for using words with very negative connotations; reminds me of teenagers saying that using "gay" as an insult isn't to do with homosexuality being seen as bad. Makes me very sad and I don't find it funny at all - not least because his use of "faggotry" throughout the set felt very forced, there was simply no reason for it to be there and it just wasn't funny. We then saw Jack Whitehall this weekend who was great. Short (actually funny) support act (10-15 mins) then Jack himself, short interval then good long post interval set and one encore (which was very, very funny). He was a bit patchier than Ed Byrne, but still very funny; we went home with aching cheeks from laughing! We just have Dave Gorman to go this Sunday - can't wait to see him! And I made it to the interval without having to leave to wee every time - HURRAH!

And with that, I think I am all caught up! Hurrah! :D

lol ghost at your inner film geek! I did say to DP we could call it Indiana (Indy) for a boy too, but he was having none of it! You are most welcome to nab Indigo - it is after all a truly fabulous name!

My goodness trope you deserve a medal for those epic posts, you really ought to post more often!

lol, a medal or a slap, could go either way!!! Have been ridiculously tired this last week so have been sleeping lots - just can't get my brain awake enough some days to cope with actually writing words on a screen! I haven't updated my "trying to conceive" blog since I got pregnant! I suck! But I am making a determined effort from today onwards (there, i've said it out loud so you can all mock and chide me if I disappear for another week!!)

DP is off to NY from the 6th to the 19th (not the month long trip we had feared thankfully!) so I shall be posting lots then I suspect! Will be going potty home alone for that long!

My 4D scan isn't booked yet, they recommend you do it between 24 and 32 weeks, we are planning on 30 weeks so it's something to look forward to between 20 week scan and baby's arrival, however, we'll decide for sure after the 20 week scan as if baby is feeling coy and we can't find out the sex we may have it a bit earlier!
Good idea having notes on a pen drive, I too can't afford to carry around extra weight!
House hunting on Saturday, very exciting!
I love the name Indigo, I wonder if DH will allow it on the list (it has to be a 'real name' sigh)
Sorry to hear about your rat issue! I used to keep rats and they are really lovely creatures but I would still be totally freaked out by one breaking and entering and performing polterrat - esque antics in my living room!
Currently on the bus home from acupuncture and have a guy coming to do photos and floor plans and energy rating for the flat. We're getting the photos and floor plans done anyway just in case the sale falls through as have to get the energy rating done and it's the same guy. After this we can go back to being our slovenly selves although we have said we'll try to keep it tidy! Anyway, the acupuncturist has booked me in for one more session to 'make sure I'm okay' and I asked her if it was still worth waiting for the physio referral, she was surprised I'd heard nothing for 4 weeks. I told her i was worried it hasn't been made as midwife sis not appear to believe me about the pain. She checked with the midwives and guess what? the bitch my midwife hadn't even made the referral. I can now expect an appointment in about 4 weeks. I think I will follow your advice trope and make a complaint about her once we move. I just hope they don't tell the Hastings midwives that I'm a pain in the ass, oh wait, that would involve communicating with others!

sorry to hear about the escapades with the rat - I don't have problems with the idea of them out in the wild, but destroying my house... shudder fortunately one of my felines is a proper killer so we're unlikely to encounter small furry beasts indoors (at least, not ones that stay alive for very long).

carlita 30 weeks sounds like a good plan - nice midway point! :)
Ooh house hunting - I love house hunting! Especially when it isn't my money! How many places are you viewing? Will you be near the seafront or further back? I don't know Hastings well at all so don't know where the "good" and "up and coming" bits are!

Just unbelievable about the midwife - what a cow! Glad you have a referral sorted now - shame they can't fasttrack it for you :( I wouldn't worry about them saying nasty things to the hastings midwives, aside from (as you say) that involving actually communicating, I would imagine one glance at your notes and a quick chat about your issues with her and they'd quickly realise that she was in the wrong - not you! I'm stroppy about stuff all over the place - have changed doctors within my surgery, have changed rheumatologist, have (in the past) insisted on a second opinion at a different hospital, have made a formal complaint to the PCT about the circumstances of my rheumy leaving and will be putting in a complaint to the local surgery about the nurses saying I had to have the MMR before getting pregnant again (it's a live vaccine and therefore incredibly dangerous for me to take as I'm immunosuppressed). I figure anyone worth their salt will listen to me and treat me based on what they see, not what they hear from others! (So a stroppy cow who unfortunately for them usually knows what she's talking about - ha!)
Loving the Indigo love! Be funny if we all ended up with girls called Indigo!! Sods law dictates that I would then have a boy and not be able to use my lovely girls name!

ghost If I wasn't horrendously allergic to cats (most hairy animals in fact) DP would insist on us having one (or more - he grew up with 2 family cats) which would be rather useful at this time of year! Like you, no real issue with them in the wild, but in my living room? I think not!!

In other news, the builders are here and are currently chipping the pebbledash off the front of my house. It is VERY LOUD! He's removing all the pebbledash from around the front door atm, it's like having someone constantly hammering on your front door :( No sign of pest control guy yet, otherwise I could go out and avoid the noise for a while! Still, at least progress is finally getting made! We are the last external rendering job they are doing this year as it will be too wet and cold in a week or two (please let them get it finished before the temps drop, please please please!!) Can't wait to have a nice newly rendered front wall! It's going to look SO much better!

I too have an efficient cat, they don't even come near and that's impressive in London! trope do you like cats?

X posts trope!

lol - if only there was a non allergic option! A robotic cat would be cool! And you could program it to leave dead things outside, inside of bringing them in to proudly show off!

Until then, I fear we are stuck with poison and regularly checking the pipework for gaps!

Just popping on to ask you all to stop writing so much! I am very busy and important meant to be cleaning and don't have time to keep reading this thread! Besides which, I'm stuck on the sofa with a pounding headache for the millionth afternoon in a row. Actually, keep it up, you're giving me something to do! :)

Trope hurrah for the rendering! We are considering that when we get our extension done, start in a few weeks hopefully. (Living on a building site for christmas, anyone?)

Awful about the rat, we had a squirrel get in once while my dad was home alone for a week. It ate all the lead (twas a long time ago!) off the windows and scared him witless! He was calling my mum saying there were burglars in the house! [hgrin] Hope pest control is with you soon. Also, aren't Rex cats ugly as sin hairless and therefore allergy free? Or you could get a Jack Russell terrier poodle cross. A dog is much better than a cat [hgrin] and Jacks are born ratters. Just a thought, you needn't be petless!

fools you have my sympathy - I had really bad headaches in the second trimester too (I have a history of cluster-headaches/migraine) but they've almost disappeared again now. One non-medical thing to try is to roll up a towel into a tube shape and lie on the floor with your neck supported by the towel, and your head just barely touching the floor at the back. If the headache is any way caused by back/neck/jaw tension this could help - it worked for me sometimes.

It's not going to stop me blithering on though

Oh ghost you've just made me laugh! Lying on the floor isn't an option for me, if I don't get ds come to jump on me, I will get the dogs looming over me, trying to lick my face and drown me in slobber be affectionate. If I'm really lucky, I get both. Think I'll stay on the sofa! Lots of water and my trusty 4head stick seem to be helping. Just need to survive making dinner. Home made wedges always seem like a good idea until it comes to actually preparing them.

I'm sure a bit of dog slobber would be therapeutic too