January 2012-Close encounters of the third trimester kind.... Too much nesting not enough resting!

[fishandlilacs]

Here we go ladies. A shiney new thread.

January 2012 - Do not handle the bump as a punch in the face often offends

Thats got my vote!

..and yes our thread does seem to move fast. I think it's because were lucky enough to get on really quite well and theres a few of us who are quite chatty so it keeps moving on.

Also theres like 50+ in the stats list-where are the rest of us?-theres what about 20 of us who are active on here? I do hope everyone else who is due in Jan is ok.

GARGH! Whatever's going on in my throat it's pissing me off a lot.
I am a little burpy, but that's it. Just feel like I've swallowed a friggin marble. Eating fine, breathing fine, no heartburn (I imagine I shoudl be getting a burning sensation somewhere with heartburn), but nothing else other than a small exhaustion-induced vomit last night. Driving me mental, just can't ignore it.

Re: maternity pads. I've heard some people use the 'night time' standard pads rather than giong specifically for maternity pads. What have you guys done previously? Or are planning on doing?

I'm sharing my photos with the year 7 boys who are doing pregnancy this half term. Not sure they will make of them. Ds 1 is really interested and I have had to help him with the homework tonight.

As for breast pads bamboo fleece sounds nice as it is thin but soft and absorbent I have some cloth nappies with that in. Wish I was talented to make my own.

oiesha I used Boots maternity pads for the first few days the last time. They came highly recommended and were great value for money. Once the tenderness settled I went onto the long standard pads.

cakes I love hearing about your latest creations. Your so crafty. I'm seriously thinking of making my own mobile for the cot as I can't find one I like and totally object to paying 30quid for them

Oeisha - I heard someone say the biggest post natal mistake they made was to take the advice to use standard 'night' pads rather than actual maternity pads...

Shon - it's due to a combination of easily bored, tight-fistedness and a sluggish hippy/eco mentality :) I love my mooncups, but they're hardly going to be practical after birth so am making the second best alternative. All the bits for the baby is just an excuse to keep getting more pretty yarn ;)

I'll have to take pics of everything to show you :)

Oeshia that sounds like the 'heartburn' I get a couple of rennies usually sorts it.

Nanny - no talent required, just layer up some fabrics, tack them together, then draw circles on and sew the layers together and cut them out. Easy peasy.

Sorry maternity pads - last time I had 1 box of thick maternity pads and felt like I was wearing a nappy, it was horrible so I moved on to always night pads, I send dh out immediatly to find some thin maternity pads as regular ones are very rough and after stitches and grazing it was very painful. I won't be making that mistake again. Maternity pads are designed to be soft and gentle so i would highly recommend using them until down there is healed.

There are 2 types tho, really thick ones like nappies and thin ones almost like sanitary towels.
Hth

As regular sanitary towels are very rough

good advice all round ladies. will order some maternity pads! I am super impressed with making your own nipple pads, that is amazing. I bet there's only about 3 women in the whole of the country doing that cakes! are you in fact Kirstie Allsopp in disguise....?

i am starting to get freaked out about how close some of us are and wondering who will have early babies, if anybody. For some reason I keep thinking mine will be early, but I think that's just the panic talking!

Got a well needed day off today but got to do lots of boring jobs to get the house ready for 2 new carpets on friday!!!!! can't wait!!!! we semi-fixed the paint problem in the end, and now the lounge looks all lovely and fresh (or will do when the new carpet comes!) This house has been weird and broken too long - can't wait to eradicate all signs of the incredibly creepy and scary man that lived here before....

Nah - Kirstie Allsopp has to get experts in to show her how to do stuff. Me, I copy stuff off the interwebz, innit? Made DH an advent calendar last year, which I adore and would like to make one for my mum and for Sproglet, but my God it took forever and I haven't the energy! lol

I second you on how close we are now - only 10 weekends left, really eek! It's funny, I can't imagine our family with a baby in it, not really, not as a full time thing, but I guess once he's here it will be impossible to think of our family without him!

Just need to have a little dance of triumph here, because I can;t really do it anywhere else and DH isn't replying to his Gmail chat!

I have two clients -

XXX - marketing agency who are slow to pay (currently 4 month's in arrears) try and pay me as little as possible and just generally difficult to deal with. 2 weeks ago they asked me to pause all work until further notification because they were short of funds and couldn't authorise any more payments

YYY - lovely one-woman crafting business whose products I love and whose work I really enjoy promoting, but I've been working for her for three weeks and she still hadn't paid the £100 retainer I asked for and I've now done £200 worth of work for her.

Today I was brave enough to ask YYY for the retainer and she replied immediately apologising and saying she would as soon as her new cheque book came through.

XXX had sent me an email asking for copies of some photos I had taken so they could use them on their website and I was brave enough to tell them that I had been asked to pause all work until notification and had included the post-processing of their photographs in this. Was I being asked to recommence work?

Goodness it felt good! I feel so brave for asking the nice lady for money and not offending her and for making my position clear to the agency and refusing to do work unless it was cleared that I would get paid for it!

Exhausting being self-employed :)

well done makes I had to do exactly the same this week, emailing certain people that hadn't paid me and saying I would have to stop teaching their children if they didn't pay up!! It's tricky being self employed sometimes isn't it. I think the asking for money bit is one of the worst aspects. Especially when you don't get it back! I am still owed £400 by a major record label from 2009!!!! don't think I'm ever going to get it now.

However the upside to my job is sometimes I get a surprise windfall from just having played on a successful record - thats really nice when it pops up in your bank account. I just found out that Professor Green is at No.1 and I'm on that single so I think I might get a little bonus in a few months time hooray! never been on a No.1 record before so I'm quite excited!!

red - ooo, how exciting and congratulations on your chart topping place! Glad the house is coming along well - there's something so satisfying about putting down the paint brushes and realising it actually was all worth it!

cakes well done on getting mean! I imagine the thing that's easy to forget that you are running a business and not just doing everyone a favour. I struggle with that working for a big company - I just like some of my customers too much to get mean with them!

oiesha - without being too yucky, don't underestimate how much you bleed for the first few days (and how long it goes on for - I thought a couple of weeks, but actually 6-8 is normal!) so maternity pads are well worth it for the first few days, even if you do feel like you're wearing a nappy, as addicted said! Get quite a few as well - you'll need to change them every couple of hours to start (I don't think I was a particularly effusive bleeder either.) Eugh - I now remember the worst thing about giving birth - all the icky stuff afterwards!

Oh how exciting Red!! Congratulations on your first Number One!!

Well done cakes Its tough chasing people isnt it.

Happy November Ladies!
November 1st - exactly 2 months until my edd. Still have a feeling that bubba will be born this year though....

I'm just one of about 30 string players so you can't actually hear me at all but it's still exciting hee hee

by the way everyone I just realised (prob about 10yrs behind everyone else but thought I'd share in case it was useful) there's a thing on the Amazon Wish List where you can install a clicky thing onto your desktop that lets you click on ANY product on ANY website, but add it to your Amazon Wish List. So people can go on to it at christmas and see exactly what you want - just thought it would be super useful this year to get baby things that I really want instead of getting extra or random things I don't need. For example I've just added a nice nursing nightie from Mamas and Papas that I probably wouldn't spend on myself, some blankets and some super cute pram suits from Mothercare - all not available on Amazon obviously and all too expensive for me right now, but nice things for other people to buy me if they want and the list is handily all in one place.

We find our parents and grandparents nowadays just want telling and don't want to make the choices themselves! I still like getting surprises as well, but some people would rather have a list I find.

That's it exactly! Plus I find I feel a bit daft charging people for stuff that seems so self-explanatory to me that anyone could do it.

V exciting to be on a record anyway, red. Who cares if you can be individually picked out?

I was wondering about exactly how much bleeding there'd be. God, I've almost entirely forgotten all about the inconvenience of periods, am not looking forward to that!

I really hope that I dont bleed as much as I did last time. I didnt even need a lot of stitches but for some reason I was still bleeding (not alot after the first few weeks) 10weeks after the birth. The HV and GP thought that I had went straight from post birth to menstrual bleeding and blamed my irrigular periods for it. Was not pleasant.

Dont you think time is travelling far too fast?! This pregnancy has flown by

congrats red! A few of my friends are professional musos and they're having a hard time at the moment - one is a horn player but the other plays viola and I think she's just got a trial with the London Phil (if I remember correctly anyway) which is pretty cool. Thanks for the Amazon hint too - my folks are already asking but since all I can think about is the baby I guess I'll be asking for lots of baby stuff! Also my b-day is in January so I usually need to suggest things for both christmas and my birthday.

Speaking of early babies - someone from my antenatal yoga class had her baby at 25 weeks and just over 2 lbs, but the baby is doing well and is now 5 lbs and out of critical care, which is fab. Haven't we all been lucky so far, really? And fx it continues!

and well done cakes - hope it translates into some cash for you very very soon.

as for bleeding, I knew my mooncup wouldn't work immediately post-natally but I was so hoping it somehow would be ok. I loathe sanitary towels. Yuck.

Finally, a hint from my friend who is expecting her second child in mid Jan too - apparently [[http://www.waitrose.com/shop/ProductView-10317-10001-2841-Waitrose+baby+bottom+butter Waitrose Baby Bottom Butter] is the nappy cream of choice - it's not organic but it's pretty much made of emulsified olive oil, so no nasties on the baby's skin. It's apparently not as nice as the Neil's Yard stuff but is

let me try that link again! Waitrose Baby Bottom Butter

oh no i have seriously messed up on my car tax!!! just found out it ran out yesterday - and only found out because our neighbour delivered the envelope telling us - because i haven't changed my bloody address on it!!! so it's now illegal to drive my car until they receive my paperwork changing the address, which I can't find because it's in a box somewhere!! shit!!!!

shonno poor you! I was lucky as breastfeeding halted my periods for about 9 months, so after the initial, er, deluge, I had nothing for months. Ahh, those were happy days...

cakes - it's funny, after the first couple of weeks you get so used to it that it's weird when it stops!

red - oo, good tip. That'll stop my mother buying me random tupperware type items from Lakeland (I mean really, who needs an egg slicer??)

red sorry to hear that. The crucial thing is to get the tax paid quickly so there's no snag in the system. Can you bring the car off the road too? You need to get sorted asap as the car must either be declared SORN (statutory off road notice) or be taxed. I recommend you give the DVLA a quick phone call and they should be able to advise what you can do here - this must happen fairly frequently so there should be a process in place... good luck!

oops x-post. red gah! Can you phone up the DVLA and cry? Sometimes works.

ghost - I haven't found that Waitrose nappy cream to be that good, except for general baby bottom smoothness (but baby's have pretty smooth bottoms anyway, really!). If your small gets nappy rash, you really need to get out the big boys - I've found Metanium is brilliant, although it does stain everything in its path yellow, nursery always ask for Bepanthen, which I don't think is that good, and Sudocreme didn't work at all for me (or for DD, more to the point). Just make sure you have some "proper" cream in just in case.