Baby's age: -20 days

Today’s top tip for the very pregnant is not to take your fetus to loud rock concerts unless you want to lie awake for hours afterwards. Pete, Bernard and I went to see The Zutons last night, supported by Terra Alpha [a Razorlight-esque four-piece of very skinny boys] and The Grates [an Australian guitar/drums act with the most energetically bouncy girl in the world on vocals].

The support acts weren’t bad, and The Zutons didn’t disappoint at all [contrary to expectations], although the lighting was a little uncomfortable from the balcony, with spotlights shining directly in our faces throughout the show; and the roadie’s constant running on and off the stage to assist with frequent guitar changes was a little distracting. Musically they were polished but still exciting, and the material from the weaker second album stood up just fine once mixed in with the fabulous first album stuff. The saxophonist was particularly impressive, and I really enjoyed it, from my perch up in the balcony where the grown-ups sat. Had I not been 8+ months pregnant, it would have been a good gig to be standing in front of the stage [though safely out of the moshpit, of course!]

And how did Bernard enjoy the show? I think I once described his movements as a fluttery, gentle bump inside – oh, those were the days. Now we are talking small uterus-churning earthquakes, feet and fists, twists and turns. He has on more than one occasion punched Pete in the ear. He gets particularly active in response to loud female voices, deep bass tones, startling guitar riffs, and changes in volume. Readers, the baby danced throughout.

He continued to dance all the way home, kicked his dad during the nightly bump massage, and refused to settle down for another hour and a half. Sometime around 1:30 he eventually got tired and let me get some sleep. I am expecting to feel significantly fewer kicks than usual today; I should think he will be needing a rest.

Baby's age: -21 days

Today I published the 1000th poem on Clock. It is also my first day off work, although I’m not technically on maternity leave until next week; this week is just ordinary holiday. Amounts to the same thing, though: alarm goes at Pete time instead of Karen time (i.e. half an hour later) and I daydream for a while about having a long lie in, until such time as I become overwhelmed by hunger, which forces me downstairs before he has even left the house. I have a list of things to do for every day this week, and progress so far has been good.

And here’s a top tip for the very pregnant, about raspberry leaf tea:

Raspberry leaf tea is very unpleasant stuff. You can get it in teabag form from health food stores, but this isn’t particularly strong, so you’re drinking that nasty liquid for nothing. Neals Yard sells a tincture, for £4.75, which granted is a lot more expensive than the tea, but not a lot in the scheme of things. You add about 30 drops to a small amount of water and knock it back – yay, no mug of filthy tea to drink! The tincture is much more powerful than the tea, too. NOT recommended before about 35 weeks, though.

Pete’s mum came to stay the night on Saturday, and we took her to Guildford to do some shopping. She scoured the place for a particular baby beaker made by Heinz, which she insists we will need immediately. She also had a lovely time in [Grand]Mothercare, purchasing a mountain of cotton wool, of which we can’t possibly have enough; and found the perfect changing mat at The White Company. Then she informed me that my constant hunger was just greed, and told Pete off for stealing the neighbours’ water, so we sent her to bed without any supper.

Baby's age: -23 days

I think there should be some sort of class offered at around 12 weeks, along the same lines as the excellent NCT course we just attended, to explain to couples what to expect throughout their pregnancy, and what sort of decisions they are going to be expected to make. Perhaps we could call it What the midwives don’t tell you.

This is the stage at which the self-informing parents-to-be are researching like mad, often after they have been given a choice about something they don’t immediately understand. The less self-informing, who are doomed to doing as they are told throughout and not taking control over their experience, would obviously benefit as well. I really think that information is withheld from us not just because the people in charge of our “care” have such poor communication skills, but also because it makes it easier for them if they give us a minimal range of options. And of course if they dissuade us from giving birth in a unit outside their own health authority, then they get the revenue; but surely that issue wouldn’t prejudice the way they treat us?!

Here are some possible syllabus topics:

• Physical symptoms you are probably going to experience during a normal pregnancy, and how to cope with or reduce them.
• Symptoms that might be danger signs, and when to get medical advice. Relatedly, symptoms that are scary but are not actually danger signs.
• What tests and scans you are going to be offered, and which ones you can get privately; the consequences of a negative result, and how to get help with making difficult decisions.
• Options for place of birth, and why they make a difference. To include the advice that the safest place, if you are in a low-risk category, is at home. Also a little bit of information at this stage on intervention, pain relief, etc, which doesn’t really need to be covered too deeply until the later classes.
• Some guidance on things you will need to beg/borrow/steal or as a last resort, buy, for yourself and the baby. Around this time, women will just be starting to need maternity clothes, and a few weeks later will probably start to worry about how many nappies (and what sort), how many vests and babygros and sleeping bags, what sort of pram they need, how often they will need to go and buy bigger bras; perhaps a little bit about feeding.

But the real advantage would be the early-stage networking. These days women are so much less likely to have the close family support system, and even if they do, it may be a good 30 years since our mums went through this, and there have been a lot of changes in that time. How about a brainstorming session on how to reject your mum’s advice without hurting her feelings? It would be nice to gather that peer group four or five months earlier, so that you can compare notes and go shopping and moan about people rubbing your belly without asking.

I know all of this sort of thing is covered in the books, and at least the pregnancy books are a little more consistent in their advice than the first year books; but they’re not completely comprehensive, and there is so much to worry about during pregnancy that having one authoritative class somewhere near the beginning might help demystify everything a bit.

Baby's age: -26 days

When I lived in Budapest, I helped to set up a book club. We had people of all nationalities there, which sometimes made it difficult to choose a book; it was hard enough to get enough english language copies, without having to find Italian and Serbian and Korean as well. We usually found it quite hard to talk about the books, as well, but we always enjoyed the wine and the cookies.

Yesterday I joined the book club run by ladies from the local NCT. I was the youngest person there, or at least the only person who didn’t have a child of school age. We met in a very smart house in the next village, and the biscuits were on a table out of my ungainly pregnant reach. We mainly talked about laser eye surgery and which local celebrities live nearby (it’s a very smart village). The host says she used to ride her horse past Glenn Hoddle’s house.

I was a bit bored, really. The book wasn’t the most gripping read ever (The Giant’s House, by Elizabeth McCracken); and other than speculating about whether an 8′4″ man could really exist, we didn’t talk about it much. Next month’s book is really dire, but the meeting is on the 21st, so there’s a strong chance I won’t be able to make it. Never mind.

The lady who kindly gave me a lift also kindly gave me the benefit of her experience: birth plans are optimistic nonsense, and you can have all the good intentions you want but it’s okay to have an epidural in the end. Yawn.

I can’t even be bothered to discuss it anymore. It’s not that I’m so single-mindedly stupid that I won’t under any circumstances etc blah blah blah, but just that I don’t see the point of going into it with the assumption that it’s all going to be awful and no-one can ever cope with it. There are good birth experiences as well as scare stories. And don’t tell me that opting for an epidural doesn’t make you feel guilty; if women didn’t feel bad about it, why would they keep on justifying it to me by telling I will need one too? If it turns out that I can’t cope without medication, then I will give in, but I will be disappointed, not defensive.

Baby's age: -30 days

Yes, more ponderings on the state of pregnancy. My offline diary is rather a detail-free abstract zone, so if I am going to record this experience for future reference, then it has to be here; you don’t have to keep reading it, you know.

Having finished our NHS parentcraft classes, yesterday we started the two-day NCT antenatal course. On balance, I would say that you could safely skip the NHS classes and go straight to NCT, although the NHS is free so you might as well do both.

The NHS course consisted of up to 25 couples crammed into a small room, sitting in rows and being lectured at. The NCT course has only eight couples in attendance, and is much, much more interactive. No roleplaying yet, but a lot of groupwork. Mostly we get divided into MUMS and DADS, and set a little exercise which is nominally about brainstorming on to a flipchart, but really just an excuse for Us to giggle about how little our partners know about childbirth, and for Them to complain about having to put up with Us being moany and useless, and not getting enough sex. Each group then puts the right answers on the flipchart (Us: tiredness, anxiety, discomfort; Them: frustration, anxiety, support), and we re-assemble to admire each other’s work.

Fortunately I am no stranger to being the hippiest girl in class, and by the end of the day I remained unnetworked, having raised one eyebrow too many in response to the others advocating Gina Ford and being far more relaxed about formula feeding than I am. Luckily, our extremely personable and competent teacher is also anti-Gina and pro-breastmilk, which makes me feel like the class swot. Again, this is not an unfamiliar sensation.

The personable and competent teacher is a fount of interesting statistics, and tells us that only 20% of couples say that their relationship is improved by the birth of their first baby. As with nappies, breastfeeding, sleeping arrangements, and a million other areas of controversy, I am determined to be in the minority. Pete and I are good communicators, we share burdens well, we know how to have a good time, and we’re committed to Project Baby such that we don’t worry so much about how awful it’s all going to be, but think about ways of enjoying it and making it not awful. We appear to live in a culture where childrearing is seen as more than just a challenge, but as a truly dreadful experience, the effects of which we should seek to minimise as far as possible. Once again, I ask: so what’s the point of having a baby, then?

Meanwhile, Teach has set us some homework. Each couple had to pick a form of pain relief during labour, and present a short piece of feedback about it at the next session. We didn’t speak up soon enough, and got stuck with hypnobirthing, which is good in a way because we know nothing about it, so it will be more interesting than researching entonox or epidurals. Despite what you might think, I’m not a big fan of such apparently new-age tree-hugging alternative therapy nonsense [see oft repeated anecdote about the acupunturist who diagnosed me as having a liver complaint based on me giving my favourite colour as green]. To my surprise, preliminary reading around the subject of hypnobirthing actually makes it seem quite appealing. It’s not all about you are feeling sleepy; it’s more to do with being well-informed, and preparing yourself positively for labour, so that you can let go on every level, and deal with the physical process rather than focusing on an unnecessary fight-or-flight response. This makes sense.