petite anglaise

In the weeks leading up to our second ultrasound scan, lots of people began asking me whether we’d be in favour of taking a closer look at baby’s undercarriage to determine its sex.

This is something I’d studiously avoided the first time around, allowing Tadpole to creep up on me by stealth. I was hankering after a little girl, but knew that whoever popped out (oh, if only that were an accurate verb, it makes it sound so much easier than the fourteen hour marathon her birth really was) would instantly steal my heart.

Despite an overwhelming intuitive feeling that the inhabitant of my womb was a boy this time around, I found myself, once again, hoping for a girl. The official reason I gave, when pressed for justification, was that I’m not a big fan of golden showers. I’ve heard several horror stories – from reliable sources – about boy infants and their fountain-like abilities during nappy change time and decided this was not something I felt the need to experience.

But – joking aside – the real reason was that I have little firsthand knowledge of what makes small boys tick.

I grew up with two younger sisters, you see, and although I actually have twin brothers as well, we didn’t meet until I was almost thirty and they were in their late teens. Small boys are therefore something of an unknown quantity to me and preferring the idea of a daughter over a son was probably a case of ‘better the devil you know’.

Observing friends of mine with their sons from a safe distance, I’ve often found their levels of boisterousness overwhelming. And I’ve noticed other differences too. The way infant males tend to cling to their mothers, for example, often quite literally, wrapping themselves around their mummy’s legs like bindweed when they are going through the separation anxiety stage.

The Boy was adamant that he wanted to find out the sex of our baby at the second ultrasound scan, and I decided doing things differently this time was a good way to ring the changes, so we informed the doctor of this just as she was noisily squirting a huge quantity of lube onto my belly. She nodded, but explained that she’d be taking all the usual second scan measurements first, and would look at the genitalia afterwards.

And by the time she got to the money shot, I have to admit that I was so preoccupied with the baby’s SIZE that all gender-related considerations had taken a back seat.

Baby’s estimated weight – at 22 weeks – was 570g. I happened to know for a fact that the average weight at this stage tends to be more like 430g, meaning that baby was about two weeks ahead of him/herself. The head, femur and foot measurements were all equally supersized, placing baby in the 90th percentile. How on earth, I began to wonder, eyes watering in premature anticipation, was I ever going to get this baby out of my womb without breaking my pelvis in two?

And then there it was, the turtle-like outline on the ultrasound screen that clearly indicated that my (and the Boy’s) intuition had been correct. Le bébé is indeed a he, just as we’d both suspected.

A few days later, I find I’m getting used to the idea of male offspring and I even bought a delightful blue robot-print babygro in the sales, by way of celebration.

But as for the size issue, my eyes still water every time I allow myself to think about that.

Oh, boy.

My first trimester blues (and headaches, and tummy aches, and indigestion) began to fade once I’d got the first three and a half months behind me. Now, just clear of the halfway mark, I’m starting to feel much more energetic and an awful lot happier, something for which I suspect The Boy is just as grateful as I am.

The fun part of pregnancy – feeling baby’s movements – began much earlier this time around. With Tadpole, I remember feeling the first flutters while wallowing in the full-length bath (oh the luxury! If only Parisian apartments had proper baths!) at my parents’ place on New Year’s Eve 2002, helpful timing which conveniently allows me to date the event with some accuracy. But I’d barely passed the three month mark with #2 when I detected the first twists, kicks and flutters. I think there are several reasons for this. First of all, I knew what to look for (and, above all, knew better than to confuse these faint manifestations of life within with more prosaic complaints, such as the aforementioned indigestion). Secondly, my tummy ‘popped’ much earlier this time around, letting it all hang out, as it were, so that, to my mind, I already look more like a woman nearing the end of her sixth month. And, last of all, the first scan showed that, this time, the placenta is placed towards my back, effectively removing a potential frontal shock absorber from the equation.

But at first, whenever I sought Tadpole or The Boy’s hand and plonked it across my bare belly so that they could share the spooky internal thudding sensations with me, baby invariably stopped moving, prompting sceptical looks from The Boy and impatient scowls from Tadpole. Her attempts to spur baby into action – mostly by shouting things into my tummy button as though it were a megaphone – were futile and, for a while afterwards, she couldn’t be prevailed upon come and touch my belly at all. ‘No thank you, mummy,’ she would reply firmly. ‘It never works.’ Or ‘it’s too boring.’

But a couple of weeks ago the baby got a whole lot more active, enjoying long bouts of hiccups and putting a lot more oomph into those kicks and punches, causing visible tremors. So now my belly is providing free, wholesome entertainment for the entire family. Who needs a TV?

I still have some unspeakably annoying little pregnancy-related complaints – nothing, I realise, compared to the real medical complications some unfortunate folks suffer from – most of which come into full force shortly before bedtime. Late in the evening, my skin often begins to itch ferociously, causing me to scratch up a storm, remove my bra (the main culprit, often not helped by the fact that stray food particles seem to find their way into the cleft between my newly ample bosoms at dinnertime) and wriggle about on the sofa like a woman possessed. From what I’ve been able to glean online, it’s a hormonal thing, and no amount of soaking in emollient baths seems to make a blind bit of difference. There’s no alternative, I fear, but to scratch and bear it.

Another complaint I often suffer from at bedtime is what I call ‘fidgety leg syndrome’. Suddenly there is no comfortable position and I have to keep moving my legs in order to avoid a kind of dull, heavy aching. Perhaps I have finally succumbed to the famous French malady known as ‘heavy legs’ or jambes lourdes which I hitherto assumed to be a fictitious complaint. Whatever it is, it’s unbelievably annoying and calls to mind those episodes of Grey’s Anatomy or Dr House where a healthy patient tries to convince the doctors that he wants to have his legs removed because of a phantom pain.

Last but not least, there are the increased levels of clumsiness to contend with, which have seen me head-butting open kitchen cupboards, stubbing my toes and causing myself all manner of minor injuries. In today’s example of cack-handedness, I managed to gash my forearm open while attempting to open a parcel from DHL with a pair of not particularly sharp scissors, narrowly missing a major artery. This resulted in a rather surreal scene in which I found myself holding the offending arm above my head, blood slowly trickling down my arm, while I one-handedly googled “how do I know if I need stitches?”