Do not go gentle into that good night

One of the biggest problems with the third trimester is the complete lack of sleep. I appreciate the dress rehearsal for when the bump comes screaming into my world. However, all the baby books currently tell me that I am supposed to be resting before labour and getting as much sleep as I can - clearly this was written by a different author to the one that tells you that you will manage 90 mins, maximum, without needing the loo at any time of day or night.

One of the books I have suggests that you take afternoon naps. Great idea, except that during nap time this afternoon I had a one hour conference call with our Head of Indonesia - I doubt he would have taken me dropping off mid conversation all that well. Although I doubt what I was saying was all that interesting.

Sleeping on my back is out (cuts of blood supply to the baby and is a bit like sleeping with a large laptop on your front). Sleeping on my side is fine, except it gives bump something nice and hard to kick against (the mattress) with me in between feeling more beaten up than usual. Were I to be breeding the next Becks, oh god forbid, then it would be perfect, but it does not make mummy sleep any better.

So I spend most of my nights now in a semi-coma, with exhaustion being the only thing that finally brings me to something resembling slumber. When I get there, I want to stay there.

Which led to a particularly testy exchange with the Boy this morning. I have been rather proud of the fact that while my other similarly pregnant friends have kicked boyfriends and husbands onto the sofa or spare room, I continue to allow my restless slumber to be shared by the Boy. Until last night. Apparently I snore (I always have, he knew what he was marrying). However last night he felt compelled to gently shake me awake each time. Of course, sleep is such a rare event and getting to sleep so hard that what I need in the middle of the night is to be woken up a few times by the father of my unborn.

I made it clear, perhaps a bit too clear, in the car on the way to work that he will just have to put up with it for the next two months and if he dare wake me again I will resort to physical harm.

He is off on a business trip tomorrow for two weeks anyway, and the cat doesn't seem to care if I snore or not.

Pees in a pot (this post not for the squeamish)

Up until now my visits to see Dr D have been all rather normal, fun even. We have our little routine whereby he checks me out, cracks a joke, complains about the hideous overcrowding in HK hospitals due to the volume of mothers coming from mainland China to have their babies here, prods and pokes, tells me I am doing well and sends me on my way.

The whole process has been mercifully free of icky stuff. Other than an injection in my bum, one blood test, and the plastic car jack (ladies who have pap smears will know to what I refer), it's all been quite straight forward. I have been particularly impressed by the lack of giving "samples". It would appear that along with being able to keep babies alive after 28 weeks, medical science has given us the far more important, to my mind, invention of a small stick of card upon which one pees to have your pee checked for glucose, or hormones or something (I have actually never asked what it is for). This makes the whole process surprisingly acceptable - no danger of spillage, no need to carry a warm pot of pee back through reception to the nurse. It is quick, discrete, and very 21st century.

Until today. I went to see Dr D and was horrified to be handed a small plastic pot by the receptionist rather than the usual strip of card. Aghast I asked what she had given this to me for. The receptionist, looking at me as if I was mad (with hindsight it was a bit of a stupid question when presented with a pot clearly designed to hold pee) and told me that now I was late in my pregnancy they request a pot for a more accurate test. I stood there looking at it with shock. The one and only time I have ever had to do this before had been in the comfort of my own home and with the aid of a large jug. This was a tiny pot, that I had to pee into with accuracy - missing the pot was too horrible to contemplate as I had ducked out of work for half an hour - via a part of me that has been completely obscured by the bump for the last few weeks, in a public loo.

I stomped off to the loo. Selected one far away from the door (I had enough performance anxiety as it was without needing to worry about anyone hearing me) and got on with it. In the end, I admit, I was very proud. Completely accurate aim and not a hint of spillage. I have mastered the technique at the first go.

I later had blood taken (I faint at the sight of needles) and it was brought home to me that if I feel a sense of indignity at having to pee in a small plastic pot or having a few mils of blood taken then the labour will give me post traumatic stress. As if I wasn't scared enough of the whole process anyway.

I'm in the mood for dancing

Last night I went, with the Boy and about 20 friends, the the yacht club ball. It sounds far grander than it is. If the truth be known, I'm not much of a fan. The times I have gone I tend to spend most of the evening wandering around wondering where the party is. If it were not for my fabulous friends making it great fun (and couldn't we do that more cheaply in a nightclub somewhere?) I probably wouldn't bother to go. However, the Boy decided that we needed to be more sociable this year, due to impending death of our social life, so tickets were bought.

Here came my first challenge. As a girlfriend (who I dragon boated with yesterday) said, I am still in a state of semi denial about the Bump, so it came as no surprise that I ended up at 6pm last night looking at my wardrobe while various naughty four letter words ran through my head. Being in HK, I am blessed with a slightly larger number of party frocks than I was in the UK, but none are designed to accomodate an extra few kilos of bump stuck on my front. However many times I skimmed through the wardrobe, nothing seemed to get any bigger, however hard I willed it. Until, wonder of wonders, I came across a very stretchy dress I bought in a dingy shop in Oxford about 12 years ago for a cocktail party when still an impoverished student. It is a chong sam in design, but made from lovely dark blue unfeasibly stretchy material. It worked like a dream, except that heavily pregnant women probably shouldn't wear dresses with splits up to the thigh on each side, that hug every curve (leading to a comment from a drunken kilt-wearing twit later that I had "Nice bumps, all three of them").

Then came the choice for shoes. Of course I am supposed to wear flat shoes blah blah blah. So I went for 6 inch heels with a 1 inch platform Kors hooker shoes (they do what they say on the tin). I looked a lot like a lady of the night in Saigon circa 1920, except bigger.

The ball itself was the first time the Bump had been taken dancing. I love dancing, I do it exceptionally badly, but love it. However, because of my uncoordinated gait, I tend to have to get very drunk to dance. Hence I have not done it for 7 months. I took to the floor with a few rowing friends, tottering in my very high heels. A cover band playing Nickelback was probably, with hindsight, not the easiest place to start. A bit of gentle Sinatra while being supported by the Boy may have been better, but never being one to pass up a challenge I strode purposefully onto the dance floor.

To find my centre of gravity has changed, my muscles now wobble, and shoes that were hard to dance in before I was pregnant turned into torture instruments. A couple of my friends with whom I was dancing also attended the same pole dancing classes I did, so we tried our best "Pamela" struts and dips, but however hard I tried I had about as much coordination as, well, the Boy does. But, it was the ball, and everyone was too drunk to remember so I wobbled (only had to be caught once) through bad cover versions of the Stones, U2 and other soft rock music. The bump kicked along, and seems to like loud music, and I had a brilliant time.

And today I am the only person I know who went who doesn't have a hangover. There are some benefits to the Bump!

Waddling along

I had my first training waddle this morning. I got up early, donned my usual running garb, grabbed the ipod and set off on my former running route.

It just felt so very wrong.

For a start, walking to music is pointless. You are never in time and the beat is always too fast. I tried everything - 80s cheese, 90s indie, even a chilled out Buddha Bar mix, but nothing had the right velocity for waddling at speed.

Then there was the humiliation of people jogging past me. It's not that I am competitive or anything, but I hate someone overtaking me. Every time someone did I would find myself speeding up into a jog, until my muscles reminded me why I had to walk in the first place.

Finally, I have become one of the group of walkers who, in my area, tend to be either grossly overweight bankers walking with their lithe young girlfriends (reminding me of a story from LottieP about Mrs Merton interviewing Paul Daniels and Debbie McGee and asking "So what first attracted you to the millionaire Paul Daniels?), or old Chinese ladies with a bit of a stoop. Is this what the next 9 weeks holds for me? If so, where can I get a lithe young man to walk with me?

Pregnancy joke (sorry Mum for the bad language)

I've spent the past few days in our Singapore office. It was the source of my only, and therefore best, come back to someone's comment about me being pregnant.

I walked over to the desk of a colleague who didn't know I was pregnant, D (male).

Me: Hello D
D: (pointing to my large belly) Fuck
Me: Yes, that's what got me into this state


OK, so it's not really all that funny. But I was quite impressed with my quick retort.

Big marathon

Paula Radcliffe won the NY marathon at the weekend. She gave birth recently too.

Flying the bump

I am on a business trip to Singapore this week. Although I travel a fair amount for my job, this is the first trip in a while and the first since bump became obvious. It was booked a few weeks ago, the company insurance has been checked and our team assistant had checked with the airline that they would take a hazardous load. All they required was a doctor's letter saying I was safe to fly. On the basis that Dr D is still encouraging me to do almost anything, he happily signed the letter.

Now, I must selfishly admit, I was rather looking forward to the trip (work aside). More so than Europe, Asia is incredibly child-centric. Being pregnant is viewed as a blessed state, and people usually bend over backwards to look after you. Asian airlines have amazing service, so what better than to be pampered and cared for in business class on the plane? Hmmm, it wasn't quite what I was expecting. Clearly the ethos is that if you are silly enough to fly when you are 30 weeks pregnant then you deserve all the inconvenience you get. It wasn't helped by the fact that I was carrying with me 120 red envelopes with reports in, ten tin cans and 2 kg of flour, two huge A1 posters, a laptop, and a magnetic dartboard (it will take me too long to explain why).

At check-in the clerk had no idea what to do with me. Once she had established I was more than 20 weeks gone, she then stumbled through a series of screens looking increasingly worried until ultimately calling her supervisor who scrolled through a few more screens and eventually allowed me to check in. They made a huge fuss, and I wouldn't have been surprised if she had insisted I stick a "fragile" sticker on the bump.

Once on the plane, I was hoping for a little special treatment. Not a lot, I am not that demanding, but maybe a hot towel, or offering to help me put my things in the overhead locker. I stumbled down the walkway, being shoved out of the way by huffy businessmen who were in a rush to get to their pre-assigned seat and sit there stationary for 4 hours. When I got onto the plane (with a helpful "mind the step" comment because us pregnant women are a bit stupid) I was shown to my seat and asked to make sure I put everything in the overhead locker. Then the stewardess walked away. The lady behind me clearly had her eye on my locker as well and started to shove as much as she could into it meaning that I would have to put my fragile lot half way down the cabin. Not one person, not a stewardess, not one of the many besuitted business men, not even the man next to me who called his children to say goodnight, offered to help me bundle my stuff into the locker.

It was just as bad getting off the plane. As is always the way, especially in business class I have found, the moment you are stationary, normally perfectly rational men in suits are shoving people out of the way to pull down their cases from the lockers. Everyone shoved and hustled past me while I tried to walk against the tide to get down my heavy bags. Again, not a single person helped me.

The same on the carousel, and with the taxi driver.

It was only when I got to the hotel that things changed. I went through check-in in super-quick time, they upgraded me to a super deluxe harbour view room, the doorman carried all my bags and the receptionist insisted, despite there being other people to check in behind me, on walking me to my room personally, checking I was OK and offering to send up a cup of herbal tea to help me sleep.

It continued this morning when I had to get a cab to another hotel for my meeting. When I got there, a doorman took all of my bags, insisted on walking me to the conference room, whereby I found 10 colleagues all more than happy to help me put up posters, climb under and lift tables, stick up dart boards, and set up for me. Then, when we had finished, I had the same number of colleagues offer to dismantle everything for me, carry it all down to my taxi, and make sure I would be OK getting to the office (one even offered to come with me and then return back to the conference afterwards).

My faith in humanity restored, I am now in the Singapore office where I have already fielded at least ten questions about why I am still wearing high heels. Different country, same bizarre ideas.