Being super-busy this week I frustratingly haven’t found the time to write a new blog post, but my impatience to try and get something out there reminded me of an article I wrote on my old blog around this time last year. So here it is – a lot has changed since then!
I am the most impatient person that I know.
Christmas Eve = Nightmare. Birthday on a Monday? Let’s start celebrating on the Friday. Waiting for a bus = Don’t even get me started.
The day the clocks go forward is my favourite day of the year –
“Everything’s gonna be happening an hour sooner…?! Fantastic!”
However at the moment I’m experiencing a different level of impatience, and one that can be a real struggle to control.
Waiting for the baby.
We found out that we were expecting back in July 2009. Eight whole months ago. To the average person, eight months lasts around 32 weeks, or about 224 days. To me eight months can be roughly translated as a lifetime. Just writing “224 days” made me break out into a cold sweat.
And the pregnancy is then filled with a number of mini impatience scenarios – a myriad of targets and dates to work towards, all of which are just that little bit too far away, and all measured in actual periods of time to boot.
The 8 WEEK scan. The 12 WEEK scan. The 20 WEEK scan.
Or as I think of them – the 4 WEEK wait, the other 4 WEEK wait, and the 8 WEEK wait.
And then from 20 weeks onwards – the 19 WEEK wait – brilliant.
Now as I was born without an ounce of patience in my body, this presented a series of challenging situations, some of which were preceded by sleepless nights, pacing around the house and arriving at hospitals over an hour early, not to mention the chewed nails and endless cups of tea.
But after the 20 week scan, something odd happened. We knew it was a boy, and we knew he was due on 14th April, the sonographer told us everything was looking good and we walked out of St Peters hospital beaming.
Then we got home, and armed with a couple of very fattening Gregg’s Chicken Bloomers and a KitKat, started working out how much we had to do.
Paint the nursery. Buy furniture. Buy clothes. Buy a bloody tumble dryer. Start saving money like, yesterday. Start stocking up on nappies. Book the NCT classes. Book the NHS classes. Look at pushchairs, car seats, prams, cots, Moses baskets. Look into Maternity Leave, Paternity Leave, child allowance, tax benefits. Bunting, teddies, baby monitors and some bizarre sling device that I can’t figure out.
And as I finished that last stick of KitKat, I thought –
“This baby can take as long as he likes…”
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