Bad news – the exhaustion has been replaced by insomnia. All week I have been awake til at least 4am, though it was 5am on Sunday and Tuesday. I’m putting it down to the stress of moving house tomorrow as Will is in charge, therefore I do not get to be a control freak. It’s disconcerting – nagging is my forte and I’m lost without it. We’re going down to the estate agents this evening to sign paperwork and pick up the keys, tomorrow I will leave our lovely De Beauvoir flat for the final time and return to our new Muswell Hill abode. Need to make the most of the 15 minute commute one last time.

Aside from the moving worry, I seem to have a whole host of baby-themed concerns buzzing round in my head in the early hours. Last night, these included:
a) how do I get a new baby in a pram down lots of steps on to a train platform?
b) how do I get a new baby in a pram up and down the escalator on the tube?
c) can I wear high heels when I’m carrying the baby or will it mean I drop it (I’m not great at balancing)?
d) how do I watch out for dog poo when I’m pushing a pram? How do I clean dog poo off pram wheels?
e) how do you get baby sick out of silk?
f) how can I justify buying the £60 sweater dress I like in American Apparel?

As you can see, it’s really serious stuff. Send help.

- Photo Memes – looooove…. ahhhh… SOB.

- John Lewis’s baby department – there is just so much stuff in there, it totally overwhelmed me and I had to be taken to Topshop to calm down.

- Glee – I have no excuse for this one and for that I am truly apologetic.

- My bank statement – “how are we going to afford a baby??!!”  and other irrational thoughts are keeping me up until the early hours.

- My tiredness – when will it stop?

- My scan photographs –  because baby is beautiful.

- Will, just not understanding me – irrational? Hormones? Moi?

Photo credit – Roadside Guitars

The staff at UCLH have really impressed me so far – everyone has been so caring, sympathetic and professional. With the exception of the the phlebotomist who I thought was scary and mean at first, but after she sang Duffy at me throughout my last blood test I realise she’s just pleasantly nuts. Plus, if I can’t feel her taking my blood, she must be good. So every trip to the hospital right now feels to me like a holiday to EuroDisney, including the waiting (though I make this worse myself by insisting on being half an hour early to every appointment).

It’s mandatory to have two doctors present at your ‘milestone’ ultrasounds at UCH (is this what happens in other hospitals?) both confirming the health of baby, and my pair of doctors yesterday were great. According to them our baby is beautiful and perfect, music to our ears. They really took their time showing us different parts of baby, and we saw 10 fingers, 10 toes, a brain, eyes with lenses, lips, nose, ears, spine, legs, arms, the heart (157 bpm), a bladder and stomach… in short, everything is where it should be.

Our due date has been slightly adjusted to 21st July, making it pretty much guaranteed that baby will make an appearance on my 25th birthday (25th July), because I’m not good at sharing and Karma hates me like that.

Surprisingly they were able to take a guess at the sex of baby… it’s a GIRL! At least they are 60-70% sure, not enough for me to be calling baby ’she’ or buying pink stuff, but good to know. Of course I would be happy either way but I was sure I could feel girl vibes from my uterus. And everyone knows mum’n'daughter matching outfits are cute

Roll on 21st July… I can’t wait to meet our baby.

I don’t remember a great deal of last New Years Eve. I know it began with my gorgeous friend Abi coming over to the Studio flat Will and I called home in Shoreditch, and we spent the first part of the evening putting out make-up on and drinking the local newsagent’s best sparkling wine. I remember being amazed and jealous that Abi’s thighs didn’t touch at the top and vowing then to go on a diet in 2009 (I went on to lose 35lb, however my damn thighs still touch at the top). We ate pizza, listened to music and got a cab at 10 to my husband’s club for a night of electro and dancing.

Once there I recall parts of 2ManyDJs at midnight, but mostly my memory fails… I think we spent the night flitting between the dressing room and backstage areas and not listening to much more music, before crawling home at around 7am. I believe a lot of  champagne was involved.

This year was totally different. I spent the whole day preparing by sleeping, as I knew it would be a late night (and these days anything after 9pm counts as a late night). I’ve been feeling really pale the last few weeks so I gave myself a fake tan along with a hair treatment and facemask. I blowdried my hair and picked out an outfit that I hoped would make it obvious I was pregnant rather than fat.

We left the house at 6pm for dinner at Nobu with my husband’s german work colleagues and had an amazing dinner of yellowfin tuna, rock shrimp tempura, black cod miso and wagyu beef (this was following some intense googling of ‘is sushi safe for pregnant women’. Short answer, due to UK food safety regs: YES, thank goodness). I even allowed myself to have a small glass of wine and a non-alcoholic Mojito. I was really looking forward to seeing some famous faces at the restaurant, but the most famous people there were the DJs we were eating with. I would rather have seen a Sugababe or Girl Aloud, techno DJs mean nothing to me and I have been known to offend them with my ignorance of their trade.

We shot off to the club for opening, and I had a nice long sit down before the midnight count down. Midnight came and went with just enough champagne to wet my lips, a smooch with Will and I was in a cab by 12.10 and home by 12.30 where I actually crawled into bed with a hot water bottle and some cocoa.

I’m still slightly terrified that next New Year’s Eve I will almost certainly be at home with baby… though I don’t think I’ll miss the busy clubs and 7am bedtimes this is what I have been doing for the last 7 years. Saying that, I think I’ll be happy as long as there is champagne at some point in the evening.

Not much difference between this and the 10+4 belly, but I really have to stop wearing exercise pants. They aren’t sexy.

I was wrong when I thought I would be totally laid back about this pregnancy. Every twinge, every waning symptom has me running to Google and re-testing with my pee sticks, or calling NHS direct in a state of panic.

Our booking in appointment at UCH was fantastic. We were allocated a student midwife, which I was dubious of at first, but she was just lovely and able to answer our questions well. I mentioned to her the dropping off of my painful boobs (I’m able to lie on my stomach again, total revelation) as well as a faint pregnancy test (why? Why? Why? have I still been testing at 10 weeks pregnant? All credit to the midwives at UCH who they didn’t ask this question, I sure as hell would have). Still, the fact that the line was a lot weaker than my earlier tests worried me horribly.

They took my worries seriously and marched me down to the Early Pregnancy Unit for a scan. Internet, we have a baby:

It has arms and legs that were moving! A head! An umbilical cord! And what looks like a football, but is apparently a yolk.

I would like to write about how the tiredness that has taken over my life is still… well, taking over my life, but the happiness is overriding that.

So here’s the belly at 10 weeks 4 days. There’s the start of something baby in there, but I would like to know when this mysterious ‘glow’ will arrive. Right now all I want to do is sleep and vomit.

I am scared that we might dislodge the baby.

True story :/

In other news, 8 weeks today!

Nobody told me about the bone-numbing tiredness, the total fatigue that would have me sleeping at my desk if I could. I didn’t know about the constipation, that morning sickness could be not only in the morning but all day (and night). I didn’t know that I would lose weight, having gone off all food (apart from cheese straws), and that my husband would force feed me my 5 a day. I didn’t anticipate my boobs to hurt SO MUCH that every time I roll over in bed I would wince. And most importantly, I didn’t know how badly I would suffer with the worry that something, anything, could go wrong at any moment.

Last week I noticed a drop-off in my symptoms, and Googling this at 2am was not a good idea. I managed to get an emergency appointment with my GP the next morning, and she decided that this, coupled with my cramps (which have been consistent the last three weeks) warranted an early scan the next day. If I said I was terrified that would have been an understatement.

We went off to hospital the next day with a full bladder, where horrendously they were running half an hour late. I have never ever needed to pee so badly in my entire life. When we were finally called in, the sonographer couldn’t find anything because my bladder was too big! I had to half empty it for another try, but still nothing, so I then had to empty it completely for an internal scan.

Our baby looked amazing. Measuring slightly small for our dates (7+2), they estimated the baby to be closer to 6+4, but this date will be re-estimated at my next scan on 4th January. Everything was perfect. Baby is in the right place, there is a healthy flickering heartbeat and my womb and ovaries are totally normal.

And to quash my worrying further, yesterday my symptoms came back with a vengance.

Relief.