My biggest news ever

I'm breathing a sigh of relief that I can tell the world my (little) big secret, finally- you may have noticed I've not been around as much lately, and that I haven't been doing a lot in the way of writing, either.

Well, I _do_ have a good reason, and this is it- I'm having a baby!

It's due on November 17th, so I have six more months to go (unless the wee tacker takes after his/her ma, and decides to come a month early...)

Anyway- nobody told me my brain was going to go to mush when I got pregnant. Nobody told me I'd be collapsing on the couch at 4pm every afternoon, staring mindlessly at Antiques Roadshow reruns instead of writing. Really, I haven't had many more big symptoms than the tiredness, though I've just started getting sick in the last week or so. But the tiredness is all consuming, and I had no idea how it was going to affect me and my writing.

This is a blog about writing, of course, and I do have an interesting observation or two about pregnancy and writing. First, it's made me look at my characters and my story in all sorts of different ways. My story is about a guy who goes away to war, leaving behind his childhood sweetheart, and comes home to find she's died in childbirth. I've been identifying a lot more with Kit lately, now that I really understand what it's like to know your whole life is going to change, and to feel that hope.

Which leads me to my second observation- while all this is going on, it's an all-consuming thing, body and mind. As a strange result, while I've been better able to get inside Kit's head, I've been all but shut out of Bill's, because I'm almost too inside my own mind (for once) to think like him. It makes me realise what an all-consuming process writing actually is- almost exactly like being pregnant, just that you're infused with the characters and the world.

Hard to do both at the same time. However, I'm feeling VERY determined to knock BTL into shape before I have the baby, because I know how hard it'll be to get anything done after that. So, we'll see what happens in the next few months. Unfortunately we've had to cancel the holiday to Turkey and Italy (you can't count how many people told me that I'd get pregnant as soon as I booked the holiday- we'd been trying to conceive for two long, tough years and were on the verge of losing hope).

So- from here on, it's fingers crossed that everything will keep going as well as it has been so far (with the exception of ending up in the hospital with my nut allergy at 7 weeks, which was beyond scary). We had the nuchal translucency scan on Saturday- combined with blood tests, mother's details (weight, race, history of smoking/ drinking/ drugs), they measure the fluid width at the back of the baby's neck, and all those details come together to provide a risk level for Downs Syndrome and other chromosomal disorders. A result of 1 in 300 (that's the risk of a disorder) or higher (I mean 1:400, 1:500 etc) is considered low risk, and very good. Well, mine was 1 in 17000! That's about as low as it gets. We were very pleased.

We were also very pleased to see the baby behaving just as it has in the last three scans- the one word that comes to mind is cheeky. It's an active little bugger, kicking and squirming, bouncing around, swallowing, playing with the umbilical cord, with a great heartbeat of 152 per minute. I have a feeling my ribs are going to be black and blue once it gets a bit bigger! I have a few little ultrasound pics to put up:

First is the standard side view- head on the right, bottom on the left (legs not visible). The baby is facing up, and you can see the nose and mouth in profile (you can also see the brain inside the skull!). The straight bit with the three or four parallel lines hovering above the body is the umbilical cord.


Second is something I couldn't believe I was seeing- they can do a cross-section view of the baby, looking inside at the heart, the stomach, the kidneys and so on. In this photo, on the left, you can see the cross section of the hand from above- four little fingers and a wee thumb on the right (this kid poses for photographs, by the way- always in the right position)


Lastly, I know this looks like an alien if you haven't seen the live footage, but it doesn't matter, because it's awesome- it's a 3D rendering of the baby from above. At the top is the top of the head, and running from there down you can see the nose, the mouth, then the body, including the umbilical cord. I can't believe how amazing technology is these days.


By the way, for those of you who may be worried, I'm not going to cover the blog in a deluge of baby news every day (g). I'll do occasional updates, but I'm here to talk writing. I'm sure I'll have some interesting revelations about the writing process as I struggle to keep it up with this new challenge.