Pregnancy & Baby 

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Anastasia’s pregnancy diary – weeks 36–38

Anastasia and her husband, Nick, have been married for three years and are expecting their first baby in a few weeks

Nearing the home stretch

I can almost hear my skin stretching. Every time I think I can’t get any bigger, I get bigger. My friends are beginning to say, ‘There’s no way that baby’s making it to the due date…’ which, of course, only increases my expectation that perhaps this pregnancy won’t last the full 40 weeks. The advantages to this are that an early baby is a smaller baby, decreasing the chances of an OUCH-sized head attached to a 10lb body. Also, the earlier it comes out, the less my tummy has to expand. I read that a baby, after 37 weeks, gains half a pound a week. Relatively speaking, that’s a hell of a lot. Come on, baby.

Having said that, there’s a real magic in this time I have alone with Nick. We’re aware of the fact that soon everything is going to change. It will never be ‘just us’ as we have lived for the past five years. Even when the sprout is 35 years old, we’ll be worried about him or her. Someday soon we will be parents and there’s no retreat from that. We’re making the most of this precious time. Nick has been brilliant about working ‘normal’ hours for the first time in his life. We’ve gone out to dinner nearly every night, spent the day at the Tate Modern, gone to the cinema . . . in short, we’re treating ourselves and doing the things that our friends with children warn us we’ll never do again. (Of course, we don’t believe them.)

My bag of tricks

Suddenly I’m obsessed with packing my hospital bag. You’d think this would be a ten-minute distraction, especially for someone who has travelled as much as I have, someone who can pack for two weeks in Thailand in five minutes flat. But the hospital bag is a completely different animal. Once again, information overload means that I have no less than six separate lists, either gathered from my NCT class, ripped out of magazines or distributed by the hospital itself.

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