half full

29 weeks + 2 days. 9 weeks in hospital tomorrow. 63 days. If all goes well, another 7 weeks in here to go. Mental. Bizarro. Weird. These are the words Brian and I use on the phone when discussing these numbers.

I am thinking this morning about how different two days can be.

Two days ago I got a second round of steroid injections. They give these to speed up the baby’s lung development, so that if it is born early it will find it easier to breathe deep and cry loud. So they are a good thing. But they are also a bitch. Firstly they hurt like hell, burning and cramping in my (now quite ample!) bum cheek, travelling down to my toes. Right hand side at 11am, left at 11pm. On them, I do not improve my athletic prowess or my weight lifting abilities. My legs do not run faster. But my brain does. At 11am I know I am looking down the barrel of 24hours of twitchy, jumpy sleeplessness. I will be a tired tired carcass with a jackrabbit brain.

The following day I wake with cheeks the colour of a beetroot and funny spider veins running across my chest and cheeks. They remind me of the tiny red spiders that used to live under the paint cracks in our garden wall. I loved to pick a clump of paint off to unearth a wee nest of them and then pop them under my thumb with an orange smudge on the white wall. My chest looks like this.

I am roasting hot, but also goose bump shivery. I have funny heartburn pains in my chest and food just sits in my tummy. It is a blessing to reach the following evening and the knowledge that the drugs have worn off enough to let me sleep. I sleep deep, waking only once to a now familiar warm gush of a bleed. But it is fine, I am used to it, the nurse and I listen to my baby’s ever thumping heart and I fall back easily again.

And then this morning I awake refreshed. At 7am, rather than the usual 6 – the nurse is running late. And I think what a blessing to be woken every morning by someone who says to you – ‘Good morning Layla – would you like to hear your baby’s heart beat?’

The sun creeps and then streams in my window and catches the orange tulips and dusky roses and sprigs of rosemary Louise has brought me. I am no longer a beetroot. I eat breakfast on facetime with the kids. They have their pink yoghurt and oats and I have my cold toast and an egg. Of which I am now very fond. I am disappointed when the toast is warm now. I like it rubbery. A few weeks ago, after a tough few days and an unsettling room change I shed a disproportionate number of big blubbery tears when they forgot my egg. But we’ll keep that between ourselves.

The kids come and visit and we chat and I hear their news and rub noses and do puzzles and play cards. I kiss my husband. We go out to eat and we feel like a family for the first time in months. We decide unanimously that it will be a boy. And that we will get a dog. And also maybe a cat. And a trampoline.

I go to sleep that evening with the baby’s heart beat in my ears, the remnants of the kids finger tips on my belly and Brian’s kiss on my lips. Glass. Half. Full.