Hi D Ho and welcome to the final pregnancy update for baby #2 – week 40! At this stage baby is the size of …a baby! The average baby apparently weighs 7.5 Lbs at this point and is about the size of a small pumpkin.

Its recommended to gain between 25 and 35 Lbs during pregnancy, a little more if you’re underweight to begin with and a little less if you were overweight. With baby #1 I put on 45 Lbs in total over the pregnancy, I didn’t notice it creeping up at the time until it was too late. This time around I’ve put on 26 Lbs – a little less than 20 Lbs in the difference between pregnancies and you can really see the impact in the photos now. I’m really delighted to see all the effort I put in pay off.

On my Guess Date (babies due date but I prefer guess date as babies generally are not very good time keepers 🙂 ) I treated myself to a trip to the hairdressers (have to look good for those first few baby photos!) and a little shopping. I finally bought one of those belly support bands – I can’t believe at 40 weeks pregnant with my second baby I finally bought my first one of these. The support band definitely provided some much needed help to ease my aches and pains!

At Pilates class that evening everyone wished me best of luck but I was so sure that this baby wasn’t coming for a least another week that I kept telling everyone I’d see them next week. Later on Dear Husband and I went to our local indian restaurant. We ordered what appeared to be some of the hottest times on the menu (Chicken Jalfrezi and the Chicken Chilli Masala). The waiter gave us that look of “your never going to handle this” and warned us that there were very hot and asked were we sure we wanted to order them, but we braved ahead. The meal was lovely – not burn the mouth of off you face sweating hot but nicely hot and spicy.

The Indian must have worked because on Thursday I started to get dull period pains, not coming and going but constantly there. Friday I was supposed to meet a friend for coffee but it would have been an hour and a half round trip in the car and I started to feel like I shouldn’t make that drive on my own. Tightenings were coming and going but nothing regular or very strong. The tightenings continued on Saturday and after Little Man went to bed I went for a lovely bath – as soon as I got out I realised that the tightenings were getting stronger. DH and I watched TV for a bit and the tightenings ramped up to every 5 minutes or so by bedtime. We had been in touch with our doula who recommend at this stage to go to bed and try and get some rest, if the tightenings were so strong that I couldn’t sleep then we would need to re-asses.

I managed to sleep for a bit, kind of dozing between contractions until 3am, at this point I woke DH to get him to put on my TENs machine. The TENs gave me the relieve I needed to doze for another little bit. I had hoped I’d be able to sleep till 6 am to let everyone get some rest however around 4am I noticed that the contractions were now coming every 2.5 – 3 minutes. I was so comfy in bed at this stage that I really didn’t want to move but thought that it was probably time to check in with our Doula again. As this was my second baby our Doula thought it was best to go straight to hospital as apparently second babies can come quickly. We quietly packed up our bits and pieces, and DH cooked some sausage rolls to bring with us. We filled Granny in on the plan as she was looking after our little man for us and before we left we went in to Little Man to tell him what was happening, he was so excited, it was so lovely to see! Getting out of the house seemed to take forever but we finally got on the road for our 40 minute journey to the hospital. I had been apprehensive of the car journey but I need not have worried as it was surprising ok although I never managed to eat any of the sausage rolls :-).

We arrived at the hospital at 6 am and 12 hours later at 6.03pm our beautiful daughter was born weighing 8Lbs 14 oz (a little bigger than that 7.5 Lbs pumpkin baby that we have been tracking all along). Our Doula was absolutely fantastic and she helped me to achieve the VBAC natural birth I wanted using only my TENs machine and Gas and Air for pain relief. Little Ladies birth was such a positive birth experience compared to my first and best of all we were released from hospital the next day less than 18 hours after she came into this world!

So thats my final pregnancy update for baby #2, Little Lady and I have been doing great since we came home. We have all truly fallen in love with her.

I’ll write a separate post on her labour and delivery and you can look forward to lots of baby updates from here!

Thanks for sharing our pregnancy journey, E xxx