Baby Bump: {Weeks 30 - 33)

 

It's been forever since I posted a bump update (six weeks to be exact!), so I thought I'd do weeks 30 to 33 all in one go! These four weeks were quite easily the four most stressful weeks of my life to date. I've said it before and I'll say it again: managing deadlines and planning a wedding while in your third trimester is not easy. When we first got engaged, we decided on a small, intimate ceremony with no more than about 50 of our closest friends and family. We were beyond thrilled when we found our home in Noordhoek, because it's literally down the road from one of the wedding venues we'd looked at, but it had a bigger garden, better view and it was free (well, apart from our monthly rent, but you get the picture). Once we discovered that we were expecting, we were even more determined to have the ceremony and a small reception at home - only this time, we cut our guest list by a whopping 20 people (there's nothing quite like a baby on the way to force you to reassess your priorities and budget!) We thought we were doing ourselves a massive favour by having our ceremony and reception at home - little did we know! There are many, many perks to having your wedding at home (you save on venue costs, a more welcoming and homely atmosphere - well, duh! - magical memories every time you set foot into your back garden, among many others...), but hiring a venue also makes your life that much easier. Hubby spent an inordinate amount of time in the garden in the months leading up to the wedding, and the final week before our big day was spent coming to grips with a few last-minute projects: setting up lights, hanging bunting, mowing the lawn, trimming the hedges, neatening the edges of the garden beds... Not to mention preparing the house for guests and ensuring that it looked half-decent on the big day. Don't be fooled: ensuring that your house is spotless whilst still living in it is near impossible. Add into that equation a handful of house guests... a very stressful goal, to say the least! Regardless of how many helpers your may have, you never feel as though the house is quite clean enough, but there comes a point where you just have to let go... I did (eventually) and our day was utterly magical. I wouldn't change it for the world! 

The most difficult aspect for me, though, was trying to keep relatively calm and stress-free during this whole process - and doing so mainly for little Bean. I've read numerous books and articles on the effects of stress on your unborn baby, so I've really been trying to breathe and keep calm during this pregnancy. However, as it turns out, for a highly-stressed person such as myself, this isn't the easiest task on the planet and I've felt so guilty for submitting our poor baby to all my stress-induced mood swings and hormonal outbursts. I used these situations as opportunities to practice the breathing exercises I learnt on our ante-natal course - sometimes successfully, and at other times, not so much! I'm now nearing my 36th week of pregnancy and I've so enjoyed having some time off to do absolutely nothing, with no deadlines or wedding preparations to speak of. Pure bliss! I've felt a definite change in Bean's movements, too - he's getting less hiccups (I started noticing a link between my mood swings and his hiccups at around 32 weeks - every emotional outburst on my part was followed by hiccups on Bean's part - that's one way to put your mom on a guilt trip and get her to stop freaking out!), and seems more calm these days... although he's still moving as much as he did before, his movements seem to be less frantic and violent, and have become more gentle rolls. This could, of course, be down to the fact that he now weighs around 2,5kgs and is definitely running out of space in there, but either way, it feels good to be able to relax and know that little Bean is feeling safe and content, too.