At 1 month I can already.....

1. Open my eyes wide open and focus on something

2. Throw a total tantrum to manipulate my dad to pick me up and rock me to sleep on his chest

3. Cry real, heartfelt, watery tears

4. Project poo and pee about 50-100 cm against the wall (said wall has had to be washed twice. Im only  a wee little girl and i'm already defying gender barriers and doing things only boys usually do).

5. Facetime. I facetime a lot. I'm the queen of video calling.

6. Make funny little noises when I sleep. My daddy calls them elephant noises. My mum just stays awake to listen to them in delight and she giggles.

7. I am pretty social. People like holding and cuddling me and i'm totally ok with that.

Whitney Houston was wrong! Dead wrong!

On April 30th my daughter was born.

I'm one of those who believes in preparation. I'm always prepared, or at least I always try to be. I'm a control freak, and I believe careful planning and preparation make life that much easier. And so for nearly 40 weeks I prepared. I prepared for what was coming along, and I projected all sorts of scenarios. Whatever was gonna happen i knew it all -  i had read about it, researched, bought the ticket, got the t-shirt.

But it turns out I was not prepared for what was gonna happen to me on April 30th at 22h14m. When they handed her to me I became an animal. What happen was beyond all rationality - it was The Greatest Love of all. And this is why i think Whitney Houston was full of shit. The Greatest love of all is not the one I found inside of me, but rather the love for my daughter. One can feel many loves in life. Each of these loves can have different intensities and last for different periods. But now I believe that true love, unconditional love for a person, that is one we can only experience for  our children. There is no other tie like this.

Pregnancy = stupidity

Living proof that pregnancy damages your brain:
I arrived home and picked up my blackberry to log on to work remotely.
I lost my blackerry.
I searched for it everywhere. Everywhere. Nearly called IT to cancel it.
I had to send an email from my personal account to my boss with the work which was due.
3 hours later my husband finds a blackberry in the loo.

Sara Blakely you are my hero and you deserve an Oscar!

Sara Blakely really is a life saver.
After saving my wedding day and my wedding dress with SPANX, not to mention countless work meetings, cocktail events and black tie dos. Now she is saving my pregnancy - I discovered the Power Mama. And my life will never be the same. So much so that I had to facetime my mum just to show her the look (and obviously kick my husband out of the room, cos God forbid he sees me not only looking like a whale, but also wearing control underpants!

Nursery

After several months of stalling, i finally started working on the nursery. And am very happy to report that i wont even need to buy anything - just a bit of reshape and revarnish on a few items of furniture. We were very fortunate to be given a full set of nursery furniture from some close friends of ours, just need to get them the right colour now.....

Am thinking somewhere along these greys:

Im so excited!

Things that scare me

I have to confess I am very scared of what's to come. Some of my worries have died off a bit, some have increased. And it's not labour itself, it is more about the child. And the fact that you have no control over what will come out. In case you are wondering, Yes, my name is CK and im a control freak. I dont have a single day in which id not freak about something - it is just in me, I promise. Loss of control makes me very nervous.

Anyhow, i know this list will grow, but for now here are some of the things that frighten me (and i do note how superficial these all are!)

1. What if the child is as difficult as the mother, or even worse, her father?

2. What if this kid is lazy, doesn't work as hard as either of us?

3. What if I don't bond with the kid from the first moment? I mean, my grandmother, who was a saint, and who would not walk in the street with my mum without grabbing her arm (thats how possessive we are in this family), yes that saint of a lady, bless her heart, told me one day, many years ago " your mother, when she was borne, she was sooooo ugly, she had been born with a ventouse so her head was a bit weird" or another pearl " your mother screamed her head off so much, somedays i though shall i through her off the window". Thank God she never did, and thank God for her sense of humour and her long life (she lived to 90). This also came from the lady who advised me to wear neck mosturiser from very early age. She always knew better!

4. What if the kid wants a pink freaking tutu? What if her favourite colour is pink, shall i just shoot my brains?

5. If the kid is hit by another kid in kindergarten , how do you not tell her to hit the hell of the other little bugger? (Bad, bad mother, I know)

6. What if the kid doesnt like photography????

7. (Worst than 6) what if she does like it , but she shoots Nikon rather than Canon? (Can I send her back please?)

8. Oh God please make this kid like cats. Otherwise i may have to send the kid back, which may be a bit of a problem.

This is all very consuming.....

Men

One of the wonderful things that has happened to me since I told people I was pregnant, was the reaction of my male colleagues and clients. Some of my clients know better than me how far along I am ( i mean they know the week!). Some others have put delivery alarms on their smart phones for C's push date.

And then there are those comments:

- "Oh thats wonderful news. One piece of advice, have a planned c-section"

- " Have you decided if you are gonna have natural or a scheduled c-section? My advice - c-section all the way, we were too posh to push"

- " Oh this weekend i tripped on a step and it was horrible, so much pain, pain like I've never experienced before. Pain like you will know in a few months time"

- (this one from my husband, when i feel cramps cos the baby is stepping on some body part of mine which therefore refuses to move - like a hip or something) - "trust me, i know exactly how you feel" (if you were wondering on the answer it involved and F and an Off and it was not Fudge OFF!

And so on and so on....

An in this context i found this pearl on Youtube and I had to share it....

Pregnancy is....

Trying to reboot your IMAC 3 times because you have a cd stuck inside which doesn't come out.
Then proceed to read a series of group postings on Apple on how to remove stuck cds from media drive.
Then grab the coffee next to the keyboard by your right hand side, and realise the CD is there, by your left hand side, the whole time. The media drive was empty.....

Glowing pregnancy my ass

It beats the crap out of me why people seem to associate pregnancy with glow. There is nothing glowy like in pregnancy.

Today, after 12 years together, i had to get my husband to literally - and I mean quite literally - carry me out of bed. I woke up in excruciating pain with muscle cramps in my legs. I could not move the legs and i was too sleepy to explain what was going on. So this guy has to deal with a shouting woman at 6 am, who has her legs bent at 45 degrees and cannot move them in either direction and is screaming - and yeah, it was screaming - in pain. Took me over half an hour to be able to stand. He had to extend my legs and put them on the floor, and take my arms and lift me. Crucially this happens when i have an early call with a very important client - which i clearly did not make it to the office on time to do, and had to do from home. Thankfully the client has 5 kids and they were all shouting in the background ( it was past dinner time for them), and thankfully as well my cats were fairly quiet in my house.

Yesterday i was dying to go to the loo for a wee-wee. By the time i made it to the loo and peeled all the layers i had to be able to reach my ass and sit on the freaking loo, I swear to God I was to tired to pee. And then  - yes and then - i had to put all this crap back again so that I could walk back to my desk and resume working.

"Ah, but the joy of having children", some men say. My ass, I say. You should be able to buy them off the shelf at two years old, already potty trained. Want a kid? go carry it yourself, men. Thats what i wish to you all....

Why didn't anyone tell me this? Or one of the reasons ill be a bad mother

So i was as happy as Larry as I had a full set of nursery furniture which i had inherited from a dear friend, whose little girls I'm very close to. I ordered the mattress for the cot bed, and then my colleagues at work tell me: "What???? A new born can't sleep in the cot bed. You need a moses basket"

Now why the hell does a newborn need a bed for 6 weeks and then another bed?

And why did my colleagues give me the "I'm gonna call child services now" - look, when i suggested, fair enough, can't go on the cot bed, it can go on the sleep cot provided by the pram.

Im a bad mother. The kid ain't born yet and Im already a bad mother.

Pregnancy defining word

If i had to label this pregnancy, the word I would choose would be LARD - pig's fat. Yes thats right my friends, you heard me right. Long live bacon, blood pudding pork belly, pork crackling, and any other kind of pig's fat, cooked whichever way it goes. Cos you can take away my steak soaked in blood with  a runny egg on top (seriously, i cannot tolerate well done meat - i like my cow with the heart still beating...), but you cant fucking take away the lard. And i shall fight any pregnant woman's right to LARD.

Long live LARD.

They finally let me in on the joke.....

One of the most interesting things when one is pregnant is the reaction people have when you tell them about the fact that you are knocked-up. When the first person has a wild-oh-my-gosh-im -so-happy-im-gonna-choke reaction, you think to yourself, perhaps he or she was having a good day, or had one too many coffees or glasses of wine. When 10 or 20 people have the same type reaction you really start wondering what the fuck they've had ingested which you had not yet been exposed to (bear in mind none of my friends are substance abusers, so this was rather surprising). Seriously, you start wondering if the whole world is on drugs and you perhaps are the only person who isn't.

To cite just a few examples, one of my boss' bosses got so happy - but i mean SO HAPPY - with it, that i had to stop for a second and think if he wasn't really the father of the child - and no, he was not. But he was way happier than my husband (who was himself quite pleased may I say).
Another example was my aunt, whom i don't even speak too often with. With her the conversation was surreal, and hers was by far the best ever reaction - I loved it! She had just arrived from the airport from meeting her new born grandson, and was driving home with my uncle. She was on the wheel, my uncle picked up the phone. It goes like this:

CK- Hello, all good? Congratulations on your new grandson, how was the trip?
Uncle- yes very good, he is very cute, they're all doing well.
CK - Well i'm calling to give you some news as well, which I wanted to give you personally. I'm pregnant
Aunt - Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh !!!!!!!!!!!!!
Uncle (in background, barely audible) - Oh congratulations!
Aunt - Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh !!!!!!!!!!!!!!
CK - it's a girl!
Aunt - Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh !!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Uncle - how nice!
Aunt - (exhale) A GIRL!!!!!!!!!Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh !!!!!!!!!!!!!!
CK - expected for May 3rd
Aunt - A GIRL!!!!!!!!!Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh !!!!!!!!!!!!!!
CK - ok then cool, just wanted to let you know
Aunt - Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh !!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Uncle - Congratulations again
Aunt - Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhh !!!!!!!!!!!!!!

My darling child, if you have a deaf mother, please blame your Aunt Grace!!!!

Anyway, going back to the topic. It is rather odd to see people's excitement - regardless of their gender.
At the beginning i really thought they were all high on something - honest. Then i realised that they were not. The reality was, they all had kids, they all haven't slept in many years, they all had faced tons and tons of poo and been puked on countless numbers of times. They've all been cried on and farted on. They were just smiling cause they saw in me another sucker who didn't have a clue what she was getting into - another sucker who was going to spend countless nights without sleeping.

But then again.... Then again maybe not. Maybe they were just pleased that I was going to experience what they themselves had experienced and which they could not put into words. Maybe I had finally been let in on the joke. On the joke that having kids ****migh, just might**** be kind of wonderful. Or in the words of my friend Lauralou, a kid is like an orgasm - you never knew what you were missing until you had one.

What's different?

I bumped into my friend Maggie the other day, and she did come up with this really heavy question: "Do you notice any difference now that you are pregnant?". I found the question amusing, to say the least. After all, Maggie has had two kids (who are wonderfully good kids by the way) but she herself confessed she was sick for 9 months whilst she carried each of them. And by sick i mean she puked all over the place.

I am very grateful that i have not been sick. I mean SUPER GRATEFUL.

But going back to the hot potato - what do I notice has changed... Well let me tell you, if you ever see me with a black eye, it was not that my husband has hit me, but rather that i forgot to wear a bra whilst sleeping. THAT, my friend, is what has bloody changed. I don't have boobs anymore - they have formally transitioned to become dumbells, ginormous, weapons of mass destruction.

And when i went to the special gigantic boob bra store the other day, and had a fitting, i was scared when i looked at the specimen the shop assistant had brought me - "no fucking way, that's not a bra, thats a straight jacket!" Unfortunately it wasn't even large enough and i nearly cried. To which the lovely lady had to explain that so many people would pay big money to get knockers as big as these....

Ah well, there it goes for dignity in pregnancy...

Priscilla is back!

And so it turns out that I'm knocked-up. And some people thought this was the perfect excuse to go back to blogging. After so many years away, I'M BACK!

Not quite sure yet what will come of this space. I don't want it to be a baby blog. It's just my blog and i reserve the right to speak baby whenever i feel like it. On the other occasions i may just bitch about life in general and some people in particular.

Let's see what comes out....