27 weeks

• M has been away on business in Lisbon and didn't come back until Saturday night, so I took advantage of my regular playmate being away and spent the first part of the weekend vegging out. I am so tired. I'm struggling through my afternoons at work and keep waking up throughout the night because my growing bump and my aching pelvis makes it uncomfortable to turn in my sleep.
  
  
• Needing the loo and an increasing number of quite vivid dreams are also waking me up throughout the night. Usually my dreams are work-related, around the theme of not managing to get all my work finished on time. But the other night, I had my first ever fantasy-themed dream that I can remember, where I was in a dark, dank forest filled with ancient trees with twisty limbs and ogres with gnarled faces. I wasn't being chased and nothing nasty or frightening happened, but it was a strange and vivid enough environment to awake me.
  
  
• I am really counting down the days to my maternity leave now - a month and a half to go - just so I can catch up on my sleep during the day and generally take it easy. But also because the experience of pregnancy, birth and becoming a mother is becoming more and more absorbing to me. The all-absorption is perfectly natural of course and I'm not really questioning it. Yet because my career has always been so central to my life and I am very ambitious, the shift in focus is rather strange.
  
  
• On Friday night, I snuggled into the sofa alone with a plate of vegetable and prawn stir-fry with rice balanced on my belly, a glass of milk and a DVD of The Hours that had me sobbing uncontrollably. I don't remember crying this hard the first time I saw this movie. Must be all the hormones combined with fatigue.
  
  
• On Saturday, I went out for a walk locally, dropping off and picking up dry cleaning along the way, and buying croissants and the paper which I spent most of the day reading from cover to cover. I fell asleep for an hour; I made up a playlist on my iPod of "happy music", featuring the likes of the Scissor Sisters, Dolly Parton, Nancy Griffith, The Killers, Prince, Beyonce, David Bryne, the Sugababes and Girls Aloud; I ate twiglets and surfed the net; I vacuumed and did laundry. Generally I pottered and drifted and slept.
  
  
• By the evening, though, I was feeling rather bored. Luckily I had theatre tickets booked and headed to the Barbican to meet my sister-in-law for dinner at the Waterside Cafe and a sleek and modern production of Hedda Gabler, which was chillingly good.
  
  
• By Sunday, my regular playmate had returned to London laden with Portuguese almond tarts and goats cheese. We woke up late; I bought a free range chicken and some beef from the butchers; we breakfasted on hot croissants and coffee.
  
  
• And then we traipsed across to east London and The Baby Show at ExCel. I still think it's a little early for us to be buying things for the baby, but we are now deciding what types of breast pump or moses basket or pram or baby sling to buy, so it was nice seeing our chosen products up front.
  
  
• I already have catalogues from Beaming Baby, Little Green Earthlets and Green Baby and want to buy a number of things from each of these so it was great seeing their actual products on show at ExCel and having our delight in the clothes and toys ratified. Really, please do check out their stuff - truly lovely and just a little bit different from the usual stuff you can buy at Mothercare, John Lewis et al. ExCel allowed us to discover another unique mail-order company - Lula Sapphire. Most of my baby wish list will be made up of items from these small stores.
  
  
• I picked up a couple of DVDs there, focussing not just on life with a new baby but also on the birthing process itself because I really need to start thinking about this now! I picked up Miriam Stoppard's Having A Baby and what looks to be a particularly excellent DVD by the venerable Yehudi Gordon, Sheila Kitzinger and Caroline Flint called Birthwise: Your Creation, Your Choice.
  
  
• And from the Natal Hypnotherapy stand we picked up a gym ball that was also being marketed as a birthing ball (which M appreciated a lot!).
  
  
• The best thing for both of us about being at The Baby Show today, though, was seeing all those babies - most of them very cute indeed. Really, now that I am pregnant I am really making up for never having been a broody person and rarely having given a baby a second look.
  
  
• I've really popped out now. I look decidedly pregnant and more and more people are offering their seats to me on the Tube.
  
  
• For the public at least, it feels my belly has a life separate from me. It feels quite odd how some people stare at it as if it is not adjoined to me but is a unique object to marvel at or reflect on or simply to stare at absentmindedly. I feel like waving my arms in front of them and saying, "Hello, it's me, I'm here too, this is part of me".
  
  
• I've been getting my first Braxton Hicks - painless, "practice contractions" of the uterus that become more noticeable as you enter the third trimester. I've only noticed them twice so far. The front of my abdomen suddenly hardens and then pops out for a few seconds. At first I thought it might be Little Planet sticking a limb or her head out against me, but when I read about it more I realised they were the actions of my own uterus. My belly truly does have a life of its own.