Bob and the Builder crack

Nearing week 26 now and what a turning point it is, too. Gone is the honeymoon phase of sauntering around gazelle-like and posing with oh-so-little bump, and hello to the I Can Just About Fit Through Doorways phase and the Get the Hell Out of My Way Or I'll Bulldoze You phase. I officially waddle and I tell you, it ain't pretty. My T-shirts seem to have all shrunk overnight and now ride up to leave an unsightly 2-3-inch gap reminiscent of Bob the Builder. Charming.

In the past week or so I seem to have come full circle, with the first trimester hormones flowing on tap, and all of a sudden someone has pulled down the shade on my life view, making it very dark indeed. Little Green now kicks the crap out of me at all hours of the day and it's no longer the butterfly flutter of yore either. I swear last night I saw my tummy skin register a tremor worthy of the Richter Scale. All sorts of anxieties have been nibbling at my brain. What right do I have to bring a child into a world teeming with squalor and unbelievable cruelty? What temporary madness inspired me (me, who can just about call herself a respectable grown up at the ripe age of 31) to think I could look after some guileless little angel? How brazen and selfish and irresponsible and misguided must I be for believing I could just bring another human being into the world and not balls up the whole thing?

Nevermind myriad aches and pees, no wonder pregnant women don't sleep much; there are too many of these Gremlin-like critters coming in and crowding round the bed and secretly nibbling away at her brains throughout the night for her to get any much-needed shut eye. This says nothing of the usual anxieties about surviving labour (easy -- just don't, AT ANY COST, think about it) or panicking about the baby bursting out of the womb with two heads (Sigourney Weaver has a lot to answer for).

At my anomaly scan the other week I was told that Little Green is currently in breech, meaning his feet are aiming the wrong way. I was also told that my placenta was low-lying on one side but that in most cases this usually lifts as the baby grows and anyway, I could probably still have a "normal" birth. The humourless sonographer clearly euphemised the situation, which Google later informed me could, in serious cases, lead to mandatory bed rest for weeks prior to a Caesar (which is where, bluntly put, they hack into your belly to wrench out the baby since it won't squeeze through the little hole)... Sex in this case would be off limits. And, as a matter of fact, since sex proved too painful and awkward anyway, I'm becoming almost as humourless as the sonographer himself. So much for all the phony hype from the marketing gurus that guarantees you'll have the best sex of your life in the second tri. Some silver lining. Of course this is true in some cases but you have no choice but to hate the women who do get what's promised on the packet, just as you loathe the women who can eat chocolate all day long and still look like Kate Moss in skinny jeans...

So prick up those teeny ears young man. Invaluable life lesson #1: Life is seldom fair.