Thursday 28 July 2011

Knock-knock. Who's there? Babies!

Oh, it's all happening now.  Tummy is getting bigger.  Busting out of even previously baggy trousers.  Round and firm, feeling decidedly full.

Yesterday, I was running late for a few afternoon clients.  Late because I opted for going on a last minute snack run, doing a sweep through the mini-Tesco near the hospital for whatever seemed to get me salivating.  I left weighed down with a yoghurt, a pear, nectarines, apricots (yellow fruits really get me going lately) and a lottery scratch card (well, they might want to go to university, right?), dashing to the consulting room reserved for me by the kind reception staff who now always aim to put me on lowest floor possible.  I slurped the yoghurt down as I power-walked back to the hospital.

Arriving kinda breathless, since my gym sessions have become kinda sparse and kinda easy, I made it just in time.  My client was waiting.  I put on a smile, a professional gait and ushered her to the room.  We settled into our chairs and got the session under way.  She's talking, I'm listening.  It's all going as it should.  And then - blip.

That's the best word to describe the odd feeling I had in a spot little lower than my stomach.  It felt like a butterflies, but in an unusual place.  Like someone just re-arranging themselves post-snack time.  I tried to conceal my amazement and I hope my face didn't give away that my mind was somewhere else for just a moment.

So I think I felt them move.  They are about the size of apple each this week, and there's not a whole lot of room in there.  It's great to know they are there and making their presence known.  Hello, I can hear ya knocking, little babies!  

My active and strange pregnancy dream world: Part 2

Review of the last post: 'frightening'.  At least my mother found the dreams a bit unnerving.  But then she was the one being chased down by the angry snake with me.

It is a tad unfair to invite you all into my personal world and not try to offer at least a dim flashlight to guide yourselves back to reality.  Not that I will pretend to have any certainty about the meanings of my unconscious adventures, but they might not seem so odd when I pull out the themes and symbols I think I can see.

1) Animals - animals in dreams are common and can have a role in symbolising our nature or our lesser forms of awareness.  Animals can also take on archetypal qualities, meaning they stand for something larger than themselves.  C G Jung wrote about animals in dreams and their collective symbolism.  He was referring to symbols that we hold as part of our common human struggle with things such as loss, death, ageing.  The snake is a creature that he points to as having a collective symbolism.  Certainly pregnancy is a time when the common human endeavour feels very close to home.  I may not have crossed this way before, but somewhere in my being I understand the gravity of this experience.  The receseses of my mind may have just found a way to communicate this to me, like  my instinct coming to me in the night. 

It is also evidently common to dream of animals that come from the sea during pregnancy.  Sea creatures symbolising the primordial beginnings of life itself.  My penguins are at home on land or sea, and in my dream, although flightless birds, were climbing as close as they could to the sky, as if striving towards even higher and higher forms of being.  

2) Things in twos - well this seems obvious.  I am still stunned by the fact we are having twins.  But I am also freaked out a little about the potential problems that can affect twins.  I know I shouldn't have, but I googled something they told us about calmly and reassuringly at the scan - twin transfusion disorder.  This is where one twin is flooded with nutrients from the placenta while the other one gets under-nourished.  My dreams have two snakes, and when I meet the wins in my dream, one is larger and more feisty.  The other placid and small.  

3) The unexpected and my incompetence - maybe my dreams are preparing me for what we all know is actually going to happen.  The unexpected will happen.  I won't have control and I will make mistakes.  I hope I don't get into a physical fight with my brother and hit the babies with a bathmat, but no doubt I will be confronted with things that I have no idea how to handle and look back later thinking, 'Damn, why did I do that?'.  I guess that's life and parenthood.


Saturday 23 July 2011

My active and strange pregnancy dream world

It's a time of change, hormones, worry and excitement, so I shouldn't be surprised by the current wild offerings of my subconscious.  All the same they do have me curious.  Any and all interpretations welcome.

Dream 1:
Thom and I are shopping for something, possibly a house.  It's a large warehouse we are browsing in, filled with natural light streaming in from the floor to ceiling windows of the warehouse.  We browse slowly, but I feel that we won't find what we need, or possibly what we can afford, here.  We leave into the morning air and look out into the desert the stretches out before us.  Thom points to mountains far off in the distance, saying simply, 'Mountains'.  I turn and look to huge mountain directly behind us.  The warehouse seems to be built into the side of it.  The mountain is craggy and snow covers the upper most peaks.  As we stand gazing at it, I spot a penguin on one of the craggy outcroppings.  Thom and I begin up a hill towards the mountain and notice many  other penguins playing in the snow.  Thom tries to approach them as I struggle to capture them on camera.

Dream 2:
I go into labour and give birth.  Its all hazy and I can't recall if the babies were boys or girls.  I can't recall if I had pain relief.  I can't recall how I get home, but suddenly find myself in the twins bedroom, alone with them, seeing them for the first time.  I change the diaper of one.  She's a girl and is placid and calm.  I reach for the other one.  He's a boy.  He's larger and more cranky.  My brother somehow arrives and we have an argument.  I try to hit him with a bathmat, but end up hitting the twins instead.

Dream 3:
I am preparing the room before the twins arrive.  I decide to put a boa constrictor in a cage in one the corners.  I also leave a rattlesnake loose in the room to protect the boa and keep it in the cage.  I'm showing my mother around when we realise that the boa is gone and only the rattlesnake is left.  We run out of the room, dodging the angry snake as we go.

Well, any thoughts?

Friday 22 July 2011

BPS Research Digest: Babies prefer Picasso

BPS Research Digest: Babies prefer Picasso

Interesting. Particularly as Thom and I wonder how to decorate the twin's room.  Maybe animals,  but cubist animals.

'Art appreciation psychologists have a difficult job' - the blog begins.  When your sample is a crowd of nine-month-olds, I'd say so!  I want to get hold of the research and find out if the babies cried less when presented with Picasso.  And how they managed feeding and changing for so many.  I'm certainly concerned about how to manage it for just two.  But I suppose that's the difference between my personal and current priorities compared to these researchers.

Their assumption is that if you catch 'em early enough, cultural and social influences won't have had time to get in the way, and they might be able to establish what is most naturally appealing to the human eye. They showed the babies Picasso and Monet, and even though babies got on ok with Monet, they all preferred Picasso, which was interpreted as evidence that something about Picasso is more attractive.  Sounds plausible and their endeavour might possibly be useful. There are some considerations to be made about the abilities of a baby's perceptual system and it could be that Picasso's style was simply easier for babies to take in.

Although, once again, as a psychologist, I feel just a slight pang of guilt for the rest of humanity as psychology attempts to explain away just a little more of the magic of existence. For me, to define the most universally appealing elements of art robs us all of essence of art. Artists already use principles that have been shown to be appealing to the eye, for example using odd numbers or forms that draw the eye from one end of a painting to the other. But great art has also been defined by breaking the rules. Picasso was criticised for the lack of correlation between his cubist creations and real life, something thought of as a little ridiculous at the time.  Like other the rebels of the art world, Picasso was not enjoyed immediately. Maybe babies would have preferred it to other artwork of the day because of its innately appealing elements, but that doesn't really define what draws us to art.

Amazing things happen in art when it's not what we expect. The art we love is sometimes beautiful in form, shape and colour. Other times we are drawn to what seems unexpected, counter-intuitive or strange. The wonder of art can be two people gazing at the same thing and experiencing it in totally different ways (as I write, my husband interjects that he thinks 'Picasso is s***'). Will babies unlock the mystery of what makes art appealing? I doubt it. Because even if researchers continue to demonstrate infants' attraction to certain art over others, it misses the point. Art transforms us, transports us, touches us.  Art can be defined as a kind of communication, impossible to divorce form culture and society.  Far more complex and spiritual than can be summed up by attractive arrangements of shape and colour, eye-catching to baby, thought they might be.

Then again, maybe babies have good taste, and would have known Picasso was good even when the rest of the world told him to go back to drawing board. In any case, I like Picasso (maybe my perceptual systems are immature) so it's good news as I contemplate how to decorate a baby's room without clearly pigeon-holing it as a boy's or girl's room.  I'm already pleased that the twins will probably have such good taste.  The three of us will just have to convince Thom.  Or at least out-vote him on the décor.

click to view Matters Over Mind - my psychology-focused blog

Wednesday 13 July 2011

Twin-tastic!

Today was the day.  The first scan.  Nervous questions circulating in our brains leading up to this  day whipped up into a worry-cyclone by yesterday evening.  Would the baby be healthy?  How far along am I really?  Are all the body parts present and accounted for?  

Thom and I ate comfort food of beef chilli and big chunky chips in front of the TV, each in the silent knowledge that the other was wrestling their own anxieties.  A few friends sent supportive texts.  One read: 'Good luck tomorrow.  Hope everything is in pairs (except the head of course) :-)xx'.

My friend has flexed a pretty impressive and eerie 6th sense about me from the beginning of the pregnancy.  Before the missed period, before the test, he told me there was something strange with me.  I laughed it off then, but his extra-sensory perception was proved right.  After that and a few other incidents of him sensing all things pregnancy-related from a distance,  I could have seen the prophetic potential in his text.  Because today, to our extreme surprise, we indeed saw two of everything on the ultrasound screen.  Two hands, two legs, two feet.....on each baby.

So here they are, the two amazing little babies that were waiting inside to be discovered.  They were active, flipping and reaching for each other, giving the ultrasound operator a job to measure their length and check their age. They are 12 weeks and 6 days today, on the day we saw them for the first time.

The  next stage of this adventure is mapped.  There are 4 of us.  Thom has been browsing double-buggies on eBay and training courses that might propel his career into a twin-worthy wage bracket.  I have been imagining their little bodies, snuggled up and entwined, keeping each other company until we say 'hello' face-to-face.  Under the jittery excitement, there is fear, but I've decided that 'scary' is not a word I can use to describe things I have yet to live through.  Also, this news warrants an extra piece of pizza.  After all, I am eating for three.

Thursday 7 July 2011

Men are motivated by cute baby faces too | BPS

Men are motivated by cute baby faces too | BPS

Reading this in the British Psychological Society's latest offering of Research Digest made me smile. Today has been a day of gathering my own compelling evidence that men hold a softer spot for babies than I anticipated.

I've spent the last two days in a gym on a Health Screening and Fitness Testing module - part of my Diploma in Personal Training. As you all can see from BumpWatch, little baby-so-and-so has yet to make his/her presence known. So for the beginning of the course, I was just one of the students, instead of the pregnant lady. The class is predominately male, muscle-bound and protein-rich. We sat studiously for most of day one, learning the rationale and science behind fitness testing. Bums in chairs, calculators out and all trying to sound as smart as we could about anatomy and physiology. For some herculean chaps in the class, the brainy bit was a challenge, but they met it like professionals.

Come the end of the first day, it was our turn to show we could do it, starting with blood pressure, height, weight and body fat percentages. Body fat was being measured using bio-electrical impedance, a technique that uses a weak electrical current through the body to determine how much fat there is. Fat doesn't conduct electricity as well as fat-free mass. This test is a no-no for pregnant women. Electrical current though little foetus sounds very bad indeed. So I had to come clean to the class of muscle men that while I was happy to expose the extent of my lard holdings, I had to abstain for the baby.

What followed that day and the next surprised me. These tough guys brought me the mats to sit on for the practical work, asked about how I felt, were curious about food cravings and sickness, congratulated me on my own cardiovascular and strength testing results and expressed polite concern over my doing sit-ups. One bicep-bound boy caught me looking longingly at his nice smelling panini and actually offered me half of it. I was unprepared for their tenderness. I was waiting for the rolled-eyes, lack of sympathy and misogynistic jokes I so often read about towards pregnant women in newspapers. These men, testosterone-fuelled as they were, demonstrated genuine kindness and what seemed to me to be a heart-felt interest in the beginning of a brand new life.

The future is full of hope and possibilities.

Tuesday 5 July 2011

The midwife cometh

Time to give up on romanticised visions of all things birth-related.  I've met the midwife and can now face the world absolutely adult.  There is no Santa, no tooth-fairy, no special heaven for pets and a midwife is just some over-worked, grouchy, crusty old bird that fills in paperwork and makes me wish for a surprise labour and delivery in the back of a cab driven by a kindly old man.

She arrived at my door and did not even say 'hello', let alone introduce herself before coming in.  I made her cup of tea as she settled in on the sofa and spread a mountain of forms around her.  As she sipped gingerly on her tea, her eyes darted suspiciously between my tattoo and my bare left-hand ring finger.

Thom arrived home and I was eager to introduce him as 'the husband'.  She loosened up entirely.  Maybe too much.  She asked about us, our lifestyles and professions.  When I told her I was a psychologist, she launched into her own psychiatric history before asking me if I was 'psychoanalysing' her.  She was the furthest concern from my mind, but she continued on her way through the heap of paperwork, firing off questions and not waiting for answers before blurting in something else about herself.  She dismissed health problems as 'no big deal' and told me authoritatively where I would have the baby, without so much as a whisper of what options I had.

She left me shaking and anxious.  Like many other new mothers I know, it seems you have to take it into your own hands.  Getting information and advice is more of a do-it-yourself affair on the NHS.  So while this woman robbed me of my illusion of the midwife - a sweet, kind old lady who imparts years of wisdom and experience through her tender care and healing hands - she did make me take a more active role in my choices.

Speaking to others, reading, researching, Google-ing has become a more than a hobby.  More like a lifestyle.  It's gathering supplies for the journey ahead.  Don't know what to expect entirely, but I can kind of map out my journey and get equipped from the stories of those who've been there before me.  Ok, so I'm ready to stop romanticising yet.