This week has been my first week of maternity leave. I’m genuinely not sure where the time has gone! It seems like this whole year has flown by and now everything I’ve been waiting for has come to a head!

Maternity leave seems like such a strange thing to me. You are essentially just waiting… waiting for pain. You know it’s coming and you know it will be fairly awful but you have no idea when. A total fear of the unknown (possibly my worst fear of all!)

At my appointment last week I was 3/5 engaged so I know thing are progressing but it would be so lovely if they could say “hey Kelly – you’ll go into labour on the 20th December and it will last 32 hours but everything will be FINE with no complications”. I guess that’s what everyone wants though right?

I go through moments where I feel completely ready for this to happen – where the possible pain doesn’t worry me and I’d just love to meet my lovely baby and sit at home having snuggles with my new family. But as quick as this feeling comes it’s replaced by the fear – a particularly painful twinge or cramping will immediately make me worry that things I starting and I’m just not ready.

I’ve made a promise to myself to do three things this week that I’ve been putting off because it will just make things too real:

1. Listen to my hypnobirthing downloads – I’ve been putting this off thinking that if I wait, I won’t have to give birth but I’m fairly sure it’s happening either way so I should at least try to prepare myself
2. Sort out my hospital bag – I’ve bought bits for it but I haven’t packed it and I still need something to wear during birth – again, putting this off is like telling myself that it’s not going to happen yet but is actually leaving me completely unprepared
3. Test out the car seat – We have this but we’ve not tried to put it in yet. The OH passed his driving test a couple of weeks ago (just in the nick of time) so we now know he can drive me to the hospital which is a huge relief but I don’t want to be standing in the freezing cold December air reading an instruction manual when we want to bring our little man home!

Fingers crossed I panic a little less next week and can take my mind off things with some Christmas wrapping and batch cooking – only 18 days to go!!