Our latest 'project'

It's time to let you into a little secret - or rather, a secret that has grown rather big. Some of you that I know "in real life" or chat to via email or I have taught recently already now, but now that everyone who needed to know first (including my boss at college who I finally told yesterday before term started!) knows, I can share it with the rest of you....

I'm five months pregnant!

And I am so excited - and little scared, but a little less so each day, as, you see, something else that I haven't mentioned here on my blog before is that I've had three miscarriages between having B and being pregnant this time, all three of them within a year of each other. The first was May last year, and I posted here that I'd had to have a stay in hospital but didn't really go into the details of why because this blog is supposed to be about nice things like beads and jewellery and so on. So why am I mentioning it now? Partly because you won't be able to understand why we're so excited but still so nervous otherwise, but also because I know just how many women are affected by miscarriages.

When I was pregnant in May 2009 I was very aware that out of the ten family and friends that I knew who had had their second child in the previous year, only one of them hadn't had a miscarriage between their first and second successful pregnancy. That statistic was very much in my mind when I had my first midwife appointment back then, and was definitely one of the reasons that we told family relatively early into the pregnancy - I knew that if the worst came to the worst, I would need their support - and I definitely needed (and am so grateful for) their support. They eventually found a reason for the miscarriages - "sticky" blood that was too thick for a young fetus. The solution has been to take a low-dose aspirin pill each day to thin my blood a little bit. I'm not saying that that would work for everyone, and it's only something I did after long chats with my doctor, but it's worked for me.

So, I promise not to turn the blog into nothing but maternity posts, but expect to see some baby related posts in the near future! The baby is, in theory, due on 15th January, but B was 12 days early, so we'll see!

And now I'm going to have to go and get a tissue as I am just so happy to be able to write this news!