NOT SO SMUG NOW: THE SEQUEL

I'm sorry I've been giving you all the silent treatment recently. It's not you; it's me. I just needed time. And some space. And a little bit of distance. In truth, you wouldn't have wanted to hear my outpourings of the last two months. Mostly because they were physical outpourings made up of any food I dared to eat because, and here's the rub of it, I'm planning Not So Smug Now: The Sequel. I've spent the last six weeks vomiting and writhing in all sorts of dramatic nausea induced agony as my inner-universe worked its socks off growing another Small.  At first, I thought of all the amazing blogs I wanted to write but couldn't because my morning sickness was so bad, that even just looking at a computer screen, or a phone screen, made me vomit violently into the mop bucket that has been my faithful friend for the last two months. It made me sad and frustrated that I couldn't write and share and expel all the grumpiness that was burgeoning inside me. As time passed, the ideas stopped coming. Writing is like a muscle - if you stop using it, it withers away. But it's time now to rip the metaphorical band aid off and just start typing and writing and hope that, in some shape or form, it all comes flooding back to me.

So, yes. I'm pregnant with the second Small. It wasn't an easy conception. We'd been trying for a year but with a husband on tour and an ovulation cycle as regular as First Great Western Trains it was tough going. Eventually, to make matters worse, my cycle, fed up with the constant pressure I was putting it under, just upped and left. Last seen October 4th 2015. To say I was disillusioned with what appeared to be one of the most ineffective procreation systems, second only to the highly-threatened Panda, was an understatement. I was convinced I was barren, going through early menopause or fighting secret tumours that were growing at a rate of knots all over my uterus. Your mind does funny things to you when you're trying to get pregnant.

Eventually, I did a pregnancy test in late January. Not because I expected to be pregnant but because I found it lying around and was bored. My jeans were also pretty tight and I was feeling really tired and little nauseous but because I hadn't had a period since October and the last test I'd done in mid-december was negative I didn't for a minute think it was possible to be pregnant. I wasn't having periods? Surely, I wasn't ovulating silently and secretly, was I?

Turns out, I was. My mother likes to talk about it as if it's the immaculate conception but I think that's just because it gives her the edge at her Mahjong class in a 'my grandchildren are more special than your grandchildren' kinda way. I think of it as some kind of freak of nature and up until the beginning of this week, I thought of it as energy-sucking, vomit-inducing parasite that was slowly killing me from the inside out. But now, after nearly two months of being sick anywhere between 2 to 8 times a day and managing overwhelming nausea in between, I'm starting to come out the other side.

And, as I emerge from the hell of the first trimester, I hope my blog rises from the ashes too.

I was twelve weeks on Monday.  Release date for Not So Smug Now: The Sequel is September 12th 2016.

Let the good times roll.