peanut butter, dried apricots and grapes

Last week was mostly spent in a cold and headache-induced fog with little energy to do anything productive. I even ended up leaving work early one day because I felt that horrible (and I hate taking sick days). This all meant that our usual Valentine's Day dinner was spent at home, eating stir-fry, with Ross bundling me up in blankets and trying not to be overwhelmed by fumes from the Vapor-Rub I had desperately applied in the hope it might help me breathe again.  

Thankfully I recovered by Monday morning, just in time to enjoy two days of beautiful sunshine and clear skies, and in time to prevent me from contaminating all the other pregnant women when I went for my midwife appointment. 

Now that I'm in the home stretch (aka my third trimester), I'll be seeing a lot more of the midwives. This week we discussed breastfeeding and I was given a dvd about breastfeeding and another dvd about the importance of talking to and interacting with your baby. My belly was observed, poked, listened to, measured and declared... 'smaller than they like to see at this stage'. What?! (At this stage, I feel anything but small.) Since baby's heart beat is strong and all my other checks are normal, I was reassured that I have nothing to worry about, but she would like me to work on growing my bump.

It is difficult not to feel massive when you are struggling to put on your own shoes or huffing and puffing your way up the stairs, but I haven't gained anywhere near the weight I expected (at least so far). This is probably because this tiny one seems to prefer fruit more than anything else. I'd even take a bag of ripe oranges or tangerines over chocolate these days. Every Monday, I restock my office with bran flakes, oatcakes, milk, yogurt, peanut butter, dried apricots, and lots of whatever fresh fruit is going- oranges, grapes, apples, bananas, tangerines, blueberries. A ripe fruit salad is like my pregnancy heaven and I never knew that dried apricots could make me so happy!

Apparently eating fruit in large quantities is not enough, but who would have thought that this belly was 'too small'?:

I guess I'll have to try eating some steak for a change.