Many Babies Look Like Piglet: Is This More Than Just Coincidence?

NEWSFLASH!  NEWSFLASH!

Piglet has twenty-one brothers and sisters.

Or something like that.

Obvs. this is not my doing.  I barely have Piglet, let alone twenty-one other hidden children squirrelled away somewhere.

The reason I know this is because I registered Piglet's birth with the sperm bank, and although they have so far not managed to send me the photo of the donor that I requested (Piglet might want to see his father one day, right?  Plus all my extended family want to have a good look at him so they can make a more informed decision about who he looks like.  When he was born, my all my aunt could manage was "hasn't he got a lovely shaped head?") they have added me to their social media thingy where you can "connect" with all the other people who have children with the same donor.  There are twenty-one of them.  Which is actually a fairly modest figure considering that the limit for the number of families a donor can, er, donate to, is fifty in the United States and ten in Britain.  And that's not including all the other countries a donor's emissions could potentially be sent to.

Anyway, some of the other lucky recipients have set up a Facebook group for those who have received sperm from my donor or another donor who is apparently my donor's brother (quite the family business!) so they can all talk to each other.  I have sneakily Facebook-stalked some of these people and looked at their children and some of them LOOK JUST LIKE PIGLET.  It is UNCANNY.  Anyone would think they were related or something.  This is notwithstanding the fact that there are a great many babies that look like Piglet, including a baby sat on the next table to us in Grupo Lounge in Bristol when we were in there having brunch a few weeks ago, and several of the babies whose pictures are used to illustrate The Essential First Year by Penelope Leach.  Even Dermot O'Leary of X Factor fame has been mooted as a potential lookalike.  Perhaps these too are all members of Piglet's extensive worldwide family.  Anyway, I am now in the position of checking Facebook frantically every five minutes to see if the moderators of the Facebook group have accepted my request to join yet, so that I can have a proper look at these children that are apparently Piglet's genuine relations, and maybe find out some interesting titbits from their parents, such as, have any of your children so far grown up to be an axe murderer?  No?  Oh well that's great then.  The genes are obviously OK.

Could this man be related to Piglet?

Hang on.  What if their children are all awful?  And the parents are not?  Perhaps I am going to find out more than I actually want to know here.  After all, as that great sage of the nineties, Dr Alban, once proclaimed in his classic hit It's My Life, a little knowledge is dangerous.  And that song was used to advertise tampons.  I rest my case.

Horrible Itchy Disease

Woman in the last days of pregnancy is not a pretty sight.

I, for example, have just thrown up the sole thing I have eaten today-a fried egg sandwich-and after three hours sleep it's all I can do to move off the sofa in order to search the cupboards for stray crisps.  That is, if I can allow myself to eat anything at all, as I have also convinced myself that I have a terrible liver condition which is slowly poisoning the baby.

It all started last night.  I had been itchy, on and off, for quite a while, but last night's itching was on a whole new level.  My mother had kindly given up her bed and allowed me to sleep in her double while she suffered in the single bed which for reasons of storage has two mattresses and lives in "my" teenage bedroom, but it was all to no avail.  I tossed and turned, scratching away and peering at the internet on my phone in the darkness.  Unfortunately, Dr Internet's diagnosis was that I had something called obstetric cholestasis, and that my baby was going to die.  There was even an accompanying article from the Daily Mail about someone this had Really Happened To, to prove the point.  It took until 3.30am for me to finally get to sleep, only to awake at 6.30, just in time for me to confess my fears to Mother before she went to work.  Mother has now taken to addressing frequent stern grandmotherly rebukes to the baby within, urging him that it is "time to come out now and meet your grandmother."  I'm starting to think that's why he's staying in.  It was all I could do to point, sobbing, to the relevant section in What to Expect When You're Expecting and wail, "Mum, I have this.  And the baby is GOING TO DIE."

And what if the baby did die?  What would I do?  How would the news be shared on Facebook?  How would I go back to work and face all the puzzled teenagers wondering what I was doing there?  How would I put myself through it all again?  And some people actually have to do that.  It's too hideous to contemplate.

Anyway, I have spoken to the midwife this morning and they are going to do some tests today to establish if I do have This Horrible Itchy Disease.  Hopefully the results will be quick.  And at least the baby won't be premature.  Which is pretty much all I have to comfort myself with at this point, given that EVERYONE in my antenatal class (even the ones who weren't due until mid-August) has managed to miraculously pop out their babies already, leaving me as the bottom of the class loser who's a bit slow and holding everyone else up.  All I have to feel smug about is that hopefully, if my baby is born alive as planned, he will be so advanced that he'll probably walk straight out of the womb and off to university, and I'll never have to worry about getting the hang of breastfeeding, weaning or toilet training as he'll pretty much already be a fully formed adult.

I wish the Internet had never been invented.

Oh God. It's started already. I've just been caught boasting on Facebook

Phew.

All appears to be well with Little 'Un, at least according to the 20 week scan.

Of course, now that I'm home I'm fretting again due to backache and lack of movement and am thinking maybe the scan machine killed it with hitherto undiscovered toxic rays.

Not it.  He.

Yes, it's a boy apparently.  Or an "XY," as the sonographer put it.  It took me a second to work out the technical jargon.  Although that was after I had already spotted what I thought were the requisite XY "bits" and yelled "Is it a boy?  I think I can see the bits!"

This was the least intelligent question I asked.  I think I impressed the trainee sonographer who did the first part of the scan by enquiring if my cervix was OK.  He looked at me, baffled, and asked what I meant.

"I mean, it's not shortening or anything?"

"Er no.  Have you had problems with that before?"

I am officially insane.  I bet no one else goes in there and asks them to check whether they have an incompetent cervix, "just in case."

I answered no, and that I was just a bit paranoid.  And the sonographer asked me if I worked in healthcare.  There you go, a bit of googling, a quick read of What to Expect When You're Expecting and I am officially an Expert on all things baby-related.

I made the official announcement on Facebook today anyway.  I realise I am now incredibly irritating to all people who either do not or cannot have children, who are probably wishing me dead right about now, but the lure of getting loads of "likes" was just too great to resist.  It has been noted that so far none of the likes are from ex-lovers.  Hopefully this means they are all jealous.  Or repulsed by this startling window into my uterus.  Who knows?  Who even cares?

I'm off to check if I have any more likes on Facebook.

Things I Will Not Be Putting on Facebook

Things I will not do when the baby is born (assuming it makes it that far.  FINGERS CROSSED.  There are a lot of horror stories on fertlityfriends.co.uk which haunt my every waking moment.  And according to some statistics I read yesterday, which were from the fertility clinic not the Interwebs and therefore probably more trustworthy, 20% of singleton IVF babies end up in neonatal intensive care.  Does that sound a bit high to you?)

Anyway, back to the point, IF the baby is born AND successfully survives, these are the things I will not do:

1.) Make the baby-or worse, an ultrasound image of the baby as a foetus inside my womb-as my profile picture on Facebook.  I am not the baby.  We are separate entities.  Or at least, we will be eventually (I hope).  Also, no one wants to see inside my uterus.  Except me, for whom it would be a useful skill.

2.) Bleat on and on about Baby on Facebook in the style of the following:
"Today was (insert baby name here)'s first day at swimming club.  S/he loved it the most out of all her/his activities this week."
Things wrong with this: Firstly, no one cares about this except you the parent; secondly this is clearly an ill-disguised boast about the fact that you genuinely believe your offspring to be a future Olympic swimming champion, and even more blatantly, about how many "activities" you do with your child PER WEEK, all of which will inevitably lead to them being a child genius and member of MENSA by the age of four.
"Had a wonderful afternoon with Baby, who taught her/his grandmother what s/he learned this week in Mandarin class."* (see above for why this is wrong).

I fully anticipate that most afternoons with Baby will not be spent looking at little him or her adoringly while s/he reels off a list of Mandarin verbs, bakes a cake worthy of Mary Berry or names all the stars in the Milky Way.  You can't even see the Milky Way from my flat anyway.

Therefore I will not, I repeat will not, talk about Baby unless what I have to say is funny.  Anything else is just smug and unacceptable.

And that is all I have to say for today.

*Any similarity to real life status updates of any of my friends is purely coincidental.