Talk about closing the barn door after the horses have bolted... my third trimester ended last MONTH. But dear lord, did it drag! I'd heard people saying the third trimester was the worst, but after suffering through my first I am ashamed to say I dismissed these warnings, thinking they couldn't possibly match up. I mean, when you're in your third trimester, you're just a short distance from the finish line, right? You're about to meet your baby, right? So close!

Except as soon as you hit about 30 weeks or so, time just slows down, along with your ability to do anything remotely physical. For me, the worst part was the pelvic girdle pain. I've never known pain like it (contractions are a different story!). It would spread all around my pelvis and hips, and meant I was relegated to walking only very short distances, huffing and puffing like a steam engine. Stairs were just out of the question, whether up or down, and sitting at my desk at work became horrendously painful. Thankfully I was able to tack on some annual leave to the start of my maternity leave and therefore stopped going to the office fairly early on, around 33 weeks.  By 40 weeks I was hardly walking at all, I was in so much pain, and paracetamol doesn't go near PGP!
The only thing that helped was curling around my pregnancy pillow, and spending alternate days barely moving off the sofa. It meant I watched a ton of Netflix (Line of Duty and Happy Valley were ace) and consumed a large amount of ice cream to console myself, but more on that later...

Another fun physical ailment were the leg cramps - I'd escaped these throughout the first two trimesters, but made up for it by leaping out of bed, wailing in pain, on a regular basis. I HATE leg cramps.

Finally, let's talk about being pregnant during a heatwave - specifically, being heavily pregnant during a heatwave... Not only did I sweat just by breathing, but I had barely any suitable clothes when the temperatures soared, and ended up squeezing myself into last summer's maxi dresses and looking absolutely ridiculous. My in-laws very generously bought us an air conditioning unit because our lovely south facing flat gets hotter than the sun! The hottest days involved lots of soaking my absurdly swollen feet in a cold bath, sprawling in front of a fan, limiting my time outdoors, devouring ice creams...



Oh yes, on that note, in my last three or four weeks of pregnancy I was hungry ALL THE TIME. And craved the worst possible foods - I mean, I willingly purchased hot dogs, and I never eat hot dogs! We also visited McDonalds far more than is healthy - I think our local drive through recognised us and my go-to order (McChicken meal and a cheeseburger FYI) but I was just relentlessly hungry. It got so bad I'd wake up at 4am, absolutely starving, and ended up eating all the snacks I'd put aside for my hospital bag, way before we even got to hospital. I demolished an entire (cooked! So hot it was liquid) Camembert to myself one afternoon. I ate Thai green curry three times to try and coax my baby out (it didn't work). And I developed a hardcore Nesquik addiction, guzzling a glass a night to battle the heartburn (Rennies generally made me want to vom).

On a side note, literally all of these things stopped as soon as I gave birth, so if you're currently suffering through your last few weeks of pregnancy, take heart! The end is in sight (and feel free to scoff at me because I scoffed at everybody who told me the same thing).

Finally, let's chat about our baby! We discovered he was breech at 32 weeks, so I was booked in for a scan at 36 weeks. I spent that month researching breech births and Caesarean sections, and by the time the scan rolled around I'd convinced myself that at least I'd be meeting my baby before full term. Nope - he turned the morning of the scan! But I'm still glad I researched C sections, in hindsight...



My bump swelled to epic proportions by the end and I swear it grew on a daily basis at one stage. Harrison was positioned all out front so it just looked ridiculous. That said, it felt wonderful to wear tight clothes, and not have to worry about any flab showing - I can't remember feeling this body confident before!
He remained a very wriggly baby, which can be lovely, but is a little less lovely when it's 3am and you're just trying to sleep, but you've got little knees or elbows digging into your sides. I had a great time trying to film my bump making some spectacular moves!

Harrison measured big throughout my pregnancy - the midwife consistently marked my bump size on the 90th percentile, so as you can imagine I was pretty keen to get him out early if possible. We tried every old wives' tale going, I ate so many curries, tried to walk whenever my PGP allowed it... nothing. At 39 weeks I started getting contractions and got SO excited, as I really thought things were about to get going. But they'd always tail off if I had a bath or went to bed. This happened consistently for three weeks. Yup, three whole weeks - I went very, very overdue! But that leads me to a whole new post, as this one is reaching novel length.

I think that's enough for my third trimester. Tl;dr - I was hot, heavy and hungry! But it wasn't all bad, and terribly exciting getting ready for the birth of course!

Lots of love,
Dani xoxo

Well hello.

It's been a hundred days (100!) since my last post - I seem to have unintentionally been on hiatus for no particular reason, other than extreme baby brain, lack of focus, and general poor health. But you'll be pleased to know these excuses are no longer entirely valid, because... I had a baby!

Three weeks ago this little lad came into our lives and turned everything upside down. I'm thrilled to introduce Harrison, our son. I have a son! He's sweet and wonderful and simply the best thing in all the world.



I'm not going to pretend the last three weeks have been a walk in the park, because they definitely haven't. And I'm also not entirely ready to share details of his birth, because it didn't quite go to plan - I know, they never do, but this couldn't have been more different from the relaxed, low intervention water birth I envisioned, and I'm still processing it now. These things take time, and I'm not looking back with regret at all, I just have a lot of feelings to work through! The main thing is that both Harry and I emerged healthy and safe, and I'm so grateful to our NHS and the maternity unit that took care of us, because they were ace.

Right now we are getting used to being a family of three and every hour that passes is a new learning curve. It's amazing! I find myself spending most of my waking hours (and there are many of those with a newborn) just gazing at his beautiful little face, in complete awe that he was in my tummy a mere 14 days ago. When I'm not gazing at him, I'm either guzzling water, rubbing Lansinoh into my boobs, or admiring the sheer genius that is our nappy bin, for its odour-reducing qualities. I've become that person!




But let's talk a bit more about the boy himself. At this moment in time, aged three weeks...

Harry likes:
- being attached to his mother at the most inconvenient times, ie dinnertime.
- curling up on someone's chest like a koala, legs tucked under his body.
- feeding frequently.
- causing frequent outfit changes.
- having his cheeks stroked.
- the baby shusher (this is a godsend).
- a piano based lullaby playlist on Spotify (another godsend).

Harry does not like:
- being bathed.
- being in his pram for longer than 5 minutes.
- sleeping past 4am.
- waiting for food.
- being changed.

I'm sure all this will change over the next few days weeks, but it's nice to have a record for posterity. I'm also using the 1 second every day app to film little snippets of our life with him, it's so fun and I'd definitely recommend it! In terms of blogging again, I obviously cannot promise any regularity... but I would like to round out my account of pregnancy and the third trimester - I feel like there's a lot more to say - and chat a bit more about what I've been up to over the last couple of months!

Thanks as always for reading, and do let me know if there's anything you'd like me to write about (or not, as I don't mean for this to become a mummy blog really...)

Lots of love,
Dani xoxo

Hullo hullo! It's the first day of spring, and rather fittingly, the start of my first week in the third trimester. Three months to go until we get to meet our bubba - it feels like an age, and at the same time I know it will fly by! My second trimester certainly seems to have sped past twice as quickly as the first. I've been making notes all the way through to try and document my experience - excuse the rambling, and hope you enjoy!

Body
After simply feeling a bit flabby for the first few months, my bump emerged at about 16 weeks and has been doubling in size on a regular basis! I'm now living in maternity jeans and tights (H&M are a godsend, I tell you) and although I can just about squeeze into some of my old dresses, I have had to buy a couple of stretchy maternity dresses to fit over my rapidly expanding belly. My skin, sadly, is showing no sign of this fabled pregnancy glow... I'm still getting a lot of spots, despite overhauling my entire skincare routine thanks to The Ordinary, and drinking so much water I'm rarely away from the loos at work. My hair is also the usual frizzy mess of yore, none of this magical hair growth I was promised!
In terms of health, I'm regularly having blood tests and seeing specialists thanks to my underactive thyroid (a concern in pregnancy as it can affect the baby's development, although thankfully our bubba seems fine so far). Other than that it's just the expected aches and pains - my left hip keeps failing me, especially in Sainsburys, which means I've ended several food shops whilst hanging over the trolley to keep upright! Oh, and no one told me about the nosebleeds - such fun! The exhaustion is difficult too; I've been struggling with chronic fatigue for a decade now, but it's definitely been amplified by the pregnancy - I guess it's all just prep for newborn nights?!

Mind
Baby brain has kicked in - my brain just can't connect the dots between words anymore, it's like my old Spanish translations when I'd think of the word in every other language but Spanish. Ordering a Subway became an ordeal, I prepped my order so carefully in my head but then got all my words mixed up, pointing at lettuce and saying "cucumber"! The poor guy was so confused. I had to take some deep breaths and start again. Why yes, English is my mother tongue, not that you'd know...

On a less funny note, I've also recently experienced some heightened bouts of anxiety - it's not something I'm used to, my previous experiences have all been related to depression instead. So rather than the usual absence of emotion and general sense of lethargy, I've been feeling the absolute opposite - everything is overwhelming, being in crowds or around people is overstimulating and can lead to panic. I'm almost feeling too much, rather than not enough - it's as though all my emotions have been switched to the highest level and most days I'm close to tears because of it. The midwife said it is most likely hormonal, which is fine - but it's not terribly easy to deal with! I've been trying to practise mindful breathing to calm myself, and to avoid panic attacks on my commute I try to listen to music or bury myself in a book, but it doesn't always work... so any advice would be gratefully received!

Being in possession of around 60 baby books, I wasn't sure about attending NCT classes, and when my friend mentioned hypnobirthing I was both intrigued and sceptical. I thought hypnotherapy literally means you get hypnotised, you see - I couldn't have been more wrong! We attended the Babies in Waiting course in Billericay for 4 weeks and it was absolutely wonderful. Hypnobirthing challenges a lot of preconceived notions of labour and birth, and encourages the use of breathing and visualisation as relaxation techniques, with the idea that you'll have a calm, assured state of mind during the birth. It really appealed to me, and helped to reassure both Jon and I to the extent that I'm now rather excited to give birth! We shall have to practise a lot before June but the techniques help me to get to sleep at night and I've already noticed an improvement in my stress levels. I'm definitely going to visit some of their relaxation classes once I'm on maternity leave!

Baby
Most importantly though, baby is doing very well - flourishing in fact, no matter how much I'm suffering! We have a big bubba on our hands, measuring at least 2 weeks further along at the moment, but from the leg and body measurements at our most recent scan it looks as though we are expecting a tall child, like Jon! We found out baby's gender at 17 weeks, but I'm not sure whether we will announce it before the birth (although close family and friends know what we're having). I didn't actually want to find out the gender as I like the idea of a surprise, whereas Jon was very keen to find out, so this will be my little compromise. In terms of decorating the nursery and buying clothes I've still kept things fairly unisex, mainly because baby clothes are so cute, how can you possibly decide between boys and girls?!
One thing is for sure though - our baby is a huge wriggler, I started feeling movement very early on for a first pregnancy and they're only increasing as the weeks pass. At 24 weeks I noticed my bump moving of its own accord, and baby seems to dislike me resting things on the bump, which is a shame as it's the perfect size and shape to rest a cup of tea or ice cream carton on...

To illustrate this, here is bump at 22 weeks, and 27 weeks respectively...











Food!
I struggled to eat properly up until I was 16 weeks pregnant, but after Christmas my nausea diminished and my appetite returned with a vengeance. My favourite things have been clementines, strawberry yoghurt, granola, apple juice and spaghetti bolognese - Jon has made it every week since the start of the year and I can't get enough of it. After half a year of eschewing red meat, I found myself craving it again, so I've allowed myself the odd cheeseburger or steak and cheese sub, as well as making my old faithful lamb curry from time to time. Most excitingly though, I'm back on the coffee! It broke my heart when I gave it up last October because it was giving me heart palpitations, but around Valentine's Day I finally succumbed to a hazelnut latte and was so pleased when I didn't experience any side effects. That said, I have cut my caffeine intake right down, and cap it at 2 cups of tea or 1 cup of coffee a day, but I'm right on time for frappuccino season and may have enjoyed one or two peppermint mochas already...
Hope you enjoyed my thoughts on pregnancy so far! Is there anything you'd like me to talk about further? I'm always wary of rambling too much about babies and such things! Let me know!
Love Dani xoxo

My first camera was a plastic Fisher Price-style job - I've got photos of 10 or 11 year old me clutching it as though it were the most precious piece of equipment ever! I used to have to beg my mum to buy me rolls of film, then I'd run around taking random snaps and see what developed. My mum would dutifully keep every photo, no matter how blurry - some of them are still in existence in our house today!

Nowadays my photos all sit on my external hard drive, or take up space on my phone (currently over 1,800 and counting!). My instagram account might be a colourful, carefully planned haven of memories, but how often do people scroll back through their feeds? What's the point in taking an ace photo if you never look at it again?

That's where Printiki come in! I ordered 30* of their white bordered square prints, picking some of my favourite memories off my instagram - it couldn't be easier, all I had to do was link up my account and select the photos to print (this, ironically, was pretty hard). I had a couple of projects in mind for the prints, so tried to pick some that were meaningful, and some that fit the colour scheme I had in my head.

My first project is our baby memory book - as first time parents, we're eager to document every stage of our little one's existence (before we run out of time to complete it - I literally don't know anybody who's managed to fill out an entire book like this!). I printed our baby announcement photos with the scan picture, as well as a bump photo from last month (it's doubled in size since then...)

Next I chose some of my favourite memories with Jon, ranging from our honeymoon to our wedding, and other trips away! My friends have tons of photos of themselves together, whereas Jon and I only had a handful of wedding pictures in frames - no more! I'm going to pop these up in our bedroom, maybe on a canvas or in a pretty shape on the wall.







Finally, I'm thinking about decorating the walls in our baby's room/second bedroom. It's all white at the moment and I'm happy with that, I love a clean, white home (Sara of Me and Orla does this particularly well!). But I think it would be nice to have some bright artwork and prints on the wall for baby to look at, so I picked up the Polaroid peg frame from work recently and decided to fill it with joyful photos in blues and pinks! The seaside photos are all from my favourite beaches in St Briac, which incidentally act as my calm place during my hypnobirthing practice. I feel chilled out just looking at them, and hopefully baby will too!






To finish off, I added some prints from my favourite trips - York, Vienna, France and Disneyworld. I've not yet decided where I'll put these - some I'll pop in our bedroom, others I might alternate around our living room! I've also got a memory notebook I'd like to keep going, so I'll add a few in there as I think it will be fun to look back at them over the next few years. That's the joy of these beautiful prints - they're so versatile and easy to style. I chose mine in a matt finish and they're absolutely gorgeous, the quality is wonderful and the colours are so vibrant!

A huge thanks to Printiki for their help, and their wonderful service! Check their website out here, and their instagram for ideas on how to style your prints.

Much love,
Dani
xoxo



* for my policy on sponsored/review posts, please read my disclaimer here.

My favourite instagram hashtags all seem to have a theme:
#nothingisordinary
#littlestoriesofmylife
#petitejoys

I really love the idea of finding beauty in the everyday. The smallest of occurrences - blossom sprouting quietly on the trees; sunlight bouncing off a window; fluffy clouds clustered around a rooftop; my dog's eyelashes as she drifts off to sleep. I try to record these on my Instagram, as much as possible, taking joy from the little moments that make up my days.

I thought it might be fun to pick some images from my daily work life at the moment, given I have but a matter of weeks before I clear up my desk and depart on the adventure of motherhood for the next year. I'll be a different person when I return to work - I want to be able to remind myself of the lens I used to view the world through, the effort I made to find something pretty in my mundane commuter life.





I'm lucky to work in Marylebone, strolling past 221b Baker Street with a coffee in hand, Regent's Park beckoning across the road for a sunny lunch break, Marylebone High Street calling with its cutesy storefronts and floral displays. On fair weather days I try to go for a walk every lunchtime - during the winter, not so much. But here are some of my favourite photo spots that make up my day-to-day life.





The park is where I go when I need to be calm. If you pass the gaggle of geese and shrieking seagulls, down the paths and across the bridges, you find the perfect pockets of peace to while away a sunny lunch break. I came here to clear my head before having interviews with my current workplace; I come here when I'm stressed and need to sit and watch the water for a while, remembering how to breathe. Last summer I came here nearly every day with my colleagues, sprawling on scarves and eating jelly pots from the Co-op round the corner, chasing off some of the feathered thieves that have grown a little too brave for our liking. Coming to the park reminds me how much better I feel when I spend time outdoors - something that's all too easily forgotten in daily office life.





Here we're surrounded by the sort of gorgeous old townhouses I used to dream of - cheerful painted doors, flowerpots spilling over, shiny tiled porches. I can't get enough of them; they litter my Instagram from time to time, each door a different entity.





Along the road there's Paddington Basin - I make a point of walking this way to any meetings. There's something about open stretches of water that appeals to me; they're calm, quiet places to sit and enjoy the peace away from London roads.





That's the thing, you see - I let the stress of my working life take over sometimes. Days pass in a blur of commute, work, commute - and it takes a toll on my mental health. So when I've made an effort to appreciate my surroundings, enjoy what's available to me, and take time to make happy memories too - it's only natural that I feel more at ease with my day-to-day routines. I think looking around and taking a breath at least once a day is beneficial for all of us. And goodness knows what my daily life will be like in 3 months - a 9am coffee run could be a thing of the past (who am I kidding - it'll be a 6am coffee run!)

Love Dani
xoxo

For the last few months there has been a magical treasure trove of Harry Potter film memorabilia, hidden down a side street in Central London. You've probably heard of the House of MinaLima - a pop-up shop featuring creations by the two artists who worked on the film props, designing everything from the Daily Prophet to the Half Blood Prince's potion book. I visited in autumn but restrained myself from posting much about it, as I was under the impression the shop would vanish in early 2017 - but yesterday they joyfully announced that they're here to stay, so I'm here to make a case for visiting!