Pregnancy, at the moment, is being completely upstaged by ongoing accommodation issues. Our house renovations are going to take much longer than anticipated and so we won’t be back home before the baby is born – it’s all very unsettling and nerve-wracking. I’m usually quite an independent person with an adventurous spirit, but for the last couple of months I’ve just wanted to burrow down into a permanent place and stay there!

In a way, though, all of this house stuff has probably been quite good for me; I was on track to be quite a paranoid pregnant person, obsessing over every little twinge and quirk, but since Christmas I simply haven’t had time. Thank goodness, because there are many twinges and quirks and weird abdominal sensations that the books don’t really talk about – it would be easy to dwell on them and constantly think that something was going wrong. So a good distraction – if a slightly stressful one.

I have nothing very much to report this week, in terms of feelings or symptoms. I can’t believe that tomorrow I’ll be 30 weeks along; I remember being 8 weeks and seeing the third trimester as this amazingly distant and unachievable goal, and here I am racing along through it. I don’t think that I have ever been so grateful for anything as I am for this pregnancy; I’m not a religious person but I do take time out every single day to say a massive thank you to whoever – or whatever – is up there looking out for me. I watch my growing bump with amazement and the most acute sense of joy; it more than makes up for the many years of feeling helpless and pessimistic and the frequent bouts of despair. I feel so incredibly lucky and I’m trying to remember every little moment…

..apart from the moment(s) spent at the hospital last week, waiting to complete my Glucose Tolerance Test. Oh my God, two hours sat in the blood test holding area having to endure the most bizarre procession of people I have ever seen! It was like some kind of circus show! First of all a man came in wearing one shoe and carrying a plastic bag filled with something incredibly smelly (fish? Rotten meat?), then a woman sat in front of me along with four adult members of her family who I assume must have had nothing better to do on a Thursday morning. They did not stop shouting at one another, despite being sat within whispering distance, for forty minutes. Then a man went into the toilet to do some serious evacuations but forgot to lock himself in – at least three people opened the door on him, wafting toilet smells into the waiting room and making me gag. I was already feeling sick because I had been fasting for 13 hours by then!

It really put me in the mind of having a home-birth again, just to avoid having to go near the hospital, except that I can’t have a home-birth because I don’t even have a home! Do they allow baby deliveries in tents? Winnebagos? River boats? I must remember to ask…

Posts on A Model Recommends that might interest you this week: a Topshop Maternity Lookbook and a Stretch Marks Oil Review.