(picture found on http://everydaypeoplecartoons.com)

My second trimester carrying Paige can only be described as the calm before the storm.

The bump had grown all of a sudden and instead of just looking like an fatty version of myself after  consuming 10-to-many cakes, I actually looked pregnant! Which made me feel better about this whole drawn out process.  After all – how can one glow when no one can even tell you should be glowing?

I was (thankfully) able to sleep quite well at night, and had not experienced any adverse side affects of carrying a little being in my belly (other than the persistent morning sickness, and even that had mildly improved), and the heartburn had also eased off.

Still no weird cravings and the smell of coffee did not send me running to the loo to upchuck anymore – but wow, it still tasted AWFUL.  I tried a few more times to drink it but my taste-buds just refused to co-operate, and the once smooth taste of caffeine had now become a liquidised piece of burnt toast…yum.

One of our favourite parts of the second trimester was (at last) finding out what we were going to be blessed with…and no, we were not one of those couples who wanted to keep it a secret and be surprised ourselves when “it” finally arrived.  Instead, we wanted to be able to refer to “it” as “he” or “she”, so that it didn’t sound like I was going to give birth to an unknown creature that crash landed with a meteor from space.

We found out at our 16 week appointment – well, Dr H thought it might be a girl but he didn’t want to say so in so many words as he was not 100%.  She was a wriggler.

The 20 week appointment confirmed it though! We were going to welcome a little bundle of “sugar and spice and all things nice”.

We began talking about names, which was a monumental task in itself.  Until you are about to have a child of your own, you don’t actually realise the thought that has to be put into coming up with a name for someone that has not even arrived yet.  They have to live with your choice for the rest of their life!

Terry and I basically each wrote a list of names that we liked, and then swopped, and then scratched names of each other’s lists, then swopped back to see the edited versions.  There were a handful of gorgeous girl names that we had both written down so clearly our choice would be one of them.  A brilliant idea was to run a few of our maybe options past some of our friends and if they came up with any horrid nicknames then it was scrapped…immediately…and our friends are quite a creative bunch.

And so by the end of the second trimester, we had already settled on a name for our daughter-to-be.  Now when we spoke about “it” we could rather say “she” and “Paige”.