And counting down...

It's 5 am, or thereabouts. I need to be at the hospital in three hours to start the end stage of this whole process.
So I'm thinking about the last nine months  of baby preparations rather than dwell on the idea of an operation and blood transfusions etc.

9 months ago was July, my birthday, and we went out for a wonderful meal. It was that weekend that these two monkeys must have been conceived...
Soon afterward the school term ended and I headed back to the UK with the children, sometimes with J and sometimes just the me and the boys. It was a very busy time and I was shattered as I worked to sort out the UK house for the holiday rental market while also trying to give the boys a fun summer holiday, see family etc.
J's birthday falls in early August and with the boys and I in the UK and him in Guernsey he took a day off to make a long weekend and flew over to join us. August or not, the fog caused issues with flights that weekend too and he had to waste his day off sitting at the airport waiting for a plane.

We had a fun weekend and he headed back. Originally I'd been heading back too, but there was a lot of work to do so we decided the boys and I'd stay another week and he'd come back to collect us, flying into Gatwick where his dad would collect him and come to help for the weekend.

Between the 6th and 10th of August 2012 a madness descended on certain parts of the UK and I sat up late watching the footage as London burned.
Even that didn't explain my tiredness but I'd been so busy that I'd not realised that I'd missed a period. In my head I'd always know that I was due on my return journey to the island. But of course I'd delayed my return, and not thought about it.
Even when a friend of mine, Lynda, suggested that the exhaustion and nausea might be symptomatic of pregnancy I laughed it off. Yes, it was possible, but we'd been apart for the best part of a month, we'd only seen each other the weekend before, far too soon for hormones to have kicked in.
I'd missed completely the fact that actually I was already 2 weeks late...

I was cleaning when it dawned on me. J was due to arrive that evening, with his dad.
I bought  a test kit and waited for him, but I'd done the maths, checked my diary and was pretty sure. We were having another baby, after all the discussing and debating and planning, number four as almost certainly on his or her way.

J "does numbers" like I do words. He'd come to the same conclusion days before but wanted us to be together when we found out so had said nothing. We snatched a few minutes alone to each reveal our theory on my health.
Next morning I took the test kit to the loo and brought it back to bed, handing it to J to be checked as I had first time around. Sure enough, within seconds the words flashed up: "Pregnant 2-3 weeks".

We came back to Guernsey and I was about 9 weeks when I saw the GP, who was annoyed that I had waited so long to get into the system, but at least by that time we had got our heads round the fact that we were going to be the parents of a family of four.

And three weeks later we had that fateful scan, when we discovered that in future we'd need ALL the fingers of a hand to count our children.

And now it's 5.30am, on what will be their birthday, and life will never be the same again.