My 31st week of pregnancy has largely seen me tired and demotivated. All my mental and physical energy seems to have gone. After a productive few months blogging I have been finding it much more of an effort to write, edit and promote my work. I also haven’t wanted to stay up in the evenings, a time I normally get a few hours of work in after the girls have been asleep. This baby growing business has finally caught up with me.

There are lots of reasons I am feeling so tired at the moment, one of which is pregnancy insomnia. There have been several nights I have been lying awake for no reason, but just totally unable to sleep. There have also been quite a few nights where my initial waking has been caused by a small child, but instead of going back to sleep I have been awake for an hour or too.

I’ve also found I have started to get incredibly tired after eating. All my blood must be focusing on digesting my food so there isn’t much left for keeping me awake. Around this time in my pregnancy with Little I was particularly tired due to low iron levels, but I’m not sure that is a problem at the moment.

I have been eating more this week, which doesn’t help with the tiredness, but I have just felt so hungry at times. I try to focus on high protein foods like meat and pistachio nuts (the only nuts I really like), but it’s hard to think of foods to eat generally which won’t give me bad heartburn. I normally avoid eating within a few hours of bedtime because of the heartburn, but the other night I ended up cooking myself fish fingers and chips after my toddler had gone to bed because I was so hungry and snack wasn’t going to cut it (and I didn’t have a lot in my fridge). 

I know heartburn is going to be a continuous theme until baby arrives, but I found it interesting this week that I woke up with heartburn so I’m now getting it even when I haven’t eaten recently.

My bump still looks quite small and it hasn’t really stuck out much more over the last 10 weeks, but it does seem to get bigger the other way. With the girls my bumps have been more compact and they have grown outwards as the baby needs space, this time the bump mostly grows sideways and up. I’m not entirely sure where all my internal body parts have gone.

I suspect there has been a growth spurt this week, I’m not sure if that was the cause of increased hunger or if eating more has just caused my tummy to get bigger. I have had several days where the skin on my tummy has felt really tight like it is desperately trying to increase in size. I look forward to the stretch marks!

I still haven't managed to take an intentional bump shot

As it’s to be expected as the bump gets bigger I am getting more uncomfortable both day and night. My DreamGenii helps a lot with position at night, but Tuesday night I was so achy and I had pretty rubbish backache the following day. Fortunately that night was my Pilates class which made a huge difference. Pilates has really been great for me this pregnancy and I would really recommend others look for an antenatal class to make their pregnancy is more comfortable.

The lower back pain from my PGP has also been present at times this week so I'm trying to be more careful of movement. There was one evening I was looking for something under the sofas and I ended up stuck on the floor unable to get up. Eventually the pain from lying on the wooden floor was greater than the pain in my tail bone and I stopped doing an upside down tortoise impression. I'm reluctant to get down on the floor now.

Nesting

I have continued to spend a lot of time nesting this week. I might not have the motivation to sit at my computer and write a review, but for some reason I have been more than happy to pull out everything from our understaffs cupboard and fold around 100 plastic bags into triangles. Pregnancy does odd things to the brain! I now only have a few cupboards/ drawers downstairs to sort out and then it will be on to the upstairs, a much bigger challenge

The "before" of my carrier bag pile

The big thing this week was we started looking for a new (to us) car. Our current Fiesta won’t fit 3 seats across the back and the boot space is too small so we knew when we were planning a 3rd child that we would need a bigger car. Due to my fear of losing this baby I didn’t want to start car shopping until a couple of months before they were due, but now we can’t put it off any longer.

I asked people with 3 children which cars they recommended and ended up with a list of MPV’s, SUV’s and other types of car. We then spent Saturday looking around car garages. We eventually decided that we definitely wanted a petrol car because I predominantly drive short journeys so the filter in Diesel cars won’t get a chance to burn off. We also decided that we would like a 7 seater car because it will give us much more flexibility in the future if we want to give anyone a lift, and the rest of the time we would have a huge boot space. 

The challenge is that there aren’t that many second hand petrol MPVs on the market and some models of car (like Ford S-Max and Citroen Grand C4 Spacetourer previously Picasso) had to be ruled out based on availability. A few other models like The Ford Galaxy we ruled out because of the size. We finally decided we would go for a Vauxhall Zafira Tourer or a Renault Grand Scenic and we are now just trying to choose between a few available cars, but are struggling to choose due to the varying cost, specifications and ages of the vehicles we have seen and test driven.