Aoife's memory box

I've always known that I wanted to keep memory boxes for any and all children that I have. I wanted to keep momentos from throughout my pregnancy and also mementos collected through their childhood.

I'm a very sentimental person and I love keeping momentos and souvenirs myself from the things that I've done or from the places I've been. 

After the jump you'll be able to see what we've collected in Aoife's memory box so far.

A year ago today!?

One of the most exciting yet scariest days of my life happened this time last year! Can you guess before you carry on reading?

Five things I loved (and hated) about pregnancy ★

As I was saying in the previous post here is my list about the things that I really loved and really hated about being pregnant~

Loved

♡ Afternoon naps ♡

I loved having the excuse to go and have a lie down or have a lie in and for no one to say that I was being lazy. Before I was pregnant my honey said I had too many afternoon naps and then he totally retracted it and told me to go for naps when I was pregnant. At the end of my pregnancy my midwife said I needed to have a daily afternoon nap due to my unstable blood pressure.

♡ Feeling kicks ♡

The feeling of your baby moving around is magical. My little chunky (that's her nickname by the way!) always had hiccups and loved to wake me during the night with strong kicks. Feeling her move also put my mind at ease as I'm naturally a big worrier. My honey didn't get to feel her move that often because as soon as I said she's moving and he'd put his hand on my bump she would stop.

♡ The anticipation ♡

I really couldn't wait to meet my mini me. I'd spend afternoons fanticizing about what we would do or where my baby and I would go together. I'd talk to my family about taking her and her cousins out together, and then I'd think about her first days at school etc.

 ♡ The attention ♡

It's amazing how much attention you get when you're pregnant. I'd get random people touching my bump, or asking when I'm due, or just telling me about when they were pregnant (it was generally elderly women) but the attention was really nice and people were always quite sweet and friendly.

♡ Revealing the gender ♡

I loved revealing the gender when we found out. Everyone became super super excited when we revealed we were expecting a girl. People were planning what to buy her and I was excited about all the cute clothes she would get to wear. Plus my chunky and I could gang up on daddy together!

Hated

× Morning sickness ×

I managed to suffer from morning sickness very early on and also very badly. I managed to loose two and a half stone in two months due to severe morning sickness. So many people, including family, friends and the midwife, were recommending ways to deal with it and nothing would work. I was at the point where I would vomit out the small amount of water I'd just drank.

× Heartburn ×

I also suffered from incredibly bad heartburn, especially in the last three months. It became so bad that I had bottles of Gaviscon everywhere, and I was drinking it like crazy. In the end I ended up with Omeprazole because even the double strength Gaviscon, and staying away from the foods and drink that made it worse, didn't help.  

× Being able to smell everything ×

This was horrible! My nose would cotton on to every single little smell floating around. Even things that generally smell nice smelt horrible because my sense of smell was so heightened. I walked through a perfume aisle and the smell was horrendous because it was so strong.

× The constant need to pee ×

I felt like most of the time I was glued to the toilet at the end of my pregnancy. It became more annoying when I had to go to the toilet constantly during the night and I felt like I never had a decents night sleep. As well, if my chunky gave me a strong enough kick I became close to wetting myself which would have been quite embarassing in public.

× Having to wait ×

And lastly, the wait for my chunky to appear felt like it went on forever. I did have times where I became panicky because I was scared of giving birth, but the wait eclipsed that and in the last couple of weeks leading up to chunky's appearance I was so excited and couldn't wait for her arrival.

Addition to our family ～ ♡

It seems like I dropped off the end of the earth! I haven't blogged in such a long time~ v___v 

I don't have a reason as to why I stopped blogging in the first place! Maybe I just lost interest? But I'm starting to diverge here! 

I am going to start blogging again! I've given my blog a little tidy up and changed a little of the CSS so I'm all set to start blogging again. So, onto the subject of this blog post; the new addition to our family!

On the 15th April I found out I was pregnant! 

It wasn't a surprise to us because we had been trying for a baby for the last nine months, but in a way it was unexpected because I did a pregnancy test on a whim and didn't expect to get a positive result at all. I didn't believe the first test so I did more and more tests over the weekend. 

The only annoying thing about finding out I was pregnant very early on (I was around four weeks pregnant when I found out) was keeping it quiet because I wanted to shout it from the rooftops but at the same time if anything happened early on I wouldn't have been able to cope with telling everyone something had happened. Of course, our families knew as soon as I knew so at least I didn't keep it all a secret. After the twelve week scan we then started letting others know about the pregnancy. 

There were parts of my pregnancy I really enjoyed and then again other parts of my pregnancy that I absolutely hated and couldn't wait for them to be over and done with; but I'll go into those in another blog post in the future because I'll end up rabbiting on and on!

 I loved my bump though! It was only in the last month or two that my bump became quite big and started to get into the way of little daily things like bending over if I dropped something or putting my shoes on. I even struggled putting dirty clothes in the washing machine. I got to buy lots of lovely maternity clothes that I'll still probably wear because they're all so cute. The dress above is from the Asos maternity range.

My original due date was the 22nd December, however, (and luckily as it was Christmas time) my little one decided she wanted to enter the world a little earlier than expected and so on the 14th December at 10.35am Aoife May Williams was born via emergency ceserean section. 

She's only four days old in this picture here (it was the day we were finally released from the hospital!) but she already strikes some great poses and has a wonderful pout as well as a loud set of lungs. We've also had a lot of interesting spellings and pronounciations of Aoife (which is pronounced as ee-fa), but when we tell people a lot of people they have been pronouncing and spelling her name as Eva. Aoife is the Irish version of Eva so they're not half wrong at least.

I'll write more about my labour and ceserean experience in a later blog post because it will be a very long story to tell but we're a month on now and everything is going very well. It's a learning curve for myself and my partner as we're first time parents; however, we are really enjoying every moment of it (except for the lack of sleep!).