Mother's Passport? Check.

My Mutterpass.  Some people make or buy covers for these to make them look nice.  I think these people are mental.

So, I suppose in the two weeks I haven't blogged due to being annoyed with feeling so shit, thanks body, quite a lot has happened.  For starters, I've had two trips to see my Frauenarzt (gynae).  I totally enjoy going to see her, mainly because my husband enjoys going to see her so much that he won't let me go without him, and I really enjoy how much he enjoys it.  This is basically because:

(a) my Frauenarzt is ace.  She is so kind and straightforward and serious and scientific and without any sense of humour that all questions are answered in utter sincerity, even when I ask wryly if there's definitely only one embryo in there; or when my husband asks, if I'm really alright to still be going up 4 flights of stairs to reach our flat in my current stage of pregnancy (9 weeks) (bless my lovely husband)

and

(b) every time we go, the experience is a bit like 50 First Dates.  Or rather, what I know 50 First Dates to be about, because I've never seen it and so I'm basically just going on what it says on IMDB.  It's about Drew Barrymore having short-term memory loss and never remembering having previously been on a date with Adam Sandler (which sounds to me like the ideal way to date Adam Sandler).  Anyway, apart from Drew Barrymore and Adam Sandler, this is basically what it's like going to see my Frauenarzt.  It's not that I'd for one second expect her or her receptionists to remember my husband and/or I specifically amongst their hundreds (thousands?) of other patients, it's just that every time we go, it's somehow beyond lack of recognition and more like groundhog day.  I'm asked the same questions (are you taking your folic acid and iodine tablets (Folio Forte, for the record), the answers to which are noted down on each occasion.  Then, after immediately realising I'm not a native German speaker, do you speak English?  And she think I'm from Finland.  Every time.  And when we leave at the end: have we given you a copy of this pregnancy magazine?  The same pregnancy magazine we have tried to give you three times now?  Alongside this plastic bag full of advertising shit we are pretending is a special gift for your husband to make him feel fatherly and involved?

So, I love my gynae.  She is excellent, and I really love going and having the lightsaber stuck up me so we can see the insanity that is going on inside me whilst I try not to chuckle at the thin white curtains on the windows that have "dream" and "love" and "yes" embroidered on them.  At the 8-week scan (THERE'S A FUCKING HEARTBEAT!!!) she explained everything on the screen to us extremely carefully and clearly - although to be honest, I'm still really going on her word that I'm pregnant, but if she says that amorphous grey blob is really the beginning of human life then I'm not going to argue with her - and then filled out the first lot of little boxes in my brand new Mutterpass.

For those of you who thought I was wrong and that a Mutterpass cover might be quite nice: we'll just have to agree to disagree.  Image Source: Britti-1 at dawanda.com

The Mutterpass is a surprisingly large, flappy booklet that is slowly being filled with all my pregnancy-related information from each doctor's visit, and I am meant to carry it around with me at all times in case of whatever, without losing it, for the next six and a half months.  Not only has it got important doctorly scribblings in it regarding me and my foetus but also stickers from the results of various tests I had done on my first visit (for blood type, HIV, red blood cell count and plenty of other things that I don't understand in English let alone in German) which makes me really, really want to start putting in other kinds of stickers because I haven't had a sticker book since I was 12 years old.  I imagine, however, that I'd not get a particularly positive response for sticking a picture of a member of the German national football team under my chlamydia test result.  Incidentally, all those tests cost a bloody fortune here if you have them outside the circumstances of being knocked up: it's no wonder that a friend of mine here admitted she's gone to donate blood entirely because (other than being paid 27€ for it) it means you get the tests done for free.  In fact, before my husband and I started having unprotected sex, I asked the gynae for a sexual health checkup and she appeared totally confused by the thought.  My gynae.  It seems that We Still Don't Really Talk About STDs here.  Bit shocking.

But I digress.  Armed with my Mutterpass I returned on Tuesday for a spontaneous checkup as I'd had a truly minute amount of bleeding during the previous 24 hours which I supposed was probably normal but didn't really want to spend the whole day at work worrying about.  She put the lightsaber in and declared everything tickety-boo, which was a relief (and a relief to find it a relief) and remarked that from this stage, 9 weeks and 3 days, it would be incredibly unlikely for me to miscarry.  So now, it seems, it's really time for me to start getting my head around the fact that, holy fuck, I'm really bloody pregnant.