Yellow Book

Your Midwife at your local surgery will give you an A4 Book - Pregnancy and Birth Notes. Also known as your 'Yellow Book'.

This is a really important book and tells your midwife and the hospital everything about YOU and YOUR BABY.

The first page summarises your routine appointments during your pregnancy at the different stages.

Your Midwife should go through this with you and each time you see her, they should outline whether a hospital appointment will be made for you, when you need to book an appointment with your GP and when you need to book an appointment to see your Midwife.

Its always helpful to tick off where you are on this 'Summary of Appointments' and I also found it useful to add the dates of my appointments next to each stage listed. Its always a good point of reference just in case you have a partner with a sieve-head!

Another good piece of advice is...ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS take your Yellow Book everywhere with you. Not just on your routine appointments, but everywhere. The reason for this is that if you're out shopping and you have an accident, the emergency services instantly know what your situation is by reading the contents of the book.

Don't do what I did and forget to take to your first hospital scan. The hospital staff were not best pleased and the 'losing my brain cells already' line didn't work.

You think you're pregnant?

So, you think you're pregnant? What do you do?

In March 07, I bought a pregnancy home testing kit. Don't do what I did. I went for the cheapest home kit on the market and it had a 'Buy one get one free' offer. There's got to a reason they are so cheap. The first result indicated 'positive', but the colour spread across the entire window and left me feeling unsure as to the real result. So, I used the 2nd 'free' test. Same thing happened.

I bought another test which was digital, more expensive but rather than showing the result with a coloured line, it simply stated 'pregnant' or 'not pregnant'. Brilliant!

My result was 'pregnant'.

I still didn't believe it.

So, I bought another 2 tests (£13.99 for 2) ...just to make sure this one was correct. It was.

In total, I spent about £35 on pregnancy tests. My advice is just got for the Clear Blue Digital kits...it will save any question mark over your results and your pennies!

http://clearblueonlineshop.inon.com/products.jsp?productType=Pregnancy%20Tests

I made an appointment at my local GP, expecting them to confirm my result with a test there and then in the surgery. However, I was advised that these days the home kits are SO accurate, they go with those little windows of pink lines and positive pregnancy words. I felt relieved I'd done more tests...just for MY peace of mind.

ABOUT ME

Hi,

I'm Jewels. I'm thirty-six (looks younger if you don't show your age in numbers!) and together with my husband, Jerry, we are trying to merrily tiptoe through the twisting pathways of being first-time parents.

I say 'merrily', but it doesn't always work out that way and more often that not, you'll find us walking into the deep undergrowth, jumping over canyons, swinging on vines and sometimes, just sometimes...the canyons are deeper and wider than we thought and the vines aren't as strong as they looked!

Join us on our Explorers' journey into the Unknown (for us) and follow our 'no holds barred' adventure online diary including video footage and photos, starting from 9 months BEFORE our beautiful baby arrived...