You’d be forgiven for thinking I vanished off the face of the earth sometime at the end of March, but actually I’ve been alternating between being quite busy and utterly exhausted. Being pregnant makes everything hard work! I’m very lucky though, plenty of nausea but no actual being sick, in the morning or otherwise. I am always hungry, but unfortunately I’ve also gone off a lot of foods that I normally enjoy.

To sum up: permanently tired, moaning, looking for food and insatiably hungry? Yup, this pregnancy is turning me into a zombie and I love it!

Something Mr BAM had planned for us before we had littl’un on the way was our much postponed second honeymoon to Rome. (Arguably our first honeymoon didn’t really count because it was just a wet weekend in Cornwall at a B and B with a terrifying landlady.) This time Mr BAM spoiled me rotten, splurging on four nights at a five star hotel in a room with a balcony with this amazing view over the city!

The dome of St Peter’s is visible in the right of the picture, and at night it was lit up.
The weather was mild enough that in the mornings I would sit and knit on the balcony whilst I waited for Mr BAM to wake up. Sunday morning was my favourite as I could hear all the church bells ringing out across the city.

I visited Rome many times with my family as a child, but despite the inevitable nostalgia at going back, this was a very different experience! But you can’t really compare a holiday with a family of six packed into a camper van for three weeks with a four night stay in a luxury hotel; let’s just say they each had their charms! 🙂 How my parents managed it on a shoe-string budget with four quarrelsome kids and no sat-nav to guide them or internet to offer advice I will never know! I’m just glad that this time we could get a taxi back to the hotel whenever I got too tired!

Four days is nowhere near enough to even see the highlights of a city like Rome,especially not when done at my current speed, which is at best a stately waddle. Mr BAM has never been to Italy before, and although he insisted he didn’t mind taking it easy, I wish we could have seen more of the sights. Oh well, next time. (We have already decided there will be a next time!)

We visited St Peter’s on our first day, and as it was later in the afternoon the queues to get inside were more manageable. I didn’t take any photos inside, partly out of respect and partly because you miss out on the scale and grandeur of it all if you are fiddling about with a camera.

Afterwards we stopped for ice-cream and Mr BAM was amused to find a Viagra flavour on sale!

The woman in the shop looked at my baby bump and laughed, waving her finger at him and saying “this, you do not need!”. He looked very pleased with himself! We each had a cone with four flavours (count’em Mum! FOUR!) but really my favourite is, and will always be, melon. Why doesn’t anyone make melon ice-cream in England? I need it!

We then went for a walk along the river and went to find somewhere to have dinner. (Ice-cream before dinner? Sometimes being an adult is awesome!)The next day we braved the queue for the Vatican Museum with its plague of selfie stick sellers and pushy tour guides. It was worth the two hour wait just to see the Sistine Chapel, which was even more breathtaking than I remembered. You’re not allowed to take pictures in case the flashes damage the priceless frescos… so of course there were idiots who couldn’t help themselves despite the warnings in multiple languages and the signs with pictures of cameras with a big red cross through it for the hard of thinking. Sigh.

For the remaining two days we stayed in the hotel for the mornings so I could grab a bit more sleep after we gorged ourselves at the hotel’s spectacular international breakfast buffet. In the afternoons we rode around on the hop-on hop-off open top buses.

We just missed the last entrance to the Colosseum, but I think Mr BAM would had to have had carried me round at that point!

It was a wonderful long weekend away, and I’m so glad we managed to have a proper little holiday together before the little one gets here.

The baby was never far from our thoughts, and we both look forward to taking him or her to all the places we visited. I couldn’t resist buying a little cuddly lion outside the Colosseum for the baby!

And in case you were wondering what it was I was knitting on the hotel balcony…

They aren’t quite finished yet because I’m waiting to add buttons until know if littl’un is a girl or a boy. My 20 week scan is less than a fortnight away, so hopefully we will find out then!

Beth

🙂