What To Expect: Weeks 27 and 28.... and now 29

November 17, 2009

I started to write a blog entry last week, and this is how far I got:

As of this week, the baby is weighing in at around 2.5 pounds and is around 16 inches long. She's definitely become a mover - one night last week she was kicking so hard that Aaron and I could see my stomach move.

Yep, one whole paragraph, people. My brain is not working these days. Well, it's not working at full capacity, and any of the brain power I do have has been reserved for things like writing a thesis and assembling 1,234,000 pieces of IKEA furniture (blog about that to follow sometime this century) and thinking about (ahem, freaking out about) the fact that I have to give birth in 11 weeks - or less!

However, one part of my brain that is working is the part that gets annoyed. For example, a girl in one of my classes yesterday asked me if my baby was planned, and when I told her that, in fact, she was, this girl began to question my judgement as to the timing. Because it apparently didn't make sense to her that if the baby had been planned, why I had picked what she felt was a bad time to have her (the middle of the semester - GASP! ) Because you can pick the exact time you have a baby like you schedule a haircut. Because my life decisions should be based on what a casual school acquaintance thinks.

I thought I was going to have an aneurism right in the middle of class! I did wind up asking her, "Well, when exactly do you think would be a good time to have my baby?" but besides that I kept my cool in front of her. Then called Melissa and two of my friends to bitch about it. I want to call that girl's mom and tell her that she failed at raising a child with acceptable manners.

So, it's another week later on the blog entries, and now our little kicker is the size of a squash. And not a summer squash, people - a 2.5 lb to 3.8 lb beast of a squash. She's definitely quite mobile, and sometimes I'll jump when one of her big moves catches me by surprise.

I haven't gotten really huge yet, so I'm still enjoying the baby belly. In fact, every day at least 2 or 3 times I'll think about how sad I'll be when I'm not pregnant anymore. The times I really notice that my body has changed in a negative way are when I try to do things that were once easy for me and have now become difficult. Example: two weekends ago, I was involved in coordinating a wedding for my friend, Lani, down in Winter Park. I'm used to catering and doing weddings, being up and on my feet for 18 hours straight, no problem. However, by 3:00 the day of the wedding, I thought my feet were literally going to fall off - and I hadn't even been doing the manual labor that I usually wind up doing! It was a tough realization.

Getting up and down is also kind of a chore. When I go from sitting or laying to standing, it usually involves a grunt or two. This provided Aaron with never-ending enjoyment when I was up and down, up and down, up and down, assembling furniture this past week. He thought it was hilarious and started imitating my huffs and puffs and groans. Needless to say, I did not find his imitations amusing. (When our friend, Dan, asked him if he was going to do that in the delivery room, too, Aaron responded, "Absolutely!" I think we all know that's not true, but it was funny that he thought he could get away with it!)

Here are some pictures from the wedding weekend so you can see how the belly is doing!

IKEA preview

So, this is what I did yesterday.... Full story to follow.

(That's two flatbed carts FULL plus 1 shopping cart, btw. Approximately 900 lbs of furniture.)

Registry Excellence

I have to say that registering for baby items has been one of the more challenging aspects of planning for the baby. It's one thing to register for wedding gifts - you know how you live on a day to day basis, so you just pick out stuff that you need to be able to do what you normally do, except now you'll be doing it with another person that you've known for awhile and really, really love. And you have to decide if you want to do what you normally do on china with a silver band or with the trendy blue pinstripe?

A baby registry is an entirely different situation. All of these things have to prepare you for an entirely new life with a brand new human being that you have never met and that YOU HAVE TO KEEP ALIVE!!! NO PRESSURE! It's just that the cute little high chair that you like so much in the store?Well, it could kill your baby.

While registering for things that are vital to human survival, you also have to think about what these things look like - what kind of image do I want to impart on this brand new human being? This is important! This is the stuff that, years from now, your kid is going to complain about in therapy! (Example: The hideous mullet haircuts my mother gave us when I was in 2nd grade. Now, that statement will make her furious and she will insist that those were cute haircuts. Mama, I'm sorry. And you are wrong.)

The final trial you face in registering for baby gear is the fact that there are so flippin' many places to register! Target, Babies-R-Us, Amazon, babyGap, Pottery Barn Kids, and about a million other places. Then there are places that don't have registries at all - all of the etsy.com sellers, DwellStudio, Ikea. So what do you do when the crib bumper you like is at Pottery Barn, the sheets you like are at DwellStudio, and the mattress you need is at Babies-R-Us? Well, for the past 6 months, I've been obsessively trying to figure all this out.

UNTIL NOW!

Thanks to Real Simple Magazine (thank you, you beautiful, life-saving people) I found out about a website called wishpot.com. This site allows you to create a registry with items from anywhere online. ANYWHERE! (well, almost anywhere. I wasn't able to add the stuff I want from IKEA, but it's a small negative.) Now all of my registry items are in one location, so it's not confusing for me or for people wanting to buy baby gifts. PLUS it's a really user-friendly layout. PLUS it allows you to take contributions for pricier gifts. PLUS there's a fun little widget you can add to your blog! (You may have noticed all of the delightful items scolling on the right of your screen - those are items on the baby registry!)

I could probably go on for two or three more paragraphs about this, but I'm sure that would be boring. I will just say that I am in looooooooove with this website. Registry problems? Solved! Well, except for having to make sure my bedding choice won't emotionally scar my child.

The Bump

As of last Sunday, October 11, Week 25-ish.

What To Expect: Weeks 25 and 26

October 26, 2009

This entry is lumping weeks 25 and 26 together because (clearly) I missed posting last week. After 6 semesters of a blissful relationship with my computer, my hard drive decided to crash last weekend. And I found out that the lovely people who I have been paying for the past two years to back up my data online decided not to back up any of my CAD files. Who needs those anyway? Each one only represents about 400 HOURS OF MY LIFE!!!!

(Okay, deep breath......)

In news that doesn't make me want to beat my head against a wall, the baby is now over a foot long, and is weighing in between 1.5 to 2 pounds. Her lungs are forming, and she's taking practice breaths through her nostrils which have recently opened. I feel a lot of movement during the day, but it's still not really powerful movements. They actually kind of tickle sometimes. I had been trying to come up with a way to explain what the movements feel like, and was having trouble. A few days ago, my arm had a little twitch, and then the baby moved, and I realized that the two basically felt the same - her movements basically feel like an involuntary muscle twitch in my abdomen.

I have been having some trouble sleeping, largely because I'm sleeping on my side, which makes my hip hurt. I spend a lot of time rolling over from side to side. Every once in awhile I'll lay on my back just so I can have a break from the hip aches. I've had two nights when I woke up and couldn't go back to sleep. One was about two weeks ago, and I laid in bed for about an hour and a half before I got up because I was hungry, which of course woke Aaron up because he's a light sleeper. I went to the kitchen, ate a bowl of Cheerios, came back to bed, and immediately started to cry for no reason. I finally went to sleep another hour or so later. Good times.

This weekend, Aaron was gone camping, so when I woke up at 4:15 Saturday morning and couldn't go back to sleep, I just watched some TiVo'd Oprah for a few hours before dozing off again. The good side to all this is that I'm finding it easier to wake up in the morning than I usually do and I'm not exhausted all day long or anything. I know that things are all downhill from here as far as sleep is concerned, so I'm not too upset about my sleep problems. For now.

What to Expect: Week 24

October 11, 2009

Okay, okay, I'm late posting this week's update. But I have a really good reason! I swear! This week I got to go in for another ultrasound (or is it sonogram? I still haven't figured out the difference) and I wanted to wait to post until I had fresh new pictures of the baby. I also had my monthly OB appointment, where they informed me that I gained 6 pounds last month. Guess which of these things I'm more excited about.

The jump in weight is actually not a big deal, since I hadn't gained too much weight so far, and until last month I barely had a baby bump. Now the stomach is LARGE (and I will post pictures of it soon) and I really think that's where most of the extra weight gain happened. (If you have any other opinions on the topic, you will keep them to yourself.)

The ultrasound went great and everything is looking how they want it to look (I had this ultrasound to make sure my placenta had moved safely away from my cervix, which is important because if it was too close, I could wind up having placenta previa, being put on bedrest and going into early labor. But potential crisis avoided.) The Dr. repeatedly called her various anatomical parts "perfect" - perfect heart, perfect brain, perfect head. I also had the sonographer check the private parts again so we could be positively sure we're having a girl. Unfortunately she didn't snap a picture, but OH WOW is it a girl! No doubt about it now.

Having an ultrasound is one of the most surreal and bizarre things I have ever experienced. Yes, I know I have a belly. Yes, I feel a baby kicking in there. But it still doesn't seem completely real until you see it, you know? And even with the first ultrasound pictures, she looked more like an alien than a baby. This week, she definitely looked like a real human being. And it is a TRIP!!!! There are things in life that you experience that you had no understanding of before and have no way to communicate about effectively once they've been experienced. I have no way to explain what it's like to know that there is an actual human being floating around inside you, growing hair and eyelids and fingernails and slowly becoming the child that you're going to spend the rest of your life with. I just know that it has been totally amazing for me.

What to Expect: Week 23

October 5, 2009

Since we will not be getting fruit updates on a weekly basis, I thought it would be nice to have an internal view of the baby's progress (courtesty of whattoexpect.com.) The baby should be weighing in at over a pound now and over 8 inches long. My stomach is definitely becoming a force to be reckoned with, and I think I'll only have an "innie" belly button for another week max. This morning, Aaron noticed that the linea nigra is starting to show up, but it's still pretty light.

I told Aaron this morning (then I knocked on wood about 1,000 times) that I'm actually really enjoying being pregnant. I've been lucky to not have any terrible side effects and symptoms, and it's pretty fun to look down at a big fat belly and think, "Hey, that's pretty cool!" not "Hey, I am the fattest person on the planet." I feel far cuter pregnant than not. I know that's weird, and I know there are at least 1 billion women that would want to kick me in the face if they read that, but that's how I feel. Come back in about 10 weeks when I can't see my feet and I'm sure I'll be singing a different tune and then those 1 billion women can laugh and say, "I TOLD YOU SO!!!!" But for now, I'm absolutely loving it.