Yes, my big belly has now become a platform for my boobs. Where are they going to live in 2 more months?! hahaha..
So you read the title right - at 29 weeks I'm up 28 pounds from pre-pregnancy. More than I thought but not that much more I suppose. And the midwives said they like to see anything between 25-35 and are totally happy with where I'm at so I'll try not to feel the traumatization of seeing the scale readings at my appointments. I've moved to appointments every 3 weeks now. My next is 3/17 and then I have another 3 weeks later, then I believe I move to every 2 weeks! It's crazy how quickly time is going - but how slowly at the same time!
We've been making headway in getting more things that we want/need and more progress on the nursery as well. We have our stroller and highchair and have them put together and ready to go. Our first shower is this Sunday, March 14th so I'm sure we'll have plenty more by Monday! The shower is being held at
Summit View Banquet House in Holyoke. I can't believe it's already here, but so it is! I'll try to post some pictures after too.
So the nursery progress! We've got the mattress and bedding in the crib now, along with a lavender shag rug that we put in front of the crib. I'm hoping to find some big cushy floor-type pillows that we can put away during the day, but prop up against the front of the crib on the rug so we can do storytime that way. We'll have the glider up there too, but we realized that both mommy and daddy are interested in storytime, so it will likely be a family affair - at least from time to time. :-) Jeff has also taken to displaying a few of our stuffed animals on the back of the crib. We still want to get letters to spell her name on the wall above the crib but so far so good.
Then last weekend we got this cube storage dealie from Target. We were considering different sorts of bookcase type pieces and hadn't planned to go the particle-board route, but this was functional and cute. It also made for a great place to display the Jim Shore carousel that my mom got us at Christmas time and a place for us to start putting the books for our quickly expanding library. Right now the purple slide-out bins are empty, and we're not positive what we're going to use those for, but I'm sure some hidden storage is always good in a kid's room and it'll only be a matter of time before it's all filled up. :-)
Overall, I'm very pleased with how the nursery is shaping up. I actually just booked maternity photos with
Photography by Heather for April 3rd and we decided to do some in the nursery and she's going to bring her backdrop and lighting to set up some studio-type photos for us as well. I'm very excited. I'll be about 32.5 weeks at that point - though as you can see I definitely have the belly for it now! I didn't want to wait TOO long 'just in case' and plus I'm getting more and more uncomfortable and I can't imagine that's going to particularly improve at this point!!
The following weekend we have the shower that Jeff's family is throwing us - April 11th. Because of the distance between both of our families, two separate showers like we did for the wedding made the most sense. But our weekends sure are filling up quickly!
Things are pretty status quo for how I'm feeling - though just this past week or so I've started having trouble sleeping. For no particular reason! I'm not any more uncomfortable and in fact am typically MOST comfortable laying in bed, I'm not peeing every 10 mins at night or anything, and baby girl doesn't wake me up with her kicking. I just.wake.up. For no reason. But it sure is ticking me off!! Her movement has definitely increased over the last few weeks as well - Jeff has felt an uncountable number of kicks at this point and we'll often lay together so that he can have his hand on my belly to feel her movin' and groovin' in my tummy. :-) She still spends most of her time all up in my ribs making me crazy, and I'm pretty sure she's still changing position pretty frequently which I guess is good, though I'm eager for her to settle into the 'head-down' position just so I can stop thinking about it. hahaha..
And last but not least - two awesome books that I've borrowed from our Bradley class instructor:
Henci Goer's The Thinking Woman's Guide to a Better Birth, and also
Ina May Gaskin's Ina May's Guide to Childbirth. The Henci book was hugely informative and explained so many different things and procedures and was very educating. I'm still reading Ina May's book but the first 120 pages of the book are dedicated to wonderful, moving, positive birth stories from women that gave birth on
The Farm (community that she started). These women did not give birth in sterile hospitals with bright lights and bustling activity with interventions pushed at them, but rather in the quiet homes of their community with the attendance of kind, experienced midwives. One thing that's struck me is that there are SO MANY stories of women who birthed 8, 9, and 10+ pound babies all naturally - by which I mean completely med-free - and vaginally with no episiotomies and often with minimal to no tearing. In a hospital, "large for gestational age" is a reason some OB's will recommend scheduling a C-Section without even giving the woman the chance to see what her body can do. These are inspiring stories that are very good for a pregnant mommy to read.
So after cheating you out of an update last week, you got a long rambling update. :-)
