37 Weeks: Full Term!!

Meet the "full term bellah"!  :-)  Our little girl is finished developing, just gaining wait at this point, and can come whenever she wishes now.  Hooray!  She's somehow gotten even lower recently - which didn't seem possible, but there you have it.  I had a midwife appointment on Tuesday the 4th and all was well, but she had to go waaaaaay down low to get the heartbeat!  Consequently, I still only measure 36 but she said that once they drop you often won't make it to 40 so they're not concerned about that at all which is good.  I also only gained 3lbs from my previous appt that was 2 weeks before.  At this point it's expected to gain a pound a week so after the 7lb jump the last time, I was definitely thrilled to be right where I should be.  And most importantly, my blood pressure and urine samples were all normal so there's no concern about my swelling at this point which is great.  I'd rather NOT be swelling like this but it's definitely good to know it's just inconveniencing me and not causing a true problem.

They also did my Group B Strep culture at the 37 week appointment - still waiting to see how that will come back, but they did tell me they send the culture with request for sensitivities since I'm allergic to penicillin and that usually what they wind up using is Clindamycin which is actually something I've used topically before as an acne medication.  Added bonus is that it's given every 8 hours instead of every 4 like the penicillins are.  And even if it is positive, I don't need to show up at the birth center until my water breaks - so fingers crossed I labor like my mother (in more ways than one) and my water doesn't break until pushing!  Though basically they told me that the pediatricians like to see a dose of antibiotic at least 4 hours before birth, so I'm feeling better about being able to still labor at home regardless of which way the culture comes back.  I'm not thrilled about the thought of possibly having to have a heplock IV line, but will deal with that if it turns out to be a reality.

We also had our "pre-birth meeting" with our doula last night where we were able to go over any updates in the pregnancy and our plan and desires for the birth.  It really made it hit home that it could happen any time now!  But it was good to see she was on the same page with us and to know that we'll have someone there for us that actually knows what's going on and will have at least a certain level of detachment that is not something that Jeff or I could ever get in the situation, and sometimes you need that. 

I actually had a weekend of tummy upset last weekend that got us both a little excited thinking that things might be gearing up, but so far not the case.  And as piece of TMI, I think I've started to slowly lose my mucous plug between weeks 36 and 37.  No idea if it's actually 'gone' yet or even if that was just it getting ready or something, but I've heard not everyone loses it all at once and that sometimes they lose it over time more liquifying than just popping out.  Shrug.  I also know that you can lose it multiple times and it can regenerate so it's not really the best 'labor sign' out there.

But we're ready, that's for sure.  I know I keep saying it's getting harder and harder to move around, but now it DEFINITELY is hard to move around and do things.  Just going out to the store can be tough - my back starts to really hurt, and my feet start to hurt because they don't fit well in my shoes anymore (even my flip flops!).  My heartburn/reflux is INSANE at this point, which would actually be interesting if it didn't suck so bad because she's so much lower than she was so my digestive bits have more room than they did - so why is it worse?!  It's a problem at night - I usually wind up taking some tums one of the times I get up to pee in the night and still have problems, so needless to say this is one of those things I'm hoping goes away fairly immediately.  I mean, goes away to the extent it was gone before I was pregnant - i.e. managed with meds.

Despite all my discomforts though, I know I'm going to miss feeling her wiggling around inside me, knowing that she's with me.  We both definitely can't wait to meet her though, to see what she'll look like and to learn about her little personality.  So we sit and play the waiting game.  :-)

29 Weeks and 28 Pounds!

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.  :-)

26 Weeks and Less than 99 Days to go!!

26 weeks - 2 weeks left of the second trimester and I've hit double digits.  That is, double digit days left to go till my due date!  Not much else is going on and this will be brief as I lagged in posting this update almost a full week (oops).

Baby continues to push her way further into the ever increasingly valuable real estate of my abdominal cavity.  Right about now I'd put the value of my abdominal space in the category of super luxury home because there is so very very little of it left and its previous inhabitants (i.e. my ORGANS) are not pleased with their cramped quarters.

At least I continue to feel her movements throughout the day.  I've begun to notice patterns and can expect to feel her move about at specific times during the day and notice if I don't which is kind of neat.  It's almost like I'm able to keep track of what she's doing already!

24 Weeks: V is for VIABILITY!

24 weeks = "V-day" in the pregnancy world.  And that's a whole different V-day than most people think of.  We're not talking Valentine's Day people, we're talking viability!  At 24 weeks baby has a greater than 50/50 shot if she were born early and chances just get better from here.  It's a really good spot to get to for a mama.  :-)

Movement has also kicked up a notch - I still can't tell hands from feet from general moving around, but Jeff did finally feel his first kick on the 28th!  I finally made him sit down with his hand on my belly until he felt her - there's no way for me to know when she'll move and she doesn't always KEEP moving after the first bump so it was hard to otherwise make sure he was there at the right time.  Way cute - I had to tell  him when she kicked because he couldn't believe what he felt wasn't just my tummy in normal status.  hahaha..

We've also begun work on the nursery - all the previous 'spare bedroom' furniture is gone and we started painting.  Here is a photo timeline of what we have so far starting with the 'before'  picture.  We did the top half of the wall first, then started working on the stripes.  Because of how the stripes are laid out we were able to tape and paint two of the four colors of stripes at once which was nice.

I also got the call from Babies R Us that our dresser has arrived and is ready for pickup.  Thankfully we have 15 days to get it so can wait a week to go pick it up.  I'm hopeful the shape of the box will allow us to get it INSIDE my SUV - the crib was a no-go in that department and we had to ride it on my roof rack tied down.  That was...not the plan at the get-go.  I mean everything always fits in my truck!  But no - not the box for this crib.  Ah well.

I also ordered our crib bedding because the site was showing it as suddenly discontinued and since we spent such a long time deliberating on the 'right' set to get, I definitely wanted to be sure that we were able to get that one!  Particularly as I based my paint color choices off of it - so it was important that our decor actually match the paint job we're spending so much time in creating here!

Ignore my super cool 'painting' outfit here.  One thing I've learned about maternity wear is that it definitely puts you in a sticky situation when it comes to 'crap clothes' for things like painting.  So I have a pair of maternity pj pants and one of Jeff's too-small t-shirts on.  they did the job and I only caused minimal damage to them, so that's all that matters right?  lol..  Cuteness was definitely not a factor here.

In the end, we found we did have some trouble with the paint bleeding under our tape in some places.  This may be a problem where it happened on stripes that are going to be painted white in the next stage, but the other stripe color is dark purple so that should cover anything - the white is the only issue.  I've gotten some tips since discovering our problem as well on 'burnishing' the tape with a credit card or something to ensure full contact with the wall all the way down, and we also plan to pay close attention to the amount of paint we're using towards the tape to hopefully prevent bleeding again.

And last but not least, is a pic of the bedding we're getting.  We're mixing and matching from this set (Kids Line: Lilac Garden) and the Carter's: Garden Party set.  The bedding is all Lilac Garden but we're taking some of the ancillary pieces of the Garden Party set and using them instead because there are some things I just liked better and most of their stuff will match the Lilac Garden stuff anyway.  I can't wait to get the crib built and the bedding all set up!  All we need now is to build the crib and get the mattress!

23 weeks - More Big Purchases and Birthing Classes!

Movement is picking up!  I feel bouts of movement several times each day now - most commonly during/after eating.  I'm soooo happy to finally feel her - it's just such a comfort to feel her in there doing well and have that reminder.  To not have to just assume things are fine just because nothing bad has happened, etc.

According to the books, she now weighs about a pound, which for some reason seems monumental to me.  We're no longer talking about fractions of ounces anymore, but measuring in actual baby weight measurements!

We have also been working on our registries some more, and finally have a fair amount of stuff on there.  We may still add something here and there, but we've made the bulk of our decisions and between Amazon and BRU are pretty much covered.  Soooo glad that's over.  It's very hard to think of all the things and then to pick between the gazillion options out there and what's the best/safest one to choose?  How do you know?  What's just a gimmick and what's for real?  It's crazy out there.

Some of the biggest news is that we purchased our crib and ordered our dresser!!  The crib was almost a disaster to try to get home - it didn't fit in the back of my full sized SUV!  I couldn't believe it!  It takes a pretty big box to not fit inside the back but there was no way it was going in.  So they got us some rope and we did a bang-up job tying a ton of knots to secure it to my roof-rack. I canNOT wait to put them together.  I'm in love with them.  So pretty.  The crib will become a toddler bed, day bed, and full sized head and footboard as well.  They truly are gorgeous!  We got an awesome deal too - between the two pieces we saved $200 with a $100-off coupon plus a 10% off coupon that worked on your entire purchase when you add to your registry in-store. 

Now THERE'S a story - adding to our registry.  Doesn't seem like something that would imply a story,  right?  Yeah.  So we spend like an hour and a half

walking around with the little registry gun and wound up adding about 54 items.  We go to turn in our gun and the registry they print out and hand us?  ISN'T OURS!!!  They programed the wrong registry into our gun so we'd just spent all this time adding things to someone else's registry!  The "good" news was that this other girl's due date was in 2009 so it wouldn't affect hers, but we wound up having to sit at the registry desk, checking off each item we thought we added to the registry so that someone could manually add it to ours.  The confusion came when she found someone with the same name living in MA.  I apparently set up the registry under Nikki and not Nicole.  And the fact that this chick's due date was last year didn't register I guess.  So yeah.  Craziness.  And definitely NOT something that happens when you register for stuff online!!  lol.

Other things going on with me are that after my last midwife appointment we decided that I would get an upper abdominal ultrasound to screen for gallbladder problems.  I've been having this awful ache way high in my right ribs, right under my boob, that seems to start after eating.  I have it every day, usually multiple times a day, and have since just before Christmas so definitely been a while at this point.  The thing with the appointment is that it's supposed to be an 8 hour fast beforehand which obviously makes for some cranky pregnant ladies if the appt is not in the morning.  I was supposed to have it scheduled on the 28th at 2 in the afternoon but because of a scheduling snafu it is now scheduled for Feb 4th instead and now it'll be at 7:30 in the morning which of course is much better in terms of fasting.  I'm fairly convinced at this point it's NOT a gallbladder issue as the pain does not fluctuate in intensity or frequency based of the fat content of what I'm eating.  I can get it after a bowl of chicken soup or salad the same as I do after a burger and fries.  Nothing is different about it.  My hypothesis is that my stomach has squashed up into a bad spot and presses in on my ribs when it expands with food and that is causing the pressure/pain.

Also!  We started our birthing classes!  I randomly happened to contact a local Bradley class instructor to find out when her next session was going to start on Friday the 15th, and come to find out it was supposed to start that Monday the 18th!  There was some snow on the 18th and so the first class was postponed until this past Monday the 25th.  It's at the instructor's house in Newburyport and there are 3 other couples in this session.  I'm the second earliest due date in the class!  That's something.  The first class was good - I'm actually the only one giving birth in a hospital setting though!  Two couples are using the free-standing birth center in Stratham, NH that I was going to look into if I didn't like Anna Jacques at our tour, and the other couple is having a homebirth.  It's costing us $350 and classes will be once a week for two hours and last 12 weeks.  I've heard so many good things about how Bradley classes really help a couple have a natural birth and so I'm hoping it really works out for us as well.

22 Weeks - First Outside Kicks!

22 weeks and on Friday 1/15 I saw my very first "outside kicks"!  Movement has still been very hit or miss - but I at least feel a few "somethings" every day now - mostly after eating I can count on it.  Most are little movements - presumably buffeted by the anterior placenta, and when I feel things it's off to the sides or top/bottom of the belly, but I definitely saw my shirt jump twice with two little kicks that day for the very first time!!  That was so fun.  It's happened a couple times since then when I've been watching and sitting quietly at work - I love it!  Poor Jeff still hasn't been able to feel her since we're both working and so there aren't a ton of chances for him and as it is, the movements you can feel from the outside are definitely fewer than the movements that I can feel from the inside still.  But hopefully soon!

We also spent the long weekend making massive (in my opinion!) progress on nursery/baby decisions!  We made our first significant baby-related purchase - our glider!  It's cherry stained wood with 'fern' microfiber cushions.  Personally I think they look more tan than fern but I'll let them have it.  It's a Shermag locking glider so you can lock it from moving - which is a safety feature for curious toddler hands later on - but it will also lock in a variety of the gliding positions most notably the 'way back' glide so while it doesn't "recline" per se, it comes acceptably close.  We also got the glider/ottoman as a set that was on sale plus an extra MLK day sale, plus we had a 20% one item coupon that we used and returned the extra Snoogle that mom got me for Christmas with the cover so had $70 of store credit to use and in the end only had to spend $109 of our own money on the $300 glider.  Woohoo!!  Saving money is awesome.  :-)

While we were there, we also decided on what crib and dresser we are going to get and confirmed with my mom, who has said she'd buy our nursery furniture, that it was in her budget as it was a bit more expensive than some others.  But it's sooooo beautiful and will make an awesome full sized bed when the time comes.

Also, over the weekend, we finally picked a decorating style for the nursery and even purchased paint so there's no going back now!  This is a rough markup just using MS Paint to give the idea of our plan - so be kind!  The horizontal white line will be a white chair rail.  I think we're going to measure so that the green stripe is equal to the width of the light and dark purples together.  Or maybe the green with the white stripes is equal to the two purples..not sure yet..we haven't done our measuring and marking yet.  But we have oak stained woodwork in that room for baseboard trim, windows, and doors (of which there are FIVE!!) so while I hated the idea of a stained wood colored chair rail, I didn't think I could get away with doing a white one if I didn't add white into the paint scheme somehow.  Hence the white with our stripes.  Fingers crossed it comes out as nice as it looks in my head.  :-)

We also *finally* started registries.  They are nowhere near finished though.  We opened a universal registry on Amazon which is great because they have a lot more things that we want than Babies R Us does, and most times you can get free shipping over $25, plus you can add things from other websites that aren't even sold by Amazon which is a cool feature.  With the added bonus that many things available at both BRU and Amazon are significantly cheaper at Amazon, and I'm sold.  But I understand that people like to shop "in-store" for things so still have things on the BRU registry, and we plan to put more little things on that one once we get back to the store and walk around with the registry gun.  My mom booked our shower for March 14th at the Summit View Banquet House so we realized it was definitely time to start getting our registry together.

All-in-all it was definitely a week of progress!