32 Weeks: Playing Catch-Up

Okay I have some severe catching up to do.  Blogger wouldn't upload pictures the last day I tried to catch up (the day of my last late post!) and I never came back.  Shame on me.

So without further adieu....belly at 32 weeks...

31 Weeks - Just the Belly (again)

Okay so I've done it again - but have at least a wimpy excuse this time.  My laptop has been busted for a good amount of time - randomly the hard drive decided to self-destruct, and while i've been dealing with Dell and getting my replacement and figuring out how to get my data off the busted one, I've been using Jeff's laptop which is not exactly BFF's with me.  And I had my last week of work where I had to train my replacement (that would be for week 31) and was so spaced out that this pic was taken something like 2 days late (usually I take them on the actual change date).  So.  This is why, once again, there is a basically just a weekly belly picture without a significant update.

30 Weeks and First Baby Shower!

Okay so I don't have any superb pictures from our baby shower yet because pregnancy brain caused me to forget to take my own camera out of its case, but I'm hoping to get some soon.  The shower went really well though was utterly exhausting to me.  The food was great, we got some great presents, and mom got us a fantastic cake that we've been eating leftovers from ever since.  If you ever need a cake in Western Mass, Cerratto's Pastry Shop is absolutely fabulous!

Also, on the drive to the venue there was like *the* most amazing rainbow ever.  So bright and clear - you could see all the colors all the way down to purple clear as day.  My brain WAS functioning at that oment and we attempted to get a picture of it, but I swear it was the most camera-shy rainbow ever and as soon as we stopped the car to take a picture it immediately started to fade so you can only barely see it in this picture here.  But I promise you it was absolutely phenomenal at its prime!!  There's nothing more

promising to me before a 'thing' than to have a rainbow pop up.  It's like a great big smile from Mother Nature.  :-)  Anyway - if you squint reeeeally hard you can see the hint of rainbow left about the tree-line in the middle of the picture.  No I'm not crazy, I promise it's there.  lol.

We also made washcloth duckies for the tables as our shower favors.  We'd seen this done at our friend Arwen's shower a few years back and I knew when I saw it that I so wanted to do that for my shower when it was our turn.  Thankfully she still had the directions and it wound up being way easy to do - the worst

 part was seriously having to buy 80+ washcloths in our preferred color scheme!!  We wound up with a few shades of purple, pink, and green, and then a couple yellow, white, or cream ones.  We got them from Ocean State Job Lot where we were able to get a deal - but the quality was less than stellar.  I figure people can still take them apart, pull the eyes off (they're just white glued on) and use them as kitchen rags rather than for washing babies or faces or whatever.  That's what I'm planning to use our extras for anyway!  Call it my way of slipping some eco-friendliness into the shower without people knowing.  Bwahahaha!  :-)

We have a busy couple of weeks ahead of us though.  This coming week will be my last of working at Timberland - official last day is 3/26.  My next midwife appointment is April 1st because I'm up to appts every 2 weeks now (!!) and then on the 3rd we have our maternity photo session booked and Easter is the 4th.  Then our next shower is the following weekend on the 11th with Jeff's family, and the week after that I'lll have another midwife appt scheduled at some point and then that weekend is Erin's wedding shower on the 17th!  Total craziness!

My last appointment was on Wednesday 3/17, and I'd gained 3 pounds from my visit 3 weeks ago - so I've apparently hit the 'pound a week' segment of pregnancy!  But they're happy, and my blood pressure is still wicked good (108/60!) which is good to know because I've started getting some swelling off and on in my ankles and my fingers so was starting to wonder.  But that's all good.  Baby girl's heartbeat sounded great - holding steady at 140bpm most of the time now and I'm still measuring right on track.  Oh - and belly button still inside!  Woohoo!

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.  :-)

28 Weeks - falling behind

Okay so I'm posting my 28 week picture at exactly 29 weeks.  Clearly I need a kick in the butt to get these posted once a week.  Oiy.

Things have been busy though - to be fair to myself.  I wish I could explain exactly HOW things have been busy but as I mentioned, I'm a week behind and these days I can barely remember yesterday.  So I'm going to post the pic, and cut this week short in hopes that I'll post the 29 week post more 'on time' and can catch up on everything at that time.  As a consolation, I'll mention I'll have more nursery pics at that time as well!  :-)

27 Weeks = Third Trimester!

Here we go with the third trimester!  Two-thirds of the way down and coming down the home-stretch!  And speaking of stretch - good lord will my body make it these last 3 months?!?!  I'm continuing to marvel at how big my belly is and the knowledge that it's going to get bigger still.  Continuing to marvel at how such a small (relatively) little being inside there can wreak such havoc on my digestive system, my comfort level, and all of my joints.

Other than my whining about intense reflux despite my daily meds and various other discomfort, things are continuing along just fine.  The midwife appointment I had on Thursday 2/25 showed our little jelly bean is measuring exactly where she should be - despite how much bigger I look than other people in the same place as me.  She said it was just due to the length of your torso, how you're carrying, and baby's position.  Weight gain is up 28lbs so far (!!) but they're happy with where I am and said that they like to see people gain between 25-35lbs and that you usually don't gain quite as steadily through the last 4-6 weeks.  so that's something I guess.  But it sure explains why I'm huffing and puffing when attempting to do anything!  The added weight plus decreased lung function is all the explanation I need!  I also had my 1hr gestational diabetes test (GD test).  So far I haven't heard anything on the results - they said they'd call if there was anything abnormal and expected results on Friday or Monday so hopefully tomorrow goes by without a phone call.  I felt like there was more glucola this time than the first one they made me do at my first appointment, but Jeff thinks that I just forgot how much I had to drink that first time.  Yick.  And it's definitely NOT any better the second time around when you're burping it up.  Just fyi.  bleh.

Our first shower is coming up quickly as well.  While I'm still adding and deleting things from the registry from time to time, both the Amazon and Babies R'Us registries are essentially done.  The invites for the first shower have gone out including the registry info.  We went shopping for an outfit for the shower as I realized that including this one, I only had 2 more shopping weekends left! 

Which brings me to my next rant: maternity dresses.  Okay so you see the pictures online of maternity dresses and they look cute.  In general, I like dresses so figured it'd be a good way to go.  HA!  Let me tell you, the two dresses I tried on made me look like a HOUSE!  And normally I know my belly's fairly big and am fine with it - but i felt like a grandma in a muumuu or something just because the dress comes up over the bump but then just drops down and keeps going.  There's no shaping at the bottom like you get with pants and tops.  So needless to say, I'll be wearing pants and a cute, flattering top for my shower.  Bonus for not needing to shave anyway, right?  :-)

Oh and for anyone that's wondering - belly button is still in!  Woo!  Looks friggin WEIRD but fingers crossed it can make it the next 3 months..  Only time will tell.  :-)

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!