pregnancy

Start fidgeting already!

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This morning, Sean and I tried to make the baby kick by putting headphones on my stomach. We played it songs we like, but Skeletor didn’t react in a way that I could feel. I thought I felt the baby move for the first time last Friday, but I don’t think I’ve felt it since. Maybe I’m just not paying enough attention. Or maybe the kid just doesn’t like our taste in music.

A couple of weeks ago, I had a blood test to assess my risk for some scary stuff (Down syndrome, Trisomy 18, and neural tube defects), and my test came back with a really high risk for spina bifida (a neural tube defect that results in the spinal cord not forming properly). This test doesn’t tell you if the kid has any of these things, only the risk/likelihood for the kid having them when it is born. So the next ultrasound we were to have was going to answer a lot of questions for us – how the baby was developing in general, how the spine was looking, and if we were lucky, the baby’s gender.

We had this ultrasound on Wednesday and Skeletor is looking less skeleton-like, and more like a baby. There was much squirming (the baby, not me – I was very well-behaved) and it look a long time for the sonographer to get all the measurements she needed to get. We were relieved to find out that being active generally means that the baby is healthy and incubating as it should. When the measurement part was done and the sonographer brought Sean in to see Skeletor on screen, the first thing he said when he saw the spine was “that looks like a normal spine!” And it did, but we’re not the experts, so how would we know. She showed us lots of Skeletor’s parts including the bum – I think we were mooned. We saw the heart beating, which was really neat. Just watching the kid swimming around in general is a wonderful thing. Ultrasound is really an amazing thing. And not just for seeing growing babies.

She confirmed that we wanted to know the gender, then told us that the baby looked to be a girl. She didn’t want to commit 100% (I suppose so we don’t paint the nursery pink and sue when Skeletor comes out with a dink), but showed us three lines on the baby that usually mean that the baby is a girl.

So, as far as we know, we’re having a daughter in September! It’s funny because I finally dreamed about the baby after it was born a couple of days before and it was a girl then too. Sean has been suspecting girl all along, but I wasn’t sure. I had been looking at baby clothes last Sunday and I was dying to purchase some adorable girl outfits, but since I wasn’t sure, I didn’t want to risk it. Girl clothes are just so much more fun. Not to compare babies with Barbies, but no one I know ever put as much effort into Ken’s outfits as they did into Barbie’s. Ken just had a couple changes of clothes, and he’d stay dressed for six months at a time. However, I always tried to dress my Barbies as tarty as I could. I don’t think I’ll be doing that to my baby.

A big step today…

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Today Sean and I went to Babies R Us to look at stuff. We weren’t planning to buy anything, but just wanted to look in person at what kind of baby stuff is out there. Sean made me laugh because he said being in the store made this whole baby thing seem awfully real. Dude, like it wasn’t real before! He then hightailed it out of there to check out the action figures. Don’t worry though – he did come back and look some more – he’s just usually a better buyer than browser and I think he wanted to avoid purchasing things we don’t need yet. Especially since a lot of things seemed very expensive. I took home the catalog for further research. It doesn’t have prices though, so it’s not as helpful as I’d like it to be.

In other baby news, I went to the doctor on Thursday. He said that the ultrasound looked fine, but he is sticking with his initial September 10th due date. His logic is that due dates are often give or take a week. I get that, but I don’t understand what the point of the dating ultrasound was if he’s not going to use that date since that is based on pictures and measurements of the kid. I figure I’m better off throwing a dart at a September 2008 calendar to figure out when Skeletor (that nickname has started to stick) will be born. It’s really not a big deal, but the back and forth does bug me a bit. My next appointment is next month, and will probably have the big ultrasound soon after. That’s the one that should decide what gender the baby is, and if all its parts are developing properly. I’m looking forward to that one.

It’s funny, I didn’t think I’d be one of those mums-to-be that only talked about her pregnancy and soon-to-arrive baby. But it seems that I don’t have a whole lot else going on right now except for the planning for Skeletor’s arrival. Everything else is kinda running on autopilot these days. Not to say that I’m slacking off at work or anything, but when people ask me what’s new, I don’t have a lot to report outside of pregnancy or baby stuff. I don’t want to bore people and overshare this stuff, but really, it feels like my world has gotten a lot smaller lately. My biggest concern these days is incubating this kid in the best way I can. Then hopefully Sean and I will become okay parents to it. I’m not thinking a lot these days about stuff that doesn’t directly relate to pregnancy or babies. I wonder if this is what they mean by “mommy brain”.

Dating Ultrasound

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I had the dating ultrasound done today. My doctor was right – we are exactly 16 weeks today, nine days behind what we thought we were. That puts our new due date at September 17th. So there’s still a shot at having a Virgo child.

The critter was squirmy but the tech still got some neat pictures. Poor little thing probably didn’t like having the transducer being pressed down on the ceiling of its home! We saw pretty much everything but the gender-defining bits, but the picture we got to take home makes the kid look a little like Skeletor so hopefully the next ultrasound looks more baby-like. Which it should – the next ultrasound will probably be a month from now and lots of development will take place between now and then.

Haven’t felt any flutters or kicking yet, but it’s early for that. Should start in the next 2-4 weeks though.

Update on the Little Critter

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I had my first appointment with my OB/GYN on Thursday morning. He must be well-liked as the waiting room was full of people (most of whom were pregnant ladies) when we got there. (He had been delayed due to being at the hospital attending a birth.) I like him too – most of the appointment was spent explaining how things work to Sean and I. He then asked if we had any questions, which a lot of doctors don’t always do since they are often so rushed, so I really appreciated that.

We got to hear the heartbeat at this appointment, which was something we were really looking forward to.  The little critter’s heart was going at about 150 bpm, which seems ridiculously fast, but is quite normal in incubating babies. It was a real relief for Sean to hear it since he has been worrying that the baby stopped growing, even though I have been having normal pregnancy symptoms all along. We’ve done a bit of role reversal here – usually I am the worrywart and Sean is the one calming me down.

One thing that surprised me was that my due date may be further into September than we thought. My family doctor told me I was due around September 8th, so that is the date I’ve been fixated on. My OB/GYN said that I could be due on September 10th based on the dates I told him. However, when he measured me, he didn’t think I was that far along. So instead of being just over 16 weeks, I could be just over 15 weeks. So I’m being sent for a dating ultrasound to be sure. This is a standard procedure, but I think it’s usually done earlier – it just took me some time to get an appointment with the OB/GYN. I hope I’m further along, but the scheduler at the ultrasound said that my doctor is usually pretty dead-on with his dating, so I’m probably not as far along as I thought. I’m still optimistic that I will get my Virgo baby though – just like its mother! I do know that due dates are just guesses in the end and babies will be born when they see fit, but I like having an end-date in mind.

Somebody at work told me I was starting to show. I told them that it could just be my food belly showing and not my baby belly. I’m not sure if I’m showing baby yet, but I do think that my body is changing shape. (I’m in my grubbies right now, or I would take and post a picture.) Honestly, I’m convinced that my bottom is getting flatter, but I’m not sure if that’s a pregnancy thing or not.

So much to do…

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I’m feeling really overwhelmed right now. Sean and I need to merge our offices so that we can start planning the baby’s room. Sean has already cleaned out a lot of stuff out of his office (which was a huge deal for him – he is a huge packrat), but I have yet to start mine. As I look around, I see so much clutter and junk, it’s hard to find a place to start. I know we still have lots of time to do this, but time has a tendency to move really fast when it comes to this sort of thing. I don’t want it to be a last minute job – we’ll have lots of other things to do then. I’m hoping to spend some time over Easter weekend cleaning out my office. We probably won’t be fully merged by Sunday night, but I intend to at least get a lot of the clutter out of here.

As I look at all the clutter I get really angry. I can’t believe all the junk I’ve managed to accumulate. A lot of it is stuff that other people have given me over the years. Some of it was useful at one time and has simply served its purpose. A lot of it however is just the kind of stuff people give as gifts that end up sitting in people’s homes until they do a major clutter purge or have a yard sale. It makes me feel guilty because I know people give gifts with the greatest of intentions, and from a place of thoughtfulness. But sometimes, I just want to tell people to stop giving me anything. At least now with the baby on the way, people will be more concentrated on buying him or her gifts. Getting rid of that stuff at the end of its usefulness is also socially acceptable. The baby either just won’t fit in the clothes, or is too old for that toy.

Part of me just wants to wimp out and call my mother and beg her to come up and help me with this. The other part of me wants to accomplish this on my own. I know my mom is busy this weekend so if I want it done now, I’m on my own.

Maybe I need to shame myself by posting before, during and after pictures to keep myself moving. Hmm…

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Canada
This work by Melissa Price-Mitchell is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Canada.
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