Monday, February 21, 2011

21 weeks

This was the Week of Doctors, which looks like it will be a monthly occurrence for at least the next few months since the high-risk doctor and midwives ended up on the same schedule for my appointments with them. Only this week I had my "annual" physical (that was only a year overdue) with my regular doctor too, where they took a bunch of blood to see if I could stop taking my extra iron supplement. So that was on Monday, the high-risk doctor was on Tuesday, and then Thursday was the midwives. The appointment with the midwives went well too. This appointment was with another midwife I hadn't met yet, and I think there's three more in the practice that I still have to meet so I won't be meeting any of them for the first time at the hospital. We went over the results from the high-risk doctor, which was good since while they had explained a lot as they went, it was still good to hear another medical provider confirm that they had looked at everything very thoroughly and everything looked great. I apparently also have an anterior placenta, which just means that the placenta is between my abdomen and the baby, rather than between the baby and my back, and can cushion the baby's kicking - which instantly made me feel better since I thought I should have been feeling the baby more than once or twice a day as I had been at that point. And yet 3-4 days after that, this became a non-issue since I can now usually feel the baby several times throughout the day, especially during meals and in the evenings :)

In my continuing struggle with sleeping, I finally decided to get a pregnancy pillow since people seem to swear by them. I ended up getting a mini pillow rather than the full-size one since I wanted to continue using my regular pillow too rather than using the pregnancy pillow for my head, and it was quite a bit cheaper than the full-size pillows. Given that it took years to break me from sleeping on my stomach, I guess I should've expected that it would not be an easy transition to switch from sleeping on my back to my side (which is supposed to avoid cutting off blood flow once I get bigger), but yeah. I did not magically begin sleeping on my side, so I'm still waking up frequently throughout the night, but now I have the added option of rearranging the pillow (no easy feat) to see if that will somehow make me sleep more. I think it is helping somewhat, since I was able to sleep for about 7 hours straight once (although that may have also been from just being exhausted), but it wasn't quite the instantaneous fix I had been hoping for.

This week I definitely looked bigger than last in person again, and yet... my belly looks almost identical in the pictures, maybe even a little smaller. Hmm.
20-21 week comparison

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