34 weeks

After making it through the whole winter without getting sick (despite being around plenty of germs at home and at work), I managed to come down with something last week. I'm still not sure if it was allergies, but the sore throat, itchy eyes, slight fever, and stuffy nose makes me think it may have been a cold. Since cold/allergy medicines don't look like they're recommended during pregnancy (besides that I'm trying to avoid taking any unneeded medications anyway), I did lots of saltwater gargling and made use of my new neti pot instead. It seemed to work, since I just have a little bit of a stuffy nose still lingering, so hopefully that will be completely behind me soon enough and I can go back to being healthier than I normally am when I'm not pregnant :)

This week I definitely started noticing that I'm slowing down more - although not when Ryan and I are out on our daily walks. For some reason, that's the only time that I feel like I'm walking relatively normally now, maybe because we have a set purpose and it's a long enough walk that I have enough time to get into a good rhythm. The edema in my feet has definitely gotten worse, and I can barely see my ankles under all the puffiness, and now it's spreading further up my legs too. My blood pressure is still fine, so as of this morning, the midwives are still just recommending that I keep my feet elevated whenever possible and drink lots of water. I've also - very sadly - retired my heels. As of today, I think. They just don't look that cute when my poor puffy feet have expanded and now overflow my shoes. So now I'm down to one pair of sneakers and a new pair of (wide-width) sandals to hopefully last me through the next 6ish weeks.

Besides all of my signs of advancing pregnancy, things are still going well and I'm still very happy with being pregnant. The baby is still quite active (and is in fact trying to kick its way out to freedom right now), and managed to get the hiccups three times in one day last week. The midwives said that the heartbeat still sounds great, and also confirmed that the baby is still head-down, with its body in a C-shape on the left side of my belly with feet on the right - which makes sense, because it's basically a small window of space on the right side of my belly where we feel 95% of the movement.

After having some pretty visible growth the last few weeks, I think I look about the same in this week's comparison picture... maybe the baby's working on another growth spurt for next week :)