28 Weeks

I'm now two-thirds of the way through this pregnancy: hello, third trimester :) Besides the usual sleep/fatigue issues, I felt fine this week... at least until Thanksgiving. Ryan was feeling pretty awful so he went to lay down, which - until Ryan's family came over to help - left me on my own to clean and cook in preparation for everyone coming over. So I was on my feet most of the day, and realized (belatedly) that only eating an egg for breakfast and having nothing to drink all morning did not do me any favors, as I was on the verge of passing out as I was trying to make lunch for Josie and me. I'm not even sure what or when we ate, although I did note that Josie ate everything on her plate (yelling, "happy plate!" as she did so), so at least she liked it :)

I held up ok the rest of the day after I got some food in me, but then my back basically seized up just as everyone was leaving, and then I could barely move the rest of the night. Two days later, my back is doing a lot better but it's still bothering me enough that I haven't been able to resume my daily walks yet, and I keep having to take sitting/lying down breaks when it hurts too much.

Now that I'm in the final trimester, I started reviewing everything we still need to do to make sure we're as ready as we can be in 12 more weeks. We're in pretty good shape, and we've at least started on the big things left to do that we can't finish right now anyway (e.g., finishing the nursery, which is on hold for another month or so until we switch Josie to her full-size bed, or deciding on childcare for the new baby, which, since we're most likely going to go with an in-home daycare provider again, we can't do too early since they won't know their availability this far out).

I also scheduled all of my remaining midwife appointments now (except for the home visit), and then I'll hopefully be meeting with our doula next week for my first pre-natal appointment. Our birth plan is roughed out now, at least - I think I'm just going to use what I currently have more for discussion with my midwives/doula, and then will pare it down to just a few items for the final version again. But it was still interesting to work through what's important to us this time around, as we're much less concerned about trying to stave off unnecessary interventions since we'll be at home with midwives we trust to intervene only if necessary... and if we end up at the hospital, we will deal with whatever interventions come our way, since they'll likely be far more necessary then anyway.

To mark the start of third trimester, below are several more comparison pictures from the normal ;) First up, here's the usual comparison picture between last week and this week:

     

Here's my comparison panel from Josie, from start to beginning of second trimester and then third trimester:

And here's a comparison of the start to the beginning of third trimester with new baby (I left out the 14-week picture since it messed up the formatting, and pretty much looked the same as Josie's 14-week picture anyway):

    

27 Weeks

I guess I'm nothing if not consistent. I just checked my post at 27 weeks for Josie, and besides saying almost the same things (I don't recommend comparing my pregnancy posts, since it's actually a bit embarrassing to see that I still use the same phrases/do the same goofy things), I apparently missed the milestone of dropping into the double-digits of days left for her, and I retired my non-maternity work pants then, just as I did this week for new baby too. At least this far along with Josie I was already dealing with heartburn, which I haven't had any problems with this time (so far).

The fatigue and hunger are still pretty bad. I've been eating to the point where I definitely feel full, and yet I still feel like I'm starving. I had been tracking about the same as my weight gain with Josie, and although I started out weighing a little bit less with this pregnancy than with Josie, I think I've caught up in the last week to where I was with her this far along with all the food I've been eating. So I definitely feel bigger this week, and with a few days of just feeling a little "off", I've been more cognizant of not overdoing things. I know Braxton-Hicks contractions are perfectly normal and fine, but after feeling some tightness in my abdomen a few times this week, I was worried enough to take a couple nights off from the normal chores and walking.

I also had my last monthly appointment with the midwives this week, so now I have appointments every two weeks until 36 weeks, when I'll go to weekly appointments. This was a group appointment, so I got to meet a few other ladies about as far along as I am, and we all got to go through the fun of the gestational diabetes screening together. I remember it being just awful with Josie - the glucose drink itself isn't so bad, but I felt pretty crappy the entire rest of the day then. This time I ate right before, drank a bottle of water right after, and then ate an hour after drinking the glucola, and something seemed to have helped since I felt just fine the rest of the day. And I passed the screening, which is good :)

We had just a quick individual prenatal visit, and my belly measured right on track at 26cm and the baby's heartbeat was a good 155 bpm (with my midwife noting lots of movement while she was trying to catch the heartbeat again!). New baby has been hanging out (and kicking) pretty much just under my ribs on the right lately, which doesn't seem comfortable for either party, but I guess I don't get much say in it ;)

I also went to the other midwifery practice on Monday and got my Rhogam shot, so now I'm set on that until after delivery. If this baby has a positive blood type, then I'll need to get another shot within 72 hours, although I may try again to find someone else to give me the shot, since driving nearly an hour each way in the winter within 72 hours of giving birth just does not sound like fun.

     

26 Weeks

I'm considering changing from calling this baby "new baby" to "elusive baby"... because it is an elusive one. Ryan has only felt it kicking maybe once or twice, and I really haven't caught it moving from the outside all that often either. New baby also was moving around almost all day Friday - from distracting me during my first meeting at 9am until giving me a kick good-night when I went to bed, there were maybe a few half-hours of quiet, but that was it. And yet despite actively trying to catch its movement on the outside, new baby rarely kicked twice in the same place, so I only caught it a couple of times.

With only a couple weeks left in second trimester, I guess I'm giving up on the "second trimester burst of energy" I had been looking forward to, because I'm still completely overcome with fatigue. I felt like I was barely functioning some days, especially after the random night that Josie shrieked in her sleep every hour (and woke me up) all night. But then the next night, I slept straight through to 4:30am until my first wakeup, and I felt awesome! I was refreshed and super excited to start the day, even at that hour. Funny how much better something can seem when it comes on the heels of something even worse ;)

     

October

Josie was very fun and entertaining last month, due in no small part to her improving language skills and imagination. She just loves our new car, since she can see out of the back window better - and she has realized that she can interact with the people behind us. As shy as I am, I'm kind of horrified by this development, but she is also a wonderful and ridiculous child so I'm trying to deal with it :) So several times now, she has managed to charm the people behind us into waving at her: tired commuters, teenagers, etc. I've caught sight of them all in my rear view mirror grinning and waving at her :)

She has been singing more and coming up with little games, and is never at a loss of great ideas for us to do (which is how, after several "Mommy do this?" requests, we ended up with our hands behind our heads giving each other high-fives with our elbows instead of eating breakfast). Although usually every time Ryan or I note how fun or hilarious she is, the hilarity is quickly followed by a meltdown... ah well. Two is still proving to be far more enjoyable than either of us thought it would be, so we'll take it :)

Josie has been such a good helper lately. She has enjoyed cleaning for a while, but has also been helping us in the kitchen more (trying to clean the dishes, loading the dishwasher), and with food prep (putting ingredients in bowls, helping pull the guts out of her pumpkin). We also got light switch extenders so she can turn some of the lights on and off on her own - which has led to a few strobe light moments, but she seems to also really enjoy being able to do that on her own. She has also kicked Ryan or I out of her room a few times lately and then shut the door - this is much more ok now that it's finally fully child-proofed in there, so we can usually safely leave her alone until it gets too quiet (quiet = she's doing something she shouldn't be). The other day she was squealing for a while so I finally went in there to see what she could possibly be up to... and all the squealing was over the two books she had pulled off her bookcase to read. When I questioned her, she yelled "I'm reading!", waved at me, and went right back to squealing.

As far as food this month, Josie has been enjoying the tour of "Stacey's favorite foods" we've been conducting lately - lots of avocados, artichokes, pomegranates, and peanut butter on everything.

She learned how to scrape her own artichoke leaves, which made me very proud :) She also is remarkably good at pulling out pomegranate seeds, which I guess shouldn't be that surprising given that small fingers can probably get at the seeds better. But she really enjoys that, and loves the couple of slices of avocado she gets just about every day - although her pronunciation could still use some work ;)

As I mentioned, we finished child-proofing her room last month, so it was finally time to take the front rail off her crib and start transitioning her out of her crib. We switched out some of the furniture in her room, but still need to get a dresser and we'll move her full size bed in there in a couple more months probably. Her first nap in the new configuration didn't go super well - she climbed out of bed four times, although, oddly enough, she immediately dove under her bed to lay there each time rather than go play with her toys. But we immediately went in to put her back in bed each time (and the last time she jumped back in bed herself as soon as I opened the door), and she seems to have gotten the message since she hasn't tried to get out of bed again since.

We had been planning to move Josie to a new school anyway a couple of months before the new baby is due to arrive, but our timeline ended up getting moved up some. Josie had started biting again at daycare (once on a kid's face... eeesh), and since she mainly seems to bite when she's trying to assert dominance now (since it's almost always when a new kid starts daycare), we thought it might do her some good to not only get into a different environment where it's a little more school-like but where she's no longer the oldest one there. So we toured five different schools in the area, and really liked one (conveniently, it's also the one closest to our house :) ). It seems like it will be a good move for her, once she's fully transitioned (I'll probably give more details on that in the November update, since we're still in the thick of that now), since she's doing pretty well with learning the routines there, and is already picking up some stuff from the other kids in her class (who are all just a bit older than her).

My dad and stepmom brought a pumpkin and some pumpkin decorations for Josie when they visited earlier last month, so Josie got to decorate her pumpkin and I got to avoid potential carving injuries. I was really impressed by her first attempt - she got almost everything spot on, although we're still working on what exactly mustaches are and their appropriate placement ;)

We also went to a pumpkin patch with my mom, Ryan's sisters, and the cousins, and had a great time walking all over the place, seeing all the animals, and going down the slides. Josie got to pet and feed some goats, we went through a corn maze where she was enamored with her (distorted) reflection in the mirrors, and she had a great time playing on some hay bales. She also picked out her own little pumpkin to take home, which she is still decorating over and over again, now that we've cut up and eaten her original big pumpkin ;)

This year was the first time we went trick or treating with Josie. She did super well walking all over Ryan's parents' neighborhood, and while she tried to go in each house at first, she figured it out soon enough. She was quite excited about getting to ring the doorbells and grab the candy - she wasn't too forthcoming with saying "trick or treat", but she did very well with "thank you" and "you're welcome" (she normally says both herself, and "you're welcome" comes out more adorably as "i yoakam"... which made me wonder - for the first time ever - what Dwight Yoakam has been up to lately).

Miscellaneous cuteness:

 

[Another entry in the unflattering Josie pictures collection I'm working on - this was during her attempts at climbing onto a stool]

 

[Her tv-watching location of choice]

25 Weeks

This was a bit of a tough week, although new baby helped it not seem so bad by being super active :)

Ryan was in Iceland for work most of the week, so my mom stayed over to help with Josie, which was good. But the combination of Ryan being gone (and Josie being aware of it for the first time), switching Josie to her new preschool, and the time change was pretty hard. I still haven't adjusted to the time change, so in addition to all my apparently usual wakeups throughout the night, I've been mostly awake for the day by 4:30 or 5am. Josie's transition to the new preschool has been a lot rougher than I was anticipating (although her teachers have assured me that she's doing really well), so there have been quite a few tears for both of us this week, since I'm sad that she's sad about being left at a new place.

So, perhaps needless to say, I'm pretty exhausted and drained. I've also eaten a ton this week since I'm constantly hungry (even when I'm feeling a little sick from having just eaten too much), so I'd like to say that new baby is having a growth spurt, but I think it may just be me :-\ But regardless, my constant companion was very active this week, which was nice to feel him or her kicking (or punching) around so much. I also got my Rhogam shot situation figured out, so I'll be going to visit the very nice and accommodating midwives at another practice kinda sorta near my work in a couple of weeks for that.

     

24 Weeks

So this week marks an important milestone for new baby: viability! At 24 weeks, most hospitals would try to save the baby if I were to deliver now - although the baby would not be without some serious health concerns this early, so obviously we want it to stay in for about another four months.

This week I'm feeling decidedly more pregnant: I'm super hungry, irritable, completely exhausted, and my legs and feet are starting to get really achy, especially when I first wake up. I was feeling a tiny bit discouraged about all of this until I just checked through my notes with Josie, and apparently almost the exact same thing happened when I was this far along with her too - and I'm not sure how I did it now, but I loved second and third trimester with her and felt great for the most part (although maybe I have a bit of amnesia going on!), so hopefully I'll adjust to this soon so I don't feel so much like crawling into bed and crying from my inability to sleep.

We crossed a few items off the task list this week, the most notable of which is probably taking the front off of Josie's crib so it's now more of a daybed. We did add a bed rail, though, since she'd otherwise be falling out every couple of minutes given the way she flails around in her sleep, but she can get herself in and out of bed now. We'll keep this configuration for probably another couple of months and then move her out of her crib entirely and into her full size bed. Then we'll move the crib out of her room and set it up so it's all ready to go for the new baby :)

Another task list item that was supposed to be an easy to-do was to make an appointment for my Rhogam shot. I need to get this around 28 weeks to help prevent against my body developing antibodies against the baby's blood, if it's Rh positive and leaks into my blood stream. The midwives I'm seeing now can't issue the prescription for the shot, so instead I called my old midwives, despite the potential for awkwardness there... and, unsurprisingly, there was some awkwardness. Since they don't have the shot in-house anymore, they are unable to write me a prescription since I'm not under their care for this pregnancy (as they mentioned no less than four times). So then I called the hospital, ended up leaving a voicemail with somebody (i.e., someone who didn't return my call), and then called my regular doctor and left a voicemail with the nurses (who also didn't return my call). So now next week, I get to make more calls to basically beg someone to do me the favor of giving me this shot.... that I don't even necessarily need. It's strongly recommended for moms with Rh negative blood, but I'm actually Rh positive. My positive allele is apparently just very faint though, so depending on how sensitive the test is, I show up as either positive or negative, so given that, we decided it would be best to go ahead and get the shot. Now I just have to find someone willing to do it.