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):