A tap, push & a shove ~ 20 weeks, 4 days

So while I should be sitting back and relaxing and enjoying the fact that our detailed ultrasound and screening tests came back fine and fantastic, instead I have spent the past 20 minutes in a panic googling sugar levels in urine.  Yeah I’m crazy, right?  Why do I do this to myself?  Sigh….

Last week we went for our detailed ultrasound.  It was very cool.  Okay, beyond cool.  Brilliantly amazing and totally double-rainbow intensly cool and surreal.  Yeah, that will sum it up 🙂  Nick got to see all of it while I was twisting my neck to catch glances from the monitor.  After she took all of the measurments she turned the bed and monitor so I could see as well.  It was incredible to actually see that there was something alive in there!  The funny thing was I began to feel fetal movements a lot stronger just before the ultrasound and ever since!  I felt a few taps and a tiny push sporadically every so often during the past 2 weeks, but now I feel the baby tapping away quite often 🙂

Anyways, we didn’t find out the gender.  It is in the report but we are having a reveal party in a few days to find out with family and some friends.  Nick had a good point about it too (not verbatim): “I’d rather find out if it’s a boy or a girl in a celebratory manner than from a stranger in a dark room in a hospital.”  I know that other people just open the envelope together etc., but since we have both been to a gender reveal party we really love the idea and the surprise factor! 🙂

Two days later I had a routine check-up where we got to hear the heartbeat again (150 bpm).  We didn’t hear it at the ultrasound, but we got to see all of the chambers pumping away at 147 bpm.  Our blood screening came back negative for Down’s (1 in 11,000) and 1 in 4,000 for NTD – happy days!  Then she mentioned that I would be sent off for the glucose test in a few weeks.  That’s fine – totally normal.  Since they test my urine each appointment she mentioned that it was normal (I guess) at 130.  No, she actually used the word “fine” – which everyone knows what that means 😛  I made a mental note to google that information – and thus my worried searching today when I remembered my mental note-to-self.

And… no real conclusive google results which is totally normal because an afternoon of Dr. Googling is like finding a needle in a haystack and then tossing it aside because you find better information which turns out to be useless.  I really should know better by now.  I will practice and excercise patience until the glucose testing and until some actual and conclusive test results come back.  Besides, I really shouldn’t worry myself over something my doctor says is “fine”, right.  Right?

Belly Silly Worried – 18 weeks

So, I’ve been worried this past week and a half, and I will admit that I suppose I’ve been worried in a silly kind of way too.  Really silly.  Probably most likely, I hope!

Anyways, I’ve been concerned that I don’t really have a noticeable bump yet.  I barely look prego and I’ve only gained 7 pounds total as of this morning.  Everytime Nick mentions that he can see a belly, I can’t see it and I make excuses.

“Oh, I just ate.”
“It’s the maternity pants.  They bunch up all the fat into one area.”
“I wasn’t really super skinny to start with, so that area doesn’t count.”

Go on, laugh at me.  I’ll wait.

I did google it and the top results for “no belly at 16 weeks pregnant” (I did ask again at 17 weeks too) are that everyone grows at different rates, etc especially if it’s your first.  There were a lot of people saying that they didn’t really start showing until 24-30 weeks.  Most of the time I’m okay, but then there are those fleeting moments where your mind goes all stupid and freaks you out.  I was doing okay for a bit, but then I saw on FB a friend who’s only a week behind me post a pic with the caption, “I can’t see my feet anymore!”.  (I’m pretty sure it’s her first kid too as I snooped through her photos looking for signs of other offspring.)  And that’s when all this silly doubt crept in again.

However, I’m sure I’m worried because I’m being uncharacteristically impatient.  I’m sure the little baby is growing just fine but just making go mental because it’s hard to see the progress.  This morning I specifically put on a shirt that I haven’t worn in at least a good week, just so I could see if there was anything.  And, there was a little start of a noticeable belly.  So I guess I’m just being silly about this, unless it’s a belly resulting from that family-sized bag of chips I ate last week.  It also doesn’t help that every pregnancy book/website out there has an unrealistic drawing of what you’re supposed to look like at “x” amount of weeks.  But only time will tell and we have a lot of that to get through before our detailed ultrasound which is 2 weeks away.

Big steps and new memories.

This weekend we started to look around for baby stuff – strollers, car seats, and of course we looked at cribs.  More specifically, we looked at some very expensive cribs.  Cribs that we would never be able to justify buying unless we won the lottery.  I didn’t think that the thought of buying a crib for the baby would make me feel a little uneasy though.  It’s kind of a big step to buy a crib, and it holds a lot of meaning and symbolism when you do.  I mean, it’s not like we haven’t bought a crib before…

In 2006, a friend of ours mentioned that a friend of hers was selling a crib that she no longer needed.  Her three kids had finished with it and she was ready to get rid of it.  She paid $600 for it, but was selling it for only $100 bucks.  We thought it was a great deal because then we would already have a crib.  The trouble was, we didn’t even have a baby yet – or even an embryo – and we also had no idea of what our future held.  But we didn’t think that it would be long before we did need one – so we went ahead and bought it a few days later.

Well, last summer we finally got rid of it.  We had moved it with us to new homes twice already and it just felt like a burden on us.  It was heavy and awkward to carry, but not only that it was a tiny reminder of what we didn’t have yet.  We didn’t need some inanimate object silently mocking us from the corner of our spare room anymore.  We loaded it into the car (along with the other items we planned to donate) and drove it to the Value Village drop-off zone and hoped that someone who needed it would find it and make use of it.  We kind of felt bad about giving it away, but we honestly didn’t want it taking up space in our lives anymore.  When we did eventually need a crib, only then would we get one.

And now, we do need a crib as there’s only 23 weeks left!  So whether or not we buy one or borrow one off a friend, this time will feel right.  It will feel like it’s supposed to feel, scary in the exciting kind of way 🙂