The Difference

This afternoon we have an appointment scheduled with the midwife.  With Son I always was very excited about these appointments, and didn’t think they happened often enough.  But today I’m not really thrilled about having to interrupt my afternoon to drive 25 minutes to town (not our town, but the next one, but not either of the nearby Cities either) just to wait in the waiting room and then spend five minutes with the midwife while she measures my abdomen and says everything is fine.

This little monster is a very kicky fetus, much more active than Son.  He’s also a lot smaller, measuring average for dates instead of 2+ weeks bigger.  It’s rather nice, actually, and I’m hoping that I won’t become as enormous this time.

Son has started to recognize that something is going on.  He points to my tummy and says “Baby!” and then waves and says, “Hello, hi!”  It’s about time for us to get some books about how life changes when a new baby comes out of Mommy’s tummy.  I’m finally showing enough that I look pregnant instead of fat, which is a big improvement, but I’m not wearing maternity clothes yet.  Having dresses that can be tied to fit differently can be quite handy!

Birthday!

We celebrated Son’s second birthday today.  Two years ago at this time I was just about to start pushing.  He was born after 10:00 at night.  Son was in pesty form today, but so cute and sweet I couldn’t be upset.  He did many things like bringing me heads of garlic and wanting me to “open” them for him, coloring on the wall with a crayon, and opening presents that he wasn’t supposed to be getting into yet.  On the other hand, he did a great job of using the potty, giving me a back rub that lasted about 10 seconds, offering unsolicited hugs, and being cuddly.  Once his friends arrived for the party there was much running in circles and diving into the beanbag chair.  He blew out his candles on his ice-cream cake and opened lots of presents, but then shared them nicely until his friends left.

My brothers both gave him Mr. Potatohead sets, which take too much strength and coordination for him to be able to manipulate right now.  They went on a shelf for later, and I’m sure he will have lots of fun with them in a few months.  He received several books, his first Hot Wheels cars, and best of all, a box of toy dinosaurs.  The largest gift was one that Husband and I got for him with the idea that really it’s ours.  We’ll let him use it first, then his siblings, and someday we will just keep it for ourselves: a handmade step stool.  There is an artist we know who dismantles old barns that the owners want to demolish, and then he repurposes the wood for furniture.  The step stool is beautiful and practical; the dinosaurs are fun.  Son likes to “attack” us with them and say RAWR!

Tonight after dinner and after putting Son in bed, I felt the new little one kicking and squirming for the first time.  It seems really early, but according to BabyCentre after the first baby, once you can recognize the sensation and distinguish it from gas, you normally feel movement for the first time between 15 and 18 weeks.  We’ll be 15 weeks tomorrow, so this isn’t that farfetched.  It was a very slight sensation, and I couldn’t feel it with my hand on the outside, just on the inside.  I expect it will be a while before I feel any more, since if I hadn’t been sitting perfectly still at just the right moment I would never have noticed it.

Future Plans

I really did intend to write last night, but I fell asleep in front of the fire right after putting Son to bed.

We had our second appointment with the midwives’ group today.  Husband unexpectedly had to work, so it was just Son and me.  He took his baby with him and showed it to everybody in the office – the front desk staff, other ladies in the waiting room, the nurses, the midwife.  He was pretty trouble-free.  We read books while waiting for the midwife in the exam room.  Once she was there he had to show her his books and all the cats in them.  Thankfully people who deliver babies tend to like young kids!  He stood there and held his baby while we listened to the heartbeat of the baby in Mommy’s tummy on the doppler.  That’s honestly all that happened at that appointment.  Since Son was over 9lbs at birth they want me to take the glucose tolerance test early next time.  Large babies run in both of our families and Son has been quite healthy, so I’m not too concerned, but it’s good for them to have a policy to check anyway since maternal diabetes can be a big problem.

As we checked out we set up the appointment for my anomaly scan, which will be on the 14th of January.  As we discovered last time, it can be nice to know the sex of the baby in advance, mostly just to give us correct pronouns to use.  It will be nice to be able to talk to Son about his new baby brother, or his new baby sister.  Of course, if it isn’t oriented conveniently, we won’t find anything out, and that’s OK too.

Unless they find something wrong, this will be our only scan.  We don’t see any need to pay extra for elective scans, especially when it’s impossible to know whether there’s any increased risk of health problems.  I keep thinking about how it was recently noted that the mother getting flu during pregnancy carries an increased risk of heart problems in middle age.  Who would have thought?  The effect is slight enough that nobody noticed until someone actually compared the two carefully.  It’s not like you can choose whether or not to get the flu, but we can choose whether to have scans that serve no medical purpose.

Phew!

Yes, I’m still alive and kicking.  Grades are in and I just have to go in to work long enough to sign four forms tomorrow, and then I’m free for the holidays.  It’s nice to finally be able to come up for air.

We’re doing well here.  I have my second appointment with the midwives’ office on Friday, and there hasn’t been any reason to be concerned that all is not well.  It will probably be a very short visit.  They’ll listen to the heartbeat on the doppler, check the fundal height and say, “Yep, everything’s fine.” and send me home.  There’s really not a lot for them to do at this point when all is going normally.

People still say I’m not showing, although anything with a waist is long since uncomfortable and I can’t fit into several articles.  I’ve got horrible dry, itchy stretch marks on my stomach that are due, no doubt, mostly to the winter weather.  Husband put shea butter on them earlier today to help relieve the itching, after I suggested it might be a nice thing for him to do despite my being perfectly capable of doing it myself.  While my belly was exposed I caught sight of some old, healed stretch marks from last time.  I pointed them out and husband looked, and squinted, and shifted angles, and finally said, “Yes, there they are.  I can see them if the light hits them just right.”  He is a completely inept liar, so I feel good that my old stretch marks are nigh invisible, and hope I can be that lucky this time.  I didn’t have stretch marks nearly this early with Son, but then, he was conceived in the Spring, not the Fall.  And really…it doesn’t matter.  I have a healthy amount of vanity, but not so much I think stretch marks will really have any effect on my life.

The Long Hiatus

I feel terrible that I’ve let this go for a week without writing.  Anyone who has enough college experience to remember what the end of the semester is like should be able to sympathize, though.  Finals begin on Thursday, and by next Wednesday I have to have graded all of those, plus all of the semester projects they just turned in and exams that they will be taking tomorrow to conclude the last chapters of their courses.  I’ve spent the last week writing exams and catching up all the other grading (labs, quizzes).

Things haven’t been too exciting on the pregnancy side of things.  People who know I’m pregnant keep staring at me trying to decide whether I’m showing yet.  I should wear skin-tight spandex more often I guess, because my stomach feels HUGE and people can’t tell I look any different!  I can look down and see it sticking out several inches nice and rounded.  My belly button is even sticking out on one side.  The morning sickness is definitely gone and now I just have to make sure I eat regularly or my stomach will be unhappy due to being empty.  The only strange thing has been going on every day or two for the last week.  I described in a previous entry how I had a very strange sensation when I think my uterus moved to tilt forward after running out of room in back.  That has happened several more times but much less strongly.  It’s the same sort of sensation, like a really severe involuntary muscle spasm.  It makes me about double over with surprise at the sudden, strong sensation each time, but it doesn’t hurt.  I’m not sure how else to describe it even though I’m sure most people won’t think that description makes sense.

We’ve started telling Son that there’s a baby growing in Mommy’s tummy.  He’s fascinated with babies right now, but even though he nods and points seriously, I don’t think he understands that there’s really a baby in there, let along that it will come out one day.  He has been more gentle around my stomach though, so maybe some of it has sunk in a bit.  He is just starting to be able to hold conversations and it’s awfully nice.  He’s a thoughtful and agreeable child and it’s so wonderful to hear some of that communicated with his words.

About Time

It’s about time I wrote another post.  It’s also about time I was feeling better.  The morning sickness seems to really be over and done with; the queasy hasn’t come back since it went away early this past week.  I did notice, however, that I’m pretty sensitive to salt.  It doesn’t make me feel sick, it just makes me feel like I’ve had too much salt, if that makes sense.  It’s nice to be able to take my vitamins again and eat normal foods.

I do still feel badly if I let my blood sugar get too low, which means eating at regular and frequent intervals.  I still have an unopened bag of pretzels in my office which should be helpful for that, but which I couldn’t eat for the past few weeks because bread products were too revolting.

I had a very strange experience on Thursday night.  I was sitting in my computer chair and I leaned forward for a moment to reach something, and I had the oddest sensation in my abdomen.  It’s hard to describe much more than to say it was sort of like a really strong involuntary muscle spasm.  It didn’t hurt so much as just feel really, really weird.  And it was over as quickly as it started, leaving me wondering whether I had just imagined it.  But now I can feel the top of my uterus just above my pubic bone, and I couldn’t before.  So it must have finally run out of room being tilted backward, and now it’s tilting forward like normal.

Son was too wiggly and active to nurse this morning like he normally does, and I couldn’t get him to hold still and latch on until bedtime tonight.  Ohhh, I was so sore between that and my expanding breasts.  A couple of months ago he was almost weaned and often went a day without nursing.  I don’t really want to try that now!

Better…really?

No real queasiness today.  I had my share of low blood sugar headaches and feeling icky from that, but my stomach was fine.  There are still some foods that are completely unappetizing (bread is chief among them) but my list of edibles is expanding dramatically.  I was able to eat a spinach tortilla with cheese and onions tonight, and wanted another.  About halfway through the second one I was full, and then I felt queasy when I finished eating it anyway.  There seems to be a fine line between hunger and eating too much.  In happy news, I was also able to take my vitamins without gagging on them, after about a month off of them.

I’ve been craving animal protein the past few days, which is difficult around here.  I can’t eat meat.  I lost the ability to digest it long ago and it makes me very sick.  I’ve tried.  I want to occasionally have a steak or Thanksgiving turkey, but my attempts to re-introduce it to my diet have left me sick for weeks afterward.  Fish is good, but expensive.  Eggs are appealing, but the smell of them makes Husband ill.  It is odd that eggs are appealing.  They are one of the foods most commonly avoided during pregnancy.  But everyone is different, and every pregnancy is different as they say.  I believe that now.

I felt relatively decent yesterday.  Son and I went to a birthday party in the evening, and I wasn’t sure what to expect.  It was at one of those places where they have lots of huge inflatable obstacle courses that you can bounce in and climb.  He has been a huge fan of climbing lately and is almost always pushing a chair somewhere so he can stand on it and reach things we don’t want him getting into.  The party venue had a toddler area where Son started out.  It took him a few minutes to stop looking worried and realize that while he couldn’t walk normally, he could moonwalk wherever he wanted to go and climb on things.  Before long he realized that there were bigger places with more to do.  He thoroughly enjoyed the Disney Princess castle, where he discovered that he could throw himself into a partial barricade and then bounce and roll through it, and he learned how to climb the ladder up to the slide.  He had no fear of heights or of sliding down and squealed with glee as he crashed into the bumper at the bottom.  After he tired of that he ran to a really big one where I couldn’t see the entire insides of it.  I thought it would be too difficult for him to climb into it himself, but he did so quickly and was off toward a very tall, steep ladder.  Since parents were allowed inside only to assist if absolutely necessary, I left him be.  I didn’t think he would get more than a couple of rungs up before it was too steep, but he climbed all the way to the top, all 20 feet or so.  Then he circled around and slid down the equally tall slide next to it.  What fun!  He wanted to do it again and tried to go back up the slide despite my attempts to call him to the door.  Not only could he not scale the slide, a minute or so into his trying a larger child lunged into it without seeing him there, and managed to kick him in the head quite accidentally.  I crawled in and pulled Son out by his foot while the little girl apologized profusely.  Son cried terribly, but it didn’t take me long to realize that he wasn’t crying because he was hurt, but because I had pulled him out.  About then the birthday girl’s older sister came along and asked if she could help.  So she and Son went back in and she guarded him from larger children and steered him in the right direction when he came out of the slide.  He had great fun, and she seemed to enjoy it too.

We arrived home exhausted.

Today I felt even better.  I wasn’t up to eating the dinner that Husband made – that meal is questionable even on good days and he had been planning to cook something else for me anyway – but other than that I felt great.  This was the first day in weeks that I haven’t felt nauseous.  Was it just a teasing respite, or can morning sickness cease so suddenly?

This afternoon when Son woke from his nap he kept grabbing at his crotch so we went to change his cloth diaper, and it was dry!  Son wanted to sit on his potty chair, and after about half an hour of reading books and naming body parts he peed in the potty chair for the first time.  He was very happy and ready to get up after that, but I’m not sure he understands the magnitude of what happened.  My hypothesis is that he likes being diaperless, and he figured out that if he sits on his potty chair he can let everything hang free, so he is willing to trade running around for some time as a little naturist.

Not Much

Not much to report tonight.  Here it is Friday night, and here I am, the last person awake in my household, grading papers.  We’re getting toward that end-of-semester crunch which is just as stressful on my side of the classroom as it is from the students’ side.  I’m still not able to eat much.  I’m generally pretty functional other than that.  Son is doing great with his big boy bed.  That’s about all there is to say.  Have a good weekend.

Good Intentions

Well, I meant to write last night.  Really I did.  Instead, I arrived home from work at about 9:00 and found Son still awake.  He had been about to go to bed, but Mommy was very exciting and he had to spend a while running in circles around me and dancing to the tunes that one of his toys plays.  I did eventually get him to bed, and around that time Husband suggested cuddling on the beanbag chair.  We both promptly fell asleep, and that was that.  I had put my computer in sleep mode before leaving for work yesterday, and it was still asleep when I got up this morning.

My stomach is still pretty unhappy.  The midwife that I saw on Monday said that usually morning sickness gets easier with each pregnancy, but that it was the opposite way for her, too.  Thinking about what I have eaten the past few days, I can see how I’m losing weight.  Almost everything is unappealing, and nothing is good in large amounts.  The cheeses that I can handle the best are expensive and I can’t eat all I want of them.  Milk goes down well, but if I drink too much homogenized, pasteurized milk, it gives me gas – and our goats are done milking for the winter.  Aw, bother.

I would count down the days until the first trimester is over, except that people seem to disagree as to whether it lasts 12 weeks or 13.  And besides, my body doesn’t obey people’s rules about when nausea is supposed to end.  It will end whenever it does.  But it is heartening to know that this should start to improve in a fortnight or so.  Lately it has just been getting worse, and I’ve had enough.