Ultrasound 4

Today's ultrasound went really well. Baby G is still small, but she didn't lose any days between ultrasounds this time around (meaning she grew 3 weeks worth in 3 weeks time)! And she's now up to the 20th percentile in growth (as opposed to the 13th percentile from 3 weeks ago).

I don't have a ton of time to post, but here are the best pictures they gave us...

This is the top of Baby G's head, and you can see her hands and her finger bones pulled up towards her face.


This is a profile-ish shot. I think that's actually her face you can see on the right though.


They actually measured the blood flow through an artery in her head here. The graph below corresponds to the pumping of the blood, and you can sorta see the artery they were measuring through the line in the box they drew.


Baby G wasn't cooperating very much today. She was constantly moving. The scary thing is that I was barely feeling her move, but she was being super active. Meaning that she's really going nuts when I do feel her move. I think I've just learned to tune out the little movements at this point. This also means that we might have a super active baby. So she definitely takes after Jason in that regards. I slept all the time when I was a baby. But no, she couldn't take after me there. Had to inherit Jason's childhood energy levels, which from all the stories I've heard, was really really high.

Anyway, her face isn't really visible because she keeps moving and such, but you can see her arm pulled up around it, and her knee and leg pulled up to her torso.


And here you can see Baby G's face a little bit. Remember that the 3D scans cut off in funny places because it just captures the area they've specified. But again, you can see her arm wrapped around her face a little bit.

Most of the time all you could see was Baby G's arm completely blocking her face; so at least she moved a little bit for us. (The US tech totally had to poke at her to get her to move her arm even that much out of the way though.)

That's it for now. I have my normal checkup in an hour, but the US was the scary appointment. I'm so relieved she's growing more!

6 years

This upcoming Sunday is Jason's and my 6 year dating anniversary. I know you're not supposed to count dating anniversaries once you're married and such, but I'm still pretty darn excited about it.

6 years together and still really happy. Pretty cool.

And today is Jason's 7 year anniversary at his job. So in 3 more years he gets a week more vacation a year. Yay!

Oh, and Jason's birthday is July 2. So exciting days all around.

Plus, my brother's getting married Saturday, and Jason's brother's getting married a week from Saturday. So even more exciting days all around.

Exhausted

Some days this pregnancy thing is just really exhausting. Lately these days are stringing themselves together. So life is hard right now.

Things I'd like to do but can't:
1) Drink a margarita.
2) Get throughout an entire day without feeling incredibly sad.
3) Stand up without feeling like I have to pee.
4) Lie for an extended amount of time on my tummy.
5) Feel well rested when I wake up.

I'm sure the list could go on and on, but I'm done venting for now. And I feel a little better for it.

So...several times a day I feel Baby G bouncing off me, corresponding to where her head should be (ie, around my bladder/lower abdomen). I figured this corresponded to her bouncing around...but I totally forgot about hiccups. I guess babies get hiccups often; so maybe that's what I'm feeling. I read that it feels like flutters, but nothing I've felt has felt like flutters. So who knows. Pretty cool though.

Hello Summer...and the 3rd trimester!

Due to our awesome planning, Jason and I managed to align summer perfectly with the 3rd trimester of my pregnancy. Not that I wasn't going to be hot and miserable enough already with either one of those 2. Obviously the best thing would be to combine them :)

It is pretty exciting...well exciting and scary...that today starts trimester 3. Baby G will be here so soon. We're so not ready. But it will all come together. It has to, right?

I think she knows I'm talking about her. She's going nuts beating up on my insides right now.

Fla-Vor-Ice

New thing I learned about Jason: He loves Fla-Vor-Ices. I would have thought that after close to 6 years together, that I would have known about all of his favorite treats such as these. But nope. New and exciting things every day.

Also, I saw my tummy jump a little when Baby G kicked me today. That's a first for me. So cool.

House pictures, as promised

This is a view of our breakfast nook, as it looked when we went on the walk-through when we bought the house. So all of that furniture and stuff is not ours. Notice the closet on the right, and the ugly striped wallpaper.

We've still got some work to do to finish it, but we opened up the room by removing that closet, which was a HUGE pain. It turns out that electricity, water, and sewer went through the walls of that closet. Oh, and it was a supporting wall. So we had to move all that. The ugly wallpaper is gone. We ripped out a stupid desk from beneath the glass cabinets. We're not sure yet whether we're going to add more cabinets in its place or remove the glass cabinets. Also, my house really is a construction zone right now. That's a miter saw on the left, and a table saw in the center. Sawdust is everywhere.

More ugly wallpaper that's now gone:

More of a construction zone. you can see in the back of the image the part of the dining room that's not yet done.

Jason, mid swing. There's red rosin paper that goes underneath the wood to help it slide into place and also to protect the wood from moisture. The pieces where Jason can use this tool go much much faster than the pieces that are close to walls. For those, Jason has to drill holes through the wood and then hammer nails through the holes. That entire process takes forever.


We've been putting the floors in for about 5 weeks. Taking out the closet and pulling up the carpet, staples, and linoleum took a few weeks on top of this; so we're probably rounding out 2 months of work right now.

Hopefully just 1 month or so to go!

Life in general

I got a bunch of emails asking how I was outside of baby stuff...so here's the update on everything else.

Jason and I are good. We just celebrated our 1 year anniversary on the 26th. How time flies!

The new house is a construction zone right now. We knocked out a closet to open up the living room and the kitchen, which turned out to be a ton of work (One of the walls was a supporting wall we had to move. Also running through the walls there: water, electricity, and sewer! The sewer alone took a couple weeks of effort from Jason to get right.)

Besides that, we're busily putting down hardwood floors on the entire main floor and up the stairs. We're going to hire somebody to paint the rooms and to sand and seal the floors for us, but besides that, it's been all us with some (ok, in some instances a whole lot) of help from friends. Fortunately, one of our friends is totally awesome at this stuff and totally teaches Jason how to do everything he doesn't know. So we're hugely indebted to him.

I've still got a little sister in the Big Brother/Big Sister thing, which is fun. I'm also in a couple prenatal exercise classes, one of which I love and one of which I don't so much love...

So I'm keeping busy.

I'll post pictures of the floors (and the construction zone) soon.

Ultrasound 3

Baby G's third ultrasound was Friday. This is at 24 weeks.

This is supposed to be a picture of her foot. What exactly is her foot in this picture, I don't know.

The US tech printed this picture though because I asked her where the baby's feet are. Apparently, her feet are somewhere above my belly button. Baby G is already in birthing position, which means her head is lower, and most the time that I think I've felt the baby "kick" me has actually been her head-butting me.

This is another profile shot of Baby G. You can see the shape of her head on the right. The dark space in the center of her torso is her stomach, and the lines you can see going up and down are apparently her diaphragm and liver. The tech said this was a beautiful shot of her diaphragm and liver, which is why she gets paid to do this, because I don't see what she was seeing at all. On the left you can see her leg bones and her knee. (She's got her legs pulled up towards her torso here.) The thick thing at the top going from her mouth to her knee is actually the umbilical cord.

This is a 3D picture of Baby G's face. She's a little young for the picture to come out very well, but they showed me and printed it out anyway. It's pretty cool that you can see her eyes and nose and mouth, and her little arms and hands are pulled up towards her face. During the scan, they actually showed me some 4D images, which means I could see her moving over time in 3D, and she was moving her hand around.

The 3D pix are puts together with 1mm thick slices of 2D images, just like with MRIs. So if her head cuts off in certain areas or anything like that, it's because that part wasn't in the scan range of the 2D image.

I'm hoping these images come through ok, but if you want me to email them to you, send me an email to let me know.

Now for the medically prevalent and slightly scary info. If you're friends/fam and this is the first you've heard of all this, I apologize. I'm not trying to keep anyone out of the loop...just not doing such a good job of keeping everybody updated, which is sorta the point to this blog. If you want to just hear the good stuff and not the scary stuff, STOP READING NOW...


Baby G is still smaller than we'd like for her to be. Right now, we don't have any reason to believe that this is problematic, but the doctor still wants to monitor her pretty closely. As of Friday, she was in the 13th percentile for size. They don't start to get really concerned until the 10th percentile. (For the curious, they calculated her weight to be 1lb 2oz on Friday.)

Reasons to not be concerned:
1) The doctor said she looks anatomically perfect.
2) We've had an amnio which rules out a lot of scary possibilities.
3) There is plenty of amniotic fluid around her, and the doppler was normal, meaning that enough blood is going through the umbilical cord. These 2 things together indicate that the placenta is doing it's job and the problem shouldn't be undernourishment.
4) As of my appointment with the midwife the week before, my uterus is the size it should be. (There's nothing really exciting to report from this appointment; so if you're wondering why you hadn't heard about it, that's why.)

Reasons to maybe be concerned, but probably everything's ok:
1) The first US 8 weeks before showed her to be 10 days behind in growth. The second US 3 weeks before showed her to be 13 days behind in growth. This last one showed her to be 17 days behind in growth. So she's grown 6 weeks worth in 7 weeks time. Babies grow at different rates after the first trimester; so this might be nothing to worry about. The doctor said this is why we're continuing to be monitored as closely as we are.
2) The doctor wants to see us again at the smallest increment to really show a difference in ultrasounds, which is 3 weeks. It always makes me a little nervous when they want to see us as quickly as possible. She's a high risk pregnancy specialist; so she's probably more apt to monitor us more closely than a normal doctor would. We don't mind though, because she is great and if there is a problem, we feel like she'd be the one to catch it.

OK. I think that's it for now.

[Update: I mistakenly thought the first 2 ultrasounds were 4 weeks apart, but they were really 3 weeks apart. I fixed the post accordingly.]

Everything baby

I'm assuming that everybody reading this blog is here because they want updates on Baby G. So most of what I post will be about her development.

I'll try to write stuff about life in general here or there too :)

Also, for anybody that stumbles onto this site, I'll try to give a little history about some of the scary screening test results and the reassuring diagnostic results we've seen since. I know this was a scary time for me; so maybe the story of it all will comfort others in similar situations.