Update: 24 weeks

I stole this weekly questionnaire from my dear friend Katy, due with baby girl Khloe Margaret in January. I love reading hers, so I may start doing these on a weekly basis!

 

How big is baby? My weekly BabyCenter.com email tells me Baby Girl is 12.5 inches long and just over a pound (about a pound and a quarter). Still a scrawny little thing!

Weight gain/loss: Up eight pounds from my pre-pregnancy weight. I'm pretty happy with that number! I was shocked to learn how little I had gained at my doctor's appointment this morning, for several reasons: 1) I weighed less when I started this second pregnancy than I did with my first, so I thought I would gain weight a little faster. 2) I don't feel like I've been taking awesome care of myself. I have been working out regularly, but I end up eating meals on the road more often, and I've been eating more packaged meals at home, just because it's hard to find a solid chunk of time to make a healthy, fresh dinner every day. Ford is a demanding little dude and seems to get very upset when I'm cooking (??). I have wondered if a Learning Tower would help so he could at least see what I'm doing. But then again that seems like a really expensive stepping stool. 3) I just feel bigger in this pregnancy! Maybe it's mental, but I swear baby girl has popped out sooner and more obviously than Ford did. Maybe it's because she's so high, it's just more apparent?

Sleep: Decent! I've been battling the flu and a gnarly upper respiratory infection for the last week or so, which means I sometimes wake up coughing violently. Also Ford's night terrors have picked up again. :-/ But I can't blame any lack of sleep on the pregnancy, so that's certainly something to be grateful for.

Movement: She's just so busy! Ford was a wild man in the womb, and this little one is living up to her brother's legacy! I noticed the other day that I hadn't felt a kick for about an hour and got worried. Then I realized that an hour is no big deal, but I've just become accustomed to CONSTANT movement! This morning at the doctor's office she was making my shirt move with all her kicks.

Symptoms: Y'all. Ugh. LEG VEINS. OMG!!!!!! I knew this could happen, but I was hoping I was just gifted in the vascular department. But alas, I have two nasty looking veins on the backs of both of my knees. Big ones. I asked Dr. Norwood what I could do, and he told me I need to get compression stockings! Ahhhhh! He also said this was super common, and I insisted that I didn't have anything like this with my first pregnancy. He said it's a lot more common with second pregnancies and that it will get worse with every pregnancy after this one. Guess I've got to say goodbye to cute skirts for the next several years until my childbearing days are over. Then I'm getting total reconstructive surgery on my legs. Mark my words (kidding... sort of... but not really).

Belly button: So out. It's been an outtie since I was, I don't know, 15 weeks? Before I was even really showing. It popped way early with Ford too. With him I had to tape it down with masking tape so it wasn't a huge distraction through my clothes, and I'm close to that point with baby girl. I guess I have a shallow belly button! 

Food cravings: I don't know. What makes a craving a craving, anyway? Sometimes certain things sound good, but that's true whether I'm pregnant or not. I haven't had anything that makes me want to stop what I'm doing and procure said food item. Some foods I've been enjoying a lot lately are apples and peanut butter (I LOVE apples this time of year), roasted Brussels sprouts, oatmeal with raisins and honey, boiled eggs (I end up eating a lot to try to get up to the right amount of daily protein I need), avocado toast... I also was really excited to find the LAST pint of Ben & Jerry's Cannoli ice cream at Central Market! This is a limited batch that has been highly hyped but very hard to find. And it did not disappoint. SO GOOD!

Gender: Sweet Baby Girl!
What I miss? Randomly -- and maybe THIS should go under cravings -- but cider! Not like a big gallon of apple cider with cinnamon, but like the 4-5% alcohol kind served in a cold bottle! Kind of embarrassing that I miss an alcoholic beverage, but mmmm, I do. Just keeping it real.

What I'm looking forward to? Spending time with family over the holidays. Looks like we will be spending a good 10+ days in San Antonio/Boerne. I'll enjoy the slower, more leisurely pace, and the help with Ford! 

Big Brother: At almost 16 months, he's just the cutest hot mess I ever saw. From minute to minute he alternates between incessant whining and the biggest belly laughs. A toddler in every way! He has so much personality, saying TONS of words (including please and thank you, unprompted!), and loves running as fast as he can, especially if someone is "chasing" him. He's actually getting hard to keep up with when he's really running! Maybe I'm just getting slower (ha ha). He LOVES babies, often pointing them out while we run errands or read books ("Bay! Beeeee!"), but I don't think he understands that he is going to be a big brother.

I can't believe how quickly the weeks are flying by!

Bump Watch

Partly because I don't have as much time, or patience, and partly because my tummy is not as cute after having carried a baby to term plus one week, I'm not going to be doing the same type of belly shots I did last time (always in the same outfit, against the same wall, with my skin showing, etc.). But here are a couple of shots of The Bump this go-around!

 

Almost 21 weeks -- I HATE the way I look in this picture (!), but for the sake of humility, here you go.

23 weeks -- Working out at the gym during Thanksgiving week to offset the extra calories in advance!

Anatomy Ultrasound

Today’s anatomy ultrasound was a little bit anticlimactic, given that we got the Baby Girl Gaultney news last week, but it was still such a treat for Brad and I to get to peek at the little lady together! We kept our cards close to the vest and didn’t tell the technician that we already knew the baby’s sex. We weren’t dishonest about it, but we didn’t volunteer the info. I figure my doctor and the ultrasound tech must have a little bit of fun getting to have a part in the “surprise,” so why take the wind out of their sails?

Still, I can never hear, “The baby looks great!” enough, so it was so much fun. They saw all of the good things they wanted to see – four chambers of the heart, three vessels in the umbilical cord, a high posterior placenta (the ideal placement), two halves of the brain… all of that good stuff. I will try to post the ultrasound video later (we got a DVD at no cost, hooray!).

Brad had to leave right after the ultrasound, so the doctor-patient part of my visit, I did solo. I used the opportunity to have a little heart to heart with Dr. Norwood. First of all, I love love love my doctor. From everything I can tell, and I’m a pretty good judge of character, he is a good man. And he likes me a lot. He says I’m his favorite patient (I’m sure he tells a lot of his patients that, but still), we have wonderful conversations, we both love art, we both live in East Dallas, we’re both July babies… I know all of this sounds silly, but I genuinely like him as a person.

But I really needed to clear the air. When I hit the 40-week mark with Ford, I started to feel a lot of pressure from Dr. Norwood to induce, even though the baby and I were healthy and everything was going fine. And you may remember, he felt quite sure that I would need a C-section anyway (praise God, I didn’t). He didn’t deliver Ford because he wasn’t on call, but the day after Ford was born, Dr. Norwood told me he would have been “sharpening the knives” pretty early on. Just altogether very discouraging and frustrating to hear. I had “interviewed” Dr. N when I was 8 weeks pregnant with Ford to make sure we were on the same page about birth – avoiding C-section unless really necessary, and not inducing until 42 weeks… and even then, not just shooting me up with Pitocin…

Since this is the halfway point of my pregnancy, I am starting to think more about what the birth of baby numero dos will be like. And I can’t stand the idea of ending this pregnancy the way the last one did – with fear, frustration, discouragement and sadness. Even though my birth experience the first time around was wonderful, the week before was tough. Toward the end of my appointment today, I shared my concerns with Dr. Norwood. To paraphrase a line from National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, he couldn’t have been more surprised if he woke up with his head stapled to the carpet. He said we must have had a serious misunderstanding because he never would want to make a mother feel pressured to induce unless there were a good medical reason. I reminded him that he scheduled my induction date, and I just happened to go into labor the day before I was to be induced. He apologized and said we must have just gotten our wires crossed, and that usually it’s the other way around… Around 38 weeks, women come in with a gun to his head demanding that he induce them, and he has to tell them “no.” I said, “Good, because I really trust my body and I don’t want to put myself at a greater risk of having a C-section,” and he said, “Yes, I think that’s about the sixth time you’ve said that… I think I understand.” Haha.

So I feel better about things. I’m still not sure what happened last time, but I am more confident that Dr. N and I are on the same page. And if I need to, I do feel like I could switch to his partner, Dr. McCants, who delivered Ford and was extremely patient with me. After today, though, I don’t think it will come to that.

Ultrasound video and pictures soon!

Profile comparison

This is from my gender reveal ultrasound at El Centro - Ford is on the top at 20 weeks, baby girl is on the bottom at 19 weeks and some change. So fun to compare their profiles!