Yes, that's me at Harry's. I got weird looks. I think it was because I was drinking water at Harry's.
So what's happening with Baby Thornburg?
This week your baby weighs a little over 4 pounds (heft a pineapple) and has passed the 17-inch mark. He's rapidly losing that wrinkled, alien look and his skeleton is hardening. The bones in his skull aren't fused together, which allows them to move and slightly overlap, thus making it easier for him to fit through the birth canal. These bones don't entirely fuse until early adulthood, so they can grow as his brain and other tissue expands during infancy and childhood.
Your Baby:
-Weighs over four pounds and is 17 inches long.
-The skeleton is hardening, except for the skull, which will remain soft and flexible to allow it to fit through the birth canal, and also to grow and allow adequate space for your baby’s enormously brilliant brain.
-Kicks and movements are practically visible from space now, and you may look down and realize that your belly is no longer round, but pointed, as a knee or elbow stretches out for a few seconds before disappearing beneath the surface again.
You:
-Are big. Yes. And the whole world may suddenly seem like it’s got an opinion about when you’ll go into labor, and it TOTALLY DOESN’T CARE that you aren’t even full-term yet, it thinks you’ve dropped and popped and are going to give birth in like, two weeks. Tell it to shut the hell up with my blessings.
-May be waddling more than walking, and misjudging your circumference as you bump into counters and knock things over on tables.
-A lot of pregnant women start having strange dreams about those pronounced movements — legs and arms stretching out from under your clothes, or the perfect imprint of your baby’s face suddenly appearing next to your belly button. If these dreams creep you out, just remember that it’s your mind starting to wrap itself around the concept that there is, in fact, a actual baby in there rather than some hypothetical concept of a baby.
Me:
Let's see... yes, I'm big and people now have no problem saying so. I've gotten comments like, "Well there is definitely more to you than the last time I saw you" and "You look like you're carrying more than your lunch". Ha. Ha. Ha. That's fan-freaking-tastic. That's what I get for having a mostly male client-base. The dreams, however, are not about baby. The dreams are freaky though. I'm being threatened by a killer to give him my twizzlers. He ended up shooting someone in my dream because I didn't give him my twizzlers immediately. It was scary... and it made no sense.
Plus I have pregnant brain (but so does Andrew!!). I wrote down the wrong date for our nursing class and we missed it. Damn it. I tried to play it off on Andrew but the handwriting on the calendar was definitely mine. Double damn it. At least we can go to the one in November.
Another fun surprise after the shower on Sunday, my ankles swelled like giant Campbell's soup cans. Disgusting. It took a day or two for the swelling to go down but it did eventually. Thank goodness! I was not ready to give up my leggings and wear pants only until December!
Then I had my doctor's appointment on Monday. When she was doing the measurements, she said, "You are having a contraction." I kinda scoffed at her, like yeah right. She was like "No you are definitely having a contraction." She was concerned that I couldn't feel it so she strapped me up to the fetal monitor non-stress testing machine for about 20 minutes to see if I would have any more. Baby T had hiccups at the same time and was moving around a lot. My stomach looked like a disturbed water bed the whole time. Elbows and feet and who knows what else were sticking out every which direction. When the testing was over, she chalked it up to Braxton-Hicks and sent me on my way. But now I'm totally paranoid that I'm missing contractions. Oh well, Baby T will let me know when it's THUNDERCATS ARE GO! time, I'm sure.
Now for your Baby Care Instructions of the week...
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