She became heavy to carry about a week and a half ago and it’s really uncomfortable when she moves around a lot in there because it’s really pretty cramped, but otherwise I’m doing well in terms of 3rd trimester woes: only occasional mild heartburn, occasional back pain (usually at night when I’ve been carrying her around all day), not too much to complain about really, just walking around with a watermelon in front of me so gracious is really not my thing right now.
These were taken at the beginning of the week and we had a scan to determine her size and position. Everything’s fine and she weighs about 6lbs 9oz so she’ll be a good size no matter when she comes. Oh and I look incredibly happy because the hubs likes to make me laugh by being goofy while he takes pictures.
Now if only the delivery gods could be so kind as to spare me a long and arduous labor process…
I don’t know what you see in the pictures, but when I look at myself in the mirror, I think I can see the size difference between two weeks ago and now. It doesn’t seem to translate as much in the pictures though (at least to me). Do I look like I’ve put on about 33lbs already? because that’s what the scale says. I don’t have any oedema except for not being able to put on my rings until a few minutes after I’ve gotten up in the morning. Any rational explanations for this? Anyone wanna take bets on my hitting 40lbs by the end?
Yes, I’m wearing huge sweatpants. They’re Afif’s sweatpants and I like to wear them indoors because they’re more comfortable to lounge in than my pregnancy jeans. I’m pregnant. Bite me.
The little person pushes and stretches now more than kicks. She still kicks sometimes when she wants to make a point but it’s getting tighter in there all the time. When she pushes hard it actually hurts now because I am not made of rubber. I stare at my stomach sometimes to see her move from the outside, that’s always what I’ve found looked fascinating on pregnant women actually, the way you see the movement from the outside. I get daily messages from whattoexpect.com from the what to expect when you’re expecting book, which is incredibly repetitive by the way, and they increasingly talk about my belly button having popped out, it’s like they’re obsessed or something. This is funny because my belly button hasn’t popped out, although Afif remarked a while back that it had gotten considerably smaller, but by now I think it looks smaller vertically and wider horizontally. I wonder if it will eventually pop out and that’s how I’ll know she’s thoroughly baked and ready to come out.
Sorry, I could kick myself for not taking pictures in between 20 weeks and now but she’s doing plenty of kicking (and punching) for the both of us. She reacts to food she likes and music she likes, she informs me she knows I’ve woken up in the morning by vigorously working out in there. I think she’s trying to tell me it’s getting cramped in there, but there isn’t much I can do about that, it’s only going to get more cramped.
I’m still surprised when I see myself in the mirror and maybe that’s just not going to stop until she comes out, but I just never expected to see myself like this. I asked Afif to take a picture of me too rather than just my belly from the side so that all the pictures are not of an abstract growing belly in the end. Probably the biggest surprise is that, when I see myself in a mirror from head to toe, I’m not as huge as I think I am. You will probably beg to differ…
We’ve been packing and packing and running around figuring out the moving, so I’m a little late posting this but here it is.
The likelihood that the squatter is a girl is about 99%. We actually woke her up for the ultrasound, yes we saw her yawn and stretch which was pretty cool, and then she started wiggling and got wigglier and wigglier as we went along, which meant that by the end she was not willing to give us a good view. But the technician saw enough for a few seconds that we’re pretty sure it’s a girl, and since it coincides with what the private ultrasound doctor said, we’re going with a little squatterette.
And a picture of my ever-expanding belly, which fortunately now looks pregnant as opposed to beer-guzzling.
yes I know, no 18 wk picture and no 19 wk picture, but you get to see the 19 wk ultrasound pictures instead.
I actually have my properly scheduled ultrasound next Monday but last Sunday I had some massive pain in my lower left abdomen, and since it lasted for several hours, we decided to go to the hospital to see if everything was all right. I was hydrated, they took my blood (it was the first time I got a central line while awake, Thank You Squatter), they gave me pregnancy aspirin by IV (good stuff people, good stuff) and they let me go because there wasn’t anything identifiably wrong with me and their best guess was that Squatter was positioned awkwardly or kicking me in a not nice place.
Since I can’t exactly feel Squatter’s kicks right now (Squatter is only the size of a banana so there’s still room to do the tango in there), but I feel flutters and things like popcorn popping on the inside, the best thing to do was to schedule an ultrasound for Monday morning so they could check on Squatter and on the particular area where I was feeling pain.
It turns out that as soon as the ultrasound technician pressed down on that area, which was no longer painful by Monday morning, we saw the squatter kick and it hurt again. So basically the Squatter is just kicking the crap out of me. It appears to have moved since then because I don’t have pain right there anymore, I just get random pains here and there every so often about the same time I feel bubbles on the inside, so I know Squatter is just doing an I’m-going-to-kick-the-crap-out-of-Mom routine. Actually, I think Squatter is complaining about the size of the apartment he/she is in right now and is trying to make more room.
This weekend I’ll take a picture of my 20 wk belly and then on Monday we’ll see if we can definitively find out if Squatter is a boy or a girl. Stay tuned.
UPDATE: Here are the first two minutes that I was able to upload to YouTube
At 13+4 I had another first trimester ultrasound at a private ultrasound facility so that I could get a better view of the squatter, and they actually gave me the movie on a disc of the whole ultrasound. It’s much better than the few pictures I uploaded above and the equipment was vastly more sophisticated.I’ve been trying to figure out how to upload it so that you can all be bored to death with all 10mn of it (although there are actually some pretty cool things to be seen throughout it, mostly the fact that you’re looking at a humanoid thing that’s 3 inches long), so if anyone knows how to upload a ~770Mb vob file to YouTube or knows of a reliable freeware program I can use to convert it to a more reasonably-sized avi file (I’ve tried a couple and so far it hasn’t been brilliant, or it stutters a lot and a watermark appears every few seconds because I don’t want to pay $50 for a program I’m going to use 2 times).
Oh, the doctor who did my ultrasound is fairly certain that the squatter is a girl, although that’s obviously an educated guess on her part, but she does do this sort of thing all day long with pretty advanced equipment, so Afif and I have to think some more about names, because I was thinking that only a boy would make me suffer this much. We won’t know for certain until the second ultrasound, if they’re able to see clearly then, so the squatter remains genderless for now, although you have 50/50 odds of being right whichever way you guess.
Also, in case you’re wondering, I’m doing much better, thank the powers that be for small favors.
Well, I’ve made it this far, though it’s been a bitch to be honest. There was violent all day long nausea (whoever termed it morning sickness is on my black list), then spontaneous vomiting, which I’m not sure is really over yet, and though the all day nausea is gone, having the ability to smell a large fraction of what dogs can smell out in the world is threatening my ability to keep food down when I go outside.
The little squatter has been working his/her way through most of the food categories in terms of size. It started out as a poppy seed, then a sesame seed, then it was a lentil, then a blueberry, then a raspberry, then an olive, then a prune, then a plum, and now here we are, and it’s about the size of a peach. A small peach mind you.
Here’s yesterday’s sonogram. To my great relief, he’s human. Everything is normal, and true to form on my side of the gene pool, his head is bigger than average for his average size body. I haven’t tooled around wordpress so I don’t know why it’s so small, but if you click on it you’ll see a large version. You may notice the 5 digits of the left hand above the stomach in one of the pictures. Afif maintains that the squatter was either holding a martini with extra olives or giving the sonogram technician the finger because she was trying to get him to move (which he clearly wasn’t interested in doing, so the latter is the more likely version of events). The white thing you sometimes see under his chin is the heart in mid-beat.
