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2004-04-09 - 4.22pm��previous entry��next entry
10 weeks - many milestones!!!
Ten weeks, ten weeeeeks!!! Yay! I'm ten weeks pregnant, thrilled at being into double figures, and officially one quarter of the way through my pregnancy!! Yay yay yay!!! It was hard to sleep last night because I was excited about really being 10 weeks pregnant! It was like waiting for Christmas in a way, because I kept thinking, "In the morning when I wake up, I will be 10 weeks pregnant!" and not being able to get to sleep therefore! Ahhh I love milestones. Each one brings a measure of relief, and this one is soooo nice - to have reached double figures is gooood.
Actually I have reached several milestones today. Me and Bean, that is. All of Bean's organs are made, and now that the "ground work" on those is complete and I'm still pregnant, the likelihood is that they were completed successfully, and my risk of miscarriage drops again. From now on, Bean will be growing, developing detailed features, and testing out organ systems, not building new systems anymore. Way to go Bean!!!! :D
Also all of Bean's fingers and toes are now seperate and elongated, not webbed or stubby anymore. Bean has a chin and a lower jaw (forgive me if I'm repeating myself from other entries!), and is working on tiny tooth buds (20 of them). Bean has eyelids, and if she is a boy (!!) the testes are already producing testosterone, even though they aren't completely formed yet. Of course, I do not have a testosterone vibe, so that's probably not happening! ;)
Bean is 2.7cm long from crown to rump today. We have been listening in to her heartbeat every day and it is steady every time we listen to it, at exactly 173 beats per minute. She moves about a lot now. FF says that my baby is now able to move her ankles (she has ankles!!!) and feet seperately, and exercises her little limbs constantly. She can move all over the womb, and does so continually, like a goldfish in a bowl. We are starting to notice this as we hold the doppler wand verrrry still, and off she goes! One minute she's thumpety-thumping away right under the doppler, and the next there's a little swish and no more heartbeat! Or it gradually gets more and more distant and I have to follow her across my pelvic area if I want to keep the heartbeat sounding nice and clear! It's so much fun.
All the family have now heard Bean down the phone. This morning we phoned Neil's family and his mum and youngest sister listened to Bean in awe. Then we phoned my parents because my brother and his fiancee are staying there for Easter. They both listened down the phone and seemed amazed. They all commented on how fast the heartbeat seemed. To us it seems normal, even slow at times now! I guess we have got used to the sound. I love that we have got used to it. I love that we have had real contact with Bean and you would not believe how much we have fallen in love with her just from listening to her heart beating. It's amazing. At first we listened several times a day. Neil woke me up getting ready for work the morning after I got the doppler, saying, "I want to hear the baby" - bless him! But now we are listening once a day. I don't want to overdo something that isn't necessary allll those times. Once a day is lovely. And less than that and I start to wonder if Bean is still okay, so I like to check daily :) I love my doppler!
Okay I put a new belly pic up in the belly gallery!! That's exciting because it's only my second belly pic! And the last one was 5 weeks ago! So there it is, my 10 week belly pic. Neil took it about an hour ago. Can you see my rounded bit?!! I am so excited about that! Okay so the biggest part of the rounded bit is probably bloating, but the bit that is Bean for SURE is the bit lowest down from my trouser waist-band. No matter how bloated I get, I nevvver used to get rounded there, it was always flat. If I press there, it's firm and round under the skin.
At 9 weeks and 5 days, that was the first time I was sure I could feel my fundus (the top of my womb) in bed one night. I think it's way too early for that, but oh well. It was one of my least bloated moments so my tummy was much softer and easier to press into. So I was able to press into my tummy just above my bulge, and then down on top of it, and I could definitely feel a hard ridge in a smooth round shape, about the size of an orange (going by the curve of the fundus), which I read today is just how big my womb should be around now. I can feel it at my bikini line, but only if I can press into my tummy and push down on it. When I do that, I get an immediate feeling of pressure like I need to move my bowels. It's the weirdest feeling! But it's not that I'm pressing on my bowel, it's like I am squashing something firm which in turn presses on my bowel.
I am peeing a fair bit during the day at the moment, but not so much at night. Last night was the first in several nights that I actually got up to pee at all. I am sleeping pretty well at the moment. Still having weird dreams, but no nasty ones until last night. Last night I had another one where I was being chased by people with guns in a multi-storey car park so it was hard to get out of the line of fire, and all the stairs and things were out of use so I had to use the car ramps ro run down. But on and off, there kept being someone else with me, someone helpless who didn't know what to do or how to hide, and I had to protect them, which made it so much harder to escape and make a good getaway. My dreams are beginning to have this feature more and more often now. It's as though I am starting to see myself as a mother more and more, with someone who needs my protection and it changes how I always used to handle things, because now it's not just myself I need to think about. Hmmm.
Well, what else? Sorry I didn't update for a few days. I have been doing okay, but I don't go on the computer too much when I am feeling sick, and I feel sick all day. The nausea has been noticably worse this week, harder to ease with my normal methods. I am still not being sick (thank goodness!) but I have felt pretty rough this week. If I hadn't learnt about keeping on eating, I would not have been eating this week, it has been really hard because I have felt sick while I've been putting food in my mouth, and still feeling sick on a full stomach, although a full stomach does start to ease my symptoms after about 5 minutes. I am back on the apple juice ice-cubes, and they help instantly, although I can't think why - I tried drinking the apple juice non-frozen, and it did nothing for my nausea at all. Orange juice ice-cubes help a little, but my stomach doesn't like orange juice much at all.
Anyway, hooray for apple ice-cubes! We ran out of apple juice so Neil has bought 4 litres today!! Better get pouring and freezing. The evenings are always by far the worst for nausea, and I feel too sick to even watch TV. I usually lie in bed and suck ice-cubes and read. I have read through loads of books lately because of this! I read to pass the time until bedtime and then it's BLISS to lie down and lose consciousness, because there's no nausea when I'm asleep, even if I wake in the night, and come the morning I am feeling much less queasy.
Oh! I didn't finish saying about Bean's milestones!! Bean's tail has finally disappeared in the last couple of days!! This means Bean is now officially a fetus!!! Yay! I know I said Bean was about to be a fetus at 8 weeks, but I had it wrong. Well, my pregnancy book had it wrong. I looked it up at a ton of embryology places and some other books, and ALL of them said it's at 8 weeks from fertilization, not gestation, that an embryo becomes a fetus. It is to do with the tail. The tail disappears 8 weeks after fertilization, and the baby is then known as a fetus. So happy Fetus Day to me!! :D I have a fetus. Ahhh they grow up so fast! ;)
Thanks everybody for all the guestbook messages and emails. I am so so so so useless with emails at the moment. I check diaries and sometimes write my own, and my pregnancy/fertility boards and things, when I'm online, but that's usually all I do. I read email but then I don't do very well at replying because I just feel so yuck and for some reason it's worse when I use the computer. Weird. But true. So forgive me if I owe you an email.
How weird that the 8w6d ultrasound video didn't work. Did it work for anyone at all? I sent my parents the link and their computer is ancient (took like 20 mins to LOAD before they could even play it!!) but they could see it fine. So it's strange how no-one can work it. Hmmm. Are you guys letting it load first? And then pressing the play button? I am so confused, I can't think how it wouldn't work. But oh well. Hopefully you can all see my belly pic!
Thanks Alison for the concern about my calcium supplement. It's not a chocolate or caramel one (YUCK, the very idea of putting a calcium supplement in something like that!!! Urgh!) and it's just a basic one from Boots, vanilla flavoured, with 100% RDA of both Vit D and calcium. There's an artificial sweetener in it which is a source of phenlyalanine - is that another name for Vit K??? If anyone knows, please can you tell me if anything sounds dodgy for me to take in pregnancy? I am not taking it every day at the moment because I keep reading how calcium supplements can cause constipation, and I seriously do NOT need any help with that!
Ohhhh a few nights ago I had a big nasty attack of IBS :( Haven't had one of those for nearly a year, but I guess my bowel is reeeeally cross with me by now! It is not impressed with pregnancy! Anyway it was so painful, I was breaking out in sweats and breathing through it, etc, etc, and trying my hardest not to think about labour. I could hardly bear muscle spasm of the bowel, so it makes me feel an automatic failure when it comes to labour. BUT, I am trying to think that labour is healthy pain, no matter how painful it is. Bowel spasm is just bad bad bad and not normal for that organ! Anyway, it lasted most of an evening and gave me diarrhoea (nice) which Neil said should be a relief after all the constipation, but I didn't feel like it was, and then I went to bed. It was okay in the morning, just a kicked-in-the-guts feeling that is normal for me after something like that. Bean didn't seem to have minded the whole palava taking place only inches away from her - her heart was bumpety-bumping away just as steadily the next morning.
Hmmm.... I can't think of anything else at the moment. So I think that's it for this entry. I will try to update more this week though!
Ooooh oooh, how could I almost forget?!!! Everyone go and congratulate Sara who has been trying to conceive from when Neil and I were, in June 2003, and she has just got her positive test!!!! Yay Sara!! She is due a month or so after me. And that reminds me, thanks Jackie for your guestbook entry - nice to meet someone with almost the same due date as me!! So exciting!! There seem to be a lot of pregnancies around right now. Or maybe that's just me noticing because I'm more involved? Anyway, yay, I am so happy to be pregnant!!! :)
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