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2004-04-13 - 1.10pm��previous entry��next entry
10 weeks, 4 days - 3D ultrasound pics link and appt dates!!
Thank you everyone for your guestbook entries! Thanks Katie and Poppy for helping me clear up the calcium supplement issue! :) And thanks to people who commented on my latest belly pic (which I'm very excited about!). I am NOT sticking my tummy out in that picture, tsk! ;) I will have to make sure you can see my back as well in future photos so you can see I don't stick my tummy out! Now that I look at it, it DOES sort of look like I might be sticking my tummy out, but honestly I wasn't. It's all bump! :)
I have found 2 pictures online to show you, from amazingpregnancy.com. They are incredibly clear 3D ultrasound images of a baby in the womb the same age as Bean. The first one is of a baby 8 weeks after fertilisation, so 4 days ago for me and Bean. Poo they are not working! Okay neither are links, so I will have to give you the webpage and you can go to the list of 3D ultrasound images and look at the first two on the list. Those are what I'm trying to show you. Here's the link.
I think the first one is so cute! I love how the little Bean is all curled up with its arm on its face. The second one is of a baby at 8 weeks and 4 days after fertilisation (today!!). I can't believe Bean is that well developed already. It feels like too short a time for such amazing leaps and bounds in development like that. Arms and fingers and toes, it's so amazing.
Well I have not updated in the last few days because of feeling sick again. Honestly, I can't imagine why using the computer makes it worse, but it does, usually the instant I sit down at the computer. So weird. But oh well, it means I can't really use it much. Yesterday was a particularly bad day. I was fed up and tearful from feeling so nauseated without a break for so long. I love Bean so much but I did wish I could be at the part of pregnancy where I feel better. But the love I have for Bean is strong enough so that even feeling like that, I still felt that if I happened to be nauseous for the whole of my pregnancy, I would still choose it, to have Bean at the end of it all. It would be so worth it. But feeling sick like this does suck all the same. I'm still glad for the reassurance that Bean is alive and well though.
The thing that made it harder yesterday was that none of my usual nausea-aids were helping, not even ice-cubes. Well, they did take the edge off it, but nothing like before. If I ate anything, I felt sick, and I had no relief for having eaten. My head ached and I felt hot and bothered and bored and restless and fed up. I have been getting really antsy lately and feeling like I've been cooped up indoors for long enough now. I crave fresh air, but going out is a nauseating affair so I still don't do it much. The car is not nice. And the streets round here are fumesy and smelly. If I can get away in the car then there are nice places to be, but I feel too sick to enjoy them and I get tired really quick so I'm heading home again in the queasy car within like 20 minutes of arriving. Bleugh.
BUT, it will pass, and I will feel great soon, I'm sure. I don't know when, but eventually I will. And I still love listening to Bean every day. I listen first thing when I get up in the morning. Bean is always easiest to find at that time and I love starting the day off by hearing my baby's heart beating. Her heartbeat has been 173 or 172 every time, but this morning it was 171. It should be slowing gradually over the next couple of weeks, to somewhere between 120 and 160 (but I still can't help but think that 120 seems a little too slow!). Bean can be found just above my hairline every morning.
That's another thing. I KNOW my womb is higher than it ought to be. Before I was wondering, but I am sure of it now. It's easy to find, very firm and rounded and smooth under the surface. At first I started thinking maybe I was pressing on constipated bowel (!!), but now I know I wasn't. You see, a couple of days ago I noticed something new, after sex (more specifically the part of sex that rhymes with phantasm (I hate perverted google hits!)) the bump that I thought might be womb went like a hard rock and stayed that way for quite a while. I was a bit concerned about it but I didn't feel any crampiness or heaviness at all and it went back to normal after a bit. But it's definitely my womb, you see. Yesterday I finally got a tape measure and measured it, and the fundus is exactly 3 inches above my pubic bone. So what's up with that?! It's not supposed to be there yet.
Does anyone have any insight into this? Please leave me a message if you do. I know Mia said it should be just a smidge above my pubic bone from 10 weeks, but this is definitely way more than that. I wrote in this diary at 8 and a half weeks that I could feel a firm bulge just poking out above my pubic bone, and I'm glad I kept a record of it. Things are definitely happening early, and I want to know why.
So today I got fed up with waiting for my midwife appointment to come through, and phoned the antenatal clinic at the hospital. I'm so glad I did, because my doctor stuffed up. He sent the wrong address for me (my old one), and then sent the right address but gave me the wrong birthdate so they filed me as two different people rather than amending my records to the correct address. Tsk. Anyway, the receptionist was lovely and she gave me my appointment dates - hooray!!
I have to wait ages, but oh well. My booking appointment with the midwife is not until May 13th!!!!!! What?!!! I will be 15 WEEKS by then!!! That's crazy, you're meant to have a booking appt between 8-10 weeks!!! But I am slightly consoled because I have my first official scan before then!! My dating/nuchal-test scan is April 30th, and I will be exactly 13 weeks then. This is what people here call "the 12 week scan" so it's a bit late but I'm just glad it's booked and happening this month! The 12-week scan is for "dating" the pregnancy - from this they give you your "official" due date, based on the baby's measurements and therefore gestation. Which I plan to mostly ignore, since I know when I conceived even if they date me differently. So there. But it will be interesting to know what they think though. Also the scan is for doing a Nuchal test, which is where they measure the fold of skin (Nuchal fold) at the back of the baby's head/neck. If it is thicker than normal it could be an indication of Down's Syndrome. I don't care about this part of the scan. I'd rather not know, because it makes not one jot of difference as to whether we'd have the baby and love it to pieces. But routine, routine.... and I get to see Bean, which I can't WAIT to do!!!
What else can I tell you? I am currently REALLY into cottage cheese sandwiches with cucumber and tomato sliced in them. They are the latest thing that seems to settle my stomach a bit if I am feeling really sick. Plus they are good for me and Bean, and they are better than a snack, more like a light meal. I ate four meals yesterday but didn't enjoy any of them, as I was just eating so that I didn't get to feeling sick enough to throw up. I got horrible heartburn yesterday evening, and ate another 1 and a half cottage cheese sandwiches at bedtime, and then after an hour the heartburn was so bad I finally took some antacids. They must have worked because I went to sleep and when I woke in the night I had no heartburn :)
I am having the weirdest dreams lately. I had a really vivid one that was totally wacky but it all seemed normal to me while I was dreaming it. In my dream I found a way to make the doppler produce pictures, like when you get a scan in the hospital. Only it was soooo clear, I could see Bean flexing her fingers and opening her mouth, I could even see the nostrils and little tooth buds in her jaw. So weird. It was lovely. At that point in the dream, my womb was in a frying pan on the stove so we could peer at it more clearly, and the doppler was more like a magnifying glass. I know, I know, so weird, but it was really normal in my dream! Anyway I saw what I thought was another baby in there, which made me relieved to find out why I was big for dates, but then I realised it was a worm with a baby's face, and then I saw another one, and got worried it was like a parasite that would kill my baby. So I put the heat on under the frying pan to kill off the worm-things. One of them turned into a cat which leapt down from the stove, and that distracted me completely. I picked it up and stroked it, and showed Neil, but then I realised I'd left the stove on, and my womb in the frying pan was like a fried egg, completely cooked except for the surface. Neil was all calm and collected, and he tried to take the surface off to preserve it (just like him as well!), but I was freaking out because there was no way the lining would be thick enough now to sustain a pregnancy. Anyway, the long and short of it was that I was devastated because I'd been careless and killed my baby. I couldn't bear to look through the doppler/magnifying thingy to confirm it. It sounds soooo crazy but it was awful, and I woke up at that point out of breath.
Crazy dreams.
I am less into milk at the moment. Not sure why. But I am much more into sweet things, particularly chocolate! It even seems to help my nausea, but then if I nibble it all evening I can't sleep for hours when I go to bed. Plus I think it gives me more headaches and grumpiness. So I'm trying not to eat too much of it. There was a research study published this month from Finland that proves (this sounds sooo crazy!) that pregnant women who eat chocolate produce babies that smile and laugh more!!! I thought, yeah right! But it's actually true, this study proves it. I found it at FF, but it's been in the news as well. So I'm glad I'm into chocolate at the moment :)
I KNOW there was something else I've been meaning to write every time and forgetting.... aaaargh what was it?!! Ah yes!! I keep meaning to write about hormones. I seem to have been pretty stable with my emotions this pregnancy, but I have recently been quite moody and irritable. I've been feeling like I have huge PMS all day for the last couple of days, but I put it down to feeling stuck in the house and bored and frustrated.
The one thing that has been noticable is how much I cry at the TV. Weird things make me cry on TV. In fact, most things seem to make me cry, whether they are emotive or not! I am starting to get fed up with it and keep trying to find things I can watch that won't give me a huge lump in my throat or blur my vision or give me a stuffed up nose for the rest of the day! I watched The Borrowers on TV the other day, and it was GREAT - no crying at all!! Yay! But yesterday I watched My Dog Skip - bad bad bad baaaad move!!! I cried for ages after it finished, and couldn't stop, and felt so miserable, like it triggered a big wave of unhappiness that lingered even after the trigger disappeared. So weird.
I cry at adverts on the telly, ANY children's programme, especially ones where they read a children's story - those always get me going. But the weirdest thing I cry at is Cash in the Attic, which, for those who don't know, is a programme where people sort out their junk in their homes and then sell some of it at auction so they can make a bit of money for a holiday or car or something they really want. It is not thrilling viewing. Definitely not emotive. But it makes me cry like a baby when they get money for their things at auction and go on holiday or whatever at the end. And A Bug's Life, where the baby princess ant was hanging onto the dandelion clock and then she let go and fell screaming - man that made me sob and cry like nothing else! It's so weird, because it's like I have an emotion button that has been pretty normal for years, and suddenly it's like there's someone in there pressing it at random moments! Very strange feeling.
Well I can't remember if I had more to say but I feel pretty sick now so I'm going to finish up. I will hopefully write again before 11 weeks (11 WEEKS, how amazing is that?!!). Thanks for the lovely cheery messages, they always perk me up :) xxx
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