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2007-08-12 - 10.45pm��previous entry��next entry
14 weeks pregnant - new belly picture!
I�m 14 weeks pregnant today!!! Every time I see another new number on my ticker for the number of weeks pregnant that I am, it just boggles my brain. I can�t believe how many weeks pregnant I am already! It is going so fast. Sort of. Normal speed in some ways � I feel like I have been pregnant for months, which I have, but otherwise those months are just zipping by. It�s so nice to feel that nice familiarity of �settled in� pregnancy, the feeling that I have been pregnant for a while, with still a nice way to go ahead of me! I LOVE being pregnant. I wish I could just do it a million times over.
I am still exhausted and nauseous, BUT it�s the weekend (Sunday afternoon right now) and I have noticed my nausea was considerably better yesterday over the entire day. In fact, in the evening it was so unusually bearable (just a little queasiness here and there, that�s ALL!!! Wow!) that I decided to play The Sims 2, which I have been avoiding (along with all other computer games) because I know my own tendency to associate morning sickness with games that I play a lot when I�m in my first trimester. Then I feel sick as a dog forevermore when I play those games. *sigh* But anyway. So I have been avoiding playing games I REALLY love, so that I don�t have to have that issue later on! I am soooo looking forward to when I don�t feel sick so that I can play The Sims 2, and the new game that Neil bought me around the time I found out I was pregnant. Anyway, yay! I had fun playing The Sims 2 last night! I didn�t do much because I got so tired, but it was fun!
Today I have been queasy, but again I am noticing much less of an issue than normal. I feel nauseous right now, but this is normally a peak time of day for me to feel HORRIBLE, so just to feel kind of nauseous is great! I do have the odd occasion where I get a couple of days together that aren�t so bad, and sometimes I think it would just be SO much more bearable if I was able to rest (which I have been able to these last couple of days, given that it�s weekend and Neil is home), so I�m not holding my breath. But I hope hope hope it�s a sign that my morning sickness might end soon! I also noticed over the last few days � maybe a bit longer � that I am getting interested in looking at recipes again, and thinking about different things to make for the boys to eat. I would NEVER absent-mindedly think about cooking when I was really morning sick! I have had to force myself not to think about meal planning, cooking, ingredients, etc, for weeks and weeks now, as it just does NOT help at all! I just make things as their mealtimes approach, without thinking about it too much beforehand. So to realise that I am thinking about it, without having even noticed at first, is encouraging. I also noticed just recently that I am drinking water a little better. It�s still gross and feels sloshy and nasty in my tummy, but I can take a few gulps at a time now, which is a HUGE improvement, and perhaps another good sign? I can�t wait to feel nausea-free again on a permanent basis!! :)
It�s belly picture day today!!! It has been four weeks since the last one, but from today onwards, all my belly pictures will be every even-numbered week throughout my pregnancy! I�m excited to reach this stage again! Belly pictures get more interesting from 14 weeks onwards. I have to say, I was reeeeally tempted to take a belly picture a few days after I turned 12 weeks, as I felt sure I wasn�t showing that much in my other two pregnancies and I wanted to record it. I will probably show that early again with any other pregnancies I have, so perhaps I should have. But I didn�t! It felt odd to think of doing a 12-week belly picture, since I have such a set thing with the timings of my belly pictures, right back from my pregnancy with Arthur! Five weeks, ten weeks, then 14.
Anyway, today�s the day! I have to try to find the pyjama bottoms I was wearing in the other two pictures. I am not sure if I still fit them though. I have literally seemed to be changing every DAY this past week. I know I mentioned it last entry too, but even since then I have had so much more trouble with clothes to wear! I was a size 10 in jeans and trousers before I got pregnant (I didn�t go down to a 10 before Matthew�s pregnancy, so I was in 12 as my starting size then). Mid-week (a few days ago), I fit my size 12 jeans and NONE of the size 10s at all. The size 12s were starting to sit a bit funny on my start-of-a-bump and didn�t feel too comfortable. Fast-forward to the weekend, and NONE of my size 12 jeans fit me! None of them. One or two will not pull up over my hips! Yaaaargh! I am not really putting on weight yet, or if I am, I have only just put on a couple of lbs. But already my hips are a-spreadin�! Help!
Anyway, nothing will do up over my definitely-there-now bump. It may be small, but it�s THERE. I begged Neil to bring down my box of maternity clothes from the loft but he hasn�t had time to do it yet. Today I had the hardest time getting dressed to go to church. Everything I had just worn in the last couple of days was in the dirty washing pile, and everything I wore in the few days before that was already TOO SMALL! In the end, I decided to try on the size 14 stuff that was falling off me just on Tuesday, and to my amazement, two of the pairs of jeans I tried (yes, we wear jeans to church) FIT perfectly!!! One has a high waist, which does not thrill me hugely, but never mind. It fit comfortably over the little bumpy bit. And the other pair had a low enough waist to not press uncomfortably on the little bumpy bit. So that was okay. Then it got warm later in the day, so right now I am wearing a pair of very baggy maternity shorts that were left out when I boxed everything up after Matthew. They do great on me when I�m huuuuuge, but if I am not sitting down in them at the moment, they pretty much want to fall down! But at least nothing is digging into my sensitive bumpy bit. It does not like being leaned or pressed on lately. So anyway, I really do need my maternity clothes down from the loft now. I think if things changed this fast over just the past week, I will be in dire straits by next weekend, if I haven�t had that box down! It feels crazy to me that I need maternity clothes already though. I am pretty sure I�ll be equally frustrated once I get them out, because I will probably be in that annoyingly in-between stage where I am not big enough for ANY of my maternity clothes, and yet can�t fit in a single other thing! But it will pass quickly as Beanlet grows :)
I am still bleeding. I nearly wrote an entry about that yesterday but it would have been kind of moany, and in the end I figured I would save all the newsy stuff for an entry at 14 weeks the next day. I�m glad I played The Sims instead! Much more cheery of me! :) Anyway, the bleeding. It was light-ish on Tuesday and Wednesday, and then has become heavier and heavier every day since. Ugh. Today I am just wondering if it is lighter again at last though.... I was planning to phone the maternity unit tomorrow (I always get to the point where I need medical advice or help on Friday night or over the weekend when there�s basically nobody around � what is that always the way?!!), to ask if the heavier bleeding is okay, or if I should come in. My next scan is a week from tomorrow, at 15 weeks. I knew that having brown bleeding was GOOD because I have a huge haematoma that really needs to go, and bleeding it out is a great way for it to do that. Also, at least I could reassure myself that if the bleeding was brown, I did not need to worry about it at ALL. And it did start out brown. But as it got heavier it got kind of more red. The consultant said I should go back immediately if I had red bleeding again, but I�m pretty sure he meant the bright red, fresh kind. This is dark red, and I can�t say it�s not brownish as well, so it must still be old blood from the haematoma. But it unnerves me anyway. Every day for the last 3 days it has been heavier than a period, reddish, and with clots sometimes. I hope that�s okay.... I am wearing hideous night-time pads all the darn time and needing them. But I know I am not �losing blood� as it were, which is vaguely reassuring. It was all lost on Sunday night when the actual bleeding occurred and the haematoma formed. It does make me realise how much blood I did lose all at once on Sunday though. I think it must be nearly as much as the blood loss I had at 11 weeks. I have worked out (very roughly) that my haematoma may have contained about 250mls of blood, based on its measurements. Now that I am losing it, I can compare the blood loss to the previous bleed, and I reckon it�s similar at the moment. So that would mean that I could have lost 500mls of blood in 2 weeks during early pregnancy. That surely CAN�T be good?! And I don�t like it one bit. But I am just praising God that my baby beany one is doing okay despite it all. And that I had such a high baseline haemoglobin level to start with! One of the many blood tests I had done after my scan on Monday was to test my haemoglobin levels again, so I will be interested to see if it�s still okay. I hope it will. It was still 12.5 after my first bleed so it might be within the norm still. I�d rather not take iron supplements � I�m constipated enough as it is!
What a lot of intricate detail there is in this entry, haha! ;)
Anyway. I was getting nervous about the blood loss. But today seems a little better (and less red), so I will see how it is tomorrow. If it is all normal, then I feel pretty good about it, because with the amount I�ve been bleeding over this week, my haematoma could have pretty much resolved! I sooooo hope that�s the case! That�s what everyone has been praying for. People prayed for me at the end of church today too, which was lovely. I do feel at peace about stuff in general. People pray and then they always tell me that they feel I should just rest in God and trust him that everything will be okay, and that he will provide. But I already feel that way, as though God himself has already communicated that to my spirit. So, it�s wonderful that God is my peace at the moment, and that he is confirming this through other people when they pray for me � it�s ever so reassuring! :) Thank you God!
Okay, the boys are home from their walk in the park, so I will finish for now and save this in Word. I need to take the belly picture (or rather, Neil does!) later anyway, and then I�ll post the whole lot together after the boys are in bed tonight.
It�s 10pm now and the belly picture is up in the gallery, yay! I DID fit in those pyjamas, too! ;) Definitely more of a bump now than at 10 weeks. Neil said that maybe the baby IS a girl since I�m so much bigger so quickly, but then I showed him Matthew�s belly gallery, which is pretty much exactly the same, and he just said, �Oh.� Hehe! We also looked at the first 3 pictures in Arthur�s belly gallery, and that was kind of funny because of how flat/toned my tummy was, even though it was growing. You can tell that I actually had some abs back then, haha! Whatever I had was stretched beyond repair by the time he was born, and so my subsequent belly galleries have had everything hanging out by 14 weeks, through the slack-o abs! ;) Never mind! The sweet babies are worth it!
Neil got my maternity clothes down from the loft before the boys went to bed, so that�s exciting!! I can�t wait to rifle through them all when I get chance! They are in the room where Arthur is sleeping right now, so I will have to wait till tomorrow. I am excited to think I might actually be wearing maternity clothes tomorrow!!! I don�t need the tops for a while yet, I shouldn�t think. But I am eager for comfortable trousers and jeans again!
Last night I listened to the baby with the doppler, and there was plenty going on in there! The baby is getting big enough now so that I can angle the doppler along the length of the baby to hear different things! After I search for a while to hear where different sounds are, I can start at the top and work my way to the little leggies! I hear the heart beating clearly, and then that fades out and the umbilical cord pulse fades in (though I can find this in several random locations, since loops of it can be found just about anywhere!). I can also hear little bumps and scuffles with the cord pulse, which I presume is due to the fact that the little tiny hands are busy around that sort of area. Then those sounds fade out and I hear nothing for a moment as I angle the doppler down further. I hold it still and wait, and sure enough, I get some strong thwacks and �doof� sounds on the doppler from Beanlet�s little legs kicking! Sometimes they sound like muffled swishes (like a sudden sort of �shoof� sound), and other times it�s like they hit the doppler and the noise is very sharp and loud. I LOVE listening to my tiny one kicking and wiggling around in there! I can sometimes feel the movements as I listen to them, but other times I can� t feel many of them at all. Lately it�s only when I�m really focused on the baby and lying flat and still that I feel movements � and of course that has to coincide with a time that the baby is awake, so I am generally not feeling movements very often. It�s so reassuring to have the doppler at this stage, for that reason, and because of the bleeding, etc.
I did notice something new last night though. It took me a while to find the actual heart beating, although I could hear the heartbeat clearly. By now, the heart is big enough (though still teeny tiny!) to be able to clearly locate it with the doppler right over it, and then the heart sounds are SO clear and well defined. It�s less muffley and �chuff-chuff� sounding. But last night I heard the more muffley sounds of the heartbeat for a while, and eventually tracked it down to right under the doppler. The sounds I heard were unlike the sounds I heard with the boys, and it really surprised me. Somebody once said (might have been Jemma??) that with a boy, the heart sounds are like a train (chuff-chuff), and with a girl it�s like a horse galloping. I figured that was more to do with the stage of pregnancy than gender, as it�s always chuff-chuffy early on when the heart is too tiny to pinpoint exactly, and as it grows bigger and develops more, you can hear much more defined heart sounds which are more gallopy. That�s what I noticed with the boys, anyway. But yesterday when I got the doppler right over the baby�s little beating heart, I heard heart sounds that I swear I never heard before with my other babies. It was chuff-chuffy when I wasn�t right over the heart, as it was more muffled, but when I was right on top of it, the heartbeat was made up from 3 clear �clip� like sounds (instead of the two typical sounds of a heartbeat, or the two sounds that make up the �chuff-chuff� sound), which were so fast that it sounded EXACTLY like a crisp horse�s gallop. I was so surprised, as I�d never heard anything like that before with the boys, and I listened to it for quite a while in awe. It made me think of the gender thing straight away, though it sounds like it�s an old wives� tale so it could mean absolutely nothing! But it was interesting, anyway.
Well, I�m sure there are other things, as always, but it�s getting late and tomorrow is Monday so it�s the start of another week with Neil at work. I love the weekends!! I have had a nap BOTH days in the afternoon (quite long too, a good couple of hours) and seem to have really needed it. I think I would need a 2-hour nap every day at the moment, just due to pregnant-ness, but alas I can�t do it during the week. I hope my bleeding GOES AWAY this week, and that my nausea goes with it, and I get some energy back. I am so eager to get back to a sense of normality with my little ones, and do some fun things and go out and cook for my family properly again. We are going to start getting our supermarket shopping online and have it delivered to our house, as it seems like an appropriate time to do that. At the moment, sweet friends from church keep asking if we need shopping, and bringing it to us, so we haven�t been short of supplies this week. But we may as well be getting our shopping delivered and then it wouldn�t put others out. Even when I get my strength back a bit and stop bleeding, it will be helpful not to have to do the supermarket shopping, and to use that energy for something fun with the boys instead.
This week I have done something fun with Arthur every morning while Matthew naps, which is so nice. I feel great for doing it. It feels like it has been way too long that I haven�t felt up to doing stuff with him. Matthew�s nap used to be a time where I flaked out on the sofa feeling horrible and whispering to Arthur that Mummy just needed to rest for a little while. I hated doing that, but I just couldn�t do any more at the time. Now, when Matthew naps, we do crafts, or we bake cakes. This is my first week where I have felt okay about baking. It still turned my stomach somewhat, but it was definitely doable! Last week I couldn�t have brought myself to do it.
I think my milk is on the way out at last. From 14 weeks last time, it was very sparse, and it dried up completely between 17 and 18 weeks. Arthur sometimes complains that �There�s no milky in this breasty!� and Matthew now changes sides very frequently, which is a good indication that he isn�t finding much in there. He does still gulp at night though, and this afternoon I had a surprise when he was nursing in bed for his nap, and suddenly (after a few minutes, mind. Not at the beginning like usual) I felt my milk let down! It really tells me how much less milk I�m producing now, that a let-down sensation during the day is such an unusual thing to feel. The flow of milk from that didn�t last all that long though. For a while I have been feeling like I am only able to produce enough milk for ONE toddler. If one of them nurses, the other one gets next to nothing after that, for an hour or so. At bedtime, whoever nurses first gets the milk. The other one gets maybe a little, but mostly just some comfort sucking. They are both nursing as often and for as long as always. Matthew is actually wanting to nurse for longer per session than he ever has before. He doesn�t seem frustrated at all. He seems quite happy and contented at the breast, but he is mostly just comfort sucking. I never really saw him as a comfort sucker before! He has always been all about the milk, and I used to worry that he would self-wean when I got pregnant again. But he hasn�t! And he isn�t. And he is getting more attached to the breast, not less. He is thirsty after breastfeeding, so I think my milk must be getting more salty, and more like �weaning milk� therefore. I will be sad when it�s all gone, but I know it�s just for a time, and then I�ll be flowing with milk again! I LOVE breastfeeding! I am pretty sure I�ll have three nurslings when the new baby is here, and I WILL manage that somehow. I am happy to continue. I really want my kids to choose when they wean. Having said that though, I may well choose to cut Arthur�s nursing sessions right down, even if he�s not too keen on that at first. We�ll see how it goes!
At the moment I will also have three in cloth nappies, full time. *sigh* We haven�t begun potty training yet, but I need to. I am NOT contemplating it while I�m still feeling first-trimester-ish though. I think Arthur is ready, but maybe I�m wrong, who knows? *I�m* not ready yet though! When I am, I�ll start. Two full-time in cloth nappies has been fine, and I�m not worried about doing it again. Three would be a LOT of work! But I�m not aghast at the thought, and it doesn�t consume me to want to potty train him QUICK before the new baby is here! I might feel differently about that by the end of the year mind you!
Okay, that is all for tonight. I need to go to bed. I wish I had some Ben & Jerry�s Fossil Fuel ice cream. But oh well. :)
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