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2007-06-30 - 3.59pm��previous entry��next entry
7 weeks, 5 days pregnant!
It's the weekend, yaaaay! Wow, that week was quite hard to get through. I have felt much sicker this week than before, and the type of horrible nausea that is always reserved for the evenings (my worst time) has been coming in waves all day long, as well as the evenings. It's worst around mealtimes, which is hard. My mum asked me if the peaks were tied to any particular thing, like feeling extra tired from activities with the boys, or something. I can't see any particular link, but there probably is one, since it's otherwise a bit odd that I'm having such awful peaks of nausea every couple of hours throughout the day. My WORST time at the moment is in the 2 hours leading up to Neil getting home and eating the family meal. I can't stay at the table for the whole meal now. I feel too sick for anything and can't finish the cooking, so Neil has to do the last little bits when he gets in from work. I'm still proud of myself that I'm THIS nauseous and this far into morning sickness and still cooking meals for my kids and my husband to eat. I have never done that before, so it's a new thing that I'm proud of! I am not sure how much longer I can keep it up for, though.
It is making a huge difference this pregnancy to be eating my evening meal at like 6.30pm instead of when I always used to eat it - late in the evening, with the earliest time being 9pm or something. By 9pm there is no way I could eat a meal! I feel too sick. It makes a big difference to get to that time but to have already eaten a proper meal, which means I can safely eat any old snack that might help my nausea, instead of worrying that the snack will be my only source of nourishment that evening! I think my body is better for getting 3 normal meals a day while I'm morning sick too. I have never managed that before during my other pregnancies. It doesn't appear to make the nausea any more manageable though. I feel just as sick as the other times. Sometimes, with my memory fading from the previous pregnancies, I am convinced I feel MORE sick than I ever did, but I probably just feel the same. It's horrid!
Anyway. Now that it's weekend, and Neil is home, I am interested to see how my morning sickness is with more rest and less pressure to be chasing the kids around and sorting food out when I don't feel up to it, etc. It's 11.30am now. I went back to bed after Matthew woke this morning and slept till 9.15am. I couldn't sleep any more, so I lay in bed trying to doze till about 10, when Neil brought Matthew up to breastfeed. After that I came downstairs - what a wonderful lie-in!! I felt great for 10am! Usually I have been feeling awful by then, even though I start the morning better than any other time of day. I ate toast for breakfast and the boys went out with Neil to the park (despite the pouring rain - Arthur loves jumping in the puddles!). Now I'm sitting in a relatively quiet house, updating my diary! So it's a very different day. Right now I feel pretty nauseous and yucky, but I think I will feel that way no matter what the day is like. That's morning sickness for me. It's not too bad that I have to get away from the computer, yet. So that's something.
The foods that help me most continue to change all the time. These last few days, my best time of day is while the boys are napping. I don't know if that's because there is a lovely peace over the house, or because my feet are up and I'm lying on the sofa watching Wimbledon tennis, or because I am stuffing my face continually with chocolate and liquorice!! I am wondering about the chocolate and liquorice - if I'm feeling really sick, those things give me an instant lift, but the lift doesn't last for long, whatever food I eat to help me. Anyway, it's not easy to eat sweets while the boys are up because I have to be all secretive so that they don't see me and want some! While they're napping I just lie on the sofa surrounded by bags of sweets, haha! I'm sure it won't last for long, and then there will be another thing that might help me instead, but for now the stuff is WONDERFUL. Liquorice and chocolate (not necessarily together) also have always happened to help me when I'm constipated, if you know what I mean! Which I am, horribly, these days, so those foods have been doubly helpful lately! ;)
In fact, my nausea is getting worse so I think I will get my bags of yum-yums right now :)
Mmmmm, liquorice!..... I'm eating Darrell Lea's Australian soft liquorice. I found it at Tesco. Oh my gosh, it's fabulous!! It makes the hard chewy stuff seem like plastic in comparison! Marvellously flavoured plastic, but plastic nonetheless!
I can't BEAR any fragranced product. Well, more specifically, handwash. The same thing happened last pregnancy, and unfortunately it seems to be a lifelong thing for whichever handwash we were using while I was morning sick. After Matthew was born, I STILL couldn't stand the smell of one particular handwash pump that we had, so much so that I had to take it to a family gathering and beg someone to take it away and use it up! My parents are still using it now :) So I know this will now apply to Carex and Pears handwash pumps. I soooo loved the fragrances when I bought them about a week or two before I started feeling sick. I bought them FOR the lovely fragrances. But now just a whiff of them on Neil's hands as he walks past me or hands me a boy, makes my stomach turn over and I feel more sick than ever. I can't wash my own hands in them at all any more. If I have changed a pooey nappy (a preferable smell to the soap, honestly!) then I do force myself to, but otherwise I am washing my hands less, or nipping up to the bathroom to use the little bar of ordinary soap on the sink there. I need to buy some fragrance free handwash. I think that will fix it. Ugh. Shampoo is the same at the moment too. Yuck.
Also yesterday, while I was eating my lunch, I got a whiff of some bus fumes through my open window and did not recover from that for a good long while! It seemed crazy to me that in my 3rd trimester with Matthew, I was CRAVING bus fumes and drinking them in with great pleasure, and now they make me feel so sick!
What else can I write about besides nausea and its triggers?!!
I am breathless and lightheaded a lot. Well, breathless much more than lightheaded, but yeah. We went to the swings with some friends the day before yesterday, and I had my first dizzy spell there. My head suddenly felt like it was buzzing from the inside and things looked all whirly and horrible. It only lasted about 10-15 seconds, but I felt scared while it was there because I felt kind of isolated out there at the swings with the little ones, even with a friend to help me. It isn't a place that's next to a road where you park your car (which I DO even though we live within walking distance - I just can't walk far without coming over exhausted and dizzy at the moment), because it's in the middle of a big park which you walk through to get to the swings. I just thought, what would happen if the dizziness didn't pass? How would I get back to the car, and how on EARTH would I ever drive home?! It did pass very quickly and I didn't have any more incidents, but it makes me nervous. It reminded me that I do get stages in my pregnancies where I have these dizzy spells, in fact, my peak time seems to be somewhere around 16 weeks where they are far worse and more persistant, and eating something doesn't make a difference. It's scary when it happens and I'm out. It makes me want to make sure I stay IN a lot around that gestation, until I notice it happening less and less!
I had another dream the other night. We were waiting for the baby to be born - I was at the hospital (for some strange reason!), and not really in labour, but I was there to give birth. We were fully expecting a girl, but then it transpired that we didn't actually KNOW, because we weren't able to see at the scan. We felt pretty sure it was a girl, but we just had to wait and see. As I woke up, I tried soooo hard to stay asleep to wait till the point where the baby was born to find out whether it was a girl or a boy, hehe! But it was in vain. I woke right up.
I still have no hunches about this baby whatsoever. Not even the slightest leaning. So far, it just feels like "pregnancy" to me, nothing else.
I am 7 weeks and 5 days pregnant today!!! That was a personal milestone for me last time, as it felt like sooooo "advanced" and far into pregnancy when I saw a friend's ticker with 7w5d on it when I first tested positive with Matthew. I couldn't imagine ever being so far into my pregnancy that I was 7w5d pregnant! So it was exciting for me when I got there. And here I am again!! :) Nearly 8 weeks. Wow. It's going soooo fast, even with the morning sickness, which is a huge blessing. I can't BELIEVE I'm coming up to 8 weeks pregnant already. Crazy.
I am still going by the embryonic development stages at the sites I posted about, but I have noticed that they seem a bit inaccurate with their crown-to-rump lengths. I just realised that I found this last time, and so kept track of crown-to-rump measurements from a chart at a different site. That site seems to have ceased to exist now, and I can't find it anywhere by googling. I have found another one that's less detailed but still a better chart from CRLs. Also, if I check my diary entries from previous pregnancies, I will probably find the correct CRL for the stage I'm at now, from the site that doesn't exist any more.
For example - Beanlet has now completed Carnegie Stage 15, which runs from 35-38DPO (I'm 40DPO today!!), and is now in the middle of Carnegie Stage 16, which runs from 37-42DPO. However, stage 16 has the CRL down as 9-11mm. From what I have found, that is WAY out. The old site had a CRL measurement of 10mm for exactly 7 weeks of pregnancy (35DPO), with the baby growing another mm each day. According to this embryology site, that measurement is 2 stages behind now, which is pretty inaccurate really. For me, the accuracy of the old site was confirmed when I had an ultrasound with Matthew at exactly 7 weeks and one day, and he measured 10mm. The sonographer said that was a normal measurement and dated me 7w0d. NOT what the embryology sites say. So I totally go by the old site. It's frustrating that it doesn't exist any more! However, I have found a new chart here. It only gives half-weekly measurements instead of day-by-day ones, but hey ho. I'm almost 8 weeks, and after that time I go by the chart at Babycenter.com, which seems the most accurate I can find. So Beanlet should be 1.4cm long from crown to rump today! 7.5 weeks was 1.3, and 8 weeks says 1.6. So I reckon 1.4 would be accurate for today. Beanlet is getting pretty big, for such a tiny one!! :)
Also, hmmm.... another thing about the embryology sites is that in the next Carnegie Stage, Beanlet's heart will be dividing into four chambers (it's also the Carnegie Stage where the CRL is finally over 1cm (not accurate!)) - well I saw clear-as-day a 4-chambered heart beating away through Matthew's tiny back when he was 7w1d (36DPO). The embryology site has that down for 42-44DPO. So that has to be absolute rhubarb, doesn't it? Anyway. From what I remember at Matthew's scan, Beanlet should have a 4-chambered heart beating away, and sweet little stumpy paddles for arms and legs! Beanlet does now have sort of webbed beginnings of fingers too, and definite wrists, elbows and ankles. Sooo amazing. Beanlet's internal organs are coming on wonderfully! This is the stage of development where Beanlet is most at risk of things like viruses and substances crossing the placenta, which could cause severe deformities and things if the development that is taking place is interrupted in any way. I am managing to take my prenatal vitamins every night (forgot last night though) and being very careful in general. Everyone is healthy here too, so I hope nothing will hamper Beanlet's development efforts as he/she builds all the vital organs!
Bit of a break there because the boys got home from the park. It's 3.30pm now, as there was lunch and then getting the boys down for their naps (which was NOT easy with Arthur, and then Matthew woke crying twice). Although, now that I've just re-started this, I think I hear Arthur waking. *sigh* I need to finish this to get it posted before evening comes!! I don't want to be on the computer in the evening. I will feel too gross. Although, having said that, I had every intention of posting an entry at my arthursmummy diary today, and if I can possibly manage it, I will do it tonight if I don't get time before then. I am so fed up with not being able to update as freely as I want to!
I am also LONGING to play some computer games. I really want to play the Sims 2 at the moment, but just feel too queasy. Neil bought me "Hospital Tycoon" a few weeks ago, which I am SO excited to play! I love Theme Hospital so I am eager to play this one. But I am not allowing myself to even load it up until morning sickness has completely gone. When I was pregnant with Arthur, I had recently (for Christmas - he was conceived in February) received Zoo Tycoon as a gift, and I was just getting really hooked on it as morning sickness started. The evening morning sickness hit me, I spent several hours playing it. To this DAY, I cannot play that game without instantly feeling carsick. I can persevere, but I will feel horribly queasy the entire time I am playing it. I'm so sad about that, because I love the game! But it has become pretty much unplayable for me. I SO don't want that to happen because of the same type of association, with another game, and it is SURE to if I start playing a new game now. So I must wait. But I'm really itching to play some computer games in my "free" time in the evening at the moment. I will enjoy it way more when I don't feel sick any more, so I will hang in there! Hopefully only just over 5 weeks to go....
I got my doppler out yesterday!!! Yes, yes, I realise it's WAY too early to hear Beanlet. But my doppler is rather temporamental and I suddenly remembered that the last time it had been sitting for ages, it didn't work at ALL when I finally got it out again! I didn't want that to happen again, so I got it out early to test it out. Sure enough, dead as a Dodo. I fiddled with the battery connection for ages (which is what I used to have to do to get it working before) but it still didn't work. In the end I opened it up and examined the wiring, and found that the red wire was fine, but the black one was actually broken, just hanging on by a thread of its black casing, near the battery connector. Poo! In the end I stripped the wire back and closed it back into the battery connector, loose (because I haven't got a way to fuse it in place!) but vaguely in contact with the connector. With a large area of wire exposed, it should stand a chance of hitting the right part if I jiggle it or something! So it works now, but it's as temporamental as it always was. I can live with that, anyway.
THEN, because it was up and running, I couldn't help but just squeeze a bit of ultrasonic gel on my bikini line and just see. *sigh* I am nothing if not predictable! ;) So, no heartbeat yet, of course, but I DID have some lovely strong whooshy placental sounds! :) Unless of course, I was just marvelling at my femoral artery supplying my left leg with blood.... But I think it was placenta sounds :) And there IS a placenta there now, even this early. It has a lot of growing and building yet to do, but it's functioning. Placenta sounds made me feel much better, because that has to be a good sign, yes? It has to be whooshing importantly to supply someone with nutrients and stuff?!
My appt at the early pregnancy unit is only 2 days away. Neil has the morning off work and he's going to do stuff to the house until it's time for our appt, which is at 11.30am. I am not sure if they will scan me. But anyway, I'm looking forward to it. It's my first real "I'M HAVING A BABY!!" appointment, related to this baby. So I'm excited!! :)
I told people at Fellowship Group on Thursday that I'm pregnant :) I LOVE LOVE LOVE the telling-people part!!! It's early yet, but phooey. It's a small group of mothers who meet in one of their houses, and it's a nice close group of women that I feel confident and happy sharing things with. When it came time for praying for each other, and someone asked if there were any prayer requests, I knew it was time to tell! I sort of said, "Well, yes - Neil got a job in ____, we need to move house asap, and I'm pregnant." Hehe! ;) So everyone was very excited for us, and people asked what the age-gap would be and how I was feeling and all that fun stuff! I said I was only 7 weeks along and feeling rather queasy, and INSTANTLY one lady got up and said, "Would you like something to eat?" and went straight to fetch me some biscuits! :) She has three kids and was morning sick with all of them, and as soon as she heard I was 7 weeks, she knew I needed something to nibble on right NOW, hehe! I love these ladies. I will be sad to leave them :(
Okay, I am rambling onto other things now, and I think I have pretty much said all I wanted to say today. I need to wake the boys, because it's getting too late and they'll have a late bedtime otherwise. Neil is napping too. I am not feeling as queasy as usual today, although I felt ROTTEN around lunch time. So hmmm. It's SO NICE to have more free time and to be able to rest when I need to. Shame there's only one more day in the weekend!
Thank you so much for the guestbook messages! They were so helpful and reassuring :)
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