third prenatal Third prenatal yesterday. It was with the substitute midwife again, which is fine. Listened to the baby's heartbeat with the fetoscope instead of the doppler... well, I didn't, but everyone else did. Keith really wanted to hear the baby but of course he'd never used a fetoscope before, so it took him a while, but it really blessed me to watch his determination with the thing. We might buy one... they're inexpensive and it is really just that great to listen to the heartbeat. Keith really loves our baby and being as involved as possible in every part of the process. I hope that I'm as good a mom as he will be a dad. Anyway, everything seems normal... measurements, heartrate, etc. We'll have our one and only ultrasound in about a month, which should be the best time for making sure everything is developing properly. Our baby's more than ten inches long now, and weighs more than ten ounces! I'm impressed.
I'm finally starting to gain some weight, which is a relief. I've never really cared whether I gain tons of weight in pregnancy just so long as our baby gets all the necessary nutrients, but I've barely gained at all until now... so I'm glad to see the scale numbers finally climbing. I'm drinking water like there's no tomorrow, which is a weird change after having hated drinking water for so much of my life. I'm also hungry at last, which is great for the baby but disturbing to me, as I just can't seem to find enough to eat!
I've made the switch to maternity clothes now... I don't know what I was thinking to wait so long! Josie gave me this great big box of all her maternity clothes, so I am totally blessed to be able to dig through and find new things every few days... still haven't gotten around to putting them all away though. I haven't figured out what to do with my non-maternity clothes... I know I should just box them up, but after just unpacking everything after having it boxed up for so long, I'm just reluctant.
Carmen and Josie (Keith's mom and sister) both felt the baby move while we were hanging out this weekend. That was pretty special to me... I guess it seemed like some kind of milestone for the baby to be felt by someone other than Keith or myself.
I posted some new pictures. I don't feel like I'm showing more than I was a few weeks ago, but the pictures seem to tell a different story! I can feel the baby kicking so much more now, and I absolutely love it. I can feel him or her probably thirty or forty times every day. The kicks and movements remind me of a little rabbit, still and quiet and then suddenly flailing feet and legs. I'm much less impatient for labor now that I can feel our little one squirming inside me.
This second trimester phase is so much nicer than the first one! The only hard part is that I can't seem to sleep very well. I have been waking up with Keith when he leaves at five and then am just unable to fall back asleep. I'm too tired to be productive that early, but then I finally fall asleep again after several hours, only to wake up and find myself totally disoriented for the rest of the day. Add that to hormones, and my brain is pretty loopy. I read something about women losing up to 3% of their brain mass in pregnancy. If that's true, then I think my short-term memory is disintegrating... I can't remember what I've done, need to do, or am about to do unless I keep my to-do list constantly in front of me! Every day I wake up thinking about how much I want to take a walk, and then the next morning I think, did I forget to go on a walk yesterday? And I can't remember. That kind of thing. If it weren't for writing things down, I'd have no idea what I have been doing.
2008-07-29 (19 weeks)
happenings I've been feeling the baby move a lot more in the last week. I notice his/her little kicks several times a day now, and I love it so much. Feeling a kick often means I stop what I'm doing and put my hand there and strain to feel another one, which has only actually worked a few times. Keith has felt the baby a few times, too, but I think I can feel the movements better with my hand than he can, because it's like I feel them on the inside and on the outside.
My dad and uncle came to visit us for the weekend, which was great. My Uncle Bill hadn't even met Keith before, that's how long it's been since I'd seen him. It was really fun to hang out with them, and at one point, I found myself sitting at the table, receiving parenting advice from my dad and uncle, who have one daughter and two daughters respectively. It was a really neat moment.
I'm showing more, although I still haven't received acknowledgement from strangers that I look pregnant (which is for some reason something I really want to have happen). I'm still wearing my normal clothes with the addition of the trusty rubber band on my jeans. Fortunately, it is summer and the shirts I wear sort of have that flowy look, so I think I'm gliding through the "is she or isn't she" stage without feeling too awkward about it.
We made our first baby purchase at a yard sale this weekend: a Graco infant carseat in really great condition! Yay! I've been doing research on baby things but haven't gotten around to buying anything yet, so it was nice to find an attractive, safe, clean, and cheap carseat.
On a heart-breaking note, a friend of mine lost her baby this week at 39 weeks pregnant. She went to the doctor for her 39 week appointment, and there just wasn't a hearbeat anymore. She had a previous miscarriage just before mine last year, and I am so full of grief for her! (Note: The following reflections are probably not good to read if you are pregnant and think that pregnant women shouldn't think about difficult things.) At the same time, thinking about the devastating loss of her baby made me realize how fearful I really am about losing this little one. What if I follow in my friend's footsteps again? My heart was absolutely broken by the loss of our first baby, and I don't think it could be more broken if we lost this child even at 39 weeks. The pain of holding a dead baby is indescribable, no matter what the stage of development. I so desperately don't want to lose another child. So I finally sat down and faced my fears, realizing how afraid to love this child I have been. Looking squarely in the face of the question, "What is the worst that could happen," I think the worst that could happen would not be losing our baby, but losing our baby without ever having fully committed to loving him or her beforehand. That would haunt me far more than handing our child over to the arms of Christ. So, having already been battling through the fear vs. love thing in other areas of my life this month, something changed in me, and the Holy Spirit has given me love, and enabled me to make the choice to love our child unconditionally and with the perfect love that casts out fear. I don't know how to describe it better than that, but I am so relieved and happy to, with God's help, love our baby sincerely and with all my heart, not fearing the future but simply trusting it to the Lord of all grace and mercy.
That is not to say the battle is over, or that it doesn't hurt to think of the child we lost. In some ways it has been hard to love this child not even so much because I am afraid of losing him or her, but because I don't understand why our second baby is alive but our first baby isn't. It has made me almost resentful at times toward the child now in my womb. It's not just about having A baby, it's about THIS baby, and THAT baby, the one who would be in my arms now if he had lived. I realized a few days ago that the baby shower which a friend is planning to throw for me will be on the same day that we lost our first child last year. Is that cruel timing, or is it God's perfect timing? I don't know. I feel guilty, as if by loving our second child, I am forgetting our first. It is hard for me when people refer to this as my first pregnancy. It's not. I have already loved and delighted in and prayed for our first baby, and then I have begged God to take my life instead of my child's, and then I have held my child who never got to take a breath, whose heart stopped beating in what should have been the safest place in the world. I have placed that child in a grave and cried with my husband as we buried our firstborn, and a day hasn't passed when I haven't thought of the little one we lost. So what do you do with that? What do you do when people smile and call this second pregnancy the first, and have no concept of how deeply broken we still are by the loss of the one for whom we had hoped for so long. What do you do when you begin to love your second child so deeply, and you know that you would give your life for this child, but there is a small and unquenchable dread behind it all that you will have to let this one go, too.
This is probably much too heavy for a goofy little pregnancy blog, but for those of you who are interested in this mama's real pregnancy reflections, there you go.
2008-07-21 (18 weeks)
fourteen kittens Last night I dreamed that I gave birth to fourteen kittens. I thought that was kind of weird that they were kittens instead of babies, but I tried to nurse one for a while. It didn't work very well, and it made me worried that they wouldn't have enough to eat. We didn't have enough names picked out, so we just named them all a bunch of Bible names, even though I thought it was weird to have tiny kittens named Rebekah and Hannah. Then, since we had fourteen new children instead of just one, all we could buy for each 'baby' was one new shirt. They all had to share one room since we were living in a very small house.
My dream fastforwarded 12-14 years and our kittens/babies were all young teenage humans. They didn't look anything like each other and I was disappointed that there was no distinctive "Keith and Jamie" look to them. I was trying to watch all of them at once and I realized that I couldn't even keep track of their names and what they looked like, let alone keep up with their activities. They were each still wearing the same shirt that we bought them when they were born. In my dream, we were just finalizing the difficult decision that there really wasn't enough space in that one room for all fourteen kids, so we were going to turn our two bedrooms into one girls room and one boys room. Keith and I were included in that, so we would have to be in different rooms too, and I was really disappointed.
The dream was definitely funny to me when I woke up, but I can see some of my fears coming out in it. Breastfeeding. Not being able to afford the expenses of raising one child, let alone fourteen. Wanting our children to look like us. (That one is kinda silly but Keith and I go back and forth with, "I hope our baby has your eyes" and "Well, I hope our baby has your lips" and that kind of thing.) Not wanting our baby to keep us from building our relationship and spending time together. Wanting to choose the perfect name. Definitely things I've been mulling over, whether deliberately or not. Still, I feel really relieved to have my first pregnancy-ish dream. I've been having weird dreams, but mostly about other people. The only ones that have related to me are ones of my mom screaming at me and chasing me or that I'm having a miscarriage. It's a relief to have a normal-ish bizarre dream for once. And at least the kids in my dream were very nice kids, even if we didn't have enough money to provide for them.
