18 weeks pregnant

At around 17 weeks I went to an in-clinic midwife appointment to hear the heartbeat again. I hadn’t yet felt the baby move so I was of course feeling nervous… While listening to the heartbeat (which was good and strong, thank goodness), we heard a kick through the doppler. I hadn’t felt it. The midwife said the baby was tucked low down in my pelvis (which is also where Avery spent most of her time in utero), which explained why I wasn’t yet feeling movements. A couple of days later, I felt movement for the first time, definitively. It’s one of my favourite things about pregnancy.

Bodily Experiences

Before starting down my journey to motherhood, my bra size was a 34 A. My size (and shape…) fluctuated a lot through my first pregnancy, breastfeeding, post-breastfeeding, and now in my second pregnancy. I just did a (distanced) bra fitting, and I’m a 36D. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I’d become a D cup 😆. I can’t imagine what size I’ll be when I’m 9 months pregnant! I’m loving it, though.

My body is feeling pretty good these days. Good old second trimester… I have a bit of hip pain still but it has been much better since I started using the pregnancy pillow at night!

Baby This Week

Size of a sweet potato (5.5″). Baby is developing myelin around its nerve cells as well as fat deposits under the skin. It can also yawn now. It also has finger prints.

Bump shot

This pic should have accompanied my last post, but I forgot.

16 weeks

16 weeks pregnant

It’s a stressful era to be pregnant in, but it’s a magical time of year to be pregnant, too. We ended up doing virtual Christmases with family for which I am thankful, but it was also kinda sad and draining. Luckily Avery and my wife made me feel the magic of the day. I cried over dinner because I’m so hormonal, and Avery hugged me so tight and said she loved me so much. 😭😭 Here I go again.

I don’t really have any pregnancy updates. I feel pretty much the same as I did pre-pregnancy now, in terms of energy level. The only thing bothering me is this damn hip pain! I’m loving my bump more and more every day as it rounds out and looks more and more real…

Baby This Week
Baby is the size of a pomegranate (4.5″ long) and its legs are now longer than its arms – becoming more proportional every day. Baby is also producing meconium already, and breathing amniotic fluid to exercise those lungs.

I think the coolest thing is that baby can hear us now 🥰

14 weeks pregnant

Welcome to the second trimester.

I had the genetic screening testing done just past 12 weeks, so we had the opportunity to see baby on the ultrasound again. Because of COVID I have to go to all appointments alone and you can’t take video footage of ultrasounds, but luckily the ultrasound tech let me video call my wife so we could both spend those precious 30 seconds watching baby move around on the screen. And we got some pictures to bring home to Avery. Also, results were negative 👍

Ultrasound pics can be kind of weird, but I love seeing the little profiles forming 😍

We also shared our news with the world just after 12 weeks.

Bodily Experiences

Dizziness, round ligament pain and hip pain have continued. Otherwise I’m feeling pretty good! If I hadn’t caught a cold from my kindergartener this week, I think I’d be feeling back to near-normal in my energy level. Boobs are lumpy and sore, but I love the increased cup size!

Baby This Week

The size of a lemon and covered in fur (lanugo) to keep it warm. Can squint, grimace, and suck it’s thumb.

12 Weeks Pregnant

Avery is over-the-moon excited to meet her baby brother or sister in the spring. Now that we’re at 12 weeks, I’m finally starting to relax a bit about the fear of losing the pregnancy. We talk about the baby a lot, and Avery rubs and kisses my belly and tells everyone she meets that her mommy is growing a new baby. She also constantly tells me to rest, and has started doing things more on her own, like getting her own drinks and snacks from the fridge.

I also got to hear the heartbeat at my in-clinic midwife appointment just after 10 weeks. The midwife was unsure she’d be able to find it that early, but she said my uterus was already popping out of my pelvis, and baby’s heart beat jumped out at us as soon as the wand touched my skin – 170 BPM. According to the old wives tale sex prediction, that’s one point for girl. I wish I’d thought to have my phone in my hand so I could have taken a video for my wife and Avery. It’s sad that they don’t get to be involved in the midwife appointments because of COVID.

My next ultrasound is on Monday, and it’s the genetic screening ultrasound. I’m nervous, but not too nervous, and looking forward to seeing the baby again.

Bodily Experiences

The symptoms I’m experiencing are nearly exactly the same as my last pregnancy. I’ve had first trimester nausea but only threw up a couple of times. I’ve been fucking exhausted. My nose has been bleeding. My nails peeling. So much saliva… I’m constantly battling constipation. Thankfully the one symptom I don’t have this time is depression. I might be more short-tempered this time though. Or maybe that’s just an effect of working, parenting, and living in a pandemic….

My least pleasant experience during the last pregnancy was hip pain, and it’s back again as of this week. I’m blaming the relaxin hormone, maybe. Might be time to break out the pregnancy pillow just for my hips!

This week I dove into my big bin of second hand maternity clothes. Having my jeans undone all the time made me feel sloppy, and kind of exposed… Maternity clothes feel SO GOOD.

Baby This Week

Baby is the size of an apricot and has a sense of smell already! It’s curling it’s fingers and probably touching its face with its hands lots now, practicing for coordination on the outside. It’s also breathing in amniotic fluid to exercise its lungs, and hiccuping to strengthen its diaphragm.

10 Weeks Pregnant

This is going so fast…

I had a bit of a blood pressure scare this week, but after a misunderstanding with the nurse at my doctor’s office was resolved, I now know that my blood pressure is high-normal. I’m not in immediate danger, and nor is the baby. However, because I’m predisposed to pregnancy hypertension (and I had it before), I now have to do regular at-home blood pressure monitoring and I’ve taken up a daily cardio exercise routine. After I drop Avery off at school, I continue on for a 30 min power walk before sliding up to my computer at 9am sharp. My lifestyle has been packed enough without having to factor in exercise, but my health is kind of the number one priority right now.

Bodily Experiences This Week

I’m itching to get into maternity clothes… My jeans are too tight to button up and my leggings just roll down my belly. To my own eyes, the bump has unmistakably popped. I was nearly 16 weeks when I looked like this in my first pregnancy. I guess my abdominal muscles were really weak this time… Last time I was trying to accentuate the bump so people would know I was pregnant in my second trimester, and now I’m trying to hide the bump so people don’t know in the first trimester.

I have had a very tired past 2 weeks. So exhausted all the time. But, luckily, the nausea has begun to subside! Woohoo! Just in time for my new exercise routine…

Baby This Week

Baby is the size of a kumquat. Its neck has unfurled from the chest, limbs and joints are formed, it has tiny earlobes, a nose and little nostrils, and inside its gums little teeth are beginning to form. Its bones are hardening, and all of its vital organs are either already functioning or developing.

So tired….

I’m so fucking tired ….. It doesn’t help that I can’t seem to get more than 6 hours of sleep at night because I stay up late to get time with my wife and time to unwind, and then I wake up early because I have a 4 year old.

My work is suffering…. I’m just crossing my fingers that my employers don’t notice before the first trimester ends (and that the second trimester will bring me enough energy to make up for all the work I’m slacking on now).

More than anything else in the world, right now I want to lay my head down and go to sleep. My eyelids weigh a thousand pounds.

8 weeks pregnant

This week feels like a milestone to me. I saw the baby wiggling around on the ultrasound screen… I saw its little heartbeat, and its little limbs. I had been having a really tough morning before arriving to the ultrasound, and as soon as I saw the baby my mood completely turned around. I forgot about everything that had been upsetting me. I couldn’t stop smiling.

After getting the reassurance I wanted from the ultrasound, we told Avery. –When Avery gets big emotional news, she tends to react in the opposite manner than you’d expect. For example, when we told her her cat died, she acted goofy and started laughing maniacally. When we told her we were growing her baby brother or sister, she acted disinterested, changed the subject, and later started smacking my stomach. By the next morning, though, she had a handle on the emotions and was very sweet. She made me a blanket bed on the floor in case I got tired while making her breakfast, and she started listing things we’d need to get for the baby (“we’ll need to get our crib back, and buy some pacifiers because I didn’t like them so we don’t have any.”) Our little planner didn’t fall far from the tree 😆

I also had the first appointment with my midwife.

Bodily Experiences

As I mentioned in a recent post, I’m nauseous. Usually it’s just morning sickness and not all-day-sickness, but I went to sleep at 9pm last night fighting the urge to vomit. I have not yet thrown up, despite feeling so close to it that I’ve sat by the toilet for a while… In my first pregnancy my experience of nausea was the same. It’s manageable, but at times quite unpleasant… even harder to manage with all the responsibilities of a parent to an existing young child. I often get anxious that I’m going to vomit on the sidewalk while walking Avery to school.

Given that my uterus is the size of an orange now, it’s not that surprising that as of today I need to use the elastic trick to hold my pants closed. I wear high wasted skinny jeans that are pretty tight, so there was very little wiggle room to begin with… There’s no room for all this bloat to go! Not ready to break out the maternity clothes yet, but I can definitely see what other parents have mentioned about the belly popping earlier with subsequent pregnancies.

Baby This Week

Different pregnancy apps use different fruit and veg comparisons, but my favourite app, Ovia, says the embryo will be the size of a wild strawberry this week. I love wild strawberries. I also know that it has little arms and legs, because the ultrasound tech said she saw them moving (although my eyes weren’t trained enough to see it).

Bad dream and nausea

I drempt last night that I started bleeding. It was sad. Luckily just a dream…

I’m feeling really nauseous this morning, to the point where it’s very difficult to sit at my computer and work. But I’m thankful for that nausea because it’s a sign that the embryo is growing and my body is changing as it should.

I also have a dating ultrasound tomorrow that I’m so nervous and equally so excited for.

On a different note, Avery came into our bed around 2am and cuddled with me. We woke up an hour before we had to get up to get ready for school, but she just stayed there cuddling for the whole hour. It was an epic cuddle. When it was time to get up she said she just wanted to stay in bed and cuddle with me all day…. Sounded wonderful!!

For having such an attached (and some said co-dependent) mother-child relationship most of her life, lately Avery has been much more independent since turning 4. It’s common now that I’ll try to cuddle and she doesn’t want it. During an after-school meltdown she told us she was going to move to the other side of the planet so she never had to see us. She bikes so far ahead of us that we lose sight of her (which we don’t actually give her permission to do). She’s growing up… I’ll miss that little cuddly baby so much. But it’s nice to know we get to go through the cuddly baby stage all over again with someone new 😍

The tired stage….

I was thinking I might do bi-weekly pregnancy updates, but in the meantime, here’s a little update that is oh so cliche of the first trimester.

I dropped Avery off at school today and then sat down on the couch with my laptop to start work. I was nauseous and so tired… I could barely keep my eyes open. I thought, what’s the harm in leaning back and closing my eyes for 15 minutes? Maybe it’ll make me refreshed and more efficient than ever.

2 hours later, I woke up, just as groggy as before.

I feel so guilty, but I just couldn’t help it!! Thank goodness I didn’t sleep through any meetings… Hopefully I’ll find the energy to work tonight to make up for it.