I have the look!! (Post 150!)

Well firstly, this is my 150th post! I meant to somehow recognize my 100th and totally missed it, so here we go, post 150! Woohoo!

Also, I finally had my midwife appointment today--we had to reschedule several times but it ended up working out great because James could be here today . . . and . . .

She says that I have "the look"!! The look of someone who will be going into labor sometime soon! I don't think soon like tomorrow--more like in 3-12 days, I think ;-)

Anyway, thank God!

In other news, James and I are off today to go do last-minute pre-birth stuff.

1. Get a deep freezer.
2. Get a fishnet (for skimming out the water if I give birth in the water).
3. Cleaning!
4. Raking

We actually already raked a little. Woot woot, we rock.

Ouch

So my sister yelled at me for not updating my blog, so here we go.

OOOWWWWWW

A few days ago I was telling James how good I feel and that I think James has more room in there now, and he is comfy and I am comfy and we are all good together . . . sounds like a Beatle song.

So as recommended I've been sleeping on my side--one or the other. Typically in the middle of the night I will wake up and turn over, and it will always feel like a huge effort--that the baby has settled DEEP into the side of my uterus and I am flipping him over like a pancake off of a grill, LOL.

So the night before last I had this same feeling, and I got out of bed to go to the bathroom, and found that my side was pretty freaking painful. I "ouched" my way to the bathroom and back, and assumed when I woke up for my day all would be well.

Well, it hasn't been!! The pain continues!! All day yesterday, and today to a lesser extent, the only thing that is remotely comfortable is sitting up. If I am laying on either side, my muscle is pulling, and walking around hurts a ton. Additionally I just plain haven't felt good--overheated, low energy, etc--my house is once again in a shambles and I have no motivation to accomplish anything.

It is possible that this is round ligament pain, or alternatively, I might have actually pulled a muscle . . . either way, I am using this as an excuse to kick WAAAY back and watch a lot of Dexter.

I'm toying with the idea of calling my midwife, but I don't think she could do much either way It just hurts so much and for so long now, especially if the baby is in a moving and stretching mood. OWWWWWWW.

I have had pulling pains before but they've never lasted this long or been this bad. :-( So there's a nice fun "update" for you. LOL

OMG I think there's a baby inside me!

So as I mentioned last week, I've been feeling what COULD be little kicks here and there. (Or they could be gas bubbles). I've been leaning toward kicks a lot of the time when there isn't further gurgling and moving of the intestines. But it definitely hasn't been anything where I feel sure that it was kicking or moving.

I may or may not have mentioned that we have our own doppler machine, so we can listen to the heartbeat whenever we want (though we try not to overdo it, we might listen once every two weeks or so). But the last two times I looked for the HB I found it immediately.

So yesterday when our midwife was here, she tried for a min or so to find the heartbeat, but for some reason I just had this feeling that she was in the wrong spot. So she asked me if I wanted to try to find it, and after a few seconds, I found it pretty easily. My midwife was like: "The Moms always know where it is!" LOL.

But seriously, how DID I know where to look? I guess I do have a sense for where it is, though I couldn't find a logical reason why I should.

But just now I think I might have really felt it kicking or possibly even moving/turning a bit! Of course I can't be sure but it was little bumps just a little higher and to the other side from where we heard the heartbeat. So depending on how it is facing, that WOULD sort of be right where its feet could be!

I will have to keep an "eye" on this phenomenon and see if I keep feeling it in the same spot! Hehe! I'm so excited for when I can feel it move all the time.

Kicking?

Okay, so it is possible that once yesterday and a couple times today I have felt little kicks from the baby!! I will be 17 weeks on Tuesday, so it is definitely "about that time"! I am really excited to start feeling it move all of the time.

We have a midwife appointment on Thursday, and after that, she will make the appointment for our "big ultrasound" when we find out if it is a boy or a girl! I am really hoping that we'll be able to get our ultrasound for next week (18 weeks), since the week after that, we'll be vacationing in Maine with my family. It would be really fun to find out before our vacation, so I'm hoping it all works out!!

Awesome First Appointment!

I love love love our midwife!

She came over today for our first appointment. As we usually are before people come over, James and I were frantically cleaning when the phone rang:

"Hi," she said, "it's me, I'm running about 15 mins late, I'm so sorry!"

"That's okay!" I answered jovially, "we are big fans of being late over here!" Which was NOT a lie--our house looked awesome when she arrived.

She asked us a TON of questions on our health, health history, and family health history. These questions were punctuated by shared stories of having ADD, forgetting things, James' childhood asthma, Roger's childhood asthma. She laughed and shook her head sympathetically in all the right places.

She gave us tons of good information about the rates of certain procedures and complications in home birth versus in hospital birth. Homebirth has less: Episotomies, tearing, labor inductions, medicated births, etc etc." She gave us homework to fill out questions about our expectations for labor and birth, and for me to write down my diet for three days.

Then I peed in a cup, and my pee told us that I was hungry. "Actually, now that you mention it, it HAS been awhile since breakfast!!"

Finally, and most excitingly, she felt my stomach and said my uterus was measuring right on--almost exactly 13 weeks, 2 days. And then we found the heartbeat with a doppler!! It was amazing!! I guess mostly the heartbeat we'd been hearing was mine, because the placenta has "my heartbeat", but it was AWESOME to hear that gallop of the baby's heartbeat!!

It all seems so much more real now--tomorrow is the second trimester, and we have one healthy baby in there. Yay for life!

First Midwife Appointment Today!

So today is the first official appointment with our midwife! Since she is home-based, she is coming to our house for the appointment. I really like her so this should be fun, but it also means I need to CLEAN MY HOUSE.

It WAS JUST pristinely clean like seriously? Two days ago, but for some reason James and I can mess it up in a very incredible way in just 48 hours. Sigh. So I'm off to clean. And I only have 2.5 hours left because it's 11:30 and our appointment is at 2. But am I motivated? No. Not at all.

Sigh, YOU CAN DO IT ADRIENNE.

I love my Friends

Jessie was visiting this week, and it was quite delightful to have her. Her first morning at our house, we left early for our midwife appointment, and as we pulled back into the driveway, James turned to me excitedly and said: "Let's tell her right now, okay?"
"Sure!" I said. So we came inside and there she was on the couch, playing Wii Mario (because, really, what else would one be doing at 9:30 in the morning), and I said: "Hey, we had an appointment."
"With a midwife!" James added very proudly.
Her face quickly broke into joyfulness: "Are you pregnant?" We nodded and smiled, she jumped off the couch with squeals and hugs, and the rest of the day was punctuated with those same exclamation point noises and shrieks, along with things like: "OMG you are going to be a Mommy!" "THERE'S A BABY INSIDE YOU!", etc.

Later that night, Jessie and I met up with Katie, and went to her house to hang out. They had bought beer and I had bought food, and was on an eating binge like no other. Katie asked me if I wanted a beer, and I said: "No thanks," and then a few minutes later: "Guess what?"
"What?"
"I'm pregnant."
"OMG seriously? Ahhh! I am so happy for you!!" We collapsed into almost little-girlish giggles, the three of us, and they couldn't stop talking about it--calling me Momma, Jessie gathering me in her arms like a baby for a picture of "Her Holding Adrienne and the Baby," them making fun of me for my eating binge--saying I was eating for two ("Yeah, but one of us is only the size of a mouse.").

A while later I went home to collect James so he could go out to dinner with us, and we arrived at Willimantic Brewery, to gather with Jessie, Katie, Chris Henegan, and later to be joined by Mariclare. As we settled and got our drinks, I did the "Guess what?" game to Mariclare as well:
"I'm pregnant." At first she thought I was kidding, and as the reality sank in she became more and more joyful and shrieking--and it soon went around the whole table--the joy.
And Mariclare looked at James and I and said: "You guys are going to be parents!"
And apparently this was too much for Katie--she collapsed into nearly hysterical sobbing for a second as we all looked over in astonishment. I thought she had been poisoned by her food at first, asking: "Are you okay, oh my God!?"
But when she was able to compose herself a bit, she said it was just seeing the two of us together like that, James' proud grin, knowing we would be parents. The happiness miracle was just too much for her.
James could handle all these girl hormones since he was the glowing father, and Chris just rolled with it, leaning back in his chair, relaxed and smiling.
Mariclare said that she felt like she was pregnant, too--that this wasn't just changing our lives, it was changing all our lives.
"We are ALL pregnant," Jessie said. And in a sense it was true--this is our first baby, among my friends--and it will be loved so deeply. We are all pregnant.

The moral of this story--I love my friends. My protective secret curtain is being pulled back SO joyfully that I couldn't have asked for anything better.