GIRL!
I don't want to say "It's a girl", because that's what you say when the baby's born, and this baby is not yet how-you-say, viable? In any case, come May, we'll be saying it's a girl. In the meantime, try grossing people out by telling them that my fetus has female genitalia. That's great at parties.
Ultrasound photo will probably make its way to Flickr eventually.
In the people-I-have-failed-to-timely-notify pile, please include my friend from high school who got the news from my mom when she called my parents' house accidentally or something. Anyway, here's the catch-up email I sent. Now everyone will feel caught up!
My Official Due Date is May 23rd, and we found out at the ultrasound last week that it's a girl. I'm at what's called the 19th week; the 'standard' is to count along a 40 week progression from last period to due date. So I'm almost at the halfway point! Sort of!
I haven't thrown up once, and I'm incredibly proud of the streak I've got going, though I've developed some kind of weird thing, maybe acid-reflux, that periodically threatens to break the streak. Most of my 1st trimester I was exhausted and nauseated. Now, in my 2nd, I feel much better but I have an achy lower back.
I should be able to feel her in a few weeks. I had my monthly dr visit this morning, and she (baby, not doctor) was very squirmy while the nurse was trying to find a heartbeat. Squirmy is good, but it is freaky to know that a being is squirming inside me and I can't feel it.
Well, that all might be more than you needed, but there you go. My mission for January is to figure out a pediatrician, a new doctor for myself because mine is moving away, sign up for a few prenatal classes, interview childcare facilities, and not get overwhelmed by it all. Hopefully we'll get to start setting up the baby's room, too. That should be fun.
Christmas was great, except for the part where I was sick the entire time with a cold that started on Wednesday, and got much worse Friday evening through Sunday. The only medication that I knew I could take was Tylenol (acetominophen), so that gave limited comfort. I had a handout from my OB that said I could take Sudaphed, but when we stopped at a grocery store to pick some up, there were multiple types of Sudaphed. The sheet hadn't specified what the active ingredient is, so I couldn't figure out what to take. Finally, 9:30am Sunday morning, I decided I had to call the nurse hotline to find out what I could take.
The nurse hotline was completely useless! They said they can't even recommend Tylenol without doctor's permission.
So I had to call my OB's answering service, and they had to page the on-call doctor, who had to call me back to essentially tell me that ANY Sudaphed is OK, oh and also, any Tylenol Cold product is OK. She sounded kinda pissed.
And wouldn't you know, that very night, I received a pregnancy book as a gift, and it said the same thing, that most o-t-c decongestants are fine. Unfortunately, it also said topical benzoyl peroxide is not good. That's going to be its own post when I get around to it.
Yeah, that's right. I had a party and I didn't take ANY PICTURES. Maybe because I was too busy hosting and serving dinner to 20 guests. Or maybe because I don't care about your feeeeeeeelings. Because I'm eeeeeeeevil.
Photos of people holding a skateboard, Lite Brite set, and Big Mouth Billy Bass would just be confusing to people who weren't there, anyway. And if you were there, then YOU should have taken photos.
I ended up with a massage pillow. The massage pillow is nice, but what's also fun is taking the massaging disc out of the pillow and using it as a little handheld device. D and I had fun giving each other shoulder rubs with it - takes all the work out of massages!
Lately, I have been enjoying at least one cup a day of Stash Tea's White Christmas tea. It's a peppermint tea made with white tea and a bit of ginger, and it's the best mint tea I've had. I think the ginger gives the tea a kind of cheerfulness that other mint teas lack. I'm not the biggest connoisseur of teas, so this isn't a Grand Statement. However, if you're looking for a nice mint tea, I highly recommend this one.
I mocked D for insisting that we include a digital kitchen scale on our wedding registry. What would we have to weigh? I'd never yet seen a recipe that called for weight. It seemed like one of the several items he wanted on the registry that he had learned about from The Food Channel, but we would never need or use.
I take it all back. He was right, and I was wrong, and my life would truly be more difficult if we did not have a small, easy-to-use digital kichen scale. I actually DO run into the need to use it when I run into crappy recipes that list ingredients like "One box of sugar". Omg. I will kill you, bitch. OK, so I have what I suspect is your "one box", and now I have to freaking halve the recipe. This is where the scale comes in: the box lists the net weight of the contents, so I can just divide in half and weigh out that much into a measuring bowl that's on a zero-ed out scale. Hooray! Crisis averted.
I really like Smarties candy, and lately, I've been indulging myself by allowing them into my diet. This stuff:
I like to open the roll and eat them two at a time, by color. Two orange, two green, etc. Here's the really weird thing though:
There are always three singles left over.
They aren't always the same colors, either, because any Smarties eater knows those rolls are pretty random. But in any given roll, all the colors can be eaten in pairs, and there will be three candies left over, in three colors. Always three. It's really strange.
UPDATE:
I did some math on this, and here's the thing: I think there are 6 colors the candies come in. There's an odd number of candies in each roll, and that means that the only possible numbers of leftover candies are 1, 3, and 5. So technically, 1 and 5 should show up regularly as well. Now, I think I HAVE gotten only 1 on one or two occasions, I must admit, but really, mostly only 3.
I had a great doc appt this morning. Just a check-up, but it's nice to know the little person is still in there, doing his/her thing. Which apparently involves squirming that I don't notice at all.
We received a hand-me-down infant carrier and car seat base, so we're debating whether to just get the skeletal stroller base for it, then get a regular stroller for when the baby outgrows the carrier, or if we should get a single stroller that the infant carrier fits onto. I'm currently leaning towards the two-stroller thing, because it would be nice to NOT have to pack/unpack a 18-27lb stroller in addition to the infant carrier.
