ally-cat

(i found this in my drafts folder, apparently it never got published)

How your baby’s growing:

Your baby is still packing on the pounds — at the rate of about an ounce a day. She now weighs almost 6 pounds and is more than 18 1/2 inches long. She’s shedding most of the downy covering of hair that covered her body as well as the vernix caseosa, the waxy substance that covered and protected her skin during her nine-month amniotic bath. Your baby swallows both of these substances, along with other secretions, resulting in a blackish mixture, called meconium, will form the contents of her first bowel movement.

At the end of this week, your baby will be considered full-term. (Full-term is 37 to 42 weeks; babies born before 37 weeks are pre-term and those born after 42 are post-term.) Most likely she’s in a head-down position.

A post Paul put on my Facebook that made me LOL:

This is what it is like living with you while pregnant :D
http://i.imgur.com/7Eve8.jpg

So the heartburn has gone away over the past couple of weeks, but I still have the awful lower back pain when I try to sleep at night (or lie in bed more than a couple of hours). i still want to sleep all the time, and get headachey/dizzy occasionally.

we (paul) got the room painted and the border up!! i’m so excited how it is coming together

talked to a nurse today (my insurance has a nurse that calls me monthly to check on me), and found out that the ultrasound measurements are only accurate for due dates in the first trimester. that the babies grow at different rates, so just because she is measuring to be due Feb 18, doesn’t mean that is as scientific as it sounds. so now i have no idea when she will come. i’m sticking with *fingers crossed* my guess of the 16th. anyone else want to register a guess?

1/14 i think it’s cool that Lucas has a pretty good grasp of verb tenses. we were doing laundry, and he was carrying some clothes to the hamper. he said, “Lucas getting it.” then after he dumped them in he said, “Lucas got it.”

1/16 Lucas got his big boy bed today! paul converted Lucas’s old crib into a full-sized bed, and the mattress and box springs got delivered. so now his crib mattress gets moved to Arianna’s crib, and he gets the big bed!

a few days ago when it was storming a bunch at night, Lucas developed a fear of thunder and lightning. one night the thunder was really close and kept vibrating the house. at 6am Lucas comes to our bedroom door, duckies in tow, and when i asked him why he was out of bed he said, “Lucas scared.” so i tried to let him cuddle in my bed, but he would not stop squirming and would not stop talking. since then, he has started waking up during the night (for no reason that i can tell) and comes to the door wanting to cuddle mommy. hopefully with his new big bed he might break the trend.

the other night i was trying to get him to climb up on the potty, and he kept being all distracted. so i was going “get on the potty, get on the potty,” over and over. finally he says, “okay, Momma, quit. mommy so annoying.”

How your baby’s growing:
Your baby now weighs about 4 3/4 pounds and is almost 18 inches long. Her fat layers — which will help regulate her body temperature once she’s born — are filling her out, making her rounder. Her skin is also smoother than ever. Her central nervous system is maturing and her lungs are continuing to mature as well. If you’ve been nervous about preterm labor, you’ll be happy to know that babies born between 34 and 37 weeks who have no other health problems generally do fine.

How your life’s changing:
By this week, fatigue has probably set in again, though maybe not with the same coma-like intensity of your first trimester. Your tiredness is perfectly understandable, given the physical strain you’re under and the restless nights of frequent pee breaks and tossing and turning, while trying to get comfortable. Now’s the time to slow down and save up your energy for labor day (and beyond).

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“ Her fat layers — which will help regulate her body temperature once she’s born — are filling her out”…really? b/c i have tons of fat layers and none of them are helping with my fun new (as in the last couple of weeks) symptom of nocturnal hyperhidrosis, which is fancy medical jargon for waking up in the middle of the night having completely, literally soaked all the bedding in sweat. yuck.

“ By this week, fatigue has probably set in again, though maybe not with the same coma-like intensity of your first trimester.” nope — definitely coma-like. it takes forever to go to sleep at night, usually from major muscle/joint achiness in my lower back and hips and legs, the i wake up pretty much hourly to pee, so i’m tired like allll the time. i nap so much that every time i sigh lucas says, “mommy tired” and every time i leave the room lucas says, “mommy go night-night.” paul has him seriously trained now to never ever ever wake mommy up and he is sooo 100% good about following that rule.

the 2011 baby name list is out now. Arianna landed #22 on babynames.com and #32 on babycenter.com

we finally have our paint colors picked out and paul is going to start taping off the nursery tomorrow and mom is hopefully going to be able to start sewing. now that January has hit, i’m suddenly anxious to get the nursery ready. i also might be nesting, because i suddenly got the urge to organize the master closet and bath – the only two rooms left of the house that weren’t unpacked and settled.