My Little Banana

This is day number 166 and you're 23 weeks pregnant! You have 114 days or 16 weeks left, and are 59.3% of the way there. Baby's age since conception is 152 days or 21 weeks. Your baby now weighs a little less than one pound, and is about 8 inches from crown to rump. He or she is continuing to develop facial features and you are probably feeling a lot of movement as your baby continues to explore its body and world in the comfort of his or her own personal "living womb." Your baby now has eyes that open and close, ears that can hear, and a thumb well worth sucking. If you notice feel your baby making regular, jerky movements, don't panic - your baby has the hiccups!

Yesterday was the joyous glucose testing. I'm generally such a hard draw I discussed my options with the doc at the last visit. He said one of the nurses is better at getting the difficult draws than the other, or I could just head over to the hospital lab and get the draw done there. I waffled for a while, but decided I will just suck it up and deal with being stuck twice, or bruised... and to give us our best chance, I drank so much water, there was just about no color in my urine sample. Baby is measuring right at 24, doc felt like my weight gain was good (still higher than I would have liked, but no chance of me loosing it now!) and my BP was higher than my pregnancy-normal, and just marginally higher than my non-pregnant normal. Which was actually still good.

Prior to this OB visit, I had been having lots of low back and middle pelvic pain, which I think had a lot to do with how the baby was laying: ridiculously low. I would have sworn that I was walking around at zero station with a 7+ pound baby, rather than a 1 pounder the size of a banana. Fortunately, a few nights of smooshing baby upwards I think helped that, as I was much more comfortable this morning. No more waddling! The OB did advise me that what I was experiencing was relatively normal for subsequent pregnancies as everything is much easier to stretch and move around, and I was experiencing some cartilage trying to stretch - which it doesn't really like to do. So, unfortunately, I think there is a good chance this will return once the baby starts to run out of room (if not sooner).

I have a pretty good notion of June Bug's sleep/wake cycles, and how well those correspond with eating, or drinking something cold. I did feel hiccups a few days ago, which was fun. Because baby was so low, Ray still hasn't gotten a good chance to feel movement yet... well, that, and all the Olympics watching.