Wednesday, May 31, 2017

Pregnancy Update: 22 Weeks

Well, I've made it to the stage where there's no denying I'm pregnant. I've made it more than halfway through this pregnancy!.Walking up to the cash register in the liquor store the other day, buying two 1.5 liter bottles of wine (for my husband, of course), I certainly got some wide-eyed looks. 




























Pregnancy Statistics:

Weeks Pregnant: 22 weeks. Baby is the size of a banana, approximately.  Here's a post from when I was 20 weeks pregnant with Henry.


Weight: (From starting weight) +13 pounds. Lucky 13, I guess. 


Exercise: I have met my goal of walking at least 10,000 steps for 6/7 days of every week. My Fitbit says my average is around 12,000 steps a day. On Monday I got 16,907!  :)  My feet still hurt quite a bit, but for some reason they hurt a lot less when I can wear wedge flip flops every day. Thank goodness for summer weather!


Cravings: Meat in all of its forms. Henry was messing around with my phone the other day and commented, "Mommy, why do you have two different hamburger apps on your phone?" He's right, too. The doctors say I'm starting to get anemic, and I'll bet that's why meat has been calling my name. 


Sleep: I tend to get 6-7 hours of sleep per night, which isn't enough for me. I'm looking forward to summertime, when I can sleep in most days. The night splint makes me sleep more lightly, and my Dexcom alarm goes off some nights, waking me up. When I do wake up, no matter what the reason is, it's much harder to fall asleep for some reason.


Also, three times in the last week I've woken up ravenous a few hours after falling asleep. It's the weirdest feeling to be sleeping one second and then bolt upright in bed, and know that you just have to eat immediately. I'm becoming an expert at midnight snacks. 


Mood: Even though my 20 week ultrasound came up normal, I still worry a lot. I have a 24 week ultrasound coming up to check the baby's heart, and that makes me nervous. Also, I don't feel her move very much. Just like when I was pregnant with Henry, I have an anterior placenta. It's right up in front and she is behind it, making it very difficult to feel her moving around. 


Here are some pictures from my 20 week ultrasound:



She's measuring right where she should be for her gestational age.























Can you see her little arm waving?






















There she is, full-length.






















Medical: I'm now seeing an obstetrician, a fetal medicine specialist, an endocrinologist, a bariatric surgeon, a hematologist, and a podiatrist. Something tells me I'll hit my out-of-pocket max on my health insurance well before this baby is born.  ;)


Because of the reactive hypoglycemia I'm prone to, my endocrinologist had me start wearing a DexCom 5 continuous blood sugar monitor. It has a tiny filament that sits under my skin and sends signals to my iPhone, continuously keeping track of my blood sugar. You'd think it would hurt, but it doesn't. In fact, I don't really feel it at all. It only requires two finger-sticks a day, to calibrate, and that is way better than what I was doing before. 


It's been very helpful to know what's happening, and to have the warning alarms when I start to get low. The Dexcom warned me a few times that I was having low blood sugar overnight, and the doctor started me up again on one Metformin every evening with dinner. That seemed to help with the overnight lows. However, I've also noticed high readings lately, so now I'm also watching for that. I'm really hoping I don't end up with gestational diabetes. 


Nesting: In other news, Greg and I took out a loan to finish our basement. We have a small, two-bedroom duplex, and we're starting to feel rather cramped. Our goal is to finish the basement and have the boys move down there. Then we will have room for a nursery upstairs. The boys will have their own little apartment downstairs, so they'll have much more room, too. It will be our summer project--like nesting on steroids!


We've been working on cleaning out the basement. To be honest, neither one of us is particularly handy, so we have a contractor coming in to do the work. We bought our home in 2006, right when prices peaked, so we're underwater and can't sell. I'm really glad we bought a house big enough to renovate, so that we can make the house we have work for us. 



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