I am behind with my belly pics! The weeks are going too fast and the last time I looked up, I was 28 weeks (seriously!). I set my camera to take a 28 week belly picture of me with the boys all around me, because I did that last time with Elijah's pregnancy and it turned out to be a sweet thing to do! :) So here is my 28 week belly picture - I will post Elijah's for comparison below it:
Here's my 28 week belly picture from Elijah's pregnancy - I was surprised to see how much less my bump stuck out last time, than this time! Mind you, Elijah WAS small for dates. And I'm carrying just as low as ever with this baby girl, so that's that old wives' tale out of the window then! ;)
I don't think I am any different at ALL in terms of the pregnancy, how I'm carrying, etc. Nothing much is different, it's just "pregnancy" as usual. I have craved (bizarrely) classical music this time - I wish I could describe that better, but it's just that. I HAVE to listen to it. Not always, but I get times where the urge is overpowering like a pregnancy food craving (which is a STRONG pull). Sweet foods also, are a big thing right now, but then I think that's pretty normal for me at this stage of pregnancy anyway.
I expected to maybe carry higher, or a different shape, or put weight on differently (so many people have been telling me these things over the years), but really none of the above has been true for me at all. I'm carrying low (super low, sometimes), round like a ball on my front, and with no particular difference in weight gain. At 27 weeks I weighed myself and I was 11st 2lbs I think (I can't remember the exact lbs now). I haven't worked it out, because I am fairly disinterested in weight gain during pregnancy (You're pregnant. You gain weight. You give birth. You lose weight. Time scale matters not. End of!) and can't remember my starting weight exactly (9st 5lbs? 9st 7lbs? Not sure). In previous pregnancies at this stage of my 3rd trimester, I have usually gained a lb per week of pregnancy, so if my lower estimate was correct for my starting weight, then I had gained 25lbs at 27 weeks (or 23lbs if not), which is a little less than usual maybe? But I always end up gaining more than a lb per week from around the middle of my 3rd trimester onwards - sometimes several! :S
Anyway, it's all the same really, and that's quite nice! I have spent all these years and pregnancies slightly apprehensive about "what might happen" to my body should I ever be carrying a baby girl! ;) It's, well, just.... a baby really, as far as my body is concerned! ;)
In the last week or so, I have started to really feel more big and pregnant than before. I feel uncomfy quite a bit of the time now, but still able to enjoy being pregnant! I love it! :) I have restless legs like crazy at night which disturb my sleep quite a bit. Not as bad as last time yet, but bad enough. I have tried the liquid magnesium (run out now) and didn't notice any difference, unfortunately. I haven't had much trouble with leg/foot cramps for a while, so I will try going back on the magnesium if that starts up again.
I feel very big around the tummy! ;) I can't bend down to get things while sitting, or I get a horrible sharp piercing pain under my bump at the very front. I am having a LOT of trouble with ligament pains this pregnancy - sharp searing pain in the sides/underside of my bump, which is normal in pregnancy. I think I noticed more of that last time too. I wonder if that comes with the territory having had this many babies? I have ligament pains every pregnancy, sometimes quite a bit, but the first 5 had nothing on the 6th and 7th. It wakes me at night sometimes, and is so searing that I'm not sure what to do with myself. I am usually doing something really contorted or awkward like, ohhh, lying on my back! ;) Or my side. Something innocent and un-stressful for my ligaments like that - it's very perplexing! Changing position used to fix it pretty quick in my earlier pregnancies, but it's not doing much this time. It's as though just carrying a baby in there is stressing my ligaments out constantly. I am not sure if it has to do with her position, but I can't tell if there's a correlation.
I had my 28 week midwife appointment, and that went well. My urine was clear of any troubles, and I had my blood taken for antibodies (routine) and iron levels. They said they'd call me if my iron was low, and I haven't heard from them so I assume it's fine - it always always is during my pregnancies, so it's not a surprise to me. I went through a tired patch a while back and was pale, so Heather suspected low iron and had me take Floradix liquid iron for a while. I never finished it - I was just so sure it was a pregnancy/growth-spurt thing, and that my iron was fine, so I stopped taking it eventually. And sure enough, it seems to be fine! :)
Lydia was head down at my 28 week appointment but very high up, curled in a ball - nowhere near engaging her head in my pelvis, which is to be expected. She has plenty of room to turn about all over the place since she's my 7th baby! She is SO active!! I got worried a couple of weeks ago that there was something wrong because she seemed TOO active one evening! Evenings were her busiest time and one evening she just started kicking about like crazy. I mean, you're supposed to have 10 kicks every hour, and she was kicking more than 10 times in every MINUTE, for over an hour and a half straight!! I got concerned after half an hour and got my doppler out. My catastrophic imagination was picturing her entangled in her cord and frantically struggling to get free before she ran out of oxygen, or something like that. *sigh*
Her heartrate was around 130 (just as it was at my 28 week appointment), and it went up into the 150s range when she was particularly excited, but otherwise stayed pretty steady. No big dips. I listened in for about 20 minutes straight, and even found her umbilical cord pulse, which was pipping away nice and strongly. That reassured me somewhat that she was getting good blood flow and that (hopefully) her cord didn't have a bloomin' great knot in it or something like that (slightly more paranoid now, after Elijah was born with a true knot in his cord!). She kept it up for a long time and then went quieter for only about 20 minutes before starting with the frantic exercises again. My uterus got tired of it after a while and felt sore and crampy, and I had a lot of sore Braxton Hicks contractions! But I went to bed and she seemed more calm the next day - busy again in the evening though. Lately she isn't quite so predictable in the evenings. She is still awake and kicky and busy, but not always for very long. She is very active at various times throughout the day, evening, and night, at the moment. She kicks and pummels, and doesn't do many slow movements that I've noticed, like a long lazy stretch of her leg across me (some of my boys did that!), or slow squirms. On the other hand, she isn't at Matthew's level of strength and vigor in there either! Not many babies are, mind you! ;)
Lately I am feeling tired and breathless and pregnant. Normal 3rd trimester-ness, but it has really just started in the past week or so. I just feel under a lot of demand, physically, that's all. Not tired as in sleep-deprived, although I am that too, but just tired with the effort of growing and carrying a baby. She seems big to me, but I'm hoping I'm wrong! ;) My bump measured 29 weeks at my 28 week appointment, and she kicked about against the midwife trying to feel her position a lot! She also kicked (hard) the doppler directly at various times when I was listening to her, like she didn't want it poking her space! She is easily woken up by Elijah banging my tummy with his little hands or headbutting (he does this a LOT - like Arthur and Matthew did as babies/toddlers). I correct him all the time for it, and he has also learnt the word "gentle", and he strokes or "apologises" when he has whacked my tummy (or anywhere else on me) and I've said, "Ow! That hurts Mummy!" I have been working with him on it for a few months, because I could see the kind of baby he is (bit of a hitter) and wanted him to be clear on "gentle" and making someone better after hurting them, for when Lydia arrives. He isn't aggressive/mean, he is probably on the autistic spectrum like the other brother(s) who acted that way at that age. It's sensory in nature, for Elijah, not aggressive. I understand him. :) Anyway, he wakes her up a lot when he does that, as does Samuel or Benjamin doing loooouuuud tantrummy screaming right next to me on occasion. Hopefully she's being conditioned now to the kind of world she'll be born into, haha! ;)
We still haven't told the boys her name, but they are BEGGING to know, and we've told them that we'll let them know in September at some point, so that's quite close now. My scan dating says that my due date is October 20th (my dates by my chart say the 22nd, which I'm personally sticking with), and it's the 20th today, so that's exactly TWO MONTHS to go until my due date!!! Only 2 months!!!! That's sooooooooooo soon!! I'm exactly 31 weeks pregnant today, so only 9 weeks to go! I can't believe how fast it is going, and how close I am getting to holding my very own actual baby daughter in my arms for the first time (ever!)!! I'm so excited! To see her, and find out what she looks like - who she looks like. To put her in girly clothes - I just have that tight-throat feeling of squashing a squeal EVERY SINGLE TIME I think of that, even though that seems a really trivial or "shallow" thing to consider!
Elijah is starting to need his first haircut pretty soon, and the boys were talking about it today. Nathan said that the new baby would probably need her hair cutting when she got to be Elijah's age, and I said noooooooo, I would not cut it! I would let it grow and grow and grow, and only tidy the ends occasionally! :) They were all open-mouthed asking me WHY, lol! So I explained that I wanted my little girl to have long hair because I liked long hair on little girls. They paused to consider that, and then Arthur agreed, "Yes, I do too!" :) I hadn't thought about that before. We found the photo of Nathan from when he was about 15 months old, right before his first haircut, where I had used pink floral hairbands to put his hair into bunches - ohh he DID look sweet, hehe! But I knew it was a quick silly "thing" to do before cutting his hair. Suddenly today I realised I would be able to do that EVERY DAY with Lydia's hair and it would not be silly in the least if I did!!! Joy!! :)
I haven't started to even think about a "to do" list to get ready for her arrival yet! Normally I have by now, I think? I have so much else going on that it hasn't occurred to me, plus I have really genuinely been taken by surprise at the speed of the last few weeks passing by. I am currently in the midst of a new discipline/reward system for the boys, to get a handle on the trickiest part of my days (their behaviour and general stuff like that), and this week we began a new chores system for the first time, to help me as I get more pregnant, and in the postnatal period, and also to enable me in any case to have time to manage (read: not burn out, which would be the alternative, I assure you!), homeschool, and meet their needs, etc. Next week, Neil is off work and we are doing a "staycation", going on day trips but returning home at the end of each day. So that takes planning too. The week after is our first week back in formal schooling for the best part of a year. We've been unschooling all this time, and I am keen to start back with some formal lessons in the basics at least, and continue the "free-range" learning the rest of the time. More planning (lots and lots!) needed for a new year of homeschooling! Then suddenly I have 6 or 7 weeks to go, and yet I've only just started school with the boys for the year, so that will take my full focus for a few weeks as we get into a rhythm. I hope we'll get going well and manage to keep going up until the very end of my pregnancy, so that it's not too stop-start-y for the boys when we stop to have a baby for a bit. We'll probably stop until pretty much the end of the year - at least, I'm not expecting anything of myself until the New Year, but if Lydia is colic-free (!) and an "easy" baby like Samuel was, I can see us starting back in early December if not before, especially if we were off to a good start in the autumn. We shall see. Colicky baby girl? No plans for school until Next Year (ie. off my radar for a while!)! Love the flexibility homeschooling allows us! :)
I am getting rather excited about giving birth, although I'm sure the natural anxieties will return nearer the time when it feels more real! Last time felt like a GOOD birth experience for me (yay, at last!), not scary or unmanageable, and so for the first time I am looking forward to the next one! I know they're all different, but I'm hoping hoping hoping that the trend will continue. So far my labours are getting shorter - the last one was about 4 or 5 hours from 1st contraction to birth - and I am able to manage so much better because I feel very used to the sensations and remember, even in the moment, how I coped with that kind of pain last time, etc. Heather makes a big difference on the few occasions when I "lose it" and start freaking out or panicking - she brings me gently back to earth very quickly, and reminds me to go with my body, which I did 100% last time (again, for the first time), and which might well have been the reason I didn't tear (again, first time!) enough to require stitches. My recovery in the hours after Elijah's birth was SO much different to all the previous times, and I think it had to have something to do with the no tearing/stitches thing. Anyway, I hope Lydia's birth will be quick and straightforward and uncomplicated. And no stitches would be a marvellous bonus too! ;)
Okay, glad to have managed a decent update, but soooooo tired now - must go to bed. As always, I know there's plenty of stuff that I will have missed, but never mind. I'll really try not to leave it so many weeks this time! I want a belly picture for 32 weeks for sure, so I'll hopefully update with that. My next midwife appointment isn't until 34 weeks. I asked them to visit me at home for that, which they've agreed to do, and that makes it much easier! :) I'll update when I can! Thanks for hanging in there with this blog if you're still there! ;)
