As of Friday, I am 30 weeks pregnant! Here’s an update on the progress of the baby bump, since I last posted at 22 weeks:
(Click the photo to see it larger.)
I’m well into the 7th month, and the baby is now the size of a large squash! It’s been a couple weeks since entering the third trimester, and my energy level is going down again, so I’ve been spending a lot of my weekends and evenings after work taking power naps to recharge. The baby is more active than ever and with all the constant kicks and jabs and rolling this way and that, it’s been hard getting a good night’s sleep. Perhaps this is nature’s way of preparing you for the sleepless nights ahead with a newborn. 😛
Dan and I watched the movie Away We Go this weekend. Our friend Megumi had recommended it to us, saying it was a cute story about a pregnant couple. Dan was a little reluctant to watch it at first because he was under the impression that it was a chick flick, but we both ended up loving it!
Of course, I’ve always loved John Krasinski of The Office fame, and although he was pretty scruffy-looking in the film, he still retained his signature dorky, cute personality in this film. The movie was quirky, charming, and had some really funny moments that had Dan and I chortling with laughter. Amidst some of the awkward and kooky happenings in the story, there were also some melancholy, sincere, and heartwarming points that made it very real and tangible at the same time. The emotions and feelings of uncertainty, anxiety, and hopes that the couple share as they prepare for their first child were all-too-familiar and sometimes I felt like the film was mirroring what I was feeling internally. It was oddly reassuring to see that I’m not the only expectant mother in the world whose anticipation and excitement towards impending parenthood is tinged with a myriad of worries, apprehension and self-doubt. They say everyone experiences it, but when I see other women who are absolutely blissful and happy-go-lucky about their pregnancies, I can’t help but feel a little guilty.
Anyway, the movie was sweet and endearing — thank you Megumi for telling us about it! 🙂
I’m coming to the end of 22 weeks now, and am really starting to show! What could have once passed as a food baby or too large of a lunch is now looking more and more like a bona fide baby bump. We’ve been taking biweekly photos of the progression of the belly since I was 14 weeks (in the same black maternity dress for consistency), and while I’m still only a little past the halfway point of pregnancy and have several weeks to go, we thought we’d share the progress up until now:
(Click the photo to see it larger.)
Certain things are already starting to get uncomfortable, it’s exhausting to stand for long periods of time, and I’ve been having trouble finding a good position to sleep in. I can’t imagine how life is going to be at full term, when the baby (currently the size of a papaya) is going to be as large as a watermelon in the tummy. (Yikes!)
We’ll continue to take pictures of the progress of my abdominal girth… stay tuned in the coming months to watch me as I balloon into ungainly proportions!
Dan and I went to the radiology department at Kaiser today to get our 20-week ultrasound, mainly in hopes to determine the gender of the baby. We’re excited to announce that we’ll be having a baby girl in April!
Here’s how she looks at 20 weeks, the size of a small cantaloupe.
When we first started the ultrasound, the baby was in an uncooperative position (see above), where her legs were tightly closed and faced upwards, and the ultrasound tech said that it might be a little difficult to determine the gender initially. But as soon as the ultrasound tech said, “C’mon baby, you gotta open your legs so we can see if you’re a boy or girl!”, she moved into exactly the right position for the tech to get a good look! We were all laughing at how well she “listened.” We were able to clearly see the labia on the screen, and the tech told us that there was no mistaking that it was a girl in there.
She was moving around a lot, flipping over and doing somersaults twice during the half-hour ultrasound session. I actually felt my first kick this past week, and since then, the baby’s been kicking quite often and I can feel her moving around a lot in the belly. It was alarming at first, but I’m starting to get used to it… now it’s a little annoying because it keeps me from sleeping comfortably at night.
We would have been happy whether the baby was a boy or a girl, but I’d always thought it would be easier to have a girl first, so she could help me around the house and with her younger siblings when she’s older. So I had secretly wanted a girl, but after listening to all the old wives’ tales from people around me that you’re probably carrying a boy if your morning sickness is really bad or if you’re carrying low, I had convinced myself that we were expecting a boy. So I was actually really stunned — but of course, very happy — when we heard that it was actually a girl. Dan, on the other hand, has always had a hunch that the baby was a girl, and he claims that he could tell it was a girl on the screen even before the tech said so.
I’m so happy we finally have the answer to the gender question. I’m way too much of a control freak to be one of those parents that keep themselves in the dark until the delivery date! Now to hit the baby stores… 😉
Happy Halloween! Halloween is always one of my favorite days of the year — I love seeing how creative people get with their costumes and decorations, and it’s a fun occasion to dress up! Dan and I didn’t do anything last year because I was really sick on Halloween weekend, and I was really bummed… 🙁
This year, we celebrated a day early, going to a friend’s Halloween party. Dan and I both worked on our costumes for a couple hours on Saturday afternoon before going to the party. Can you guess what we were supposed to be?
We may just look like a generic jock and cheerleader, but those who are sharp may have guessed that we were supposed to be characters from Glee! Since the show started airing, we’ve actually had several people tell us that Dan looks a lot like Finn Hudson, the star quarterback of the school and one of the central characters in the show. We’ve even had a random passerby come up to us at a restaurant to point out that they thought there was a striking resemblance. A lot of people say there’s a resemblance, some don’t see it… I can see that they have similarities in stature, the pale complexion, the pigeon chest, the general face shape, and hairstyle, but I think most of the likeness is in their facial expressions, like the face they have when they’re flustered or confused, or when they raise an eyebrow in a questioning look.
Anyway, we had enough people bring the likeness to our attention that we decided to run with it as an idea for Dan’s Halloween costume this year.
The costume was pretty easy — we took a plain red Nike jersey and stuck a huge number 5 on the front and back for Finn’s football outfit…
We stenciled and cut out white letters to spell out “HUDSON” for the back:
I have no such resemblance to any of the characters in Glee, but we decided to have some fun playing off of the pregnancy factor that I shared with Quinn Fabray, Cheerios head cheerleader and Finn’s former flame who was pregnant during most of the first season.
For the Cheerios uniform, I just ordered a simple red and white cheerleader uniform, and spent the afternoon meticulously stenciling out the letters WMHS (for William McKinley High School) onto red cloth and outlining them in white and black cloths, and gluing it onto the chest of the uniform.
Costumes complete, we headed over to our friend Joletta’s, who was hosting a Halloween party at her house.
There was lots of delicious food and we played a few fun Halloween-themed games! Afterwards, those of us who brought pumpkins gathered around to do some pumpkin-carving.
The completed pumpkins! They all came out so well!!! Can you guess which one is mine…?
I made the Totoro jack-o-lantern! 🙂 I was actually quite pleased with the result:
Dan went with his signature scary style with the carving, and created this two-faced jack-o-lantern. He carved it really fast, too; we were impressed! (He actually finished this complicated design before I completed my simple little Totoro… haha*)
Everyone at the Halloween party was dressed in such fun costumes! I really enjoyed seeing what everyone came as. :)Â Huge thanks to Joletta and Mapolo for hosting and organizing such a fun party!
Lovely Ann Helen made an adorable chef!
Lilly was the prettiest elf, and David came as a Turk! haha*
With French maid Joletta and bumblebee Christella.
We brought our pumpkins home, and I let Piper play with it since this is his first Halloween with us. Diesel was uninterested, apparently fed up from my past Halloween antics. Piper ended up biting off part of Totoro’s ear, though, so we had to repair it. 🙁
All fixed!
Today, we spent the day doing some major cleaning around the house and just prepared some candy for potential trick-or-treaters that might come by this evening. We hope everyone had a safe and fun-filled Halloween!!!
When you’re newly pregnant for the first time, you find yourself faced with an overwhelming number of things you should and should not be doing during pregnancy, and at times different sources say different and even conflicting things. Since it’s a totally new experience, you want to do everything “right” for your baby, but it can be trying to keep up with all the guidelines and opinions that are being pushed towards you from every which direction. Don’t drink alcohol and coffee, don’t smoke, don’t eat raw fish, don’t eat deli meat, don’t eat fish that could contain mercury; do take your prenatal vitamins, eat healthy, exercise in moderation… most of this is common knowledge today. We’re fortunate that we live in an age where we know how so many of our actions and what we put in our bodies can affect the fetus (two generations ago, expectant mommies were smoking and drinking away — can you believe it?) so that we can take preventative measures during pregnancy, but it does get a bit stressful to constantly have to be paranoid and second-guessing yourself with every thing you drink, eat, and do during those nine months.
Some of my girlfriends and I were talking about pregnancy this past weekend, and a couple of them recommended an article that was recently the cover story for TIME Magazine. Titled Fetal Origins: How The First Nine Months Can Shape the Rest of Your Life, it was a really interesting article about how researchers have been finding evidence that our susceptibility to and predisposition to certain diseases and conditions that often don’t appear until much later in life — such as heart disease, cancer, hypertension, diabetes, obesity, mental illness, and depression — can be traced back to our fetal origins: the first nine months of our lives, which we spent in our mothers’ wombs. It’s widely accepted that the environment and diet you are raised with as a young child has a significant bearing on whether or not you’ll have some of these conditions later in life, but I was surprised to find out that the fate of your health can be traced to even further back in your developmental life. Two decades ago, the hypothesis was scoffed and laughed at, but there’s been a lot of research and findings since then that have come to support this theory, and it’s now causing a revolutionary shift in science which brings pregnancy into the forefront as a critical time in which an individual’s lifelong health may be determined.
The effect your pregnancy has on the unborn baby goes much further beyond some of the more trivial things that baby-obsessed expectant mothers concern themselves with:
The notion of prenatal influence may conjure up frivolous attempts to enrich the fetus: playing Mozart to a pregnant belly and the like. In reality, the shaping and molding that goes on in utero is far more visceral and consequential than that. Much of what a pregnant woman encounters in her daily life — the air she breathes, the food and drink she consumes, the chemicals she’s exposed to, even the emotions she feels — is shared in some fashion with her fetus. The fetus incorporates these offerings into its own body, makes them part of its flesh and blood.
Often it does something more: it treats these maternal contributions as information, biological postcards from the world outside. What a fetus is absorbing in utero is not Mozart’s Magic Flute but the answers to questions much more critical to its survival: Will it be born into a world of abundance or scarcity? Will it be safe and protected, or will it face constant dangers and threats? Will it live a long, fruitful life or a short, harried one?
I encourage those who are interested to read the entire article, but it goes on to cite examples of how some of the poorest regions of England were prone to cardiovascular diseases (which is traditionally associated with an affluent background), because of malnutrition during pregnancy that led to infants being born with weakened hearts. Areas that are marked by air pollution caused their inhabitants to often produce babies that were born prematurely or with heart malformations. The mother’s exposure to carcinogens can also increase their child’s predisposition to cancer later in life. Obesity and heavy weight gain during pregnancy has been linked to the child facing weight problems and Type 2 diabetes years later; abnormal levels of stress and anxiety experienced by the mother can also cause their kids to be susceptible to mental illness and depression in their older years.
My best friend sent me an article from the New York Times a few weeks ago that also talked about how fetal origins can determine an individual’s course in life, but it was more general, bringing in educational attainment and success in society into the picture — but the basic premise is the same; that stress encountered in the womb can put a child at a disadvantage much later in life, and it shows that the repercussions stretch beyond health conditions:
Perhaps the most striking finding is that a stressful uterine environment may be a mechanism that allows poverty to replicate itself generation after generation. Pregnant women in low-income areas tend to be more exposed to anxiety, depression, chemicals and toxins from car exhaust to pesticides, and they’re more likely to drink or smoke and less likely to take vitamin supplements, eat healthy food and get meticulous pre-natal care.
The result is children who start life at a disadvantage — for kids facing stresses before birth appear to have lower educational attainment, lower incomes and worse health throughout their lives. If that’s true, then even early childhood education may be a bit late as a way to break the cycles of poverty.
Some may find all this depressing, to find that one’s future can be so heavily affected from before they even have a chance to step out into the world, but overall, I think all of the research on fetal origins is fascinating and exciting. In the TIME article, a researcher envisions a future in which expectant mothers in will be prescribed supplements that will protect their children from getting cancer. The more we know about how life and development in the uterine environment can influence and shape our children’s future, the more we will be able to prepare and protect them to have fuller, healthier lives.
