I wanted to write up a post about all things Baby Zipshits, along with memories and thoughts from my pregnancy so far. As I write this I am 33 weeks pregnant. It is hard to imagine that in less than two months Ilya and I will have our baby in our arms! I know I have already mentioned in previous posts about us finding out I was pregnant in North Carolina the night before Nick and Steph’s wedding, making our NC trip that much more memorable! It was a little stressful trying to keep our secret while spending so much time with friends on the trip, and trying not to let anyone notice my avoidance of alcohol at such a boozey type of occasion. I was able to conveniently volunteer to be designated driver for our group on the wedding day. The following Monday, I called my doctor to make an appointment, and they scheduled one about 3-4 weeks away to do an ultrasound and make sure everything was on track. It felt like such a long time to wait! It was so exciting to see the little heartbeat flicker on the ultrasound. Here is the picture we got to bring home. The gestational age was calculated as 8 weeks 4 days at this time, making the 40 week due date March 1, 2013.
I’m happy to say that the stereotypical early pregnancy symptom of nausea and vomiting never really plagued me. Around the 8 week point I did experience a week or so of my stomach feeling kind of off, and I felt like all I wanted to eat was bread and bread-like stuff to keep nausea at bay. This is when I began my breakfast kick of a glass of milk with a banana and an English muffin with peanut butter began, and that has remained my pregnancy breakfast of choice pretty much this entire time. I would also take a baggie of pretzels and animal crackers with me to work to nibble on all day to keep my stomach settled. I also ate a lot of sandwiches in this time. I just always wanted bread! I’ve read that this is a pretty common feeling in the first trimester. I also ate a lot of fruit, cheese, and yogurt at this time, but veggies and strong smelling stuff like onions really turned me off. This feeling only lasted about a week and ever since it left I have not experienced any nausea or aversions at all throughout my pregnancy. I do remember feeling fatigue, the other big first trimester symptom, although it never got to be as bad as I was expecting based on things I had heard and read. Our next appointment was for our 12 week check-up. We were amazed to see the change that occured in just a few weeks! Everything was progressing exactly as it should.
Around this time, we started to feel comfortable with telling family and friends our exciting news. Ilya and I told Al over skype, and made sure to get a screenshot of her reaction. So funny.
We had another ultrasound a week after the previous picture because the baby hadn’t cooperated on a few of the views they wanted to get. The first picture below is a profile of the face and the second one gives a really cool view of the itty bitty spine. Amazing!
As I moved into the second trimester, the fatigue fog lifted and I felt pretty great! For some reason before becoming pregnant I always thought of pregnancy as a delicate condition where the pregnant person is frail and not feeling well most of the time, but I was pleasantly surprised to see that it is not like that at all. Our bodies are made to do this, and pregnancy could not be more normal, and I have felt like my normal self (with more potty trips and snack breaks) through most of it.
I remember the exact time and place of another big pregnancy milestone, feeling the first kick! I was sitting at my desk at work on September 24 (17w3d) and felt this funny little flutter. It was an amazing feeling, which I was so excited to tell everyone about. After that I would continue to feel this subtle butterflies feeling off and on all throughout my days. In just a few weeks the feelings got to be more unmistakable, and I would start to be able to SEE the kicks from the outside. Ilya was able to feel the kicks from the outside for the first time while we were watching a movie on a laptop during our brief Hurricane Sandy power outage on October 29 (22w3d).
On October 12, we had our big, exciting 20 week anatomy scan and gender reveal! Our appointment was at 11:15 AM and we were sooooo incredibly anxious to see everything and find out our baby’s gender! We got breakfast at a diner, though we were almost too anxious to eat. From there we stopped at Party City to get some pink and blue balloons which we would use to reveal the gender to our parents. Then we went to our appointment where we were taken in for the ultrasound right on time. We told the technician right away that we wanted to know the gender, and she started doing her thing. The baby had changed a lot in 8 weeks and was looking more and more like a person. It was truly amazing to see the 4 chambers of the heart and lots of other details of this little person inside of me. It wasn’t until about 45 minutes into this ultrasound that the technician FINALLY announced, “It’s a girl!”. We were so incredibly excited to finally be able to say “she” instead of “it”, and everything just felt so much more real in that moment. I cried a whole bunch right there on the ultrasound table. After the ultrasound we met with the doctor who looked the report over and said our baby girl was developing perfectly. Here are the pictures we were given from that ultrasound:
From the doctor’s office we drove a few miles to Ilya’s parents’ job to tell them the news. We took one pink balloon, one blue balloon, and a safety pin. We asked them to guess what they thought the gender was, and that we would pop one of the balloons leaving the “correct” one intact. We of course built up the suspense by pretending to pop the pink balloon, then the blue, then the pink again, and finally popped the blue one! It was a pretty fun way to reveal the news. We did it again for my mom and a third time over skype for my dad and Linda. We then took a walk outside with my mom and did a little photo shoot with our pink balloon to get some pictures to use to spread the news to our friends.
My mom brought those shoes to our house that day (along with a blue pair, which she then returned!).
A few days later, we left for Vermont to celebrate our first wedding anniversary. I took lots of pictures and plan to write about that trip in great detail.
Here’s the most recent ultrasound picture that I have, from 11/6 (23w4d). I love comparing this one to the 12 week ultrasound and seeing how much more defined the baby’s profile has gotten.
I don’t have any more ultrasound pictures to post, but we did have one a few weeks ago at around 31 weeks (12/26) wherein they estimated Baby Zipshits’ weight to be 3.5lbs. which was in the 53rd percentile. Right on track! It is so amazing to me that she is going to pretty much double her weight (or more) in the next 9 weeks from that point. I truly believe that she is growing up a storm in there, because this past week I have been incredibly hungry! I am eating lots of small meals, since my stomach is too smooshed to be able to do much else. Since baby gets active at night, Ilya and I have made it part of our bedtime routine to stare at my belly for a few minutes before bed each night. All sorts of crazy stuff is going on in there, we see and feel lots of movement. I’ve been able to feel her hiccups for a few months now, but just recently they’ve gotten strong enough that they can be seen and felt on the outside, too. I honestly don’t feel like baby’s movements keep me awake at night. They might make it take a few minutes longer to fall asleep, and maybe they wake me up without me realizing it, but I feel like even at this late stage I sleep pretty soundly most of the time. There is a lot of getting up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night. and it is getting a little bit harder to get comfortable sometimes. Getting up out of bed or off of the couch has started requiring a lot of effort due to the size of my belly. Also because of my belly, its very easy to throw my back out of whack if I do too much, which I did a few times over the busy holiday season with all of the entertaining and stuff that we did. I think I’ve learned my limits and Ilya is great at picking up the slack for me when I need him. The nursery is coming along, and I’ll post pictures of it once it’s complete. I just wanted to post these pictures and write up all these little details of my pregnancy before they become a distant memory. It will be fun to look back on these details some day. All in all, I have to say that pregnancy has been a lot easier physically than I was expecting, and I am pleasantly surprised. We have loved this process and feel very blessed that it has been so uneventful and that our baby is developing without any issues. Time is flying now, and in just a matter of weeks we are going to start our life with our daughter. See you soon, little girl!
No comments:
Post a Comment