Monday, December 21, 2009

Holy Moly!

We had a wonderful weekend celebrating Christmas with my mom, stepdad, Nanny, Papa, uncle, and two cousins.

My mom and stepdad got here on Friday and we ate some tamales and hung out for awhile. Saturday, my grandparents, uncle and cousins came in town and we opened presents. I got this Active game for the Wii Fit (to help me get back in shape after the baby is born), two really cute hospital gowns I wanted to wear while I'm staying in the hospital after he's born, What to Expect the First Year, some money, books for Toots, some clothes for him, and a new camera! It's a Panasonic digital camera, 12 megapixels and 18x optical zoom. It got the best reviews online. I'm really excited about it to have when we have a new baby. We also went and ate at Reata in downtown Fort Worth and it was delicious. We ate at home Saturday night and had a really good beef tenderloin. Sunday, my stepdad left and we did some shopping and went around looking at houses in Southlake and Keller.

Today, we had our ultrasound. At 36 weeks, the ultrasound says he probably weighs 7 pounds!! That's a big 'ol baby! He's measuring 36 weeks, 6 days based on his weight (about 5 days ahead of where I actually am). Everything else looks great, and he's still a boy :) The doctor said they don't induce strictly because of weight, so he will have to come early on his own if he's going to come early. He went ahead and did my first internal because the ultrasound lady (who is his wife!) and the nurse thought he should. Toots is dropped pretty low in my pelvis already and I am 2 cm dialated. He said something about the softness/shortness of my cervix (which I think is how much it is effaced) but I can't remember what he said. He said I could walk around like that for weeks but it does mean that I am progressing, which is good. He should do another internal next week so we'll see if I am continuing to progress. Maybe we can get him here a little early - we are all getting very anxious!

It was hard to get any good pictures because he is so big and squished in there now. This first picture is his nose and mouth. It's basically like he is pressing his face up against a window so it's all smooshed. The nose is on the right in the black area (near the middle) of the picture. He's turned sideways, so his nostrils are one on top of the other, facing the left. His lips are right below the nostrils all pressed together. It makes it look like he has big lips! I think it looks like Tim's nose but we'll see.

Anddd here's how we know he's still a boy! Look close at the picture and you can see where she wrote "MALE" with a little line pointing towards his pee pee. Haha!

Here's the ugly belly picture I took this week. My mom and Tim think I looked bigger, I just can't tell. I thought about cropping my head out of it. Everything else has been pretty much the same. A little swollen, but the doctor said not much, and I'm still having a hard time sleeping, but that's about all the complaints I have.

Here's what going on with baby this week:

Your baby is still packing on the pounds — at the rate of about an ounce a day. She now weighs almost 6 pounds (like a crenshaw melon) (except we know it's more like 7 pounds!) and is more than 18 1/2 inches long (most other books and websites say 20 inches or a little more than that). She's shedding most of the downy covering of hair that covered her body as well as the vernix caseosa, the waxy substance that covered and protected her skin during her nine-month amniotic bath. Your baby swallows both of these substances, along with other secretions, resulting in a blackish mixture, called meconium, will form the contents of her first bowel movement.

At the end of this week, your baby will be considered full-term. (Full-term is 37 to 42 weeks; babies born before 37 weeks are pre-term and those born after 42 are post-term.) Most likely she's in a head-down position. But if she isn't, your practitioner may suggest scheduling an "external cephalic version," which is a fancy way of saying she'll try to coax your baby into a head-down position by manipulating her from the outside of your belly. (I think I said this last week, but we know for sure that he is head-down. He said he thought so last week and the ultrasound confirmed that this week as well as the internal when he said his head is pretty low in my pelvis.)


Hope everyone had a wonderful weekend and has a very Merry Christmas and/or Happy Holidays!



3 comments:

Natalie said...

Yea! I loved getting down to weekly appointments... sounds like he's nice & healthy. My doctor never did an ultrasound this late so I never got a guess of how much he was at this point. It would be interesting to compare how much he grew those last few weeks!

Kelli said...

Looking at houses in Keller? I love it here. We live in a newly constructed neighborhood and there are a lot of available lots left (some empty and some almost finished where the original buyer's financing fell through). Let me know if you want any info on the neighborhood or builder.

Monica said...

Ultrasounds this late are +/- a pound so don't worry about the 7lbs! At this stage in the game 506 days difference is nothing! I hope you have a super easy labor and delivery! Cade was measuring 40+ weeks for his head measurement at 36 weeks and he just got back on the chart at 95th percentile :) Thank goodness he was breach (and could not turn) because there is no way I could have delivered his big ole head!