26 weeks: Pregnacy Meme

Bi-weekly Update:

How far along: 26 Weeks, 3 days

Baby is the size of an:  A head of lettuce

Total weight gain: Up 7 and breaking even with my original weight!

 

Maternity clothes: You know it.

Stretch marks: None yet.. hoping to stay that way

 

Sleep: Hard to get to sleep. I'm sore and restless

 

Best moment since last update: Less than 100 days to go.. crazy!

Miss anything: Just the usual

 

Movement: Yep, a lot. Now I'm starting to get nervous if I DON'T feel movemnet.. if it's not one thing, it's the other.

 

Food cravings: No cravings. Sometimes I'm hungry, other times not so much. I still am throwing up occasionally. 

 

Anything making you queasy or sick: Yes, but it's random.

 

Have you started to show yet: Yes

 

Sex: Not finding out about baby, trying to re-kindle a sex life of my very own.

Labor signs: Not until at least 37 weeks please.

 

Belly button in or out: Still weird but in. It's getting out of shape.. I don't like it

Wedding rings on or off: Off today.. but it's because I forgot to put them back on after house work yesterday. By house work, I mean painting, pulling out plaster and lathe and pulling out 1000s of nails.. not laundry and dishes. More in a later post

 

Happy or moody most of the time: Emotional. Happy, scared, tired, crying, mostly overwhelmed. I have no living room, no entryway, no hall ways (up or down) and no stairway walls. STRESSFUL

 

Looking forward to: Getting to the point that we would unquestionably use available medical intervention if the baby was born. 2 weeks to go!!!!!!!! It looks like healthy survival rates are about equal between 26 and 28 weeks (28 and 30 weeks from LMP, which is how  measure it.. so by this graphic I'm 24 weeks). Before then, we would determine interventions based on brain, lung, intestinal function etc.

http://www.babymed.com/sites/default/files/u160962/preterm-survival-rates_0.jpg

Weeks Survival Long Term
Neurodevelopmental
Impairment   <23 <5% 70%   24 30% 55%   25 60% 40%   26 85% 20+%   27 90% 20+%   28 >90% <20% - See more at: http://www.babymed.com/blogs/dramos/preterm-birth-survival-and-disability-data#sthash.44LRI8qC.dpuf

Double Digits and Denial

So I've been quite. I am really, deeply in denial.

I can't believe that I'm almost into my third trimester.

I can't believe I have 12 weeks left of work before leave.

I can't believe I have less than 100 days to go in this pregnancy.

I still can't believe what happened to Blue Sunday. I acknowledge that things happened, but I can't get to the place where I can believe that it all happened to me. Is that how this pregnancy/ baby thing is going to be? Will I ever accept that I am having/ have had (hopefully!) a baby?

I know that Mrs. Wonderful said she is still taken aback by what happened to her daughter and that she now has a son. He'll be turning one right around when Take Two is due. This isn't a new thing for her anymore.

I am still consumed with what-ifs. I am still terrified that baby will be born and something will be horribly wrong. It happens all the time. We (BLMs) aren't excluded from this. I know a TFMR mom whose rainbow baby died after birth, an issue diagnosed in utero. I know another whose baby was just born ill after a 'perfect' pregnancy.

It is a lie that a pregnancy after a loss fixes nothing. It made my loss easier to bear. However, it didn't fix everything. We shouldn't overlook that either.

24 Weeks and an Update on Baby Ray

Update on Ray's baby:

Here, Healthy and Beautiful.

No issues, though small at 5lb 9oz.

Hopefully, I make a post with the same first 4 words about myself in a few months.

Bi-weekly Update:

How far along: 24 Weeks, 2 days

Baby is the size of an:  An ear of corn!

Total weight gain: Up 5! That's from my lowest weight, not my starting point. From starting point I'm down only 1 pound.

 

Maternity clothes: You know it. I have to wear hub's clothes to bed :/

Stretch marks: I think may be one is starting on my hip, but it could be a red mark from leaning against something, or an old one

 

Sleep: Up 1-2 times a night to pee, but OK otherwise

 

Best moment since last update: Viability! And adding 2-3% of survival likelihood every day

Miss anything: Sam Adams Oktoberfest. The Winter Sam is my least favorite of all Sam beers.. I am pretty sad I'm coming back into drinking on that one. There is a Harpoon Winterwarmer in my future though.

 

Movement: Yep, a lot. I can even see it now!

 

Food cravings: I don't hate food as much as I did, but I don't have much of an appetite

 

Anything making you queasy or sick: Anything fried or spicy.. so everything

 

Have you started to show yet: Yes

 

Sex: None for me, thanks.

Labor signs: Not until at least 37 weeks please.

 

Belly button in or out: Still weird but in

Wedding rings on or off: On, I really hope they remain so.

 

Happy or moody most of the time: Happy, Happy.. and tired

 

Looking forward to: Getting to the point that we would actually resuscitate if the baby was born. It depends on the baby of course, but this date is more like 28 weeks than the 24 of viability.

We All Got Bruises (Part II of my Last Post)

24 weeks tomorrow.

Holy Crap.

More on that next time. 

Ray is in labor, on the day of her work baby shower (she missed it). I feel so jealous. I just can't shake this feeling. It isn't even like this is an especially good thing. Her baby girl is 5lbs 8oz per the U/S but has dropped from the 35th to the 10th percentile in the last 3 weeks. The docs told her last week that if baby was in the 5th percentile or smaller they would deliver. They decided to change their minds and deliver her anyway, at 37w2d in fear there is a nutrient blockage. Ray is freaking out.

She and I are opposites in a lot of ways. She is super laid back, and by that I mean, not a planner. She has been busy renovating a house she just bought and hadn't put the car seat into the car, packed her bag or really planned and exit strategy at work. I have a dated schedule of when each of those tasks will be done. Seriously.
(NOTE: Reading this as part of putting this blog back up on 10/30/14. I was so much like Ray in this regard... I didn't have bags packed!)

She never took a birthing class. She just assumes/ed everything will be fine. (Note: Neither did I)

And the thing is, she is most likely right.

So what? Her bag wasn't packed? Her husband is running home while she gets set up in a delivery room to grab their things and the car seat. Labor is natural, it can't be THAT big of a deal to never take a class. Work will go on without her.

All that matters is a healthy baby in the end.

Hopefully she gets that.

For me, I need to control as much as I can so that I can ignore the fact that everything I really need to control is out of my hands.

Everybody loses, we all got bruises
We all got bruises
Train, Bruises
(I HATE Train, and the song annoys me to no end, but I like this line, though grammatically incorrect)

I Just Can't Stop

I have 3 friends within a month of delivery. I am uber jealous. One is about to have her second, one is pregnant with a surprise (Ray) and one is beautiful, young and just married. OPG (who no longer works here) is 4 months pregnant with her second. At her son's first birthday they will be announcing the gender. That leads me to think it's a girl since she was so upset when her first was a boy... The lack of need to struggle and try, to go through a loss (though one had a chemical pregnancy) and to live with a huge fear boulder on their chests makes me very jeleous. The ability to have gender disappointment just blows my mind. I should be on my second, I should have been gifted a surprise, I should have been 2 years younger welcoming my first, I wanted a girl my whole life (and now I couldn't care less). It never stops sucking.

After that downer- I am becoming more and more invested in this baby. I can feel Take Two moving more and more often (even with my silly anterior placenta). Hub has felt baby a time or two, I've caught my stomach moving with the baby's movements-- how cool is that? I find myself actually thinking a baby is going to come of this on a fairly regular basis.

"BUT.."

I catch myself thinking. I run through a list of things that could be lurking, that could be missed, that could just happen. Physical issues not seen on the scan, pre-eclampsia,  cord accidents, birth trauma, SIDS, autism..... DEATH SPIRAL.. literally, in some cases. I talked to my IRL loss friend Mrs. Wonderful. Her son will be one just after my due date, she said she still thinks this way. That she still can't quite believe that she is a mom, or that she lost her daughter. That she can't think about it too closely, since for her the living existence of one child means the other can't exist. I guess it's universal to the loss moms.

Almost 23 weeks pregnant and still bitter. I'm not ungrateful, but I feel robbed. Totally robbed.. and I can't stop thinking about it.

And I just cant pull myself away
Under a spell I can't break
I just cant stop, I just cant stop
I just cant stop, I just cant stop

 Ne-Yo, Closer