Week 17 update

I realized it's been forever since I did a survey, and we had an check-up at 17 weeks, so here's the update :-)

DR appoint Stats:

• My BP 132/76 Weird because it's high on the upper number and low on the lower number.  I usually sit at around the low 120's/mid 80's.  Doc isn't worried as long as it stays below 160/100
• Heartbeat is 150, right in the middle of normal.  I totally get it now why some women buy an at home dopplar, I'm in LOVE with hearing that heartbeat.
• Weight (by docs scale) 206.2 but I'm at the doctor at different times, wearing different clothes, and after eating, so I'm tracking weight gain by my home scale always measured first thing in the morning in my birthday suit :-)
• Measuring right on target according to my doctor's abdominal exam

The survey:
How far along: 17 weeks 0 days
Total weight gain/loss: I'm still down about a pound from Pre IVF!!
Maternity clothes:  All maternity pants or stretchy knit skirts (I LOVE my Old Navy roll top skirts!). Some regular shirts fit, but only on good show off my bump days :-)
Stretch marks: One new one on my belly, left side.  The ones on my hips from puberty are ANGRY!
Sleep: Sucks.  I'm lucky if I sleep through the night, mainly because I can't get comfortable.  I've been careful about not drinking too much within 2 hours of bedtime so my bladder isn't waking me up which is good.  I got a Shepard's hook pregnancy pillow, and it seems to be helping, so we'll see if it get better.
Movement: Just some flutters.  I really can't wait for that to start for real!
Cravings: None really, although I have had biscuits and gravy for breakfast every morning for 2 weeks.
Aversions: Still having issues with hot sauce.  Anything really greasy doesn't sit well. Sometimes cooked fryer oil sets me off.
Gender: We'll find out in 2 weeks!!!!
Symptoms: Nausea is tapering off to once or twice a week.  Sciatica is in full force (thank GOD for chiropractors).  Tired a lot.
What I miss:  Beer with my football, I didn't get any octoberfest this season :-(
What I look forward to: Feeling real movement
Moods: Up, down left, right, in, out....depends on the minute
Milestones: Passed my first Glucose test!
Medical Concerns: Nothing major, some headaches cropping up, seems to be directly tied to my ability to stay (or not stay) out of the Halloween candy.
Weekly Wisdom: Keep a "little green brain" with you at all times! And a pocket calendar if you don't use your phone for that. I have a little green notebook that I keep in my purse so I can write down important stuff...like when food day is at work or what I'm supposed to bring for a meeting.  I am SO bad at remembering things anyway, pregnancy brain has made it near impossible.  I would never get anything right if it wasn't for my little green brain and my droid calendar!
Best moment this week: Hearing that heartbeat again.  I can't get enough of it.  It makes me smile every time.  I think I'll record it on my phone next time, just so I can listen to it whenever :-)

Holy Cow! Twice in one week! (now with Pictures)

I know its crazy, but I'm actually posting twice in the same week!  I'm sitting here watching the football game and really procrastinating putting away all the inside Halloween decorations, so what do I have better to do but blog?  :-)


I pulled a ton of pictures off the camera and moved everything from my computer to our external hard drive, but realized that I have over 300 pictures that need to be sorted and organized!! I couldn't believe how much we had been slacking on getting all this done!  So this is my big project for this week, sorting all these pictures.  But in the mean time, here's the pics I promised.

Pre Pregnancy

8 Weeks (on my birthday, an awful cell phone picture, and OMG was I BLOATED)

12 weeks

















16 weeks (wow I need a haircut!)



















I hosted a Thirty One catalog party in in October, and my order came in this week.  My SIL is a consultant, and I am just in LOVE with everything I have bought so far.  This time around I bought a new bag for work stuff, I've been bringing a lot more stuff back and forth to home lately, and I'm just sick of carrying it by hand.  And as we get into winter, I'm going to have to start wearing slip resistant shoes for walking through the parking lot, which means I'll be carrying my work shoes in.  All the more reason to have a big enough bag to carry it all in, keeps my hands free.  I also got several organizers to use with my crafting stuff, and I'm loving how much easier it is to find stuff!  As I use all of my new bags and purse, I think I'll do a little review of each on here.  SIL uses one as her diaper bag, and although I'm not fond of any of the current prints for that purpose, I'm hoping that I'll find one in the spring prints I like (out in February).  If your interested in looking at the catalog, checkout the site.  If you think you want to order, let me know and I'll get you hooked up with my SIL.

Other baby news, I'm on movement watch constantly right now.  I think I'm looking forward to that more than the anatomical scan right now.  Just that constant reminder that our little one is still in there and doing ok will do a lot to ease some of my worries I think.  I'm still doing really well in the weight gain area, only up 0.2 lbs since last week.  I'm trying to go back to my PCOS diet, slightly modified, as a way of keeping the dreaded Gestational Diabetes at bay.  I'm not back to avoiding ALL the blood sugar spiking foods, but I'm working really hard to keep it limited to one serving a day.  I can't even begin to tell you how much I missed baked potatoes!!! I also had banana for the first time in over a year and it was OH so good!  I got a pregnancy pillow last week...2nd hand but practically new, it's in the washer right now.  Hopefully that will help me sleep a little better.  Right now A is getting a little overwhelmed by all the pillows I have in the bed trying to get comfortable.  I think there was 5 on the bed this morning, all for me :-)

I did it again :-(

Seriously, how is it that nearly 2 weeks have passed since I posted last?  It really doesn't seem like that long!

Things have been absolutely nuts for me lately.  It's the whole Halloween thing.  A and I are HUGE Halloween nuts.  We volunteered for 11 years at a local Haunted House before it closed after the 2007 season.  In the 3 years since we've built a mini haunt in our yard.  Here's a video of this year's haunt. I didn't help with the build as much this year as in years past obviously, but I did get to play a crazy escaped mental patient with my psycho baby doll.  I LOVED it.

In baby news, I had my glucose test last week.  It SUCKED!  My advice for anyone who has to go through it, if you don't have to fast DON'T.  I was so nauseous after drinking that orange crap I struggled to keep it down for the necessary hour.  When I got to work, I munched on crackers until about lunch, and then I finally felt like eating real food around 2pm, and my test was at 8am!!!   Won't have the results till my next appointment, but I'm guessing if it was really bad they would have called sooner.  Next appointment is next Tuesday, and we'll have the anatomy scan the Tuesday after Thanksgiving.  Oh and the chiropractor is helping SO much with the leg issues.  I still get the tingling every day, but the sharp stabbing and burning pain only comes infrequently now instead of every day.

I've started feeling more and more of the uterine flutters that are known to happen around this time, but nothing real from the baby yet.  I'm really looking forward to really starting to feel movement.  There's still a part of me that doesn't think this can be real, that this is all just a dream.  I don't know when it's going to all sink in, but I'm really looking forward to that.

Otherwise I'm feeling pretty good.  The nausea and heartburn have lessened quite a bit.  All in all I've been really lucky so far.  I've had it pretty easy and, knock on wood, that will continue. 

A has been giving me a lot of crap for not posting more regularly, and the truth is I feel really bad about it.  Thank you for sticking with me even if I am only posting once a week.  I actually started this post 3 days ago, and its taken me this long to finish it.  I'm setting a goal for myself to post at least once a week going forward.  Hopefully I'll be able to keep to that.  Oh and I do have some belly pics, I just have to get them off the camera and I'll post them.  By next week I promise!

A bullet list update

All right, all right, I'm a terrible awful no good very bad blogger.  Somehow the last 3 weeks came and went and I never got on and posted.  It may have something to do with the fact that I'm so crazy at work right now I have NO desire to be on the computer after work.  Or maybe its because I'm just being lazy, I don't know, what I do know is that if I don't post soon, I think A's going to start taking over my blog!!!

Here's what's been happening in the last 4 weeks since my last real post:

• I have had CRAZY stuff going on with my right leg.  Basically sciatic nerve issues that have been causing this tingling in the upper outside part of my thigh.  At first it only came in the evenings, but its gotten to the point where I have that itchy tingling feeling all day some days.  When it started waking me up at night (feeling like a hot poker was being shoved in my leg) screaming in pain, I decided to do something about it.  I had my first appointment with a chiropractor last Friday, and another adjustment Monday, and already I can tell its helping.  The night after the adjustment has been bad, but the others I don't wake up because of my leg...just other stuff.  Bad thing is he's making me give up my heels :-(  Good thing is I had an excuse to buy new shoes.  Now if I could only find flats I like.
• The nausea has finally tapered off, still all at night, but down to only 2 or 3 days a week now, when it hits though, its stronger than before. 
• Most of the OHSS symptoms are gone, although the one remaining one is that I'm showing WAY early!  In the last 2 weeks, I've had more people comments on my cute pregnant belly than I can believe.  Oh and I'm totally in Maternity or stretchy clothes right now.  I have just a couple regular shirts that work, but all my bottoms are new.
• I've started feeling the fluttering uterus spasms I've read so much about, that twitching feeling in your abdomen.  I know its not the baby I'm feeling, but it's still really cool.
• I started working on the pregnancy scrapbook, and am going to be working really hard to keep it up to date so I won't have a 1 year old and still not have it done.  That is my one fear, I see so many of my girlfriends who scrapbook are currently working on LAST YEAR's Halloween page.  I really don't want to get that far behind.  If I'm going to do this, I want to do it right.  The lucky break is I've joined a group of women at my church who get together once a month (at the end of the month) and spend 3 hours scrap booking or crafting or whatever.  I plan to use that time to keep up to date, hopefully.  We'll see how it goes.
• I had my latest Dr. appointment yesterday.  Everything looks good, and I had my first experience with the Dopplar.  The nurse struggled to find the HB, but the doctor came in and found it right away.  I wasn't expecting to get to hear the HB yesterday, so that was a really nice treat. 
• I'm still down 2 lbs from pre-IVF and 7 from retrieval, go figure!  I'm definitely not complaining about that, although it does worry me a bit that I hear some women gain as much as 15 lbs in the first trimester.  Granted I hope to only gain about 15-20 total.
• I have to have my glucose tolerance test next week.  Definitely not looking forward to that.
• I need to add 20-40 minutes of light to moderate exercise into my weekly routine.  I'm struggling to figure out what that will be.  I'm thinking that a prenatal yoga class is a definite, but the highly recommended studio in town only offers it once a week so I've got to find something else too.  I was a swimmer in high school, so I'm thinking a pool somewhere might be a good idea.
• We've decided not to do the NT scan.  My OB believes that, at least in this area, it causes more stress than it relieves because it is still so subjective and often times inconclusive.  He feels that at my age, chances are so low that although possible for us to have issues, since we wouldn't terminate anyway, is it really worth the stress?  I have a tendency to agree.  If we decide we really want to know, we'll discuss amnio down the road.

That's the quick and dirty.  I"m going to try really hard to post more, and post more about things other than the pregnancy.  We'll see how that goes :-)

Still alive

I'm still alive I promise. It's been a rough couple of weeks. I've been feeling really overwhelmed with everything lately; mostly a product of my own inability to say no to anyone. The good news is we made it to 12 weeks.

I can't believe it I'm actually almost out of the first trimester!!!! This is so unreal! I promise I'll get a big update up this weekend, but A has been giving me so much crap for not posting, I wanted to let you all know I'm ok.