24 Weeks! It's V-Day!

     Twenty-four weeks marks a very important milestone, it's "V-day" for Lucy! V-day is short for viability day and it's a term a lot of pregnant women use to mark the point when a fetus is considered to be viable. Most hospitals and doctors in the US will not intervene to save the life of a fetus if it is less than 24 weeks gestation, however past this point most doctors will use every available resource. Kind of the difference of doing nothing, and doing everything. So it's kind of a big deal. Of course the chances of survival still aren't splendid (40-70%) at 24 weeks and even then it means crazy intensive medical intervention and adverse developmental effects. Still, it's something...and something is better than nothing.

     My little acrobat has been very busy putting on the ounces! She now weighs more than 1 1/2 pounds and is about a foot long. From this point on she will gain about 6oz a week. She has even more muscle tone, and an incredibly good right hook. Babies are the most active between 24 and 28 weeks which Lucy has made perfectly clear. I'm not sure if it's just that I've been feeling her move for so long so it seems like more but she moves A LOT more than Roxas did. She gets going and my belly starts popping, jumping and rippling all over the place. Usually this happens when I'm trying to go to sleep. The skin is still pretty transparent but as baby fat starts filling in she will begin looking all cute and pink. Her lungs have fully formed but aren't ready to function outside the womb on their own just yet. The parts of her eyes are all there too, but for now they are fused shut. She is proportionally perfect now, a miniature version of herself on delivery day. I can't wait to meet her.

     Some days I feel like a cow, and others I feel tiny, but one thing is for sure...it's going by incredibly fast. I've begun playing one of my favorite games that I really missed: guess the baby part! She really likes shoving her elbows and fists into my side so more often than not I can feel her by just pushing on my belly. This of course makes her kick and punch but I enjoy it. I've been having another run of particularly annoying braxton hicks, but so far they aren't causing any issues for us besides making me uncomfortable. I've managed to put on a little bit of weight now, a whole whopping 4 pounds! I'm enjoying this phenomenon now because I know in a few more weeks that scale is going to be telling me a different story.

     It is really amazing to me how hard it is to wrap my head around the idea that there is another little baby in my belly. Intellectually I get it but until I actually hold her, see her, smell her...it will not be real. I still have a hard time believing we have Roxas, never mind the fact that he is a year old. We have a video of right when Roxas was born and even after watching it recently, I can't believe I was there. I mean, obviously I was, but I can't believe that was me and I had a baby. Really it seems more like somebody just handed us this tiny human. Then I can't believe I'm going to do it all again. Hopefully faster and with no Pitocin involved this time.

     Thinking about all this got me thinking about all the life events we will see with Lucy. Images of a little girl getting to meet her favorite princess for the first time, dress up, tea parties and dolls give way to make-up, boyfriends and various talks. Then I see Kenny walking a fair-haired beauty dressed in white down an aisle with rose petals underfoot. Here is generally where the tears start welling up. Then maybe someday, if I'm lucky, the image of my baby girl with a baby of her own in her arms. Yup...there are those tears. Anyways, all of these ideas and thoughts swirl around my head but hardly ever seem real. I try to imagine how it will be seeing Roxas meet his baby sister, watching them grow up and flourish...but it's like trying to look through mud. It's not something you can know until you experience it. I'm excited, afraid, anxious, elated, euphoric and terrified all at once.


Just for kicks and giggles, the top picture is today and the bottom one is 24 weeks with Roxas.

Until next time...

23 Weeks- Who hit fast forward?

     Twenty-three weeks and less than 120 days left until the due date! I kind of took that whole "everything in the second pregnancy happens bigger and faster" thing as an exaggeration. It's not. It seems like somebody hit my body's fast forward button. If I didn't know better I would think I was in third trimester- not second! I mean really, I feel a bit slighted here. I am supposed to enjoying three months of boosted energy, leveled out moods, and just generally enjoying pregnancy. Instead I'm putting on my compression stockings (oh so sexy), waddling like a duck, and watching my ankles slowly merge with my calves. It's a glamorous thing, growing humans. My belly seems like it is just growing more and more, inflating overnight. I am absolutely bigger this time. Looking back on my pictures from Roxas, the way I look now is about how I looked around 27/28 weeks then. On the plus side my hair has recently become incredibly soft, it's the little things right?

     Speaking of little things...Lucy is growing and growing and growing. The weeks between 22 and 24 are kind of hard to measure but she's about the size of a small doll and probably weighs around 1 1/2 pounds. She is working on laying down that adorable baby fat. Her vestibular system has matured enough to allow her brain to make sense of movements, and her other internal organs are all working hard on maturing too. We had our doctors appointment last week and the doctor measured just about everything there was to measure and she is growing right on track with her due date (hey, maybe she won't be late! Ha.) She is a happy and healthy little girl, she even took a few swings at the doctor while she was doing the ultrasound. Her heart rate is a nice 151, and if you believe old wive's tales...goes along with the "girl" side. According to the doctor she is still a little girl, so at least that fear is alleviated now. I know ultrasounds are never 100% but I'm 99.99999999999999% sure she is a girl, just from what I can see on the scans and what the professionals are telling me. I was a smidge worried that I was going to have a TON of pink stuff to return but alas it still looks like our future will still be very, very pink :-D

 This is her face, looking straight on

 A little foot (it looks huge because it's magnified)

 What we all wanted to know...still a girl!

     In other small human news, Roxas is growing up fast too. I know Lucy has kind of taken over the blog lately but Roxas is making all kinds of leaps and bounds too. He is now a professional at walking. He walks just about everywhere he can and loves it. For now it's not that much more of a hassle having him walk versus crawl. He gets into just about as much trouble. We took him to his very first Easter Egg hunt (since last year he was oh so tiny still) and he did great. I had been helping him learn how to pick up eggs and put them in his basket at home and all our training paid off! 

     He finally got a few more teeth, his top two teeth have come in and the other top two are hard at work making their break for the surface. Of course this means I have a VERY cranky little boy on my hands sometimes. It's one of the most frustrating things trying to help a teething toddler. You just can't explain to them why it hurts or what is happening and it sucks. He has been developing his own little personality. Testing his limits with us as parents with some rather undesirable behaviors like hitting and throwing things. Here I thought having a baby was hard...babies are nothing compared to toddlers!

     I have no idea how I'm ever going to figure out how to have a baby and a toddler coexist in the same house. Both needing my attention at the same time. I guess I'll learn in a few months. We still aren't sure what our final decision on the whole school thing is yet. Honestly for every "pro" I come up with there is also a "con" to it. It's a really tough spot to be in. My doctor said she would be fine letting me go back at 4 weeks post partum which would be if Lucy came right on her due date and no later. She even offered to induce me a week early to give me an extra week of recovery. That is absolutely not happening. No way. At all. EVER. First of all I'm vehemently opposed to evicting a baby before 40 weeks without a very good medical reason and secondly the risk of C-section goes up dramatically with induction and not only do I really just not want that but if I had a C-section...well that's a minimum 8 week recover time...and I couldn't go back to class anyways. Yeah. Not happening. There are just a lot of things to consider and it's a really tough choice to make. I've talked with several people about it and for now nothing is in stone but I'm leaning more on the side of deferring my semester. It's a lot of travel, I mean A LOT, so that really limits the amount of time I would be able to spend with Lucy. I'm blessed to have an amazingly supportive family who will bend over backwards to help us but will it be worth it to miss those first few months of her life? Will it be worth it to potentially lose out on a breastfeeding relationship? Will it be worth that crazy, insane, inhuman, amount of additional stress? Sure, I know I COULD do it...but would it really be worth it...just to be done in May instead of December next year? There are about a million reasons why and why not and we are still thinking and praying about it.

    That's all that is really going on for now. So, until next time...