Pregnancy Journal: month #4

• Fourth Month 01/09/10 to 02/09/10: bigger belly, baby moving, big ultrasound, boy or girl?...

Our BIG ultrasound is scheduled for February 2. Dad has started to pressure me into finding out. I feel bad for asking him to wait so I told him if he wants to know, he can find out as long as he doesn’t tell me. I have a feeling that won’t work and I’m really not curious (which is hard to believe, I know…). I guess we’ll just have to wait and see. On another note, belly is growing too fast and my hips are so sore from all the changes in my body. I’ve managed to gain 3 pounds so far which is great. Insomnia also started and it has been hard having to stay awake and active all day. Running after a toddler alone is enough to drain me out… put that with waking up at 3 a.m.!

The most amazing feeling so far was waking up to the baby’s hiccups! The baby is moving so much and I can tell it’s so strong! It keeps me up during the night and it’s A LITTLE calmer during the day. We hope to change that as soon as the baby is born... :)

THE BIG DAY: Fetal survey day is here! The baby sure is active! We actually got worried when the ultrasound technician kept trying to focus in on the baby’s heart and couldn’t really see everything. Then she said she needed the opinion of a doctor. He came in and looked at everything and said everything was fine (SIGH OF RELIEF) and that the technician had trouble looking at everything because the baby wouldn’t stop for a second! It looks so big and compared to Lila’s fetal survey. I remember Lila floating in a big pool of water and this baby was almost squeezed in there. Apparently, it still has enough space to do its flips. It covered its face, sucked the thumb, crossed the legs, and just would not stop.

This baby is so different than Lila. I’m not only talking about behavior, but the profile alone is totally different! Dad is convinced it’s a boy now…The doctor asked us if we wanted to know the baby’s gender, and I said I didn’t but asked to have the answer in an envelope because DAD is really curious. They gave us the ultrasound pictures and in one of them we swear it shows it’s a boy. Obviously, we’re not sure. The envelope has been driving us insane. The family is crazy to find out and dad is getting tense too.  The pathetic thing is that dad keeps putting the envelope in the light hoping he will be able to see what's written...  Personally, I started to get a little curious because I look at the envelope every day (it’s hanging on the refrigerator door). I think we may open it after all!

Fetal survey ultrasound. The bottom picture is the one I mentioned in the post.

A better look at the "is that a wee-wee?" picture!

THE envelope! :)

[ Of course I immediately asked if the baby has Choroid Plexus Cysts which Lila had around this time. Thankfully, the baby doesn't have them. For those who don't know, these are small brain cysts (sometimes one, sometimes a few) that lots of babies have during this time and from what I was told and researched, they are benign and they shrink and disappear with time, before the baby is born. We were very worried when we were told Lila had them, but the doctor told us NOT to worry. Apparently, many things can cause these and they have been found in babies with Trisomy 13 and Trisomy 18, but in my case, my thyroid condition caused the cysts. When the doctor sees these cysts, they check the heart, the brain and other vital organs to make sure they are healthy. When they are healthy, that usually means everything is ok. My doctor always says they check for so many things, and due to the fact that ultrasound machines aren't very reliable, it's completely normal that up to 4 things come back questionable (as long as they aren't serious "things"). If more than 4 come back with a "negative" result, then they look into it further. He also said there's more risk in doing an amniocentesis to check the cysts than to wait until the end of the pregnancy so we never even considered doing that since about 1 in 200 women who do an amniocentesis end up with a miscarriage.  I just want to say I love my doctor! Everything is explained to me in detail and he always puts me at ease if he thinks it's something not worth worrying about. I've seen other doctors who freak out over anything, causing the parents to be nervous over nothing sometimes. ]

Pregnancy Journal: month #3

• Third Month 12/09/09 to 01/09/10: nausea ending, belly growing, second ultrasound…

HAPPY NEW YEAR! This is the year the baby will arrive! Wooohooooo!  And to start out the new year, THE NAUSEA IS GOING AWAY, yay! I’m so thrilled to have an appetite and, although I still have food aversions here and there, I’m managing to eat at least one meal a day and that’s very good progress! No weight gain yet, but my belly sure started to show. Scary how fast is starts to show after the first pregnancy! We also had our second ultrasound and the baby is looking great! The doctor said the baby is so active and from the ultrasound, I could tell I’m in for a rough ride with this one. At 11 weeks, the baby was stretching the arms and legs, sucking its thumb, flipping back and forth, and bouncing, LITERALLY bouncing all over the place. The doctor took almost a half hour to look at everything because the baby wasn’t helping out much. I love that! LOL… very healthy! Lila was active, but definitely not like this; and again, this has caused everyone to tell me “it’s a boy” this time. I don’t really mind if it’s a boy or girl. I figure we can’t lose: if we have a boy, we’ll have the best of both worlds. If we have a girl, Lila and her will be best friends. Dad sort of wants another girl, I think because he sees how Lila’s eyes sparkle when she looks at him and he wants that again… of course, he has no idea what it’s like to have a son, so he says he doesn’t really care about what it is. Personally, I don’t want to find out but dad wants to find out badly. I would like to wait but if I find myself getting too curious I won’t torture myself. We’ll see how it goes…
This was a busy month with all the birthdays and holidays. Christmas was here at home, and it was so much fun. All the kids together just got me more excited to see how it will be next year with the new baby.   :)

New picture of our baby!

Pregnancy Journal: month #2

• Second Month 11/09/09 to 12/09/09: the nausea, first ultrasound…

Big surprise: very strong nausea. I didn’t have it a whole lot while expecting Lila so I thought I was just lucky and it wasn’t going to happen in any future pregnancies… It goes to show every pregnancy is different. I’ve heard of women that got really sick during pregnancy that they were scared to get pregnant again because they thought they would be just as sick during the next pregnancy. And I think the thing I heard the most was “it’s probably a boy, since you didn’t feel too much nausea with Lila”.

Seriously, I don’t know how some women go through it during the whole 9 months. I couldn’t eat anything and I think the toughest part was having to cook for Lila. I felt so bad for her because some days I just couldn’t look at the food, never mind feel the smell of it. So we got lots of take out and the poor thing ate a lot of the “jarred food”…poor thing! It just so happened that she started the “I pick what I eat” phase and was very into fruits and not into food at all! As a result of the nausea I lost 6 pounds (I can’t say I was upset about that). Luckily, I have a very “strong stomach” and I don’t throw up easily; otherwise I probably would have lost too much weight and, most likely, would have felt crappier. Energy-wise, I’ve been ok. Sure, sometimes I manage to nap while Lila is napping but that’s rare because I always have something to do, but that’s not bothering me as much as the nausea…so, YAY!

The highlight of this month is that we got to see the baby for the first time! Our ultrasound was great, the baby was measuring just right and we were given a due date of JULY 9, 2010. I’m very happy about that too because not only the weather is very nice, but there’s absolutely NO ONE in our family from July. What a relief! January, February, March, April, August, October, November and December are the busy months!

Baby's first picture!

Pregnancy Journal: month #1

• First Month 10/09/09 to 11/09/09: finding out…

Surprise! We’re pregnant! God knows how shocked we were to find out! After all the issues we had while trying to conceive and after undergoing IVF to become pregnant with Lila, we thought we wouldn’t be easy to get pregnant again. The doctors had told us it COULD happen naturally, because sometimes the fertility issue “cures” itself after delivery, but we certainly didn’t think it WOULD happen! And I think the funniest thing was that I had all my doctors’ appointments this month (OB annual, endocrinologist) and both of them asked me if I was trying to get pregnant and if so, that I didn’t have to wait a year before getting help because they would immediately send me to Boston IVF.

What I felt: I got really suspicious when I started getting up at night to go to the bathroom, because that only happened when I was pregnant. The funny thing is that, although I was suspicious, when I went to the store to buy a pregnancy test I also bought ovulation tests to see if my cycles were on schedule! How funny is that?! So on October 28, 2009 we got our surprise miracle…we couldn’t be happier. We’re going through a messy mixture of emotions: happy, scared, shocked, excited, nervous, and everywhere in between!

How dad found out: So I “peed on the stick” and left it on the bathroom counter for a couple of minutes not giving it much thought. After 5 minutes I went to check and sure enough, there were two lines! I started shaking so bad and grabbed Lila and started kissing her and hugging her and jumping up and down…LOL… she must have though her mommy was crazy. Dad was at work and I didn’t want to call him to give him the news. I took a picture of the test and saved it on his computer’s desktop as the wallpaper. As soon as he gets home, the computer is the first place he goes to. That day he called to say he was coming home late so I couldn’t wait that long. I emailed him a picture of the test and wrote “surprise, DAD!” He called later in the afternoon asking if it was a joke…typical! Like I would joke about that! Needless to say, he was so happy! We certainly are so BLESSED! God is awesome!

The pregnancy test

Baby's first present! Big sister picked out the stuffed toy!

So proud to be a BIG SISTER!