The gourd and the kickfest

Okay, I felt two more kicks later on in the day on Monday. Once again, only with my hand on the outside of my belly. I haven't felt the kicks from the inside yet.

It's time for new belly photos in commemoration of 21 weeks, and here they are. My stomach looks like a gourd!


I can't wait to get new ultrasound photos now. The baby's getting bigger at a quicker rate and it'd be great to see the new developments. I feel little flutters now and then, but I'm not sure if that's the baby or just gas bubbles. I think the difference is if it's a quick jab and up fairly high, it's probably the baby, if it's slowly moving and rising or falling, it's gas. Those are usually the only 2 moving things in a pregnant woman's abdominal area!

If that's TMI for you, tune out now. Childbearing is graphic and physical, I'm sure there is worse to come. What I really want to see is a diagram of where your organs actually go when they are all squished because your baby's taking all the space in your abdomen. I've searched all over the internet and I find it odd that nobody's done it yet, or that it's not readily available. I find all these sanitized diagrams that show the baby and the uterus, but not a single one that shows your stomach or lungs or bladder.

All is well, I'm sleeping okay and still fairly mobile. Mark wanted us to move soon so that I could still be of help in the moving process, but it's getting close to the cut off time for my usefulness. Right now, I can pack things, but I can't move the boxes once they are packed. Our move date is still 2 weeks away and I'm getting antsy. The good news is that at the new house, in addition to having a room for the baby, we'll have a fenced yard for the dogs and I won't have to worry about walking 2 yanking dogs with a healing C-section scar. So far, 3 doctors have said that it's likely that I'll have a C-section. I have a large, grapefruit-sized fibroid located on the left top of my uterus. It's not in the uterus itself, so I have a shot at a normal delivery, but my main doctor things that the contractions will be "dysfunctional" meaning, she thinks the contractions won't close tight enough to get the baby down and out. So they are planning to let me try, with the thought that it'll probably be a C-section ultimately.

Cross your fingers. Doctors just guess, and they are wrong everyday. I'd rather have a normal birth that takes a week to recover from than abdominal surgery that takes a month or so. And if I need surgery later to remove the fibroid, I'd prefer that to be my 1st abdominal surgery and not a 2nd one.

So far, the fibroid is pretty darn innocuous. It barely hurts and it's in a great location. It's not sharing space with the baby, so little Miles/Kai is thriving in there. But it makes me look huge and my stomach is getting lopsided as the baby grows bigger. So older motherhood (that's what they call it, even though I think I'm still pretty young here) plus fibroid equals high-risk pregnancy. But I've got to say, it's been a relatively easy pregnancy so far. Morning sickness (all-day sickness) didn't last that long and was aggravated mostly by prenatal vitamins! My second trimester has been almost all sweetness and light.

I've seen difficult pregnancies, and this isn't one of them. I DO take it easy, but other than a bunch of acne, it's been great. It's such an amazing experience as you catch on to the gravity of what's happening. There is an actual child in there! You don't really get it completely until you see it move or suck it's thumb in utero. But every single day, it gets more real for us. This time next year, there'll be a little boy crawling around!