Pregnancy Feet

First, I am super excited to report that baby girl is head down! As predicted, she waited until she felt like it and turned on her own. She was head up when I got up to pee last Monday and somehow turned in the few hours between that and our NST. I went in apologizing to the tech that she was still breech and baby immediately proved me wrong the second the wand touched my belly. She has a mind of her own already, I just hope she's still feeling the head down position when we go in for tomorrow's NST and check up.

On the downside, E and I have spent the last few days moving boxes and unpacking and I have been overdoing it. I didn't want to track plaster dust all over a few days ago so I took my shoes off and walked around barefoot all day while j set stuff up. This of course resulted in some of the fattiest ankles I've ever seen. At every appointment my midwife has looked at my ankles and now that she's leaving for vacation I finally have the swollen ankles she's been looking for. 

Luckily, it seems to just be feet/ankle swelling. I feel fine otherwise so I'm fairly sure my blood pressure is normal. I've been doing the recommended foot exercises to help move some of the fluid and they have improved a little bit over the last couple days. I'm sure that sitting around doing nothing with my feet up would be the fastest way to improve them, but I have too much stuff that needs to be unpacked for that to be feasible. I also have a weird, circular spot on my belly to ask the new midwife about, I had though it was just another stretch mark to add to my collection but it almost looks like baby girl is busting out of my skin. I'm super curious to see what she has to say about that.

Check out those fatty ankles, I don't recognize my own feet!

House to Home: Part 1

I've been absolutely horrible about updating, mostly because we've been so busy that I've been falling into bed without doing anything at the end of the night. We have made so much progress though that you wouldn't recognize our house, or my belly lol, and it's starting to look like a real home. 

Last we left off, the walls had been washed, primed, ripped full of holes, patched and then the floors had been sanded.

Since then, our living room has gone from: 

To this:

To this:

Unfortunately this lovely clean room only lasted a night, as we moved a full truckload of stuff over and most of it ended up stacked in that clear bit of floor space. We're missing all electrical plugs but we do have the new LED retrofits in and a temporary switch so we have light. And the progress is not just in the living room. It's all the rooms! Except maybe the garage. 

The master bedroom has gone from this:

To this:

To this:

While our master looks pretty much ready to go, it also has no LED retrofits, electrical plugs or switches, not even a temporary switch, and until the house is a little more animal ready, we can't actually move our brood over and sleep there. 

The baby's room has had similar treatment which helps ease some of the crazy need to nest. I'm actually so tied when I get home that even my hormones are zonked and only heartburn or the need to pee can pull me out of bed. 

The pay off is worth it though :) The nursery has gone from:

To this:

To this:

The rest of the house has gotten quite a facelift too. The second door to the guest room was closed, the stairs refinished, the risers painted red and the front door painted grey. 

More photos are soon to come, there's still so much we need to finish before the baby arrives!

Spinning Babies (Or Not)

Although our little lady was head down at our growth ultrasound, she had decided to wiggle into a transverse position by our first NST. Our fluid was totally normal, 23cm, but they like to see babies head down by 36 weeks so we agreed to give an external version a try. 

An external version is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. Using their hands, the doctor tries to turn the baby into a head down position by pushing the baby through your belly. To make this easier, they give you a shot of muscle relaxer about 5 minutes before so your uterus should be relaxed and not contract. They also monitor the baby before, during and after the version to make sure the baby tolerated it well. 

Since I still have a good amount of fluid, I think they measured it at 20cm, our version was as easy as it could be. Baby looked great on the monitor, I got my injection, and it took 2 minutes with one hand on her tush and one on her head to nudge her from transverse to vertex. It felt like a slightly too firm deep tissue massage and I was a little tender in one or two spots for a couple days after, but I wouldn't call it painful or even particularly uncomfortable. The doctor was so pleased with how easily she turned that he said he'd have no problem trying it again if needed.

Unfortunately, baby girl is a stubborn little thing with her own ideas on position and timing. It only took her an evening to decide she liked things better from a different perspective and by the time we went into our NST the next afternoon she had settled into a full on, head up breech position. Whoops. My fluid was 18cm at this appointment, still normal. 

There are things I can do to try and turn her, like hanging off the couch on my hands and knees, but the reality is that she's going to do what she wants regardless. Sometimes I turn her and she stays for a bit, other times she flips back around and even though I'm 37+ weeks, I can still feel her turning summersaults. Our next NST and check up is in the morning and she's already been in 3 different positions today. It would be nice if she decided to be head down but I'm not going to over-analyze it if she isn't. I'll just keep my fingers crossed.  

Gorgeous Girl

After having our ultrasound canceled because the doctor was running behind, E and I were able to reschedule for 35 weeks 1 day. Normally the growth ultrasound isn't done until 36 weeks, but since our little peanut is bigger than average, S wanted us to have it done sooner.

I've known for a couple weeks now that baby girl his head down. She was riding high and transverse until one day I woke up with a waddle and what felt like a bowling ball in my pelvis. The second the ultrasound wand touched my belly, the doctor said "Wow! She's really all the way down there!"as if I hadn't noticed lol. So for now, she's in a vertex presentation, head down and facing my spine, ready to go.  It was tough for them to get a shot of her face but they managed to snap one for us and we haven't been able to stop looking at it.

Our gorgeous girl

The doc also noticed, as everyone has, that I seem to have a lot of amniotic fluid. I'm right at the high end of the normal range but don't have any of the issues associated with having "too much" fluid. High fluid levels can come with some pretty scary worst case scenarios like birth defects, placental abruption, premature membrane rupture and still birth. With mildly high fluid levels you might see a smaller baby who doesn't turn head down, since they have more room to move, putting them at risk for having the cord deliver before the baby and cut off their oxygen supply.

Thankfully, baby girl looks perfect and it appears that a slightly higher fluid level might just be my normal. Far from being small, she's right on track for her high growth curve. With a current weight estimate of 6lbs 9oz, the 82nd percentile, she should be about 8-9lbs at birth as predicted. And as I've already said, she's definitely head down with that big noggin' lodged against my cervix like a cork.

Just in case, we're going to have a NST at our regular appointment to keep an extra close eye on our girl and make sure everything continues to go well. We already had an NST when she took a longer than normal nap and she had perfect, textbook tracing so they don't anticipate any problems.