Week Sixteen

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Published 05.06.2008 | Permanent Link | Comments (11)

Your Baby:

• Is a little over four inches long and weighs a little over 2.5 ounces. The chocolate bunny that I swiped from my toddler's Easter basket weighed 3.5 ounces. But considering I shared it with my fetus, I am a good mom AND a responsible eater.
• Has fingernails and toenails, all of which will be flesh-tearing talons by the time the baby is born. For serious, pack a teensy nail file in your hospital bag if you'd rather your baby's first pictures NOT include giant face scratches.
• Is covered with fine, downy hair called lanugo. THIS will mostly fall out by birth, so rest assured you will not deliver a giant razor-taloned gorilla baby, or something.

You:

• Are leaving the more miserable symptoms behind in the dust, more or less. My gag reflex and appetite remained extremely sensitive until about week 16 last time, and the same held true this time around.
• Can feel your rock-hard uterus about three inches below your belly button (especially when you lie on your back). As your baby grows your uterus will continue to inch upwards out of your pelvis. Translation: YOU WON'T HAVE TO PEE SO DAMN MUCH.
• May be having very vivid but bizarre dreams. Some will be obviously pregnancy-related (the usual ones involve breastfeeding something other than a human baby or putting an animal or your baby in the oven or microwave to "cook" awhile longer), and others will be just plain weird or upsetting, like your childhood nightmares. They should be interpreted as nothing more than dreams stemming from nerves, hormones and your constant thoughts about the future. (In other words, you aren't really going to give birth to a turtle with a full set of human teeth.)

Okay, so the Big Thing with this week is that you MIGHT feel your baby move. The range for feeling those first delicate, pitter-pattery movements is something between week 16 and week 20. And it's different for everybody. Thin women feel it before heavier women. Women who have been pregnant before feel it before women who haven't.

Except for this thin woman who has been pregnant before and did not feel a blessed THING this week, even though I felt Noah move for the first time (clear as day!) when I was exactly 16 weeks along.

Well, let me sort-of take that back. Two weeks ago, during week 14, I swore I felt some quickening movements. It was in the right spot, over to the left a little, and felt like a few tiny soda bubbles had just popped against my insides. By the time my brain caught on to the sensation, it was long past. A couple days later, while lying quietly on the couch, I felt it again.

I spent a loooong time Googling and checking the books to see if it was AT ALL possible that I really felt what I thought I felt -- I mean, quickening is both really easy to miss and yet impossible to forget, once you've experienced it -- but came up dry. Just the same vague old language about "women who have been pregnant before feel it earlier" but no real examples of how MUCH earlier.

Whatever, I never felt it again and am still waiting for my first pregnancy-book-and-calendar sanctioned movements.

For the first-timers among us, I'm sure you've read the descriptions a million times. Little bubbles or flutters or pops or tickles. I guess these words describe it as well as it CAN be described. I used to tap the tips of my fingernails against the underside of Jason's forearm to try to give him an idea of what I was feeling (bum deal for the partner -- being able to feel the kicks from the outside is still a long way off), but it's more like an impossibly gentle and faint THUMP than a tap. Which is why, I guess, the "bubbles popping" metaphor works the best. The sensations are delicate, like a soap bubble, but there's just enough force to suggest the dramatic explosion of that little bubble.

With Noah, I found I could feel him move best while lying on my back at first, and then while sitting very quietly at my desk and focusing on my stomach. Drinking a carbonated beverage always seemed to perk him up -- I always imagined he could hear it fizzing away in my stomach and would decide to make it a rhythmic duet.

Be patient -- you'll DEFINITELY feel something in the weeks to come, depending on how active your baby is, and

Oh!

There's MY baby! I totally just felt it! And there it is again! HOLY CRAP! HI SWEET THING! Thanks for being so totally on cue there.

Oh Yeah, THIS: Uh. I completely forget what thing I was going to complain about this week now. Clogged sinuses? The misery of an unmedicated allergy season? WhatEVER. Baby just kicked! Whee!

New This Time Around: Last time I had the AWESOME side effect of not shedding any hair while pregnant. It was weird. My brushes and black sweaters remained hairball free. Of course, it all fell out a few months postpartum but during pregnancy my hair was awesome. Thick and full and I didn't have to do a THING to it. Ah. So nice. And no such luck this time. I am still shedding full chunks everyday and my hair is limp and hangy and blah no matter what I do.

EXTRA FUNTIME ZERO TO FORTY BONUS! Ladies, I have managed to get my greasy paws on a $100 gift card to Ann Taylor LOFT Maternity. Courtesy of the good folks at...Ann Taylor LOFT Maternity. And we shall be giving it away to a randomly selected reader here at Alpha Mom.

You can check out the clothing line here -- it's SUPER CUTE, for both work and casual pieces, and every piece is available in every size between XXS and XXL, or 00 and 18. If you're on either far end of the sizing spectrum, I know you've been gouging your eyes out trying to find stuff in your size that is not either 1) a muumuu, or 2) something from the Bratz doll babymama maternity line.

I will not lie, I am wishing I'd kept the card for myself instead of deciding to be all NICE about it. But FINE.

Click HERE to register for the giveaway. (No, you don't have to be pregnant to enter -- it is a GIFT CARD, after all, if you've got a special pregnant lady in mind -- but you do need to be a resident of the U.S.)

Week Fifteen

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Published 04.30.2008 | Permanent Link | Comments (18)

Your Baby:

• Is as big as a...wait for it...beefsteak tomato! Doesn't that sound deliciously substantial? Am resisting urge to go pinch some produce as I type this.
• Has started "breathing" amniotic fluid in through its nose and respiratory tract, giving those lungs some very early practice for the real thing. (Late in the third trimester, you can actually watch the fetal breathing on an ultrasound, and lo, it is very cool.)
• Can sense light and pressure from outside of the womb, so if you want to get a jump start on annoying the crap out of your kid, shine a flashlight on your stomach or chase it around with the doppler wand every night. Or gently caress your belly while singing lullabies in a variety of foreign language and mediating on the Zen-ness of it all. You know, whatever your personal parenting style goes for.

You:

• May be experiencing some of the weirder symptoms of pregnancy, many of which can start early in the second trimester. Including! For example!
• Sinus congestion! Runny nose! Stuffed-up nose! So much freaking mucus, and not in the places where you would ASSUME mucus would be involved. It's called rhinitis of pregnancy and once again, they just blame it on "hormones." Get yourself a humidifier or vaporizer, inhale steam in a fogged-up bathroom or try those saline nasal drops. Ask your doctor before taking any decongestant or medicated nasal spray.
• Bleeding gums! A side effect of all that extra blood you've got coursing through your system. (Nosebleeds are common too.)
• Skin pigmentation! The linea nigra, or that darkish line that runs down the center of your belly, sometimes shows up as soon as you start showing, sometimes much later. Moles, freckles and birthmarks can spread and/or darken. You might notice some melasma, or "mask of pregnancy" across your face, particularly if you spend a lot of time in the sun or have a naturally olive or darker complexion. A lot -- but not all -- of these changes will fade after you give birth. When in doubt, slather up on the sunscreen to increase your odds that they'll be temporary.
• Forgetfulness! Pregnancy brain! Gestational amnesia! Whatever you want to call it, you probably know what I'm talking about. In the past week alone, I've 1) run a load of laundry without any detergent, 2) made coffee without a filter, 3) tossed a Ziploc of frozen chicken to defrost in the sink but forgot to actually seal the bag, and 4) stared at my husband for three full minutes while trying to remember his name.

A few weeks ago, Your Intrepid Gestator was interviewed by The Washington Times for an article about the latest edition of What to Expect When You're Expecting. Once considered the grandmommy of all pregnancy books, the What to Expect... series has fallen a little out of favor, what with that impossible-to-obey diet section, the seemingly endless pages of worst-case scenarios that could be lurking beneath your normal-seeming symptoms, and what's with the frumpy rocking-chair mom on the cover?

You can read the article here (I show up to crash the joint on page 2). It's actually really interesting, because the author is keenly aware of these criticisms, and has sought to correct most of them in the newest version. Even the cover got a makeover! She gets to wear JEANS! And STAND UP! Ship your women back to the fundamentalist compounds -- the pregnant women are getting all kinds of uppity.

Oh, I kid. What to Expect... was the first pregnancy book I ever bought -- right when we agreed to toss the birth control pills but long before we conceived. Once I finally (FIN.UH.LEE.) got pregnant, however, I hightailed it back to the bookstore in search of an alternative guide, because my nerves couldn't take any more. And this really wasn't the book's fault -- in the pursuit of being the definitive, comprehensive guide to pregnancy, What to Expect... simply became TOO comprehensive. They couldn't talk about X and Y without talking about Z, but unfortunately for us all, Z was the 1-in-32893803495702454 case of a spontaneous outbreak of the ebola virus in a perfectly healthy pregnancy, or something.

Basically, it was Google, and a thousand paranoid ill-advised searches for "weird rash 6 weeks pregnant missed miscarriage omg flesh eating disease," all printed out and numbered by chapter for your convenience.

Here on AlphaMom, the book sits at the top of the Product Ratings page for garnering the most reviews of anything we list. Lots of love, and lots of hate. Lots of accusations of being "old-fashioned" and "one big guilt trip."

And in fact, the Internet seems to be a driving force behind the book's update. Women are turning to other women. We don't WANT to know everything that can go wrong, even though we might THINK we do. We want to be told that everything is okay, that X, Y and Z are ALL normal and harmless, and that we're going to laugh at how neurotic we were about this someday when our baby is up at 2 am for the 132th night in a row. We want reassurance that you don't have to do pregnancy perfectly to have a perfectly healthy baby, because none of us are perfect.

And so the What to Expect... books are getting back in touch with the thing that made them so popular to begin with: they were written by a MOM and not a doctor. No perfect pregnancy diet, no dire consequences lurking behind every bag of Oreos. It really sounds like the book has been completely overhauled to reflect the modern pregnancy, which is most definitely NOT spent contemplating your bump in a rocking chair for nine months.

*clap clap clap clap!*

I use a lot of pregnancy books as reference for this column, but none for my own pregnancy-related questions. I generally turn to blogs or my friends or my friends' blogs for those. I liked The Girlfriend's Guide to Pregnancy but found it sort of dated (STIRRUP PANTS!!) and fluffy, I still use the Mayo Clinic's Guide to Pregnancy but it's kind of dry and missing the inherent humor and weirdness that comes with pregnancy, and I could never bring myself to open Pregnancy Sucks or similar books after battling with infertility. I'm a sucker for anything in the week-by-week format (no kidding!) but wish they included more first-person anecdotes to follow along with.

What about you guys? What books did you love? Or hate? Do you even bother with the books anymore, or do you go online instead?

Oh Yeah, THIS: I really wish I could remember where I put my keys. Also that glass of water I swear I just poured for myself. And wait, why did I walk down to the basement again?

New This Time Around: Oh God, I seem to have developed my very first skin tag. I read about these last time but never got them. I now have one in my armpit and ew. EW.

Video for the Week: Dressing for the Summer when Pregnant.