Monster

Here I am at 31 weeks pregnant:

I had an appointment with my midwife last week when I was 30 and a half weeks pregnant. She measured me (from pubic bone to the top of the uterus - for those of you who care about the measurements). From about 25 or so weeks on the measurement, in centimeters, should be the same as the number of weeks pregnant you are so 25 weeks = 25 cm, 28 weeks = 28 cm. At my last appointment the tyke was a smidge over the number of weeks I was preggo. On Wednesday he was 4-5 cm over where he should have been!

Do you know what this means? My baby is HUGE. Sure, I'm kind of huge right now, too but nothing to make him a MONTH bigger than he should be. In fact, I lost 2 pounds between appointments. This was a good thing and cause for much celebration as I had been gaining too much weight. If I maintain my weight now I will end up at the desired weight gain for my pregnancy.

So, we know it is not something that I'm doing. I'm not feeding him steroids although I still eat too many carbs but not so much as to make him a little monster. My midwife wants to know exactly how big he is so I'm going in for an ultrasound next Tuesday. I'm kind of anxious to know how big he's going to be.

I've been told by a number of people, after I tell them that I'm growing a ginormous baby, "Well, maybe he'll sleep through the night earlier" or my favorite, "So, you're planning on having an epidural, right?"

Let's get something straight. The epidural will be wonderful for the labor and delivery but it ain't gonna help me one bit after I deliver a frickin' watermelon!

Oh! And since I'm doing a good job getting myself worked up let me lay into the people who loathe a woman who uses an epidural for pain management during labor. An argument I hear coming from this camp quite often is that is a perfectly natural life experience and women have been doing it for centuries without pain medicine, why look at all the women in Africa who give birth naturally all the time.

Well! Just this very afternoon I was talking to a Kenyan woman who gave birth to two children in Kenya. She was telling me how painful and horrible labor was when I told her I was going to have an epidural. She asked me what that was. I told her they stick a needle in your spine that essentially paralyzes you from the waist down. Her eyes got big and she said, "Really?" She said she wished she could have had an epidural.

Take that epidural haters! Just because women in third world countries deliver without the aid of drugs doesn't mean they don't want the drugs.

A pain free April = happy April. Happy April = happy Ryan. Happy April = happy nurses. April in pain = unhappy everyone else. I know everyone expects the laboring mother to be testy but I really think my mouth would get the better of me if I was in agony.

We discovered at my previous appointment that I was anemic. I got to add another iron pill to my daily regime of prenatal vitamin, fish oil and iron. Now I'm up to 3 iron pills a day. At the most recent appointment I complained that it felt like was breathing soup. My midwife did a 'peak flow' test to check out my lung capacity. It was pretty darn low. It was 85 points below normal but when taking into consideration pregnancy it was the at the absolute bottom of normal. So she prescribed an inhaler for me. It dilates my bronchioles (or something like that).

It is a miracle! I can breath again! I still get tired throughout the day but not so tired that typing is a chore.

Seriously. The day before I got the inhaler I was sitting at my computer at work typing something one-handed. My left arm was lying useless in my lap; it was too much effort and energy to have both arms resting on the desk and typing. There was a lot of work I had that could have been doing. It has been sitting on my desk for over a week. I would spend the first half of the day working on stuff that had to be done today and planned the second half of the day for work that needed to be done but not urgently. Well, once lunch time rolled around I would get so tired everything lost all sense of urgency. The day after I got my inhaler I tackled the pile of work that was sitting on my desk for over a week and got through all of it in one afternoon. It's amazing what oxygen can do for the body. Oxygen, it does a body good. And baby, too. His activity level picked up after I started taking the inhaler. When Mom's not getting enough O2 neither is baby.

The inhaler has not turned me into a woman of boundless energy. It has merely brought me from exhausted sloth level to a fatigued level.

Last night we spent at my mother's-in-law and I woke up every 90 to 120 minutes. After each waking I stay up longer and longer. Once I paddle to the bathroom after 4:30 it's all over; I'm guaranteed to be up for at least an hour. So I laid there last night playing Solitaire on Ryan's Nintendo DS at 4:30 in the absolute silence one can only experience in the country. The only thing that kept the room from feeling too foreign was the light my mother-in-law left on in the hall let enough light in our room to make it bright like the street light does to our room at home.

Solitaire is the only game I play at night because it doesn't stimulate my brain - it gives me something to do so I don't fixate on sleep and thereby chase it away. It eventually bores me back to sleep. I drifted off for another hour before crawling out of bed to join everyone else in the kitchen.

After scarfing down a plum, banana, some grapes, orange juice and two sourdough waffles (these waffles are so light and fluffy that two are as filling as one - really - they are light as air) I took my dishes to the sink and went back to bed for 2 1/2 hours. The only reason I got out of bed when I did was because company was due to arrive at 11:00 and I had to pee. Of course. It always comes down to the bladder.

No work for me tomorrow! I took Friday and Tuesday off to give me 5 days off in a row. : ) I'm not going to leave one minute of vacation time unused before I leave. I thought about just leaving 4 days earlier but why do that when I can make my last couple of weeks as short as possible? Last week was 4 days, this week will be 3 days and the following will be 4 as I'm taking next Monday off, too. I still have 4 hours of vacation time to schedule.

My office still hasn't hired anyone for my position. They have a candidate that they want to offer the job to but she has to meet one more person before they make her an offer but the person she needs to meet with has been out of town on business trips. They had better hurry and offer her the job before she takes another position elsewhere and they have to start over from scratch.

I shouldn't be too concerned because come October 5th it is none of my concern. If they want it to be of my concern it will cost them. : )