Baby updates

I have already said this before but I have to keep relearning it – the Internet propagates half-truths, oversimplifications, and fear, when it comes to pregnancy and babies.

I was not sleeping well for a while because I was desperately trying to sleep on my side all night as the Internet (and baby books) would have you believe is the only right thing to do after the twentieth week of pregnancy. There is suggestion that sleeping on your back is always bad for you, and bad for the baby, and increases the risk of stillbirth. So of course I was doing what I was told (by the Internet) and trying to sleep exclusively on my side. But it wasn't working, and was just leading to bad sleep as I was anxiously trying to control my behavior while unconscious.

So I decided to look up some of the actual studies on the matter. There are very few, but what is suggested is that back sleeping is an additional risk factor for stillbirth when other risk factors are already present. What is also suggested is that this risk comes in "late pregnancy," and I am clearly still somewhere in the middle. I do find being on my back to be uncomfortable sometimes, and will roll onto my side, but the majority of the night I am on my back no matter what I do. So at this point I am going to once again ignore the advice of the Internet in favor of what my doctor says (which is that if I need to roll over onto my side I will just do it, but she said this a while ago and I thought maybe that particular advice had expired), and try not to stress about it. Since making this decision I have had two reasonably good nights of sleep.

On Thursday evening we went to a garage sale that advertised having tons of baby stuff, and indeed they did. We ended up making our first furniture-type baby purchase – a bassinet on a frame with wheels that I can wheel around the house. I expect that this is where the baby will have naps for the first few months, and since I won't be able to carry the baby as easily as some parents can, the wheels (which do lock so that the bassinet can't roll away) will be a big help. We thoroughly cleaned it yesterday, and now it is ready to go. It's sort of exciting and at the same time terrifying starting to think about how real this is, and really how soon the baby will be here!

Also very exciting is that Jeff got to feel the baby kick for the first time yesterday. I was sitting on the couch yesterday morning feeling lots of baby movement, and noticed that I actually saw my belly move from the outside. I had Jeff put his hand on my belly and sure enough he felt a kick. Also, as of this afternoon I am feeling the movement/kicks on both sides of my belly when before I was only feeling it on the left. My right is the side of my body that has numbness and reduced sensation and I wasn't sure whether I would ever feel anything on the right. But the baby is definitely getting stronger, as I am starting to feel it a little bit on the right as well.

On Tuesday we are leaving for a week in Ottawa, where we will each attend a conference and also have a good bit of time to visit friends. So if I don't post next week, it is because we are having a good time visiting with two of Jeff's best friends, their partners, and their toddlers :-)

I am not totally sure what to write about today, so I will just write down some things that I am thinking.

1. For some reason I am suddenly really into smoothies. I wasn't just indifferent before, I really didn't like them very much, because in general I would rather just eat the things that go into them as opposed to having all of those things blended up together. But something about being pregnant has made me really crave smoothies, I think because it is a very efficient way to get a lot of nutrition. It became such an obsession that we ended up buying a special single-serve blender just for making smoothies. I still don't like bananas, but there are some very delicious non-banana smoothie recipes out there (like this one, which I made without the banana, using cashews instead of walnuts, ginger instead of nutmeg, and regular milk instead of almond milk), and I like being a little bit creative.

2. Things are starting to grow in the garden. There are little sprouts of lettuce and chard, today some of the potatoes started to pop up, and little pea shoots are shooting out of the ground. The rhubarb has at least twelve stalks, and they are getting close to being a foot long (rhubarb dies back completely in the winter here, so this is all growth that has happened in the last few weeks). I also bought some herbs at the garden center and planted them today. Gardening was much harder work today than it normally is I think, and I had to take a long break afterward, but it was satisfying.

3. I got a haircut yesterday, and it is shorter than my hair has been in several years. I sort of have mixed feelings about it, because it is a bit shorter than what I asked for (just barely below shoulders), but a summer haircut is good.

4. Today I am 23 weeks pregnant, and apparently this means that if the baby were born today it would have some chance of surviving. It seems a little crazy to think that some babies are born that tiny, and I hope this one stays put for a good while longer!

5. I am feeling the baby move around more and more. It is still inconsistent, but I am definitely getting kicked and punched sometimes – it is no longer a mistakable for a rumbly stomach or gas. I am loving it :-)

6. There are some things about being pregnant that are not as great. First, my feet keep turning dark red or purple from blood pooling, so I have to sit with my feet up a lot. I am not sleeping all that well (okay, but not as well as usual) because I am finding it harder and harder to get comfortable. I am normally a back sleeper and it is becoming less and less comfortable to sleep on my back for any period of time, and when I sleep on my side my hip and shoulder hurt. There are several extra pillows in bed of various shapes and sizes that help, but I fear that the days of good sleep might be done for quite some time. Also, I am hot all the time, and at night even though we are keeping the house cool enough that Jeff has to wear his winter socks to bed, I often find myself throwing off all of the covers and waking up a little sweaty. I can only imagine what things will be like when it is super hot in August and I am super pregnant.

7. The weather here has been unbelievably good. Highs around 25°C/77°F, sunny, sometimes a few clouds to block the sun from being too direct, and no mosquitoes yet. It is great to be outside. Everyone here has completely forgotten that winter exists, and we are enjoying one of the nicest parts of the year :-)

Florida vacation, family visit, the May two-four

Today is Victoria Day, a holiday in Canada celebrating the Queen's birthday (May 24). Around here it is also known as "May long," as in the May long weekend, or the May two-four, as in May 24 or the weekend in May when you buy a 24-pack of beer. We are going to barbecue with friends tonight, and are enjoying having a holiday weekend just after getting back from vacation.

Florida was great. We swam in the warm clear water in the Gulf, kayaked through mangrove tunnels, saw dolphins, lounged on the beach, searched for shells, ate good Mexican, went out for ice cream at two different local shops, and generally had a lovely time.

Lounging by the pool

The view from the balcony in our room

Jeff drinking a Miami Vice atop the Lani Kai (especially for Meredith)

Enjoying a walk on the beach

 Jeff has videos of dolphins, kayaking, and a tortoise chomping on some grass, but these need some editing and so I will have to post them later.

We got back on Monday evening, and on Friday morning Jeff's sister, her partner, and their daughter arrived for a three-day visit. We relaxed, had a chance to visit, ate good things including homemade strawberry ice cream (which needs perfecting – the strawberries were rather icy) and homemade rhubarb pie, went to parks, and went to the Science Center.

Maddy was stressed but surprisingly tolerant

All together at the Science Center

We had a lovely time, and were sad to see them go this morning, but look forward to future visits when we will have a cousin for the little one to play with :-)

Finally, just before we left for Florida we had our anatomy scan ultrasound. Last week we had an appointment with our OB, and she said that everything looks perfect. She also went over the results of some previous screening testing that we had done, and everything looks excellent – the risks of serious birth defects and complications are much lower than in the general population according to our results. It is always nice to get reassurance that everything is going well, especially when we have had a bit of a difficult time getting to where we are! 

I had hoped that there would be good images from the ultrasound, as there often are at this stage. However, the baby was not being very cooperative in terms of position, so getting images was difficult, but here is a cute one:

Cat jail, gardening, Florida

There are lots of things that come up in the years after buying a house, I think especially a first house, that you would never have thought of checking out before buying. There are some things that are obvious – for example, our garage is falling apart and we knew that when we bought the house. Recently our garage door  cracked, and now we have to get a new garage door and opener installed. In order to not be wasting money on a new opener, we have to get a new roof put on the garage so that water doesn't leak in and ruin it. The new door and opener are being installed tomorrow, and we are waiting on an estimate for the new roof, though it is such a small and simple job that it is likely to be not too bad. This we knew would be an issue and we expected to have to deal with this.

What we did not expect was to have a problem that seemed almost unsolvable related to this:

So Maddy is terrible for sleep. She has a tendency to walk all over us, sleep on Jeff's head, and be generally disruptive. For a long time this was not a problem because Koshka would sleep at the foot of the bed, which would keep Maddy off. But after moving to Regina, Koshka prefers to sleep on her own, and thus does not protect us from the terror of Maddy in the nighttime. 

And how exactly does this relate to anything about our house? It all comes down to problems with ventilation. In order to keep Maddy away from us at night, we have to keep our bedroom door closed. But our bedroom is poorly ventilated, and it gets hot and humid and smelly from our body heat. It's not such a problem over the winter, when the temperatures outside hang around 20° below zero, but starting in spring and going all the way through fall it is a problem. So last fall we vowed that we would get better ventilation in our bedroom before this summer. But, when we had someone come take a look to give us an estimate, they basically said our house was too old and it couldn't be done for less than thousands of dollars. He suggested we get a screen door for our bedroom. So after much thought and some trial and error, we devised a method for trapping Maddy in the basement at night. The result looks and seems a lot like part of an Odyssey of the Mind problem (if you know what I'm talking about, you will know what I mean): 

 It is a combination of part of a baby play yard, wall hooks, hair rubber bands, Velcro, and corrugated plastic. I devised this plan, with input from Jeff, over the course of weeks and really maybe months. But this weekend it was constructed, and tonight is the test: we sleep with our bedroom door open, and hope that Maddy doesn't find a way to break out of the basement. Even though the nights have been very cool, sometimes getting close to freezing, I have been hot and the room has felt stuffy and I am very much looking forward to experiencing some airflow while we sleep.

We also spent a lot of time this weekend planting the garden. The weather has been mostly sunny and highs right around 70°F, so perfect gardening weather. We decided this year to use a composting weed barrier over the whole garden to cut down on the need for weeding, so after putting down the weed barrier last weekend, we cut holes and planted seeds and tubers in them yesterday.

This year we have planted two kinds of potatoes, rainbow beets, carrots, Swiss chard, lettuce, yellow zucchini and green zucchini, cucumbers, peas, and basil. Jeff does not so much love gardening, but he is a good sport and helps quite a bit anyway, and I think he does enjoy having the fresh vegetables that we have grown. As we are getting used to how things grow here, and to our garden space, I think we are making continual improvements. My guess is that this will be our best garden yet in Regina.

Finally, I should mention that I probably won't be blogging next Sunday because we will be away. In Florida. On vacation. (Yay!). Since Jeff was not able to go to Oregon over Christmas, he ended up having a travel credit with United airlines. The credit had to be used within a year, and we realized that it is unlikely that we will be doing much traveling for a while after the baby comes in September. So, this was a perfect excuse to book a vacation. We decided on Florida because there are beaches, it will be warm, it's not too terribly far (Hawaii would be an awfully long trip from here), and I have never been.

We're going to a place called Fort Myers Beach on the recommendation of a friend. It is surrounded by state parks and nature preserves, so more our speed than a place like Miami or Orlando. We have reserved a tandem kayak for a half day exploring a nearby nature preserve, and have booked a "dolphin cruise" where we will be taking a tour of the area with a marine biologist, heading to a tiny unpopulated island to look for wildlife and shells, and are apparently guaranteed to see dolphins. We are staying at a hotel right on the beach, with a room that has a full kitchen, barbecue on the patio, and is facing the Gulf of Mexico. I am super excited for our trip, and I will be sure to post pictures when we get back!

Drinking lake water, baby bump

It is a fortunate thing that when I am feeling a little sad/angry/frustrated or similar, I am currently at a point in my life when it is not possible for me to continue feeling that way for very long. I finished my grading, submitted grades for the semester, and for the most part I am done with all of this for quite a while (with the exception of students emailing because they think their grades are unfair, and similar straggling annoyances). After finishing this last Tuesday for the most part, spilling a bit into Wednesday morning, everything felt a bit better.

On Wednesday night we had a date night – we went out for sushi and then to see a performance by the Royal Winnipeg Ballet. I had a late meeting that day, so for dinner we picked a restaurant that was convenient and that in many ways doesn't seem all that nice (it is across the street from campus, sort of caters to students, you order at the counter) but which actually has food that is like what I expect at a decent sushi restaurant. We went there quite a while ago, and I had forgotten that I liked it, so it was pleasing to rediscover it. The ballet was also quite good – the performers come from all over the world to be part of this professional company, and although they don't come to Regina very often, it is nice to know that we have the opportunity to see a performance of this caliber at least once a year or so.

We also put a medicine cabinet up in the bathroom, did some rearranging, and ended up cleaning out and throwing away lots of things (like expired cold medicine and the like). Putting up the medicine cabinet took the better part of a day, and Jeff said it is the "most handy thing [he has] ever done." But once it was done it was extremely satisfying to finally have a home for things that have been cluttering up the bathroom counter and residing in drawers in a very un-organized way. We are trying to take care of things like this now, because chances are it will get much more difficult once the baby comes, and thinking ahead a year or so from that date we need to make sure that things like medication are securely stored and not accessible to toddlers. So strangely enough we put up a medicine cabinet in preparation for the baby.

I was dismayed the other day to notice that our tap water tasted and smelled like water from a lake or pond. After doing some investigating (news story here), I found out that our water would always taste this way in the spring/summer/fall if it weren't for a filtration system used by the city water. There was an early algae bloom in the lake that supplies our water, so they did not have the filtration system online yet, and our water will probably smell and taste like algae/pond water for several weeks. It is apparently perfectly safe, but is quite disconcerting. Jeff says we have to just pretend like we're camping, but I am finding that I'm not drinking enough water. We are using our Brita water filter, which does help, but doesn't get rid of the taste completely. So Jeff is out grocery shopping right now and he is buying lots of other drinks for me.

Lastly, I will leave you with a photo taken today:

I felt like a few days ago my belly kind of popped out, making me look dramatically more pregnant. But then I thought today that my belly looked small, and I started to worry a bit. Was the baby somehow shrinking? So I had Jeff take this picture, and he said "now do you feel like you're big enough?" And after looking at the photo, I do indeed. It is a strange thing how I go back and forth between feeling huge and feeling too small. I don't know if this is a thing that other pregnant women experience, but there is a part of me that can't wait until my belly is so large that there is no question about whether I am pregnant or just eating too many cookies. I know that I will probably regret looking forward to that stage, as of course that is also when things become much more uncomfortable, but right now that is what I want. I don't think am quite there yet, but getting close :-)