Ultrasound – 23 Weeks

In a dumb series of events involving insurance coverage (or lack thereof), we had to travel to Spokane to get our 20-week anatomy scan ultrasound done, and we accidentally arrived about 45 minutes early. This was on the 15th, and I was 23 weeks along at the time.

The ultrasound tech lady did her measuring thing, and at one point I thought I caught a glimpse of baby’s bits and hazarded a guess. Then she reconfirmed that we did want to know the sex of the baby, and told us baby is a GIRL! That’s what we’d been guessing all along, but it was fun to have it confirmed. For some reason, she didn’t print a picture of that image, and I’m not sure why. We got good shots of Baby’s feet and arm. Profile was a little more difficult because she had her hands in front of her face the whole time.

Baby looks good – 35th percentile, so not a giant, which is good news for my VBAC.

The only unusual thing is that it looked like maybe my placenta had an extra lobe. My midwife said she’s seen that reported before and then it turned out that the placenta didn’t have it, but she recommended I have another ultrasound to confirm the presence of the extra lobe. They want to know about it if it is present, because there’s a possibility it might not come out with the rest of the placenta and they need to know to be on the lookout for it. Nobody wants retained placenta! It can cause hemorrhaging and poor milk supply and infections. So! Other than that, things look good.

And a girl! Aaaah!

17 Weeks

I had my second prenatal appointment today and it went really well! My blood pressure was great (94/70) and I’m only up a couple of pounds. Fetal heart rate was 140-150 and we had a nice talk about me eating more protein and taking more walks. Given that it’s currently six degrees outside and windy… I am not really feeling the walk idea but I will figure something out.

Sleep continues to be a problem. I should just get over my fear of taking Unisom regularly and just take it already since it appears to help keep me asleep, unlike melatonin, which seems to make me drowsy just fine but does not help me stay asleep, which is the actual problem I am trying to solve.

My midwife also reviewed my medical charts from my induction/c-section and said that my bloodwork/urinalysis numbers weren’t ideal but weren’t, like, HORRIBLE. So she’s pretty optimistic that I’ll “have a different story this time around.” That’s about the best I could hope for, so I’m happy about that. I would have been worried had she hemmed and hawed about me being high risk or something, but she feels like things are going great so far and we’ll continue to keep an eye on things.

Unrelated: I got my Secret Quonsar gift in the mail today! It was so unexpected – for some reason it didn’t even occur to me that I might receive it before the send-by date! I am going to mail my person’s gift out tomorrow (on the deadline! whoops) so hopefully they receive it in a timely fashion.