Increasing our Baby Investment

Nearly 2 months ago, we started out with 20 inches and 7 lb 3oz of baby. Our quantity of baby depreciated to 6 lb 2oz. Since then, amount of baby has been on the upswing, with a pronounced increase in value recently. As of yesterday evening, we possess 10lb 5oz (165 oz) and 22.9 inches of baby. This is a 43% increase in the overall quantity of baby and a 68% increase from the lowest baby value!

It's always gratifying to see an increase in investments.

Weight gain!

Sterling weighs 6lbs 11.5oz as of our doctor's appointment this afternoon! Since the last appointment, we've been supplementing with 5-7 oz of formula / breast milk per day. Dr Liz says that she's still getting the majority of her nutrition from me, but that seems like a pretty sizable quantity to be getting not from me.   Basically, when she wakes up and gets hungry, I nurse her. If she's still hungry after nursing, which seems to be about 50% of the time, we give her a bottle. Typically she drinks 1-1.5oz per bottle feeding.

I tried to up the number of times I'm pumping per day, but it's tough to fit it in because I can't pump very well while I'm holding her. When I pump right after she's nursed, I get a trace amount of milk. If I wait for an hour, I get about 0.5oz (combined total). If it's been a while, like when she's only nursed on one side, I can get about 0.7oz.

I'm hoping that I'll be able to up the number of times that I can pump because we had a napping breakthrough today. Up until today, she was very reluctant to sleep unless someone was holding her. Today, she slept for an hour on her own in our hand-me-down baby papasan chair. It was lovely. I ate lunch, started a load of diaper laundry, and was able to pump. Unprecedented.

I'm currently drinking Mother's Milk tea, the herbal tincture from the Birthing Center, and taking fenugreek capsules every four hours. I don't know if it's helping, but it's not hurting.

Doctor's Appointment

Sterling hasn't gained any weight since her last doctor's appointment on Monday. Here's the plan as it stands right now:
-Add more supplementation. She's getting enough milk from me to hold her weight steady and to pee and poop regularly, but she's apparently not getting enough to gain weight. We've been supplementing her a little bit before bed (otherwise she won't fall asleep), but we're going to start doing it more. We're now aiming for a total addition of 4-6 oz from a bottle.
-Continue with Mother's Milk Tea and tincture from birthing center. I'm also going to start drinking protein shakes (sounds lovely).
-Try to pump more regularly. This is good for nipple stimulation and we can feed the milk back to Sterling.

Here's how I'm going to try to work our schedule:
Typically, Sterling wants to nurse again 2-3 hours after she's filled herself up. At that point, I'm going to nurse her for about 5 minutes on each side (or as long as she's actively nursing; she tends to slow way down and fall asleep after not too long). Then, we'll give her a bottle and see if she's still hungry. Once she's full, she usually falls asleep. After about an hour, I'll give pumping a try. An hour or so later, baby can nurse again and we'll repeat the process. Dr Liz says that the fact that she sleeps in 4-5 hour stretches at night is fine and won't affect my production, but I think I'm going to try to get in at least one pumping session at night, too. At least for the next couple of days.

We go back in for our next weigh-in on Monday.

It's a watermelon!

Update - not much to report

The title pretty much says it all.

I'm slowly getting bigger. I still don't feel like I'm as big as other women who are pregnant the same amount I am, but I guess that's ok. Next doctor's appointment is on the 31st and I'm sure she'll say something if I'm growing way too slowly. On the one hand, it's nice because I'm definitely not as inconvenienced as I would be if I were huge. I can still put on my socks and wash my feet in the shower. On the other hand, I was sort of looking forward to actually looking pregnant while I am pregnant. It's vaguely disappointing to not be larger. I'm sure I'll get there, though.. and then wish I was smaller again.

Sleeping is still challenging. Last night was a tough one. My hips got sore and I woke up and rolled over a lot of times. Strangely, I only got up to pee once. Maybe my hips were distracting me because I drank a ton of water yesterday evening.

I feel like I'm drinking a lot more water than I'm peeing out. I'm thirsty a good portion of the time, so I've decided to just carry a water bottle with me around the house. I don't feel like any body parts are getting particularly swollen (ankles seem to be normal), so maybe this is one of those parts of the pregnancy where my blood volume just increases quite a bit.

I haven't been remembering any of my dreams specifically. I feel like I remember them sometimes when I wake up during the night, but then by the next time I've woken up I forget them. It just seems way to hard to write them down in the middle of the night so I might remember them in the morning.

Last night, I sorted through all my yarn and divided it into categories by yarn weight (thickness). I know I had things in mind for most of this yarn when I bought it... but wow. This is a lot of yarn. No more yarn purchases, probably until the tiny squee is in its mid teens. Today I'm hoping to go get some bins for yarn storage.

My father is coming up to visit tomorrow and we're going to go hunt for more bins for storage. My goal is to get some of the craft/baby room organized. Right now, it's relatively functional for me as a craft room, but there's no way that we could fit much in the way of baby stuff in there. I did get in and craft some baby items last week. I've made several waterproof pads that could be used as changing pads or on the floor under a naked baby. I think they're pretty cool and I'm planning on making more for gifts. They also use up a lot of fabric, which is a plus. I feel like it makes a dent in my fabric stash when I pull out and use up a large piece.

It's an eggplant.

Halfway!!

I'm at 20 weeks now, which means that we're halfway to the birth. I still don't look all that pregnant (although sometimes I look a lot more pregnant than others), but the baby starts to gain weight a lot faster now. That means that I'll probably start to look pregnant-er in the next couple of weeks. I should also start feeling the baby move more.

I've felt what could potentially be baby movement. It sort of feels like there's a degu dust-bathing in my abdomen. It feels almost like nausea, but not quite. It's a really weird sensation. This has been going on for a week or so, but I'm not entirely ready to pin it down as baby movement. It's difficult to identify a sensation that you've never felt before. I was pretty sure I felt a definite baby movement last night, which felt sort of like several pokes, but then I spent the rest of the night sick so there was obviously something abnormal going on in there to start with.

Dr Liz says that in the next few weeks I should start feeling the baby move at least once a day. That'll be exciting. It'll be nice to know that everything is going ok in there. It's sort of tough to tell right now. There's not a lot of pregnancy symptoms at this point, so I get concerned that there's not a lot of pregnancy. However, baby has been doing fine at all the appointments, so I shouldn't worry.

This week, baby is roughly the size of a degu! So if you picture one of these rodents on the inside rather than on my lap, that's in the right ballpark. The length of a goo is probably pretty close to the crown-to-rump measurement of the baby and the weight is about right.

Spicy

This week, the baby is the size of an onion. However, we weighed the onion and it's roughly twice the weight of the baby. We decided that the baby must be full of styrofoam.

Falling Behind in my Blogging

I was attempting to make it on here every day, but obviously I haven't met that goal during the past week. Quick updates:

One day I lost half a pound, the next day I gained four. I'm not quite sure what my body is up to. Today I look pretty pregnant, but that could be the quarter pound of jelly bellys I ate an hour ago. I think I need to stop eating out so much.

I had a bad dream that I was quite a bit more pregnant and had my hand on my belly, feeling the baby move. Then, the baby bit my hand and wouldn't let go.

We went on baby's first trip to the coast. The weather was fabulous in Cannon Beach and we walked a long ways down the beach. We started north of Haystack rock, walked past it, walked past a park, then walked past a set of two haystack rocks. By that time, the tide was going out and we had some good tidepooling. We brought Rags with us because he enjoys snuffing about on the beach, even though he hates water. He did not appreciate tidepooling because it involved going out where the waves were. Even worse, it involved going where the waves split around large rocks and then came after him from both directions at once. He had to climb up on the barnacle and mussel covered rocks a couple of times to escape from certain doom. Finally, he went and sat far enough up the beach that the waves couldn't get him. He did keep a close eye on us to make sure that we weren't going to be killed or washed out to sea. By the end of the walk back, Rags and I were pretty tired. My feet were getting sore (one of them hurts quite a bit today). I also got sunburned various places: arms, cheeks, back of neck, back of calves, tops of feet. We randomly encountered friends and had an excellent dinner. I had steak, Mike had mac and cheese (which sadly came with peppers in it, so I couldn't eat any).

Our "what size is baby this week" website says that baby is currently the size of a peach, but will be the size of a lemon next week. I'm not sure that the writers of the website have ever seen either a peach OR a lemon. We decided that it's a small peach this week, and next week it will be a large peach.

Studies show that stretch marks are mostly genetic and no matter what you rub on your growing body parts, you're likely to get stretch marks if your mother had them and not get them if she didn't. I have coconut oil to rub on, but it makes me feel greasy and I stick to my pajamas. In the defense of coconut oil, lotion did the same thing.

Also not my best night's sleep

I guess I'm practicing for after the baby gets here. I did eat out both of those nights, so maybe there's some sort of correlation.

Last night, I dreamed that we were out on a hike. We saw a mama bear and her baby, which was exciting. Then, this large brown bear ran down the hill towards us. We were scared and just about to run away when it became evident that all he wanted was to get over the top of the mountain. Turns out there were TONS of people on the trail up the mountain and the bear wasn't able to go by himself because either (it was unclear) he would scare the people or the people would scare him. I began leading the bear up the mountain, which involved basically walking between the bear and the people. When I was between the bear and the people, they couldn't see each other.

There was another whole part to this dream that I remembered this morning, but have since forgotten.

In other news, the baby is the size of a plum.

Baby Size

Last week, the baby was the size of a kumquat.

This week, the baby is the size of a fig.