Pregnancy

Yesterday I had my 20 week ultrasound and, to my relief, the previous gender results were confirmed- he’s 100% boy. I was a little hesitant to believe it the first time since we both thought it was a girl even though we really wanted our first baby to be a boy (Trent probably would be fine if the second and third etc are boys too). I think we talked ourselves into thinking it when we were coming up with all the positive aspects of having a girl. Needless to say, I feel much better now having a second confirmation that he's really a he and most importantly he developing perfectly.

I never wanted to only blog about pregnancy when I was expecting, and believe me I’m still not planning on doing that for the next 20 weeks, but it does seem to be the one thing that occupies my thoughts about 90% of the time so we will see how successful I am with blogging about something else. With that having been said, here are my thoughts on pregnancy so far.

Kicking
For the past couple weeks I *thought* I have been feeling the baby move. Since it’s my first pregnancy I don’t really know what it’s supposed to feel like. But regardless of what it is that I'm feeling, it started in my 18th week as faint, little flutters and then three days ago (after eating a chocolate covered pretzel at work) it progressed into what felt like 3 distinct kicks. I even put my hand under my sweater after the second and I felt something move with my hand. But just now at work I felt a similar sensation in my upper thigh. I’m beginning to think these feelings are the fluttery feeling of fat accumulation. Either that or muscle degradation.

Weight gain
Ill be completely honest- I’m scared to death of gaining too much weight during my pregnancy. My doctor only gave me one piece of advice in the first few visits- “don’t gain to much weight.” It seems to me there isn’t a ton of things to do to prevent the excess pounds, exercise seems to be restricted to low impact aerobics like, swimming and um, walking (does that even count?). And then they say you aren’t supposed to lift heavy things, I’m just crossing my fingers those 10 pound dumbbells at the gym don’t count. So far keeping the weight off hasn’t been a problem, the “pregnancy cravings” haven’t hit and doing an occasional workout has seemed to fit into the schedule so far. Having a personal trainer at work has probably helped too. But then again our baby boy weighs only half a pound and I’ve gained 5. Its probably that chocolate covered pretzel.

Pictures
Just as I wasn’t going to blog every post about pregnancy, I definitely wasn’t going to post pictures of the growing belly. So far I haven’t even taken any (of the posed nature) to post, but I’m thinking tomorrow on the official 20 week mark I may take one. I am thinking I might want to remember what I looked like before the baby completely takes over and changes the way I look (forever).

Pet Peeves
I’m sure my list of pet peeves is going to get a lot longer as pregnancy goes on and people start saying/doing weird things, but for now my biggest pet peeve (I guess you could call it a pet peeve) is people calling pregnancy 10 months. I was always confused by this before I was pregnant but never cared to really look into it. Until now. And I think I figured it out with the help of Wikipedia and lots and lots of calendars and counting.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Prenatal_development.png

First of all, notice what they call “the first two weeks." To include those in your pregnancy is definitely debatable. All I’m going to say about it is this- to include those two weeks would mean that I was pregnant on the first day of my last period...I'm no expert on the matter but I think that's highly unlikely. However, notice in the picture above that even if you keep those first two debatable weeks, 40 weeks hits right at the end of 9 months.
I think people get confused because they think months are 4 weeks or 28 days and so when they are 12 weeks pregnant they divide that by 4 and say they are 3 months. Or at 16 weeks they figure they are 4 months pregnant. No, you’re thinking of February. On average, a month is like 30.42 days, that’s about 2.5 days longer than 28 days. Multiply that by the “10 months you're pregnant” and that’s were you get those extra 25 days you call the 10th month of pregnancy.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I do know two things for sure- 1) the doctors told us our baby was conceived sometime in September and 2) baby is due May 29th. I'm only pregnant for 9 months.

To sum it up
All and all, being pregnant hasn’t been too different from not being pregnant. When I think of all the “pregnancy side effects” they are all symptoms I’ve dealt with my whole life, I guess now I just have an excuse? Examples include the following:
-Pregnancy brain- Forgetfulness has always been a problem/strength (however you look at it) of mine.
-Gas- Nothing new here.
-Fatigue- Sleeping has always been on my top 10 list of favorite things to do.
-Increased Appetite- I have and always will be hungry for more. Always.