Week 18

Starting with usual list of complaints: back pain; exhaustion; sleeping poorly; dry skin and eczema....However, Wednesday morning I awoke very early on account of some uncomfortable pains. It was hard for me to fall asleep again after that because I became paranoid and worried. There were no other accompanying symptoms, so I decided to just hold tight until later on. Several hours later with the pain still bothering me, we called our doctor who was very reassuring. It's hard to know what is "normal" sometimes, no matter how much you read and experience pregnancy. I'm sure that it's just the ligaments around my stomach getting cramped as they stretch over my cantaloupe sized uterus.

Other than that little episode of paranoia, everything has continued to progress well and the baby and I are both healthy. I think that we might be able to find out the gender of our baby in the next few weeks--so that's exciting!

This week, our baby is growing a lot--but I was amazed to read that finger prints and toe prints are developing now. So cool. Adam and I were just talking about how interesting it is that people track their pregnancies by weeks now instead of months. Our culture is inundated with the desire to know what's going on exactly, all the time, as much as possible. You can get all sorts of trackers to put on your desktop that remind you of how many days you are pregnant and what's happening with you and your baby right now---you can get on email lists that will do the same thing. And there's no end to all the material online. Gone are the days when people would ask an expectant mother, "how far along are you" and she would respond "about 4 months".

~julie