Trimester 3B

Well, I've hit the second half of the third trimester. Or rather, it's hit me. With just over 4 weeks to go, mostly that means that things have gotten hard to predict and sometimes I feel terrible and sometimes I feel fine. As much as first trimester sucked, I feel like it helped prepare me for now--just when I think I will now feel bad forever, I get a little reprieve. Oh, and once again I can inexplicably sleep for ten and a half hours straight, and then still take a little nap before dinner.

None if this is helped by the fact that it's been 88 degrees here in October, but I won't get started complaining about that. (I'll just say that I'm pretty sure what's going on is that my little internal heater/baby is putting off so much heat as to affect global warming. Our apologies to the rest of you who are affected by it.)

I'd had a little issue where my blood pressure had started to rise--one appointment it was 142/70-something and then the next appointment it was 160/70-something. I was kind of concerned and so was my doctor. By my most recent appointment it had gone back down to 128/64, though, which is normal, so . . . like I said, things are a bit unpredictable at the moment. My feet had also swollen up a bit, and now they've gone back down to near normal. At this point I'm close enough to the end that when something new becomes uncomfortable I kind of think "Oh no, this is it, now it's going to get worse until delivery" but so far that hasn't happened too much--most things are still fluctuating between better and worse.

I also have to say that my personal experience with pregnancy has been that the things that feel alarming (nausea, fatigue, the aches and pains) are normal and healthy, and the things that are actual problems (blighted ovum, high blood pressure) arrive on the scene silently. People are always telling pregnant ladies to trust their instincts, but for me I think pregnancy throws all the normal alarm systems your body relies on out of whack.

The good news at my past few appointments is that the doctor determined that Cora is positioned head-down (and at this point is most likely to stay that way). She spends most of her time with her feet over against my left flank, and her bony little butt making an asymmetrical lump high on my right side, right up against my lowest rib. Her movements are pretty restricted at this point, so what I get are tickle-y little foot wiggles just above my left hip, and then she can still turn side to side, and I can watch the derrière lump slide from my right ooooovvvver to my left.

The other thing she does for entertainment right now is get the hiccups, which she seems to do at least once or twice a day right now.

She is riding high at this point, and the upward and outward pressure on my ribs makes them sore (and makes me short of breath sometimes), especially after hunching over my desk for a few hours. The top of the belly "shelf" really sticks out pretty perpendicular from my ribs (it's definitely a good beer holder now). The baby is supposed to "drop" into the pelvis a few weeks before delivery, shifting your aches and pains from your upper torso to your lower torso, so that should be interesting.

So we're still plodding along over here, coming into the home stretch.