!6 weeks and finally I got to hear the heartbeat!!!!!!!!!  At 12 weeks the midwife couldn’t hear a heartbeat so we had to do another ultrasound so I got to see the little peanut, but still hadn’t heard anything from him/her.  This appointment was pretty standard.  Just listened to the heartbeat and checked weight.  My blood pressure is still fantastic (yeah).  But I’m sweating the upcoming 28 week blood glucose test.  I’m so freaked out about the potential of developing gestational diabetes.  Not that I have any signs of anything right now, this is just one of those things I don’t want (not that anyone does).

So on Feb 26th, I have a “level 2 ultrasound due to advanced maternal age”.  Translation: Andrea is “old” for having a kid.  They’ll check to make sure all the baby’s organs are in place and functioning and make a rudimentary check for Down’s Syndrome.   They do this for all over-35 pregnant gals.  And don’t you just love the “advanced maternal age” thing.

Hearing the heartbeat was pretty awesome!

Okay, I have an appointment with my midwife here in like 1.5 hours.  I’m actually concerned that I gained maybe up to 4 pounds this month.  Why is this bothering me?  This might sound stupid, but I didn’t want to gain any weight while pregnant because I’m already overweight.  And 4 pounds is totally normal to have gained by 16 weeks, but I’m still wigging out.   I’ve been starving almost continuously for about 3 weeks now so some weight gain is to be expected, I suppose.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not thinking about this from a vanity point of view, but more a safety point of view because I don’t want to complicate delivery or increase my chances of developing gestational diabetes due to weight gain.  I just need to be more careful about food choices, but man when I get hungry taking the time to peel a carrot sounds like an eternity versus opening the cheese and cutting off a hunk.

When I get hungry these days, I have visions of the baby floating around yanking on the umbilical cord with an annoyed look because I’m taking to long to get food down there.

So I’ll know here in a short while if I gained any weight according to the midwife’s scale…

Guess what I did?  I “went” maternity clothes shopping.  I don’t need anything yet, but I had a gift card to JCPenny’s from my parents and they had a sale online.  I found two cute short-sleeved shirts and a pair of pants to buy.  Since it’s going to be summer when I’ll need these clothes the most, I thought getting 5 short-sleeved shirts, one pair of pants, one pair of shorts and a skirt would probably be really the only maternity stuff I need.  My mom has offered to make a few shirts for me so I might only need to purchase a pair of shorts and a skirt to be all set.

Right now, I can’t even tell I’m pregnant, really.  When I wear some pants, the waist band now feels uncomfortable to me.  But the baby is still really low in the abdomen, barely over the top of the pelvic bone.   I have to wait 5-7 more weeks before I’ll be able to feel the baby moving.

It was so fun looking for maternity stuff though!  I had to wait THIRTY-SIX YEARS to finally get to do that, but I guess it was worth the wait!  Oh, you know what they call women over 35 giving birth…women of “advanced maternity age”, ARGH!  What a stinky moniker.   But you know what the medical term use to be for us gals having our first baby after 35…Elderly Primigravida.  Thank goodness that term went out of fashion! 

So I’ve been slightly addicted to watching those baby/pregnancy stories on Discovery Health and TLC in the mornings.  And they’ve got me thinking about thinking ahead.  Since labor & delivery isn’t an utterly controllable setting and you never can tell how exactly you will end up delivering a baby for sure, I should be prepared for whatever outcome will result.  The plan is to be as o’natural as possible about this whole birth, but I also know that a healthy baby, healthy mom is the best outcome, no matter how that has to happen.

I am going to try having, especially food, prepped and frozen well in advance of my due date in July.  When I was sick the other day, it really got me thinking.  Left on his own to produce a dinner means my dear hubbie doesn’t always make the healthiest food choices.  He bought frozen Banquet pot pies for himself for dinner the other day.  Now I also know from tales of his bachelor days he’d make a dinner of those frozen burritos they sell for like 10 for $2.  So I am going to start working on making extra meals to freeze.  We have a huge freezer in the basement that has plenty of space.

I have some good recipes for pretty healthy casseroles that have plenty of veggies & meat so they easily make a meal on their own or with a quick salad.  So I thought I’d line a glass casserole dish with parchment paper, put in the casserole, freeze it solid, then remove it using the parchment paper and slip it into a vacuum sealing food storage bag so it doesn’t get freezer burn.  Then when we need it, we could just open up the bag and slip the casserole back into the glass pan and cook it.  That way I could make lots of those kinds of casseroles and they’d all use the same sized dish.  Plus, since there is parchment paper underneath the casserole it will make clean up after cooking the casserole much easier.

Does that make sense?  Hopefully, at least my mom will be able to come out for a time after the baby arrives and she’ll be really helpful.  So things shouldn’t be too hard, but I think I can make it easier if I just do some good advanced thinking ahead.