Balsam Woods Blog

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.

For the past maybe two weeks I have been experiencing some whopper headaches.  I have sinus issues so I’m use to dealing with the occasional mega-sinus headache, but these new headaches aren’t the same.  They are these horrid things that seem to radiate from the base of my skull and wrap up and around my head even effecting the area behind my ears.

Unfortunately, the pregnancy books all say headaches are a normal and a frequent complaint of pregnancy.  So am I having a normal pregnancy headache or some other kind of headache.  I wish the books described the pain women have felt during these pregnancy headaches so I knew.  I’ve tried to stayed away from all medicines (except my thyroid prescription) during this pregnancy, except for now having taken my sixth dose of Tylenol in 13 weeks.  I feel bad taking even Tylenol, but it sort of takes some of the edge off these headaches.

So for now, I’ve just started tracking when I get them and what I did or did not do to get rid of them.  The midwife was interested in knowing about the headaches, but wasn’t overly concerned…of course, I wasn’t overly concerned and I find that with medical professionals sometimes personal concern makes them concerned.

I had an appointment this morning with my midwife.  I haven’t gained any weight!  (In my case, that’s a good thing.)  I had a minor few moments of concern though because the midwife couldn’t hear the baby’s heartbeat.  She said, “oh, come on baby” in a concerned voice, then promptly said, “oh, don’t worry, we’ll find it.”  Well, we ended up doing a sonogram because the Doppler just wasn’t finding the heartbeat.  Then with the sonogram, baby wasn’t moving, wasn’t moving, and still wasn’t moving.  FINALLY, babe made a little jump and started moving around.  Gave his/her momma a fright.  The midwife said, “well, that’s strange, I’ve never seen a baby sleeping with “his” legs straight out like that.”  But the baby looks great, bumping and thumping around just fine…after we woke him/her up.  Apparently, baby was just chillin’ and floatin’.  Kind of funny.  My midwife said that at 16 weeks it won’t be as difficult to hear the heartbeat because the baby will be much bigger and higher in my abdomen, so we shouldn’t need to do another sonogram until the 20th week when I go see a perinatologist to make sure all of baby’s parts are in order and functioning properly.  Thus far, baby looks great and altogether normal on the two sonograms I’ve had so far though.