32 Weeks Pregnant

Belly measurement: 38”!

At 32 weeks gestation, Norah only has about two to three more inches and about the same number of pounds to gain before she’s ready to make her debut! And I’m such a daydreamer – I keep looking through her little outfits and trying to imagine what they will look like on her!

My tail bone is finally almost healed. It’s only hurting once in a while now. Lower back pain is getting worse, but it’s not all the time either. If I’ve been sitting or lying down, when I first get up my lower back hurts and my legs/hips feel weak and I can’t always stand up straight right away. Is that what sciatica is?? Still considering the chiropractor. :-P I should just go for it. I’ve spent weeks debating with myself over spending the $25. It’s just $25. Yes. I will make an appointment.

I haven’t really had cravings this whole pregnancy, but lately I keep making the same ice cream concoction: vanilla ice cream (chocolate would be great, too, I’m sure), raspberries, chocolate chips, and mini marshmallows all mashed up together. I don’t know if this is pregnancy related, or if I just like this mixture. It’s similar to what I’ve always ordered at Marble Slab or Spill the Beans.

I have a cloth diaper update. So, as I said in my 30 week blog, we ordered a “grab bag” of six girl diapers from GoGreen Pocket Diapers, using a $50 gift certificate from Travis’s parents. We decided to do that even though we wouldn’t get to pick the colors because the diapers were about $7 each that way, instead of $9 to $10. Anyway, we got the diapers, kept the four that we liked, and are currently selling the other two on Ebay (zebra print and bright pink). While I was on Ebay listing them, I noticed that other people were selling the same exact cloth diapers for way cheaper than what GoGreen charges! I looked into it and found that GoGreen orders their diapers from a large manufacturer in China called Alva Baby, and then marks up the price by a ridiculous percentage. Alva Baby sells their diapers on Ebay under the store name “perfect_store_I,” and also at www.alvababy.com. Their price is between $4.59 and $5.59 per diaper, with free shipping!! GoGreen charges between $9 and $15 per diaper, depending on which type you want, PLUS $5 shipping on every order. On top of that, when I placed my order there using the $50 gift certificate, they wouldn’t let me use it toward the shipping cost. I had to pay the $5 using my debit card. I asked them about it, and they said, “Since we have to pay the shipping, we can’t take it out of a gift certificate.” This made no sense to me since they were paid actual money when the gift certificate was purchased. Grr.

I ordered three diapers from the Ebay store yesterday, two of which are the $15 type, which I’m really excited about! I paid a total of $15.99 for all three, when the same three diapers from www.gogreenpocketdiapers.com would have cost $44 when you include the shipping cost!!!

Ok, sorry about my long rant on that. It really makes me mad! These people are making a killing and all they’re doing is buying and selling someone else’s product.

At yesterday’s class, we talked more about labor and what to expect. It’s good to have an idea of what thoughts might go through my head and what I might feel, do, and say so that Travis and I will both know how to handle it. Basically, the husbands are just being instructed to stay encouraging, do whatever we tell them to do, and not take offense if we say mean things. J Perfect.

Then we watched a birth video. Poor Travis. He wasn’t feeling well in the first place yesterday, and I think he almost tossed his cookies. He’s now thinking that he might want to support me from behind so he won’t have to see everything, which is totally fine with me. I think I’d feel more supported (physically and emotionally) with him behind me rather than standing off to the side gawking at me. The only thing is that he was considering catching the baby, but I think he’s sort of insecure about that idea even though it would be pretty cool. I can also catch her myself if I want to. I have no idea whether I’ll want to or not. We’ll just see how it goes. You can’t very well plan out the whole birth process in advance anyway.

Making Room For Norah

So…(sigh)…we’re still having trouble knowing where to start with all the cleaning we need to do. It’s so overwhelming. We did manage to put some stuff up in the attic finally, so it’s looking a little better. And next week is Spring Break, so we’ll both pretty much be home all week and will hopefully get a LOT done. I’ll go nuts if we don’t. I just want to have it all done and organized and clean and ready.

This weekend we had a really nice St. Patrick’s Day dinner with Eric and Valerie (they brought homemade corned beef, cabbage, and veggies!!). Travis also made really good Irish soda bread! Then on Saturday, Eric’s sister Dana came all the way up from Greenwood to bring us tons of clothes that her girls had outgrown! Norah now has clothes in sizes all the way up to 3T! I spent some time organizing those, plus all the other clothes that are 3 months and up, and some of them have already gone up to the attic and are ready to be pulled out when Norah grows into them. (But I want her to stay little forever!)

Midwife appointment: we just got home from our 32 week appointment. I don’t want to make this blog a whole lot longer than it already is, so I’ll TRY to be brief.

We got to spend some time getting to know Linda, the other midwife that will be attending the birth (unless there are two births going on at once). We really liked her!

Weight is now 134.5 lbs., and official belly measurement (fundal height) is 31 centimeters (technically one week behind, but totally fine).

She retested my hemoglobin level because it had been on the low side. I’ve been taking a supplement called Chlorofresh to bring it up, and apparently it’s working because I’m at a good level now (11.4).

I was having a Braxton-Hicks contraction when Linda put her hands on my belly to feel where Norah was, and I didn’t even know it! I guess I get them more often than I thought. Once in a while they’re strong enough to be uncomfortable, but often my belly gets really hard without any discomfort. I wasn’t sure if this was a contraction or if Norah was just in a weird position. Now that I know it’s a contraction, I would estimate that I have them quite often – maybe five times a day. My body is doing exercises to prepare for birth, just like I’ve been doing!

Norah is head down and will probably stay that way. I thought so, because I keep feeling kicks up high (like right now). Linda showed us how to feel for different body parts, which was pretty cool!

This part might gross you out, and I’m sorry, but I think it’s important – placentas. Different cultures have different traditions, beliefs and practices regarding the placenta, which is the organ that is created along with the baby at the beginning of pregnancy. Its main function is to nourish and supply oxygen to the baby. In our culture, most people regard the placenta as a waste product, and it is usually disposed of immediately after birth. In other cultures, a woman might eat her placenta, bury it in a ritual, keep it attached to the baby until it shrivels up and falls off (yeah, that one is a little odd to me), or any number of other things. Since it is not my nature to be wasteful, I wanted to know my options. We asked Linda about it today. She gave us some ideas and basically said we can do whatever we want with it. The birth center is going to send it home with us no matter what we decide, because legally they are not allowed to dispose of it for us. Now, I am not going to fry up my placenta and make a meal out of it. That sounds gross to me. But we’re looking into having it encapsulated. Linda said she knows of someone who does that, but she charges something like $200, which seems like a lot. So we might do it ourselves. You just need a food dehydrator, something to grind it up with, and some capsules to put the powder in.

Now, what’s the point of ingesting it, you ask? The placenta is an extremely nutritious organ. I think it is meant to be eaten by the mother. I’m pretty sure most animals eat their placentas. It just seems like the natural thing to do. In human mothers, eating the placenta has been associated with a faster recovery, improved lactation, and reduced rates of postpartum depression. There are probably other benefits that we don’t even know about. It would be nice to take advantage of those.

Anyway, again, I’m really sorry if I grossed you out. When you think about it, though, is it any stranger than eating liver, or gizzards, or any other piece of meat? (Ok, maybe just a little…)

On that note, have a nice week! I hope you weren’t eating dinner while you read this! J

22 Weeks Pregnant

Happy Snow Day! For those of us in the South, today is a good day to stay in. We couldn’t even see the outline of our street when we woke up this morning. I think one of our neighbors tried to leave, then slid all over the cul de sac and had to ask for help pushing the car back into his driveway. I guess he gave up. We’re not even attempting it.

At 22 weeks (5 months!), my belly button is getting pretty shallow. :-P Baby has eyebrows and fingernails now, and is getting stronger and stronger. Last night Travis got to see the movements for the first time, and he also felt some pretty strong kicks. The baby should be 11 inches from head to toe, and weigh in at about a pound! It seems like yesterday that we were measuring it in millimeters and grams! In the past week I think I have felt baby hiccups a few times, as well as some Braxton-Hicks contractions once for about ten minutes.

I want to use the rest of this week’s blog to talk about cloth diapers. I hope I don’t bore you to pieces. This is exciting stuff to me, but I’m weird like that. I’m kind of obsessed, really.

Travis and I decided a LONG time ago that we want to use cloth diapers. There are a whole slew of reasons to do it, and only one or two reasons I can think of not to. Some of our reasons for doing it are:

· - They’re adorable! They come in a bajillion different colors.

· -You never have to worry about running out of diapers.

· - I don’t think it’ll be that much work, and I don’t mind what work it does involve.

· - They’re better for the baby’s skin, and more comfortable.

· - They’re way cheaper than disposables in the long run. This is an important point. The cost of using disposable diapers for one child (birth to potty training) is estimated to be around $2,000 in the US. Our cloth diapers will cost us around $350 TOTAL. (We plan to do diaper laundry every 2-3 days. It’s not a good idea to let them sit much longer than that.) If you factor in that we plan to reuse the same diapers on two or three children, the savings is humongous. If we have two kids, the disposable diaper total is around $4,000. $350 is less than 9% of 4,000! That’s like buying a $35 pack of disposable diapers for about $3.

· - Lastly, I don’t feel good about putting 4-ish years worth of diapers in the landfill. Nobody even knows how long it takes for them to break down…they pretty much just sit there forever, and they have chemicals in them that aren’t good for the environment. And poo. Gross.

Ok, now that I’ve filled you in on why we plan to use cloth diapers, I want to tell you about the specific diapers we chose.

There are a whole bunch of different “cloth diapering systems.” The cheapest are prefolds with covers. This is the old fashioned type. They involve folding the diaper a certain way, fastening it onto the baby, and then putting some type of waterproof shell overtop. You can fasten them with diaper pins, but these days they make something called a snappi that has little tiny hooks that hold the diaper together. These are safer and easier to use than pins.

At the other end of the spectrum (most expensive and most convenient) are all-in-one diapers. You use them just like you would disposables, except you throw them in the wash instead of in the trash. They snap or Velcro, and usually you buy them in sizes, so you have to buy a set of smalls, a set of mediums, etc. Another note about these is that they take forever to dry since they’re all in one piece.

The diapers we chose are somewhere in the middle of these two extremes. The first, which I found months and months ago, before I was pregnant, are called Best Bottom diapers, by Nicki’s Diapers (www.nickisdiapers.com).

This diaper is an “all-in-two” system. It consists of one-size waterproof covers (adjustable to fit babies from about 8 to 30 lbs.) with sized inserts (small, medium, and large) that snap into the covers. These end up being one of the cheaper systems to use because when you change the diaper, if the shell is pretty clean, you can just wipe it out and snap in a new insert. That way, you don’t have to have as many covers. (The cover is the expensive part.) I also like them because they won’t take up much room in a diaper bag and will make less laundry than other types.

The other diaper we plan to use is the GoGreen diaper, from www.gogreenpocketdiapers.com.

This is a pocket diaper. It consists of a waterproof shell with a soft fabric lining that has a pocket that you stuff with an absorbent insert. This particular brand is the least expensive of this type that I’ve seen that still gets wonderful reviews. The cost is $9 per diaper, while most other well-made pocket diapers cost around $20. I like it because of the cost, the adorable colors, the soft lining, and the fact that it, too, is adjustable to fit a baby from about 8 to 30 lbs.

So, why are we getting two different types? Both diapers get excellent reviews. They don’t leak, they fit well on babies of all shapes and sizes (some cloth diapers look really bulky), they’re cute, they’re well-made (don’t fall apart in the wash), and they’re cost effective! Honestly, we were having a hard time choosing one over the other, so we just decided to get some of each. Also, I think the Best Bottom will be better for outings and trips, while the GoGreen might be slightly more comfortable for the baby and will work well at home and at night, since you can stuff extra inserts into the pocket to absorb more wetness while the baby sleeps.

And that’s my dissertation on cloth diapers! I hope it was interesting enough that you actually made it to the end. J

If you haven’t voted on the gender yet, you have until the day of the ultrasound: Wednesday, January 19^th! Vote! Hope you have a good week!