9 weeks to go

The rainy season is ending here, so we've been able to revisit all our favorite places again. A few weeks ago we went to Limantour Beach at Point Reyes. It wasn't really that cold, but Anja wanted to wear her hat and gloves anyway.


We had family visiting the week before last, Anja's aunt and two cousins. We visited many of our local highlights, like this spot in Bolinas for tidepooling:


...and Chimney Rock for seal watching:


With just nine weeks to go, prenatal visits continue to be uneventful. I am slightly anemic, like most pregnant women in the third trimester, but my glucose screen came back great, so no gestational diabetes to worry about. The baby measures right on for size, and I've gained exactly the average recommended amount of weight. Heartburn is back full force, and this time is actually worse than before. It was so bad last Friday night that I woke up in the morning with a badly burned esophagus from all the bile that kept coming up. It's like having a sore throat, except along your entire esophagus! It recovered after a few days of minimal, careful eating. So from now on I have to eat even smaller meals and nothing after 8:00 every night.

We finally made it to the hospital tour. It seems like an okay place. The labor/delivery room is nice enough, with a shower you can use during labor, and birthing balls and stools and they seem to encourage moving around a lot during labor. The recovery rooms are very small, and shared, which I'm not very excited about. But hopefully we won't have to be there for very long after delivery, so that's okay. Getting there will be pretty easy, takes about half an hour, and we can park right outside the door. Our other option was to drive to San Francisco, but with traffic it could easily be an hour and it is a massive hospital in the middle of the city. The place we're going to instead has a much more personal feel to it.

Anja continues to show me where her baby is, when I show her where mine is. But just recently she has been really interested in a book we were given about becoming a big sister and what the new baby will be like. I'm sure she still doesn't understand, but at least the baby is part of our regular dialogue.


Anja had a great Easter weekend. Saturday was the local Easter Egg Hunt, which was at the park near us so we just walked over. Anja was surprisingly not scared by the Easter Bunny, and thought he was really funny. It's the first time we've subjected her to an Easter Bunny or Santa type experience and she loved it. She even gave him a high five.


Easter morning at our house below. Anja had fun finding the plastic eggs that were hidden. Some contained little chocolate eggs and some had stickers. She also got a couple of crocheted bunnies that I made, a kite, and some little matchbox trucks.


Don't forget to follow Laura's blog each week to see what vegetable we are now: the baby is a cabbage this week, which doesn't sound very cute until you see the picture: https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgiO28szwUjvuTZmVX7CSiVIaP7hYjaDQjjIpApfBD17E92qah79rOP62MkolAfn_Qohvr_vYmAhixTp-ynoDwEBCoo6yKlXtmDH3lBGQE4tC6FSIsHjyzsXWi0s3h-lbRu9SKoRRTaT8c/s1600/cabbage.JPG

Third trimester and the aquarium!

As a reminder, my due date is June 8th. Here is the actual fortune Jay got at Lily Kai this week:


Those people who say they enjoy being pregnant are lying. We are now in the third trimester, otherwise known as the longest 13 weeks ever. I'm tired, and have heartburn most of the time, I waddle when I walk and my hips and back are sore all the time. I have very little space for my lungs to expand so I'm always out of breath. Picking up Anja is really difficult and a little painful for me now. Until the last few weeks I was still wearing a few non-maternity shirts that were just really stretchy, but that's not possible anymore. I've gained 15lbs so far but it feels like much more. Interestingly, it is exactly the same amount I had gained at this point last time, within .5lbs. Yesterday I picked up some decidedly tent-like shirts that should fit me until June. I'm supposed to start keeping a "kick count card" of daily baby activity. I wish there was just a box to check for "moves around constantly like a bag full of kittens". Luckily, sleeping has been pretty good lately, so I'm feeling much better than I could. And although the sleep deprivation will be hard, I'm looking forward to feeling physically better once the baby is here. I want my lungs and stomach back!

Jay has started planning some races he will run in the near future. It's exciting to me, because these are races I can potentially run next year! I have a few in mind I would really like to train for, but I'm going to be much more conservative in my approach this time, since my recovery was very slow last time, and I just ended up disappointed when I couldn't meet my goals. I'm trying to remember that I have many years of running ahead of me, as long as I'm smart about training, and there's no need to rush.

We keep trying to arrange time to go for a hospital tour of the place we'll have to go for delivery. We can't bring Anja, since kids are banned from visiting hospitals right now (H1N1 season), and that makes it difficult for us. After many many weeks of trying to arrange for a babysitter, a friend volunteered to watch her today. But we decided to go out to a movie during that time instead, since that sounds much more rewarding than a hospital tour. It will only be the second time we've gone out on our own since we moved here over a year ago.

I'm much less concerned about the details this time around, having already been through this once before. We never went on a tour of Sparrow Hospital before we ended up having Anja there, and we had a wonderful experience. We don't really have a choice in hospitals due to our HMO anyway, so it isn't totally necessary to check it out ahead of time. It seems like an okay place. They are completing a brand new labor/delivery wing of the hospital sometime around June, so we may even get to be there for that. The one bad part is the distance from where we live. At best, we will have about a 30 min drive to the hospital. If it's rush hour, the drive could be much longer. I sometimes have fantasies that we can use the freestanding birth center in Santa Rosa that looks wonderful, but at over $6500 (not covered by insurance), it's not going to happen. Maybe we will "forget" to go to the hospital until it is too late and end up with a homebirth. Just kidding, Mom!

Yesterday we went to San Francisco's Aquarium on the Bay then downtown to meet a friend for her birthday lunch. Anja loved the aquarium and did pretty well at the Indonesian restaurant, considering how tired she was. Here she is at one of the touch tanks, petting a live starfish!


We have a yearly pass to this aquarium now, so we can go whenever we want. The bay area is expensive, if you want to go to any museums/zoos/aquariums, but the yearly passes are pretty reasonable. We are really lucky to have so many great places to visit that are so close. The aquarium has some amazing tanks of sea jellies. These guys are actually sea nettles. The still photo doesn't really do them justice, since they are in constant motion. Amazing.


Here are a couple of bat rays overhead in one of the underwater tunnels. Anja really likes the tunnels. Actually, she likes all of the exhibits.


The tunnels are always popular. There is one for primarily predatory fish and one with schooling fish and other less dominant creatures.


Anja and Jay in the tunnel.

Tahoe and Petaluma and 26 weeks

Well, we've all been transferring colds around here for the past three weeks or so. First Anja, who had the worst of it, and then me for the last two weeks, and Jay was a little sick off and on during that time. I'm just now beginning to catch up on everything and today is the first day I would say I'm not actually sick. Unfortunately I still had a really bad cough over the past weekend, sometimes uncontrollable, when we went away with my coworkers to Lake Tahoe. It was a fun trip, but I was pretty physically miserable. I slept a lot, or tried to through all the coughing. Having the depressed immune system of a pregnant woman is not fun at all. It's very frustrating to have to spend weeks fighting off a cold in addition to all the other pregnancy discomforts.

Otherwise, the pregnancy is going well. All measurements are right on target, and the baby is very active, just like Anja was. I just finished 26 weeks, so I have another 14 to go. Still seems like forever, but at least it's getting closer.

Even though the trip was tough for me, I'm glad we went. It's about a 3 hour drive from Petaluma and we left Thursday after work. Anja fell asleep in the car Thursday night and woke up Friday morning to this view out the window. The first thing she said was, "Snowmen!" when she saw some in the yard. She hadn't seen snow since she was 9 months old!


This is the back yard of the lodge we rented. Stunning. And with a great little sledding hill! That's Lover's Leap rising up in the background. We stayed for three days and even had some new snow while we were there, maybe a foot or so. We also lost power for about 12 hours the second day (overnight). It was just like being back in Michigan.


Here are Anja and I on our way out to the sauna. She was very excited to have her own towel like mommy.


She thought the snow was pretty cool. She threw a few snowballs, and we built her a little snow fort. She wasn't very impressed with how difficult it was to walk in fresh snow, though.


Meanwhile, spring has been here in Petaluma for about a month now. The hills are bright green and all the trees are blooming. We've had quite a bit of rain lately, but most days the sun still comes out for a bit. We had a few weeks of weather in the 50's, but now we're solidly in the 60's every day. Flowers are out in all the yards in town, beautiful.


We've been talking to Anja about the baby coming. Since my belly is huge now, I've been telling here there is a baby inside. She just thinks it's a joke, and shows me where her baby is:

Do it again!

Anja sledding for the first time at Lake Tahoe: