3-13-13

Today, I turned 33 on 3-13-13. A palindromic birthday. As my girl Sarah said in the card she sent.

Mid-week and mid-milestone birthdays are kind of lame. We’re actually not doing much to celebrate tonight — work has been too crazy to really plan a fancy dinner (our usual way to celebrate birthdays) for tonight and we’re headed out of town this weekend for a birthday celebration with my fellow March-born college roommates up in Syracuse. My office did have some birthday cupcakes for me at our weekly meeting today. (Technically, they were St. Patrick’s Day cupcakes… that St. Pat is always stealing my thunder. But they were from Wegmans and were DELICIOUS considering I’m not a huge cake person.) I stopped at Caribou Coffee to pick up my free birthday drink. (And accidentally forgot to ask for decaf, so hopefully I’m not up too late tonight!) Thanks to RA‘s inspiration, I’ve got some root beer chilling in the fridge for some birthday floats for dessert tonight. But other than that, it’s a pretty typical day – working late, making stir fry for dinner, probably doing a little laundry and catching up on the DVR in between calls from my family, opening gifts my family sent.

We are going to plan a not-as-fancy dinner date for Friday of next week. We might even go to a movie after!

I guess I’m past the age where birthdays are just an excuse to have a crazy party, but honestly? I think I like it better this way.

Halfway There…

This Monday, I hit the 20-week mark of the pregnancy, so according to all the books, I’m halfway there.

(I’d like to point out that for the first two weeks of pregnancy, you aren’t even actually pregnant, so there’s really 38 weeks that you are pregnant… which means that halfway would be 19 weeks after those two weeks are up… which would be week “Week 21,” so next week. And then if you factor in that I didn’t even know I was pregnant for the first five/three weeks of my pregnancy (depending on when you consider the pregnancy to start), I only know of the pregnancy for 35 weeks… which means that halfway through the time I actually am aware I’m pregnant would be 17.5 weeks after we found out, so “Week 22.5.” So I may be “halfway there” according to the technical way pregnancy is tracked, but I’m still 2.5 weeks away from being halfway through the emotional roller coaster that comes with actually being pregnant.)

(Not to mention, the 40 weeks is an average and the likelihood of delivering on my due date is pretty minimal.)

(Geez, I wonder if I’m a lawyer or something. Ugh.)

SO! Twenty weeks! We’re halfway there!

(Woah, livin’ on a prayer!)

We had our anatomy scan ultrasound yesterday afternoon. My appointment was scheduled for 3:40 and I was supposed to go over to the other office, a few blocks away, for my actual appointment at 4:15. Well, I didn’t get in to the ultrasound until 4:15 (this is why I try to schedule at the beginning of the day!), so my doctor called me at the office and rescheduled my appointment with her for two weeks later.

The anatomy scan was pretty cool. It went on for about 40 minutes as the tech took all the measurements she needed. It was fun to get to watch the baby hanging out on the screen the whole time… he or she was awake, but not super active. There were a few sneezes (or whatever the equivalent of that is in the womb… it sure looked like a full body sneeze!), a big yawn, and at one point, he or she bopped himself or herself in the head with his or her fist. (You know what? The he/she is getting cumbersome. I’m just going to go with it and ‘fess up that yes, indeed, I spend most of my time referring to my darling child as “It.”) We told the tech we didn’t want to find out the sex and she said she’d tell us to look away when we needed to, but the baby was too lazy and/or shy to show its private bits anyway… it spent the whole exam with its legs crossed and pulled up tight and didn’t budge from that spot. I’m guessing the tech could have maneuvered the ultrasound thing into a better position to attempt to get a look, but since we didn’t want to know, she didn’t bother.

We were able to see a few 3D images, although we didn’t get any of them printed out. The 3D screenshots she got weren’t all that great, anyway. (Neither were the regular screenshots… the “good tech” was out of the office on leave this month, sadly. Well, not sadly for him. He was out because his wife just had a baby.) Anyway, so we didn’t get any good 3D pics to take home, but it was pretty cool to see the 3D live shot. The baby totally has Adam’s high cheekbones. (He also swears there was a dimple in there, too.)

So, here’s a kind of crappy photo of the baby’s profile.

And this was the best of the four printouts we got. Sigh.

It’s hard to tell whether the baby looks much like anyone in this photo, although we can sort of see the resemblance to Adam’s profile even in this photo because we spent so much time looking at the baby’s face during the actual ultrasound. I’m not upset… I think Adam’s pretty darn cute, so fine by me if the baby takes after him!

The only glitch in the ultrasound, which likely isn’t even a thing, is that my amniotic fluid levels were borderline low. The tech had a doctor that was in the office (so, not my doctor) take a look at images and he said it wasn’t anything to be concerned about now, but that my doctor will probably want me to have another ultrasound in 4 weeks to see how it looks then. Until then, I’ll try to up my water intake (which is already pretty high… TMI alert: I peed when I got to the office at 3:35, by the time I got into the exam at 4:15, the tech told me to go again because my bladder was full and the ultrasound needed to be done while it was empty, and by the end of the exam, she noted that it was full again… so she didn’t think my water intake was the likely culprit). The doctor said not to worry, so I’m not… I’m just seeing it as a bonus 24 week ultrasound, because if everything had checked out A-okay, I might not have had any more until possibly the very end, if at all!