Sunday, September 21, 2014

31-37 weeks

Well, I'm officially out of the comfortable stage of pregnancy. At night when I need to get up five times to pee, everything hurts. It's hard to roll over, lean down, sit down, stand up.

I still don't have bad pelvic pain! But I honestly think it's because I'm lying down all the time -- ha! After a day of normal activity level, my hips hurt a bit more that night or the next day.

My emotions have seemed to even out, thank God. I feel overall very calm, patient, and ready to have the baby. I may lose it now and then, like uh, when I started sobbing last night because I was super nauseated and my mouth was salivating like crazy and I was thirsty, but I couldn't drink water or chew my mint gum, because both make the heartburn worse. Heh. But for the most part, I've been pretty zen.

Insomnia is back to sucking. I have a hard time falling asleep before midnight, and then I usually wake up naturally at around 6 in the morning and cannot fall back to sleep. I have no idea why, but it is so frustrating, and I know it attributes to my fatigue during the day.

I'm absolutely exhausted all the time and take daily naps. It might sound nice to nap every day, but I have zero energy to do normal things that need to get done, like vacuum, make dinner, play with my kids. I just lie in bed all day, just about five to six days a week. Every now and then, I'll have a day where I feel more energetic, but for the most part I am physically weary and tired, and actually sleepy all day long. I never experienced fatigue like this during my other pregnancies, and certainly not throughout the entire pregnancy.

It's still frustrating to try and eat. Too little food, and I feel light-headed and nauseated. Too much food, or the wrong choice of food, and I feel sick to my stomach, have heartburn, and just all-around gross. I eat about two meals a day and carbs make me feel like crap. I've discovered that I feel best on a low-carb, high fat diet, and that's what I've been eating the past few weeks to try to get my iron up, and it's been working. Lots of beef, eggs, and veggies. At least when I eat like that, I don't have horrible heartburn or nausea, and the protein helps me feel less light-headed.

I have been having a lot of prodromal labor as of week 32. Regular, crampy contractions always happen at night, after I'm already in bed. I've stopped timing them, because I know they are just going to stay like that without turning into actual labor -- until they do! But I don't expect that to happen early. I am still very worried about having the baby too quickly. I'm not so worried about my midwives not being here for the birth, but more so about John missing the birth, since during rush hour it takes him over an hour to get home, or my mom missing the birth, since she's not always great about answering her phone, haha.

My iron got lower -- really low. My hemocrit was at 28 (whatever that means?) and needed to be at 30 to legally have a homebirth. Well, after two weeks of eating a ton of beef and taking three different iron supplements, it's finally up to 30.5! I am thrilled, because if I didn't get it up, I would need iron infusions, which would happen a few times a week and would require me to sit in the hospital for about three hours each visit, and I just don't have the time or resources to do that, with having a two-year-old and only one vehicle. I am so thankful to God that my iron went up and I am in the "safe zone." I had been working so hard to get it up for over a month, and to have it dip even lower was confusing and frustrating! It was so low, I think it's only by his hand that it budged.

This baby is still so much more quiet than River and Austen were. I'm feeling lots of internal kicks, like I'm being socked in the stomach. And he sticks his little hands up near my bladder a lot (ouch!). I love feeling him move. I hope his quiet nature in the womb means he will be a mellow baby! (Except that he seems to be most active at around midnight... so that'll be fun in about three weeks!) I cannot wait to hold him.

(And no, we still don't know the gender, I just don't like saying "it" and have a feeling the baby's a boy. :)

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