the pools are opennn

 The DC pools officially reopened on Tuesday October 13th! If they didn't have limited hours and limited reservations/week, I would probably end up going into labor in the pool.

I was so psyched about it that I even attended a webinar today with DCPR during lunch to learn more. It sounds like setting up this 'no recreation without online reservation' has been a massive undertaking for them and they are still working out the kinks. I couldn't get into my account on Tuesday and missed out on the slots this week, but I was shocked that when I called DCPR's customer service line about it I actually got a call back within 30 minutes and they solved my problem quickly. DC govt is turning over a new leaf, my hopes are high for this working out. 

little chunks the bump- week 21

WELCOME TO THE SECOND HALF OF PREGNANCY

After the anatomy scan, Little Chunks made a big show of moving around so I could feel it for the first time. Here's the bump this week:

We started talking to doulas and attending 'meet the doula' sessions to get a sense of what's out there. There are a lot of different companies with a lot of different set ups- we have a few recs but one of them was for a group that doesn't assign your doula until you go into labor, and while all the doulas seem great, we also won't know who our midwife will be, so it would be nice to at least have one less unknown there in the room. 

My company has this new service I've been using called Maven, which is basically a maternal support program that you can access through an app. I have a care team assigned to me, including a doula, and I can set up appointments with them to video chat over the phone. We attended a 2 hour birth 101 session a few weeks ago with one of their doulas and were very impressed. I wish this woman could just be my doula, but she lives in the Philadelphia area. I did talk to her a few weeks ago and she gave me some tips on selecting a doula, which all seemed pretty boilerplate but she did say that I should observe physical characteristics as well and if my doula would be a good physical match for me. This is the first time I have ever been given the OK to judge someone based on their physical appearance, and am wondering what qualities I should analyze- head shape? waist girth? flat footed or not? Will need to get my list together. 

20 week anatomy scan

The big news we have from this week is that we did the 20 week anatomy scan, and Doglet is doing awesome!

Of course, the appointment came at a bit of an unfortunate time because I had two submissions due last week, including one on Friday. However, since my co-workers know now, I could tell them in advance about the appointment and set a hard cut off time for when I had to stop working on Friday. As a result, the seismic forces on our California building for this 65% submission are lifting it up into the air and throwing it down violently, but that can be dealt with later. 

The 20 week anatomy scan is a big deal- it lasts a lot longer than the 12 week ultrasound so you can enjoy the images of your baby more. And, if you want, you can find out the gender, which we did...

Here is the car trip to the appointment, pondering what the gender will be:

I will not reveal the gender just yet until all parties have been told, but I enjoyed how the ultrasound technician told us. She asked us very clearly at the beginning of the appointment if we wanted to know or not, and throughout the 20 minutes or so she was taking measurements, she didn't mention anything about the gender. I was nervous and not sure how she was going to tell us, so I didn't say anything, but I kept thinking that she must know already and hadn't told us yet. When we got to the end, she asked us again for confirmation that we wanted to know the gender, and we were like YES. Then she put up an image of the baby on the screen, wrote It's A...she hesitated for second...and then revealed it. Jubilance can only describe how happy we were in that appointment. 

The baby is healthy and doing well. In fact, the baby is a bit rotund, so I have started calling it variations of Little Chunks instead of Doglet now. There's always something to worry about, and I felt like my bump was growing rather slowly, so it was a relief when we learned that the baby is actually quite big- it is in the 88th percentile of weight based on their estimates. They said at 90% the baby is getting to be too big, so we are just below the cut off 😅 I know it's just an estimate, but when I saw how big this baby's belly is, I believed it...its belly and its head are the same size....it really kills me. I must have looked at this picture 100 times to get another good laugh. Little chunks is squirrelling away all of my food into its belly for the winter or something. 

I also learned that I have an anterior placenta, which means that the placenta is attached to my uterus towards my stomach. It's more common for the placenta to attach in the back or at the top. Who knew? I always thought the cord would attach near my stomach, I guess because the umbilical cord is attached to the baby's stomach, and it seemed like it would be more of a tummy to tummy connection. But apparently the placenta can drift around the uterus and won't necessarily stay there. The internet says "It is unclear why different placental locations occur but it is speculated that the placenta tends to favor growing toward the top and back of the uterus because it increases access to those blood vessel-rich areas." So hopefully it will float away soon.

Another reason I had slight worries (even though there was no reason to) was that I hadn't felt any definite movements yet, and I read that you can start feeling those around week 18. I also read that from having an anterior placenta, you may feel movement later because the placenta is blocking your stomach, so that solves that. However, it seems like a total coincidence, but when we got home later that night, Zach and I were lying on the couch and I felt a fluttering in my stomach, and then another one. His arm was kind of lying across me, so I moved it to see if I still felt anything. I'm positive those were the first real movements I felt, because I ended up feeling those flutters all weekend. It's a very pleasant feeling, kind of like a tickle in your belly that doesn't actually tickle. I think I had felt a few sensations like this earlier in the week but this was definitely the most clear. Pretty funny it happened on the same day as the big appointment. 

After the anatomy scan we had an appointment with a midwife, and then were starved, so we went to Little Sesame downtown to get some fuel for Chunks. I was still so excited from the appointment I didn't even realize that I was holding the long roll of ultrasound shots, and when I went up to order at the outdoor counter, the guy working there must have known what he was looking at because he asked if it was a boy or a girl. I was so taken aback. So the Little Sesame employee was officially the first person to know the gender, haha. 

We ordered and a few minutes later, a different guy called out our name to get the food. He had a container of ice cream in his hand that he said was a gift from the guy we ordered from. How nice! So we took our food to Farragut park and had a little picnic in the grass.  It was a gorgeous day outside, except there were a lot of pigeons running around.

Afterwards, we hightailed it over to Fairfax for a swim. All in all, one of the most solid days that will ever go down in the books. Just very, very happy.

Halfway bump- week 20

 I am finally at the halfway point! Hard to believe. We will find out the gender next Friday 😬

Starting to get a nice round little pumpkin in there.

I read a little bit of a natural birth book last night by 'the mother of midwifery' and felt good about it. It seems like when I tell people I will use a midwife I get negative reactions, which is weird. For one, we did natural birth for millions of years, and two, no one cares if someone is getting an epidural. Why has that become the only way? I seem to get responses like "what are you trying to prove" and "don't be too hard on yourself, it's going to hurt." 

I mainly just want to be able to actively move around during the pregnancy, and be able to feel what's going on so my body can tell me what I need to do. I want to feel in control of the situation with the support of others around me. For me, it seems like a healthier way to do it. How is that so bad! 

Obviously I need to be prepared that things will go differently and adjust as needed. I can't imagine all the women who gave birth when covid was declared a pandemic and all their best laid birth plans flew out the window. 

I learned from my Grandpa last week that my Grandma naturally gave birth to my dad as a breech baby. She was teeny tiny and it may be why she only had one 😅 I've heard they don't even deliver breech babies naturally anymore. I was also a breech and my mom had an unplanned c section as a result. I don't like to hear this history of breech babies in the family- this baby better cooperate and assume the vertical position.

This banana sized baby is getting real! Halfway party today. Onwards to wintergreen to see Zach's cousin who gave birth to a single and then twins 😯 and then to west Virginia to see my parents.

Cville

 Zach and I are spending the day in Charlottesville with doglet. We did a lot of walking today- and Zach claimed that I was unnecessarily holding my belly while I walked like it needed to be supported. I noticed I was doing this last week, I think I just like to feel the belly. It was also a little crampy today, which from reading may be from the ligaments stretching out.

For a Friday it was definitely a quiet day on campus, not too many people were out and about and buildings looked to have limited hours. Students generally appeared to be acting responsibly wearing masks etc, at least on campus. Who knows about weekend nights nights though.

We've been back to UVA since graduating but I hadn't walked around this thoroughly since then. We walked by an old dining hall (newcomb) we used to go to a lot, which has undergone a big renovation including a Starbucks, and took the back route from there over to my first year dorms which I still remembered. They've added tennis courts behind the dorms and renovated the small sandwich shop there which was pretty old school before, and now has that modern clean design look. I've also heard that they renovated the interiors of those dorms (they have AC now 😯) but didn't see that. Because of covid they've set up a bunch of those large wedding tents so people can study/hangout outside. Other renovations include Alderman library ( I hope they don't get rid of the creepy basement stacks and microfiche), sand volleyball courts, and completion of the cabel hall extension across JPA. All in all, UVA has monnnney. UDC was so bare bones compared to UVA. 

Zach and I also hung out on the lawn for a while, probably longer than we ever did while we were actually students there. The weather was so nice out and we were tired from driving/Zach probably stayed up half the night on Twitter reading about Trump having covid/I had a long work week wrapping up the design of this damn zig zag window frame, that we actually fell asleep on the lawn for a while.  

I started thinking about how we graduated a decade ago, but that we could probably still blend in as grad students, but then I saw Zach doing calisthenics on the lawn and thought nevermind:

I meant to take a preggers pic in front of the rotunda but I was so distracted by the calisthenics that I forgot. 

When we got back to the room I was surprisingly tired. But all in all a solid fall day.

Trump has covid

 Woke up this morning to a group tweet that said something about Trump having covid and I thought it was a joke, but quickly realized it wasn't. With the way Trump has behaved towards covid, I thought he was going to get it a long time ago, especially as boris johnson and the Brazilian president bolsinero got it pretty early on. But then you learned that he and others around him had  access to daily testing and it seemed like that was providing insurance against not wearing masks, etc. Which is pretty bad because he's setting an example in a situation that others don't have. But he has it now and he's an idiot. Update* it sounds like the virus spread at a white house event for the new supreme court nominee where few wore masks, so Trump likely had it at the debate this week. So irresponsible. I've never seen anything happen so well deserved in my life.

Through this neighborhood pregnant walking group I met a German woman who is imminently giving birth at Walter Reed, like next week, because her husband is a foreign service officer. I assume they have protocols there so that when the president is there it doesn't disrupt others seeking medical care but I have no idea. I wanted to ask her if she thought she might run into Trump during labor but refrained in case that wasn't German humor. 

We are 4 weeks away from the election, so this is a weird development. If something happened to Trump, would Biden then be running against Pence?