18 week belly

If you hang out with me here, you will have to endure me blathering on about pregnancy every so often. This is one of those posts, so if you aren't interested, skip it ;)

This pregnancy has been so weird. So not like my pregnancies with my boys. The nausea lasted longer (bleh) and I ended up losing 10 lbs my first trimester, which is ridiculous. I love having an appetite now, although I can't eat much at a time and some things still don't sound very good. I am eagerly awaiting the "look like a 15-year-old" acne's departure, though it does seem to be getting better. With the boys, I started to "pop" (a euphemism for: my stomach muscles gave up and I started looking pregnant even though it was mostly organs being displaced) much earlier than with this little one. In many, many ways this prenancy is highly similar to my pregnancy with Issy and notsomuch my pregnancy with the boys. Having a girl? Joe feels confident enough to call the baby "she". We'll see!

Everything is all set on the "prenatal care" front. I got an appointment with midwife group in Rexburg and will be seeing them on Friday. I also have an appointment with the parenatologist set for Feb 11th. This is later than I would like (ideally, they would do the first doppler/amnio at about 20 weeks- I will be 22) but since I made the appointment and not my midwives, they just had to take my word for it and they gave me the "first available". I am hoping my midwives can pull some strings and get them to fit me in earlier, so that will be a topic of discussion on Friday, but I don't know.

I would be lying if I said that I wasn't apprehensive about all this. New midwives, new doctors, bloodwork, amnio, lots of driving, working out babysitters for the kiddos, lots of decisions to make if the baby is positive. I am trying not to be overwhelmed by the whole situation. Seriously, one breath at a time at this point. Make the best decisions we possibly can for baby Spud.