Our Girl - 21 Weeks

How your baby's growing:
Your baby now weighs about three-quarters of a pound and is approximately 10 1/2 inches long — the length of a carrot. You may soon feel like she's practicing martial arts as her initial fluttering movements turn into full-fledged kicks and nudges. You may also discover a pattern to her activity as you get to know her better. In other developments, your baby's eyebrows and lids are present now, and if you're having a girl, her vagina has begun to form as well.

from (http://www.babycenter.com/6_your-pregnancy-21-weeks_1110.bc)

Note from Jen: she has been practicing martial arts (hence the nickname Ninja baby) for weeks now. The poor ultrasound lady could hardly get the pictures she needed since the baby was constantly flipping. We can even see her moving across my belly already.Abby, her dad, and I have been working hard on figuring out a name for baby sister. Abby has also been working hard on designating which things are hers and which belong to baby sister. So far she's doing pretty good at understanding that she has to share things, but I'm sure that will change the minute the baby is actually here. One of the things she is excited to share is the new Disney princess table and chairs that we bought with her Christmas money from Great Grandma Lorraine and Great Grandpa Harley. She has been so excited about her chair and baby's chair and keeps asking us to take them from her room downstairs and back again, based on where she is (we are not obliging, since she already had a table downstairs).
Abby got her H1N1 booster yesterday, so she should be officially protected from getting the swine flu. Unfortunately I think they also squeezed in a little grouchy vaccine too, because she has been having random meltdowns since the shot. She was really cute after getting her "poker" - she looked at me after they put the band-aid on her leg and said "poker time all done uh-huh". She was totally over the crying before we left the exam room and besides reminding me that poker time was done, she didn't seem to be affected at all.

Big Girl Potty

We are going to have a celebration tonight because Abby is such a big girl. After her nap today Abby went pee on the big girl potty! She did a really good job at sitting still on the potty until her business was done. We had a big cheering party after that great event and tonight we are going to have more celebrating. I hope this will be a good start to potty training.

Abby had her 15 month checkup and shots today - ouch! She was 24.5 pounds and 31 inches tall. She was in the 75th percentile for height and weight, but the doctor thought she was in the 100th percentile for smartness (no joke). He was really impressed with her 30+ word vocabulary and her ability to listen and follow directions. Plus she is a very, very good waver and had all the staff smiling after a nice wave.

We had a very quick trip down to Hastings over the weekend and attended the wedding of Steve's dental school friend Adam Mileski. His bride Anne was beautiful and Abby was on her best behavior at the reception (the wedding, not so much). She even made some new friends of her daddy's old classmates.

One Last Thing...

I forgot the funniest part about the shot experience. After we were all done and I was holding Abby so she'd stop whimpering, she looked right at the nurse and waved bye-bye to her. It was as if she was telling the lady to get away from her, please and thank you... What a joker :-)

One Last Shot

Abby got her last shot for a while today. We are all glad that she is done for a while and hope that the flu shot serves its purpose (or it will have a lot of torture for nothing). I guess the only way to know it works is for a flu free season, which means it may have worked or we may have just not been exposed. Poor kid... either way Steve and I both think it is better safe and sore than sorry when it comes to getting shots.

It is still bitterly cold in the U.P. and the snow keeps falling a little at a time. There was a good 3 inches on the car when I cleaned it off, so since Monday afternoon we've had at least that much snow. It's a good thing I enjoy it or it would be getting downright depressing.

Abby is making great strides on eating big girl food. We keep reducing the amount of mushy baby food she gets each day since it is a struggle to get her to eat it at all. She has an amazingly strong little jaw when she wants to keep mush out. I think the biggest problem with the baby food from her perspective is that she can't feed herself. She just wants to be miss independent already, so anything that she thinks she can do herself, she must do by herself. I will take all the blame for that... So anyhow, she tried real chicken for the first time last night and liked it. She takes her sweet time eating when it is real food, so we had to spend quite a bit of time at the table watching her mash up chicken. Eating real food also allows Abby the chance to be a chipmunk - her little cheeks get packed with stuff and she forgets to swallow it until her mouth is extra full. Luckily she has very developed control of her mouth and tongue, so we haven't had any problems with all this new big kid food. Now the problem is going to be getting Steve and I to eat better so that she isn't mad that she is eating vegetables and fruits while we are having bread and other calorie (and carbohydrate) rich foods. Bummer...

Red Hot

We have an interesting dilemma around here today - our computer's memory is completely full. It must be we have a few to many pictures of Abigail. Luckily we have an external hard drive, so I am moving all the pictures (except the Abby ones) onto it. She is just too cute to kick her pictures off the computer, for now...

Abby didn't do as well with these shots as the last two sets and woke up in the middle of the night a little warm. Her fever has been below 100.5 all day and has responded to tylenol, so we aren't too worried about it. Unfortunately with the fever came the crabbiness we were hoping to avoid. She is really wound up today. It is even more unfortunate because Steve and I were hoping to get away this weekend to see the newest James Bond movie, but with Abby being grouchy and feverish we aren't sure any of our babysitting potentials will want to have the pleasure of her crabby company. Oh well... we can always wait until Thanksgiving weekend when there is bound to be a grandma or two who will watch Abby.

Well... back to purging the unneeded from our computer's small memory so I can continue to upload new photos. Happy Friday!

All Shot Up

Abby had to get 4 shots today and she did not appreciate that one bit! But her dad and I think it is pretty important that she stay healthy, so we let those nurses poke her poor little legs anyway. Now she just has a few more immunizations to get before she gets a break for a few years. She had a flu shot along with her boosters, so we are hoping that she doesn't have to battle the flu this year. That would be no fun.

Since we got home Abby has been taking a nice long nap, leaving me plenty of time to surf the internet for the perfect bread bowl recipe to use for tomorrow night. Now I just have to find the time to make the bread bowls. I've also been enjoying old family videos while I transfer them onto dvds for my mom. So far we've watched Hannah, Nate and Emily's music videos from 1999 and our family vacation to South Dakota. Right now we are watching Medieval Times in Chicago from 1997 - boy do we look young!

Abby is still in the 95th percentile for all her growth (height, weight, head circumference). She was pitching a fit, so I didn't catch exactly what any of those measurements were, but the doctor said she is growing well and making excellent progress on her verbal and motor skills. Like we needed a doctor to tell us that...

Four Days Old on Day Five

Unfortunately for Abby, day 5 of being a big girl required a trip to the hospital lab, even though she was discharged yesterday. Our little gal has a bit of jaundice and is undergoing phototherapy (where they use special lights to break down the offending bilirubin in the cells). She started using her biliblanket yesterday afternoon and we have been faithfully switching it from her belly to her back every hour on the hour (which made for a very, very long night). So... this morning we got ready and went for our trip to the lab, where we had to let the nurses poke poor Abby's heel to get a blood sample. Fortunately, her levels are on the way down and she will hopefully be done with the light therapy sometime tomorrow.

On the bright side, the therapy is working and Abby is getting much more active and looking much less yellow. Last night she had her first sustained period of playfulness, which was a relief to us. She spent the time from 1 am to 2:30 am kicking and waving her arms and responding to us, which was really neat, even though we were both exhausted and wishing she would just go to sleep so we could catch a few hours of much needed rest. She's also been eating (albeit from a bottle) a lot more and making the messy diapers that come with eating more. All good signs that she will be over the jaundice soon.

Since Abby is on the light pad 24 hours a day, I have been housebound, and mostly stuck in a chair holding her to make sure the light pad stays on her little belly. For those of you who know me well, you know this is making me stir crazy, but she is well worth it. Steve had his first adventure of grocery shopping on his own. I made a list, but I know where everything is at the store and he had to do a little hunting, so it took longer than he thought it would. We do have everything that was on the list, so that was good.

We are back to the lab tomorrow for more blood testing and hopefully good news that we will be off the phototherapy.

0 for 6...

Well... The doctor is zero for six in his attempts to listen to Sparky's heartbeat. She is apparently afraid of having her heartbeat known. They tried really hard to pin her down today by pushing in on my belly, but she was too sneaky for them. We visited the doctor again this morning for the dreaded shot and blood draw visit. It was just as non-fun as I had expected. First was taking the two vials of blood to find out if I have gestational diabetes. Although they say you can't feel the needle once it is in your arm, I am pretty sure they are full of it because I felt that needle in my vein the whole time. Then I got to have a rhogam shot, since I am lucky enough to have rh negative blood. Hopefully Sparky won't have rh positive blood so I won't have to have that shot again - it really stung going in and my poor backside ached all day at work.

Sparky's next opportunity to evade the doctor and the doppler heartbeat monitor is February 13th - maybe as a valentine gift to the staff at the doctor's office she will decide to cooperate. Or maybe she will just be too big to evade them.

Hoping you are all staying warm - our garage door was frozen to the cement this morning and it took some boiling water and Steve prying at it to get it open.