State of the Family Address {+ 32-Week Pregnancy Update} -

Do you like how I said back in April that I was going to be doing State of the Family Address posts monthly, and that I haven’t done one since?

Well, I intend to remedy that.

I still haven’t decided how I’m going to go forward exactly with these (with the format or the series or the focus or frequency or whatever), but I do know that I miss writing more about our life updates on here, so here goes this last week’s.

Pregnancy Update

I’m currently almost 32 weeks along, and so far, this pregnancy has been quite different from my other two, mostly just over the last couple months. Starting at 24 weeks, I started getting distinctive prelabor symptoms, which made me extremely nervous as they were exactly what I’d felt right before my water broke with my second baby. I went in to an emergency doctor’s visit at that time, and the baby had seemingly engaged down into the birth canal but then moved back up again, so I felt a relief from the symptoms for awhile.

But then they started again, off and on, a few weeks later.

Then they’ve gotten more and more intense over the last week or two.

Finally, I went in Monday for ANOTHER emergency appointment to see what in the world was going on.

For starters, the visit proved I was not crazy—my body has definitely been laboring, as my baby is currently positioned very low at a -1 station, and I’m just starting to dilate and 60% effaced.

While the on-call doctor we met with said that that wasn’t completely unheard of, he thought we needed to proceed with caution, so he hooked me up to a contraction monitor and told me that if I were having contractions, he was sending me up to the hospital right then so the baby could get steroid shots.

Well, the good news was that I didn’t register any contractions while there. The bad news is that I’ve had some since, though thankfully they haven’t been regular at all.

He also did what’s called a fetal fibronectin test, which is where they swab the cervix to test for a certain protein that’s only released when the amniotic sac starts to detach from the uterine wall. Basically, the test is really good at showing if you’re NOT in labor, but it’s not very good at showing if you ARE (aka, if you get a negative, it’s a pretty sure thing that you’re not in labor, but if it’s a positive, it can be caused by a number of different possibilities).

Thankfully, mine was negative, which the doctor thinks should buy me at least two more weeks.

I went in to my regular doctor today, and she also thinks we need to proceed with caution—I’ve been basically commanded to take it (even) easier than I have been, given some medication to take as needed when the contractions start coming again, and to plan on the baby getting steroids at some point in the next few weeks. Judging by a comment my doctor made, I kind of think she’s planning on us being lucky if we make it to 36 weeks at this point.

All this uncertainty has meant a heightened sense of anxiety, as well as the feeling that I need to prepare for the baby to come sooner than my second did (who was born at 37 weeks exactly). Honestly? Right now I’m just praying we make it to at least 36, because I still feel like my water could break at any minute (though the tests did at least give me some peace of mind).

I also failed my first glucose screening with this pregnancy, just as I did when pregnant the first time around. But, during the 3-hour glucose test at the hospital, I passed all 4 blood draws with normal levels, which was a big relief.

Update on the Fam

As winter busted through autumn awfully early this year, so did the usual sickness that seems to always accompany it. In the past two weeks, we’ve all been hit by a stomach bug (though only Raven has actually thrown up), and the kids have had colds.

Lest you think it’s all worry and sickness here though, we’ve also had a lot of good stuff going on lately.

Raven just completed a 4-week swimming course, which she’s loved. It was her first time having swim lessons of any kind, and I was nervous about how she’d take to it, just because we’ve definitely raised her to have a healthy (or maybe unhealthy) fear of water. But, to our pleasure, she took to the lessons immediately and eagerly looked forward to them. While I won’t be sorry to get those two evenings back a week, I will be sorry that she won’t get to go again until the spring.

A couple Sundays ago (November 3rd, to be exact), Matt and I decided we were going to start doing “walk training” with Mathias, since he was 16 1/2 months old and still not walking (and I really, REALLY need him to start walking before the baby gets here). We always knew he was strong enough and had the balance for it, but we were both still a bit surprised that after only ten minutes or so of cheering and encouragement, he easily walked across the whole living room. Of course, he’s still shown no interest in walking of his own accord since, but at least we now know definitively that he can.

We’ve been trying to prioritize seeing our extended families and friends more lately, so the last few weeks have found us going to two family reunions, visiting Matt’s grandma, me having breakfast with my old group of high school friends, and spending time with my family at our annual Halloween party and other events, plus our usual weekly playdate with friends.

Raven is very excited about the new baby and is awestruck every time she feels the baby move. She is always rubbing/kissing/patting my tummy and talking to her brother in there, which is just the sweetest. She also reminds me constantly that “we’re going to have to watch Mathias really close” around the new baby (#youretellingme). I told Mathias about the new baby for the first time the other day, and he poked my belly a few times, kept pointing back and forth between my stomach and the picture of the baby I was showing him in a book, gave me a quizzical look, and then started rubbing his own tummy. So yeah, he basically totally gets what’s about to rock his world.

On the Menu

I found a new (to me) blog that I love—The Big White Farmhouse–where she does weekly recaps of their menus with her family updates, which I really like. So here’s what was on our menu last week: