25 weeks

Here's my 25 week belly picture - I'm certainly getting bigger all of the time! I had a clinic appointment on Wednesday, and got to hear a very wiggly baby's heartbeat again, which still amazes me. 141 beats per minute. Adam had to work, so this was the first baby-related appointment he's missed. Baby G now weighs approximately 1.5 pounds, and is 13.5 inches long. H/she kicks a lot in the evening, especially when I'm going to sleep, and also when I wake up. It's really neat - kicks and movements feel like muscle twitches. I'm getting very eager to meet this little one 'in person'. At prenatal class last week, we talked about the possible interventions which may be necessary during delivery (c-section, forceps, vacuum extraction, etc.) and watched video clips of them. I was feeling a little bit overwhelmed by it all and had a hormone-y (translation: teary) evening, thinking about the (remote) possibility that I would have to be apart from baby G and Adam right after birth, blah blah blah. Thankfully, those moments are very few and far between, and I'm usually back to my old self pretty quickly. Adam didn't get much sympathy for his nosebleed that evening, though, which I still feel a little bad about. (Although, I must say - blood and guts and needles and such can make me feel queasy pretty often, but seeing nosebleeds has never bothered me. Kids would get them in schools and at camp frequently, and it was simply not a big deal. Probably because there's no pain involved. Anyway...)

I try to remember what I thought about how parents think and feel about their children before being pregnant, and find it difficult. Maybe it's all of the hormones, but I realize that most parents probably feel the same way about their children as I do about this baby - that h/she is pretty much the only baby who has ever been born. I seem to spend a lot of time thinking about how we can be the best parents possible, and how to care for, raise and teach this child how to get along in the world. And I can't imagine how our lives are going to change, but in a good way rather than a scary one. At the same time as I love this baby ridiculously much, I don't want to become someone who can only carry on a conversation if it has to do with my child. I imagine it's tricky, especially while staying at home to look after the baby (since your world revolves around this little one's itinerary for the first while). But I really, really, really want to be able to hold a conversation about other things without feeling the need to turn the conversation back to me and what the baby's up to. I think that part of that is probably me wanting other people to see me as more than someone who can reproduce, but I also imagine that it will be a defense mechanism to keep myself sane. And who knows, everything might just work out beautifully and in a lovely balanced way and I won't even have to think about these things after baby G arrives. Like most things, we'll just have to wait and see.