23 Weeks

Size of the Baby: More than 11 inches long and over a pound. Over a pound! Somehow that seems like an important milestone. It took 23 weeks to reach a pound but will take only ~17 weeks to put on another 5-7 pounds. Babies are amazing.

Weight gain/loss: Pregnancy weight gain continues to be weird. Overall gain is 13-14 pounds, which is totally normal, but a week ago I had shot up several pounds and this week I’m actually back down a couple. It surprised me only because I didn’t expect to ever see the numbers go down outside of normal day-to-day fluctuations. But I eat when I’m hungry, and I don’t when I’m not. I do find that I get full more quickly, which means I eat smaller meals overall. *shrug*

Maternity clothes: So I went to Target over the weekend hoping to get a couple cheap maternity t-shirts to take to Hawaii. I have plenty of normal shirts, but most of them aren’t long enough to cover the oh-so-attractive elastic waistband all of my pants are now sporting. You can imagine my annoyance when I discovered that Target’s maternity section consisted of about 3 racks of clothes, and they only had t-shirts in either XS or XXL. I ended up buying a couple normal t-shirts one size larger than I’d usually get.

The compression leggings that I mentioned last week arrived yesterday, so I tried them on last night. First of all, they may be leggings but they are still not stylish enough to wear on their own so that plan didn’t work out. And second of all, those suckers are TIGHT. I guess they are supposed to be, but I’m not particularly looking forward to wearing them for 12 hours of traveling. Hmph.

(I always have a lot to say about maternity clothes, don’t I?)

Sleep: Ugh. Not so hot. I slept horribly on Sunday night and I’m still recovering from that, although some of the blame probably lies with the rumbling thunderstorm that went on the ENTIRE night.

Movement: Jose can regularly feeling her moving from the outside now, which is cool. (Last Friday she was moving like crazy. I swear she was having a dance party in there.) And the feeling is changing some for me. Sometimes it’s pokes or jabs, but now I sometimes feel a general rolling motion — or just some even harder to describe “weird sensations.” Maybe those are full body rolls or stretches? I like being able to feel her though. Oh, I just felt her right now! Cool.

Food cravings: Sonic cherry limeade. I basically want one every day, although I’ve been saving it for the weekends.

Best moment this week? Hmm. It was kind of a slow week and weekend. I did enjoy a nice lazy Sunday with Jose though. We watched a lot of TV and then enjoyed a yummy home-cooked dinner.

What I miss: I might stop including this one each week since I don’t really miss anything at the moment.

What I’m looking forward to: VACATION! VACATION! HAWAII!

Milestones: Depending on the source, baby has somewhere between 20-35% chance of survival if she was born today. That’s low, but still sort of unbelievable to me. Modern medicine is amazing! But baby girl, you need to stay put until August, you hear me?