Kitties!!!!

It's about time I posted about the kitties, it's been a while!!

They've all recently had their annual checkups, and they all came through with a clean bill of health.

First of all, here's Stumpy - she's about 19 months old now, and still has regular psycho spells... She's a very active kitty who loves to play! She's also very in tune with my feelings. At the start of my pregnancy when I constantly nauseous she would constantly snuggle up to my belly at night time whereas normally she sleeps in her bed outside our room, and she's also just recently started sleeping with us again. If I'm ever feeling tired and emotional, she always seems to know, and comes up to me and headbutts and purrs to me, and patting her always helps - she's very therapeutic.





And Lily - our beautiful, shy girl. She's still a scaredy cat, but has come out of her shell a lot, and is the biggest sweetheart once she feels safe - usually once we're in bed, or I'm sitting on the couch. Lily is best friends with both of the other kitties, and is such a beautiful cat. She's definitely the elegant one of the three :-)




And our baby Smudge, who's almost a year old!! She's only got a little body, and her eyes are still squinty due to birth defects, but she's the friendliest, sweetest cat (and also weighs more than Stumpy who LOOKS bigger than Smudge!). she adores Andrew, and her favourite time of the day is when she can sit on his chest and snuggle up to him. She sleeps on my pillow at night and waits for him to wake up in the morning and roll onto his back so she can properly smooch up to him. She's uncoordinated, and we think she has no depth perception, but we love her all the same!

And his birthday will be...

September 17! I'm booked in for an amniocentesis at 8:45am that day to check that his lungs are mature enough, and if that's all fine (and I daresay it should be), then they'll do the c section in the afternoon.

I have 2 nephews, Seth and Mason. Mason's birthday is also September 17 - so he'll be exactly one year older than his cousin. Seth's birthday is September 26, and I guess he'll be 4 this year. So mum's 3 grandchildren will all have birthdays 9 days apart :-)

Belly photos!

Due to popular demand! (Hi Zoe and Na!!!)

28 weeks



31 weeks




18 weeks


28 weeks



31 weeks




I didn't think my belly had really grown at all in the last couple of weeks, but according to the pics it's definitely looking rounder now!

Uhhhh.... 5 weeks to go?!!!

We saw the new obstetrician on Tuesday who we liked much more than our other OB who's going on sabbatical. He has more experience in cardiac issues I believe, and he explained things much better and sounded a lot more rational then our previous ultra conservative OB.

So we talked about the delivery date with him, and he said they have to find a good balance between my heart's health and the baby's development. The heart reaches its maximum workload between 28-32 weeks, and stays at that workload until the end of the pregnancy, so they basically want to put my heart under that much pressure for as little time as possible.

So we asked about dates, and he said he thought 36 weeks would be a good time, which would be September 14 - EEK!!!! That's 5 weeks away... We wanted October 8 since my mum gets here on October 6 but he said it's really better not to wait that long. The date may still change, they may bring it forward even earlier if they feel they need to, and they may push it back a bit if everything continues to go well, but I don't think they want to let it go much further than 36 weeks.

So yeah... 5 weeks to go. OMG.

Well Labour and Delivery is nice!

We had a 4 hour or so trip to L&D yesterday. Last weekend we were at the shops and I started to get blurry vision to the point where I couldn't read anything, and saw big bright spots in front of my eyes, and got dizzy and felt not so good. For me that's usually the first sign of a migraine, but I only got a fairly mild headache, not the migraine.

It happened again yesterday, so I thought I should ring and check if it was anything to worry about, and they told me to go straight to Labour and Delivery to get checked out.

So we did that, and they hooked me up to the baby monitor to check the baby (and we got to hear him kicking and hiccuping!), and checked my blood pressure and took a urine sample, and a blood sample. Turns out blurry vision is one of the signs of preeclampsia which is what they were worried about.

Everything tested fine though, and they did a basic test to make sure it wasn't neurological, so that was nice to know.

So they think it probably is a migraine, but the symptoms are just presenting differently, possibly due to the pregnancy. Which is fine - as long as I don't have the headache that leaves me curled up in agony in a dark room I'm happy!!!!

The good news is that we were very impressed with the hospital. We were at Lucile Packard Childrens Hospital which is the hospital attached to Stanford where I'll be delivering the baby. The facilities were really nice, the staff were all fabulous, they were efficient, I asked if it was ok for Andrew to go get me a sandwich, and they said not to worry and brought me a tray of food which was pretty tasty. We peeked in at the labour recovery rooms and they were pretty nice.

So we got a sneak preview of what it might be like (without the pain and lack of sleep), and we were pretty happy! We certainly feel confident we'll be looked after!

Back to being a busy bee!

We've gotten rid of the bed in the spare room, put a heap more stuff in storage, set up the crib, bought and set up a (second hand) dresser/changing table combo unit which was fun to try and get home, washed all the sheets and clothes we've been given (people are so amazingly generous!), and put them away, and will go out and buy a stroller and car seat in the next couple of weeks. We'll also get a rocking chair or glider at some point, but I'm in no rush for that.

I'm also thinking about buying a bunch of nappies sometime soon. Our neighbours buy theirs online and they work out cheaper than the stores, and arrive in 2 days, so I think we'll give that a go. I thought I might get some smaller packs of a couple of different brands, then just see if we have a preference. We're told that the best brand is very baby dependent - what's good for one baby may not work for another baby.

So I'll start getting those, wipes, and things like that so we're all organised.

I change obstetrician's next week - hooray! We haven't really liked the current OB, and she's going on leave, so we're actually being transferred over to someone who we actually wanted in the first place but couldn't see because HE was on leave. He's got more knowledge of heart conditions, specifically of aneurysms, so I think he'll be good.

He'll be able to let us know when he wants to deliver the baby as well, since I'll be having a cesarean. We want to wait until October 8 since mum gets here on October 6, but they may not want to wait that long and risk me going into labor early and needing am emergency c section.

Apparently they like to do cesarean's at 38 weeks which would be September 28 - ie. end of next month!!!!! OMG! I know it's not much sooner, but I've had October 12 (mid-October) in my head for so long, so for it to be the month before which is NEXT MONTH just seems so close!

So between getting ready for baby, going to lots of doctor's appointments (which are all going relatively smoothly), studying, doing an online introductory photography course and learning how to create a website from scratch (ie. not using any templates) so I can make mine look much prettier, life is busy!

I'm also now part of 2 mothers groups and I'm not even a mother yet :-) One of them is organised by one of the girls in my complex, as there's heaps of mothers with young kids in the complex. We meet once a week by the pool for a general hang out which is nice. It's only new, so the only ones going are 4 of us who already know each other and see each other regularly, but I'm sure others will come! The other one is an Aussie mums and bubs group that I've just been invited to. I've been along to 2 of them now, and the other mums are wonderful, lovely people! They've all got young kids (most of them are under 2), so that extra support network is fantastic to have!

Anyway, I've procrastinated reading everything I need to for my assignment long enough, now I REALLY need to get into it :-)