Pregnant & Posting: 23 & 24 Weeks

The past couple of weeks have been awfully busy for me. In fact, I'm at home today with a kiddo who has strep throat. (Here's hoping I don't pick it up too!) So if this entry is a bit disjointed, you'll have to forgive me.

At my most recent appointment with my OB-GYN, everything looked good. I'd gained 2 lbs. My doctor is still not particularly concerned because of the overall weight loss that I had during the first trimester. My blood pressure and urine were fine as well. Little one's heartbeat was in the 150s, exactly where it should be, and I'm feeling lots of movement now. In fact, if I'm laying down or sitting in just the right position, you can sometimes see particularly strong movements or kicks. My partner was able to feel movement around 23 weeks this time (about a week later than he could feel it with my previous pregnancy). To me, movement this pregnancy feels different than it did in my last. With my other child, his head was on my right side and his feet were up high on my left. This one's almost the opposite. Head down to the left and feet up to the right. This one also seems to be sitting lower than my first pregnancy, meaning this little one likes to play drums on my bladder. Constantly. During my next appointment, I'll also have my gestational diabetes screening. This will be done via a 1-hour oral glucose tolerance test. At exactly 1 hour before my next appointment, I have to drink a very sweet drink that my care provider sent home with me after my most recent appointment. When I arrive for my appointment, they will take me back and stick my finger to test my blood sugar (they'll also test for anemia at the same time as well). The blood sugar reading will tell them how my body has been dealing with all of the sugar in the drink. If the number is outside the range, it indicates that I might have gestational diabetes and I'll have to go to a lab and have a more complex 3-hour screening done. (With the 3 hour screening, they check a "baseline" level before the sugary drink and then again at 1, 2, & 3 hours after consuming the beverage.) With my last pregnancy, I failed the 1-hour screening but only by a very tiny margin. My 3 hour screening came back fine. This time, I hope to avoid the needing the 3 hour screening, since it was a fairly miserable experience for me the first time. The test blood draws themselves weren't so awful, but sitting around with an empty stomach (except for the sugar drink) is not fun. By the time it was over, I felt sick and continued to feel that way throughout the rest of the day.