#second_trimester

[hippie-in-love]

We can start counting DOWN the days til he is here! 20 wks down, 20 to go :) #baby #pregnancy #second_trimester #instacollage

[babycampbell2014]

4 months--down!

It’s been a while since I’ve updated my blog with an entry.

I am so happy to be 4 months along ! Hardest 4 months EVAR! Lol. I think I have finally turned a corner, I feel differently than I did for the first 90-120 days of this pregnancy.

It has not been sunshine or rainbows. My body has had a very difficult time keeping food down on the regular. I’m amazed at my belly! It really has popped in the last 2 wks.

I have had immense food aversions…I pretty much hated EVERYTHING. I had to force food down, and even then I wouldn’t finish most of it. My work has been very understanding about me missing so often, & now that I’m feeling better I’m happy I can dedicate more effort to it again.

Food in general sounds AMAZING now, & I have been frequenting Culvers pretty often lately. Burgers with no bun & fries NOMMMM. Baby Piper loves her some American food now. She also has a particular hankering for Chinese food, oddly enough.

The 23 is the day of our anatomy scan (next Monday). We get to make super sure that Piper is a girl, & most importantly check to make sure everything is developing the way it should.

My birthday week is next week, too; yay! Having a get together with all my work friends, husband is planning a party with all our weekend friends (mostly his best buddies from work who have become our family since deployment), and our own solo celebration with Mommy&Daddy&Piper at PF Changs, too! We’re very blessed and I’m so thankful i have excelled at my job, which has allowed us to have a great celebration this year. Not only that, but Daddy isn’t deployed this year ;) we have two years’ worth of birthdays to celebrate !!

Good things to come for our little family—right around the corner is Halloween, and I can’t wait to dress this baby bump up as something super fun !!

[hippie-in-love]

14 weeks and feeling fine! Ms Piper is letting mommy be herself again :) #pregnancy #14_weeks #belly #baby_bump #second_trimester #yeah_buddy

[allkindsoffruit]

Liminal Limbo

Any person who has studied anthropology/sociology/art history will have learned about the rite of passage; an event that marks a milestone or change of status within a society.

Jews love rites of passage - Bris, Opsherenish, Bar Mitzva, Wedding, etc. because they are an excuse to have a big affair, eat lots of food and then complain about it afterwards.

All rites of passage can be divided into 3 stages:

Separation

Limbo

Reincorporation

As of late I can say for certain that I am in the limbo stage of becoming a father. The separation was actually pretty easy - not dad, almost dad. Well, that was as easy as getting someone else to pee on a stick. Of course my excitement and anxiousness has been well documented here and it's been a very interesting journey.

But now I am past that arbitrary point of no return and I am feeling a little bit lost. I know life is going to change drastically and I am beyond happy that I am going to be a dad but there is a little part of me that is finding it hard to say goodbye to life before kids and I don't even have a kid yet. Maybe it's just me, but sometimes I feel like people are looking at me as a parent before I have even become one.

Late nights out, going to bars, playing games on my PC for hours on end; these are all things that I feel I should be taking maximum advantage of because those days are clearly numbered but societal texts seem to be telling me to slow down, transition out, grow up!

Tali, physiological fears aside, seems much more mentally prepared for this transition. Maybe it has to do with the fact that she has a constant reminder ACTUALLY kicking her in the gut. For dad, there is no corporeal connection

I know that once the baby arrives and I am reincorporated into society as a father, things will fall into place and everything will be perfect but for now the world feels something like this:

[allkindsoffruit]

6 months!

...

So it's been a few weeks since the last update. We've settled into the norms of pregnancy and we're getting more familiar with raging hormones and little feet kicking. It's quite amazing to feel the "hiccups" in Tali's belly as the baby gives a thump or two.

I won't lie, I am beginning to get impatient, now we're in the growing stage and development is all but finished, and I want to meet my kid. We're having lots of fun with the names (something I take very seriously) and are building a list to choose from:

Mivtza (Boy)

Hanacha (Girl)

Magnetron

Shmulik

Bartholomew

Jehoshaphat

 Yoches

As you may have gathered, I suspect that our first child is a masculine child.

The various doctors have given no quarter in the scaring the hell out of new parents to be department. Luckily Tali's doctor is a friendly and down-to-earth kind of guy who let us know in advance that they like to panic people for no reason. I am looking forward to having a squiger child with super powers

We'll be going on a pre-babymoon this week which is going to be a real treat. Tali has been working hard on the baby making and deserves a break so we are going here

 (not to shabby eh?)

Soon we will be heading into the final trimester and the final 3 months of patiently waiting to meet our first born. Stay tuned...

[allkindsoffruit]

Naming a kid the easy way...

[allkindsoffruit]

More musings from a soon-to-be father

Wow it's been almost two weeks since I last wrote and considering development is pretty much done, I don't have much to update in that department. One thing that is developing is the feeling of becoming a parent.

It's hard to believe that at our next seder table there will be a new candidate for Ma Nishtana.

We went for a checkup this morning to give Tali's doc the results from the screening test. More reassurances, everything looks fine and baby was chilling in his pad, heart beating and spine straightening. This is definitely much better than the stress of worrying that your kid will be part fish, part lemur.

Now it's just a game of patience, something which is tedious at the best of times. I apparently jumped the gun in the gestational age department as I thought that the age changes based on the scans. Apparently this is not the case and while gestational age stays dependent on the LMP, the age figures given are more related to deviation from the mean. So our kid is actually 5 days "younger" than I thought he/she was.

From the parental development perspective, today I had a special moment with our good friends' daughter Gefen. While spending the day in the office with us, I asked Gefen, who is all but 2 years old, if she wanted to come to the kitchen with me. Armed with an adorable demeanor and her mother's Youtube machine (apparently it makes calls too), Gefen sat with Tali and I while we had our coffee. At some point, her eyes started getting heavy and seeing she was about to pass out, I asked her if she wanted to sleep on my shoulder. She held out her arms for me to pick her up and promptly dozed off within about 3 seconds.

There is something magical about knowing a child trusts you enough to fall asleep on you and it made me feel more prepared than ever to create a loving bond with my own child. I am still worried about "breaking" a new born baby but I have no doubt that once I get used to the various processes, I will be well on my way to being a superdad.

And so the waiting game continues, hopefully the chagim and birthdays etc. will speed up the process, in the meanwhile, I am going to resist the impulse to take up knitting - something that my mother and Tali seemingly cannot resist. I had better make sure that the nest is insulated

[allkindsoffruit]

Ultrasound rhythms

It's the week of the onion in the Segal womb and all is going well. We went for our "preliminary"/morphology ultrasound scan this week and baby has a stellar report card. There is no sound more beautiful at this point than a doctor saying "everything looks great"!

The scan is done to check that the baby is developing properly and the level of details is extremely impressive. So far we know that the baby has:

2 kidneys

4 heart chambers

2 eyes (Lenses included)

2 Ears

The recommended amount of fingers and toes

2 equally formed hemispheres of the brain

Intact spinal chord

Bladder

Intact upper lip

Ratios and dimensions are also looking good, placing baby within the 16.2 - 17.3 week range.

Tali claims she can feel the baby fluttering around in her stomach and keeps shouting at me to keep still so that I might feel the butterflies in her stomach. I'll keep my cool until we have full-force kicking.

I have also taken the opportunity to give morning announcements in a pseudo-French accent as well as nightly music sessions. We've done the Pet Shop Boys and Supertramp so far and will move on to more artists as the pregnancy progresses. Hopefully Rap/Hip-Hop will be dead by the time the kid is born.

Give a Little Bit by Supertramp on Grooveshark

And now the moment you have all been waiting for... Pictures!

That's a good looking kid right there!

According to all sources, the next few weeks are going to see a lot of growth and even more scans and tests. I am sure we'll have some updates on here too so be sure to check in.