Happy Third Trimester! No matter which book I read, 28 weeks is officially within that last third of the pregnancy range. I posted a few pictures from last week in the album...if I can get decent pictures I may try to take one or two each week from here on out just to see how much things change so quickly.
Last week I had the last of my monthly appointments...for the next few weeks I go every two weeks, then weekly. Baby Z's heartbeat was good at 140 and my vitals were good...and then it came time to measure. Using a good old tapemeasure, the doctor measures "the bump" - actually the fundal height, which is the distance from your pubic bone to the top of your uterus. On average, you measure about the same number of centimeters as the number of weeks you are. I was first measured at 23 weeks and was at 24 cm...so pretty close. This month, however, at 27 weeks I measured 31 cm! There's a host of reasons for measuring big...it could be a big baby, he could be in some weird position, there could be a lot of fluid, hard to say. BabyCenter says one potential cause is "You have looser abdominal muscles than most women." While depressing to think about, that has potential, as I wasn't exactly rocking the 6-pack-abs prior to April! Odds are if I measure that much ahead at my appointment on the 17th they'll check things out with another ultrasound.
The "fun" part of the week was the glucose screening and testing. Oh joy. I had the screening on Monday, which was not a great day for me to have my blood sugar tested as we celebrated a birthday that morning at work with cupcakes :) Needless to say, Jennie did NOT pass the screening (scored 150 and needed to be below 140). That meant I got to spend 3 hours in the lab on Wednesday doing the full glucose test. This involved 12 hours of fasting, with only sips of water, followed by arriving at the lab and getting a fasting blood test, drinking the fabulously horrible sugar solution and then having blood drawn once an hour for three hours. By the time the whole thing was done I took down a bottle of water in about 2 minutes flat...16 hours of fasting is not my idea of a good time. And I learned that you see quite the interesting assortment of people who come in and out of the lab over that long a period of time! Other than some lovely bruises from the blood draws, the testing seems to have gone well and the nurse said Thursday that as far as she could tell, the numbers looked within the normal range. That was excellent news, as I do love to at least have the option to eat whatever sounds good (including cake from the fabulous baby showers last week!). To celebrate, I ate a Starburst :)
