Actually, 20 1/2 weeks now... but who's counting?
My stomach has well and truly popped--there's no doubt about the fact that I'm a pregosaurus rex. I was at a barbecue for the 4th of July, and met a girl who's expecting a baby girl on November 7th, and I felt like an absolute whale next to her. Not that I feel like I'm fat or have gained excessive amounts of weight or anything, it's just that my stomach was SO MUCH bigger than hers and she's two weeks ahead of me. Oy. I'm starting to understand just how massive I'm going to be by the end of this journey.
I'm still feeling pretty good--definitely sliding into the uncomfortable stage, however. There's almost always something that hurts. Nothing too excruciating or worrisome, but between the horrid charlie horses in my calves that I wake up with two or three times a week, the sciatica, round ligament pain, a baby doing the polka at pelvis level and another doing the lambada in my ribs, I'm regularly at at least a four on the pain scale. I've had a number of days where I'll feel so crampy I can barely stand up straight, and we actually had to leave the barbecue on the 4th early because I couldn't even sit without feeling uncomfortable. I'm sleeping fairly well at night, but the 1st trimester falling asleep ability is long gone and I'm back to tossing and turning for an hour before I finally doze off, which is not so easy now that it requires a lot more exertion just to roll from my back to my side!
But in news of the more awesome nature, the babies are making their presence known in much more exciting ways than just punching me in the hoochie cooch. I've felt them moving for about two weeks now--I noticed it right after our 18 week appointment. It started out feeling like I had tiny goldfish flopping around in my stomach, and now it's a much more noticeable poking or rubbing feeling. Colby has been able to feel them a few times now, and I spend my evenings sitting on the couch staring at my stomach, watching them hop around. It seems a little early to be able to see them move from the outside, but I expect since I've got two ahead of the growth curve babies crammed in there, it makes sense.
We're still having pretty circular conversations about names. We've decided on one first name and two probable middle names, but our second little lady is still awaiting her christening. I'm absolutely in love with one name that Colby is a little less in love with, but he hasn't come up with any other suggestions, and I think he's coming around to it the longer I give him to ponder. I'm definitely the one who's feeling a lot more motivated to come up with names though, I think he'd put it off until they were standing in front of us with blank birth certificates at age 18. I'm just so tired of thinking of them and calling them "Baby A" and "Baby B"--our girls need names!
So, here we are at the halfway point, and I'm still loving this whole pregnancy experience. It's also starting to feel a lot more real as we make arrangements with our parents for when they're coming to visit and help out, plan our final vacations before I have to start taking it a lot more easy, and get around to unpacking all of those boxes that we stashed in the nursery to think about in a couple of months. I just cannot believe that in 20 weeks or less we're going to have two little babies.
And maybe they'll even have names.
