Weeks 15 and 16

16 weeks, please excuse the poor quality!

As you can see, I've definitely "popped" with this little guy!  I went back and read when I was pregnant with Gabby, and I thought I had popped at this point, but the pictures from then show that I very clearly hadn't!  It took until around Week 20 or so for strangers to really notice the belly with Gabby, but I was asked this morning if I was pregnant (it was one of the teachers at Gabby's daycare, so I didn't mind).  Actually, way back in Week 13 at the end of my spring class, one of my students said she knew I was pregnant because of my cute little bump!  I think she was just crazy, but now, as Brian said the other night, "It's starting to look like you have a baby in there!"  It's all still wardrobe-dependent, of course, but more often than not, it looks like I do have a baby in there, and not that I've eaten too many cheeseburgers!

No really terrible symptoms, except that the sciatica is back with a vengeance.  For those who don't know, your sciatic nerve runs from your spine down through your butt to your leg.  When it gets pinched (as is happening right now with my ever-expanding uterus and growing baby), it causes a burning pain in your rear.  I literally have a pain in my ass right now.  It's all I can do some days to sit for long enough periods of time to get anything done.  I remember this with Gabby too, and the only thing that really helps is regular exercise with yoga thrown in and sleeping with a pillow between my knees.  I do have to be careful with the exercise--if I walk without stretching (before and after), the pain is 10x worse than if I hadn't walked at all!  I usually try to walk on the treadmill and then do a yoga DVD afterwards.  It makes for long workouts, but keeps me from being in too much pain.  Fortunately, my summer schedule will allow me to keep up with this.  The only other complaints I have are the round ligament pain (from the ligaments that hold my uterus in place stretching), which is a sharp kind of stabbing pain in my sides (right more than left), and the fact that baby boy is parked on my bladder right now.

We are working on moving Gabby into what is now our office and turning her room into Artoo's room.  That means cleaning everything out of there, buying a new desk to fit in the guest room, picking out paint colors for there and Artoo's room, and eventually getting Gabby new furniture--including a big girl bed!  Brian tried to talk me into keeping Gabby in her room and putting Artoo in the office, but the office is much bigger, and Gabby is going to need a bigger room before Artoo does!  We'll deal with the jealousy over room size when the time comes.  Brian just didn't want to have to paint 2 rooms.  I don't win many arguments with him, but he let me have this one.

I start the summer semester next week, and I am so happy that I dropped the lecture!  I'll have 2 hours of downtime between labs, and I'll actually get to eat dinner and rest a bit before dealing with students again.  Plus only doing lab gives me both Thursday and Friday off every week!  At least one of those days is going to be spent grading lab reports (2/week is a lot of grading), but on the other day I can keep Gabby home and have some fun with her!  I'm not going to lie; it's been really nice not having to go to work for the past 3 weeks, but I do miss having something to do during the day.  There's only so much laundry that needs to be done, and daytime TV is terrible!

Gabby is super cute with this baby. She loves to talk about the baby inside mommy, and she lifts up my shirt to see my belly.  She gives my belly kisses sometimes, and talks about baby brother (or "baby brudder").  I know this love will change when the baby is here and taking up my attention!  She's already started transferring her loyalty to daddy instead of me.  Since birth, she's been all about mommy, but over the past few weeks, she's definitely started wanting daddy more.  I was a little hurt at first, but then I realized how much more free time I'm going to have and I got over it.  The only bad thing is that she now wants me to put her to bed.  That's been fine this week, but starting next week, I have 8 weeks of not being home at bedtime Monday-Wednesday.  It should be a very loud transition.  Poor Brian.

I'm proud of myself for posting semi-regularly, but we'll see how well I keep this up when classes start again.