Week 31: April 10-16

Baby is about 18 inches long and weighs about 3.5 pounds. This week marks an incredible milestone in her lung development. Before now, the air sacs and branches in her lungs were present but not functional. The lungs were not able to inflate properly. However, now there is surfactant being produced in her lungs. Surfactant prevents baby's lungs from collapsing outside of the uterus and she is able to take in air and breathe properly. The fetal ear is almost completely developed both inside and out. She can hear my voice and other familiar sounds that she will recognize after birth. Baby is putting on white fat under the skin and the skin's color is pink instead of red at this point. Her fingernails have grown to the end of her fingers and she may scratch herself while she is in the womb. Baby's going through major brain and nerve development these days.

Sunday, April 10, 2011 ~ I am beginning to feel the upward push on my lungs and stomach. I have to sit up very straight after I eat to avoid discomfort and find myself short of breath sometimes. This is a minor irritation though and overall I am still feeling really good. I found out that my yoga instructor teaches classes nearby on Mondays and Wednesdays. They are not prenatal classes but she said that I should attend anyway; several of the people who attend the Saturday prenatal classes in Irvine attend her Monday and Wednesday classes in Huntington. I hope to be able to do yoga twice a week for the remainder of the pregnancy. I really attribute it to how good I've been feeling.

In addition to the upward push, I'm feeling an outward push as well. I can tell that the baby has less room because she is "sticking out" a lot more often, especially after I eat. I think I officially need to drastically cut my meal size and just eat pretty much all day at this point. I haven't really been able to distinguish body parts yet but I think I'm feeling her butt and back quite often. It's fun but sometimes uncomfortable.

The baby has been very cooperative when it comes to sleep (knock on wood). I keep reading that she will be more active at night, often keeping me awake, however that hasn't happened yet. The worst that has happened is if I wake up in the morning to use the restroom, the baby will wake up, too, and start moving around. But this weekend I haven't been able to fall back asleep anyway so it hasn't really mattered (yesterday I was up at 5 am and today at 6:30 am).

I think we made some progress on names last night. Our original list was all but thrown out the window by Dan; he had a change of heart on most of the names. We have a new list of some tentative names for each gender and I hope that the baby's name is on that list but I have a feeling we won't have a name set in stone until we meet the little bugger. I mean, obviously not because we don't know the gender, but I doubt we will even have one for each gender set in stone.

We have also made progress on the daycare front. We have met two in-home daycare providers and also stopped into a daycare center. We both liked all three places but have a slight preference towards in-home daycare. Of course, Dan likes one daycare provider slightly more and I like the other; this is par for the course with us. Despite being apprehensive about daycare in general, I know that we will make the right decision and, like I've said before, I believe that the baby will thrive being surrounded by other children and that a learning environment is a great place for her to be from the start.

I am very excited about my shower on Sunday! So many people are genuinely excited for us, even people that I haven't known that long or don't know very well, and it's been really fun to be the recipient of that excitement. I can already tell that this baby is going to be incredibly loved by a lot of people and it makes me so grateful. I have always known that I'm a lucky person to live the life that I live surrounded by the people in it, but this has really amplified that feeling.