In all the excitement over the past 2 days I almost forgot that today marks the 24th week of this pregnancy. From babycenter.com:

How your baby’s growing: Your baby’s growing steadily, gaining about a quarter of a pound since last week, when he was just over a pound. Since he’s almost a foot long, that makes a pretty lean figure, but his body is filling out proportionally and he’ll soon put on more baby fat. Your baby’s skin is thin, translucent, and wrinkled, his brain is growing rapidly, and his taste buds are developing. His lungs are developing “branches” of the respiratory “tree” and cells that produce surfactant, a substance that helps the air sacs inflate easily.

How your life’s changing: The top of your uterus is now an inch or so above your belly button, which means it’s about the size of a soccer ball. With the skin on your abdomen and breasts stretching, you may feel a little itchy now and then. If your skin is dry, keeping it well moisturized may help. Also, your eyes may be sensitive to light and feel gritty and dry. This is a perfectly normal pregnancy symptom known as dry-eye. To ease your discomfort, use an artificial tears solution to add moisture.

Most women will have a glucose screening test (also called a glucose challenge test or GCT) between 24 and 28 weeks. This test checks for gestational diabetes, a high-blood-sugar condition during pregnancy. Untreated, high blood sugar increases your risk for having a difficult vaginal delivery or needing a cesarean section because it causes your baby to grow overly fat, especially in his upper body. It also increases your baby’s risk for complications like low blood sugar at birth. A positive result on your GCT test doesn’t mean you have gestational diabetes, but it does mean that you should have the more involved glucose tolerance test (GTT) to find out.

It’s also a good idea to be aware of the signs of preterm labor. Contact your caregiver immediately if you notice an increase in vaginal discharge that is watery, mucus-like, or pink or blood-tinged; any vaginal bleeding or spotting; abdominal pain or menstrual-like cramping or more than four contractions in an hour; an increase in pelvic pressure; or low back pain that you haven’t had before.

Yesterday I got into my first car accident EVER. I rear-ended a guy about a block away from work. Lucky for him I only scratched his not-so-new truck. When I got out to check my handiwork he said, “Your light is cracked.” I looked at my turn signal and said, “eh.” He said he was ok, was I ok? I said, “Yeah… are you sure you’re ok?” He said yeah, gave me a “Let’s not get other parties involved” look and said, “So do you want to do…?” I said, “Well I’m ok. If you’re ok then I’m fine with it.” So we left it at that and we got back into our respective vehicles and I drove off with that brick I shat in my pants.

When I got to the parking garage, I decided to send a picture to Jay and noticed that my turn signal was not touched at all but my side headlight was busted. The plastic surrounding the bulb was still in tact, but the plastic housing the light was completely shattered. He thought I had broken the main headlight so we had priced out a new one at $200. Turns out a replacement for the side is only $25 — whew. But upon inspection later that night I also found out that I dented my fender. (So that’s why/where I scratched his paint. Huh.) I’m not so worried about that and will leave it since the cost to repair/repaint it will probably be about half what my car is worth.

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Warning: Pregnancy TMI post
This morning I thought I noticed blood when I peed. It was kind of darkish, but the lighting in the bathroom at work isn’t the best so I kind of dismissed it but kept it in the back of my head. An hour later when I went to pee I noticed a little blood clot-ish thing floating in the water. Yumm, just what I wanted to see. It was only about half the size of an eraser on a #2 pencil, but I still freaked.
I called the OBGYN’s office, told them my problem and asked them to have one of the doctors call me back. Not 5 minutes later I was called back and told that the doctor wanted to see me immediately. So I left work (after only 2 hours) and stopped by the doctor’s office. After waiting 5 billion years in a sweltering hot room she finally came and checked on my vagina. She said I wasn’t in labor (my fear du jour when I saw that ‘floater’) and the blood didn’t seem to be coming from my cervix. She couldn’t tell me what it was (which she said happens sometimes) but she said I was probably overworking myself and I needed to take it easy. She ordered me to stay home the next few days and call back if I noticed pain (I didn’t have any tell-tale cramping or pains) or if the bleeding didn’t stop.
I told her that I had a desk job which required no heavy lifting and I sat on my ass about 95% of the day. She said she still wanted me to stay home and take it easy. So now I am burning time-off that I don’t have to burn and I’m stressing about things that I was already stressing about because I have nothing to do but sit and think and stress. Thanks, doc.
I’m pretty sure the general stress of the baby (shopping, getting prepared, doing house-things, can we afford this???) plus the stress of yesterday’s accident caused this little vaginal episode. Either way, I am trying my damnedest to relax and not think about stress-inducing things too much.
One good thing to mention is that I’ve only gained 1 pound in the 12 days since my last visit. Woohooo.

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On the advice of one of Jay’s coworkers, we went to buybuyBaby in Rockville. That place is pretty damn big and oh-my-god talk about overwhelming. It was our first trip into a baby store and I almost had an anxiety attack thinking about all the gazillions of things we need to buy between now and May. Jay really wanted to register there (I think partly to ‘get it out of the way’), but I checked their locations and they only have 8 stores — all of them on the east coast. It just didn’t seem practical for a registry.
One good thing out of that trip was that we found a convertible crib that we both really love. It is not too ‘knobby’ and looks nice as a full/queen bed. We’ll have to see if the baby furniture store here in Frederick carries it otherwise we’ll order it from them.

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I didn’t have high hopes for the paintings thing in Rockville, but we ended up getting 4 large, 1 medium and 2 small paintings. I absolutely love all but one of them and we’ll be returning that one on Sunday. You can return a painting for a cash refund on the day of the purchase only, but any time after that you can exchange it for any other painting/frame provided you have the receipt. So if you take it home and you don’t like the way it looks or if you redecorate and it doesn’t match your new decor, you can can bring it back and exchange it for another one. I am semi-skeptical about that, but it wasn’t a street vendor — they were operating out of the Marriott in Gaithersburg. Of course, I guess scams come in all sorts, but even if that one painting is a loss, we still got a killer deal on the other ones.

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And finally, I’ll just say that I have the best husband in the world. He went shopping with me, put up a bunch of knobs on our kitchen cabinets, hung up pictures, put up a medicine cabinet and cleaned out 4 garbage bags of stuff from our junk room… all without complaining! He also didn’t freak out when I got into my accident and he accompanied me to the doctor’s office today (although he does that all the time). Plus, he has been super-nice and was even going to take off the rest of the day to tend to me (I advised him against that since I don’t need tending to when I’m reading blogs and/or watching tv). The best best best husband EVAR.

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