31 weeks update! :)

Greetings from our third trimester! 🙂 I know I have not posted here much lately and apologize to those of you who may have been concerned. At this point no news continues to be good news for us and our new baby girl. I guess when things are going somewhat normally in my life, I have less to share or at least feel less compelled to blog. Bob took this 31 week “belly shot” of me on Saturday and I thought you might like to see how big our baby and I are getting! 🙂

Thank you for your comments on my Part II post about Molly’s birthday/celebration of life. This is all still very surreal to me in so many ways, especially when I think about how far my family and I have come since this time last year. This weekend we celebrated our two nieces’ and one of our nephew’s birthdays. It was nice to spend time with family and see Sean having so much fun playing with his cousins.

We have spent a lot of time recently getting ready for the newest member of our family to relocate from my belly to our home. We have been going through Sean’s things from when he was a baby, including sorting through his old clothes and picking out which ones are “gender neutral” that our baby girl can wear. It has been bittersweet going through Sean’s old things, both because we never got to do this when we were expecting Molly and because it has been six years since we were pregnant with Sean and it is hard to believe that our little boy has grown up so much since then. Bob’s brother and our sister-in-law also have very thoughtfully and generously lent us a lot of things that their two daughters are not currently using, including lots of their old baby clothes, which we are very grateful for.

We decided over the past few weeks to redecorate Sean’s bedroom (soon-to-be our children’s room) in the Pottery Barn Kids “Dr. Seuss” theme. We really like the theme as Sean is really into all things Seuss right now, it is gender neutral and they carry bedding for both cribs and older children’s beds. Sean was so excited when we told him about changing the room he is going to share with his sister into this new decor and he came with me last week to Pottery Barn Kids (PBK) to pick out the quilt, sheets and other accessories to get the redecorating started.

Sean’s bedroom is currently a light key lime green color, from when he was a baby and had the John Lennon “Real Love” nursery bedding/decor theme. We kept it that color when he moved on to a Thomas the Tank Engine “big boy” theme a few years ago. Now we have decided to repaint it a subtle yellow color (called “Mellow Yellow” in the PBK/Benjamin Moore paint color line) to go with the new Dr. Seuss theme. Bob picked up the paint this weekend and plans to paint it during some “staycation” time off from work next week. After that he will be setting up Sean’s old crib for the baby and we can really get our children’s room in order and ready for our new addition.

Our c-section is still scheduled for Thursday, September 17. So unless my water breaks or I go into labor prior to then, our baby girl will likely be born on that day. She continues to be very active, which is reassuring, and I certainly enjoy the all “love taps,” which over time have gotten a lot stronger. We are now seeing our OB for prenatal appointments every two weeks, which is normal at this stage of gestation. Our next appointment is this Friday, July 24 and we hope it is as routine and uneventful as most of our visits with this pregnancy have been.

Our doctors, nor we, see the need at this point for any special monitoring. Since this pregnancy continues to seem very normal and our baby doesn’t appear to have any heart defects, we have all agreed that it isn’t necessary. That said, our doctors have also assured us that at any point if monitoring would give us peace of mind, that they will accommodate us. So far Bob and I are fine with that. That doesn’t mean I don’t worry that something couldn’t still go wrong and that it isn’t still hard for me to imagine having a “real live baby” in my arms in about two months. However, I am feeling cautiously optimistic that we will get to bring our third child/second daughter home with us in the not too distant future.

As for how I am feeling… physically our third trimester has definitely been challenging for me. I have felt a lot of pressure in my pelvic floor region, had an increase in Braxton Hicks contractions and gotten to that point where I feel generally uncomfortable, more often than not, especially when trying to sleep at night. However, I welcome these discomforts and realize that they are both normal and a good sign of a healthy pregnancy, though certainly annoying at times. Emotionally I have had my ups and downs. I have been very hormonal, which leads me to be more sensitive to life in general, but again, I understand this is normal for any pregnant woman and especially one who has lost a baby previously while in her third trimester.

Today is the anniversary of our first angel baby’s due date (July 20, 2005). It is hard to believe that if we hadn’t miscarried early on in December 2004 that we could have a little boy or girl turning four years old and that there might have been a fourth Benson cousin (our child) celebrating their birthday this past weekend. Ironically our third angel baby (from our interstitial ectopic pregnancy) and Molly were both due in mid-late June (of 2006 and 2008 respectively), so either one of them could have also brought additional birthday celebrations around this time of year. Today I call to mind and honor the memory of all of the angel babies that have gone before us and especially our first, who I believe is resting in peace with their sister Molly and other angel siblings while watching over us from Heaven.

I also have a prayer request. I found out on Friday that a friend of ours’ (who is 21 weeks pregnant) baby was diagnosed with Trisomy 18. A mutual friend reached out to me to share the news and asked that I contact our friend for support. She let me know that our friend wanted to talk to me and had a lot of questions, but that she didn’t feel up to initiating a phone call. I completely understood, as when I was pregnant with Molly (after we received her diagnosis and prognosis) I would talk to most people who called us to check in, however rarely felt up to making phone calls myself. Anyway, I have not been able to talk with our friend yet, however I have left two voice messages and assured her that if I don’t hear back from her soon, that I will call her again.

I also shared with her through our mutual friend about my blog, as though I think our friend knows about our CarePage (named: BabyBenson2008) that we started on our journey with Molly, I don’t believe she knew about this blog. So in case my friend is reading this, if any of you have resources or experience with Trisomy 18 babies/diagnoses/prognoses, please feel free to share links in the comment section here (or email me) and she will either see them or I will see to it that they are passed on to her. Please keep our friend, her husband and their very much wanted and loved baby in your thoughts and prayers in the days and weeks to come.

Thank you for reading and for your continued kind words, support, encouragement, thoughts and prayers. Preparing for this new baby girl to enter our lives seems very bizarre and exciting and scary and wonderful all at the same time. I will try not to go so long before I post here again and will certainly let you know when our daughter/new baby sister makes her appearance in the coming weeks. Until next time, I hope this finds you and your loved ones in good spirits and enjoying summer! Take care and God bless.