Hiccups

I just learned this week that babies can hiccup before they're born. That explains so much! Tinkerbell sometimes falls into a pattern of little punches that are sort of rhythmic and repeated in the same place. I counted more than 100 of them before I fell asleep the other night. Turns out these are hiccups. I feel bad for her now when she gets a hiccuping episode, but it's also neat because the little punching tells me where her head is.

We've had a busy week. My coworkers threw me a surprise baby shower Wednesday, which was really nice. Our last childbirth class was Thursday night. And our midwife appointments are now going to a weekly schedule so it seems as if we're constantly driving to the hospital.

By every measure the baby is healthy and happy. For a couple weeks she had a little extra blip in her heartbeat, but the doctors say that's perfectly normal and it will go away on its own (and when we heard her heart beat Friday Jim and I noticed that there didn't seem to be any extra beats).

We also had one borderline low measurement of amniotic fluid a couple weeks ago, but at a follow-up on Friday everything was back to normal again. I've been drinking crazy amounts of water to make sure it stays normal.

Another cool thing we learned is that the baby is already using her chest muscles to practice breathing, even though she gets all her oxygen from the umbilical cord until she's born. That's so amazing!

I'm feeling more relaxed the further we go toward the due date. Tinkerbell is now old enough that if she was born today she would certainly be able to survive on her own and probably wouldn't even need much medical help. By 37 weeks, around the end of November, she will be considered full term.

We've started to make plans for the big event -- making lists of things to pack for the hospital, figuring out how to install the car seat (why is that so hard!!???!!), rearranging all the toys and clothes in the nursery a million times, and generally trying to be patient.