The Wait is Over!

Introducing....

Miss Rowen Whitty a.k.a Kittenheart/Kittenbaby. She's finally here!



Rowen was born on Tuesday February 14th, 2012, two days after her due date. She weighed a hefty healthy 9lbs at birth and because of this and her head of hair, our nurses lovingly referred to her as the "overcooked turkey" for Valentine's Day. Our little Valentine's Baby!
"Birth story" to follow. Love you all!

Overdue Baby and Pee cups

Today was Kittenheart's due date. It appears that she is running late... unless for some reason I go from feeling normal and sitting at the computer eating a Krispy Kreme donut to delivering a baby in the next 41 minutes. (Please no.) I'm amused to see the little ticker on the side now no longer says "__ days to go". There are NO MORE DAYS TO GO. Waiting could be over any day now!

It's a funny thing having this "due date" looming over you.... I kept saying that I had a feeling that she'd be early, or rather, I think I was hoping that she'd be early as I was kinda dooooooooone with being pregnant. I fully embraced the experience and acknowledge how freakin' insanely amazing (though at times bizarre) the human body can be. But I'm also not one of those ladies who are all precious and "Oh I LOVED being pregnant" about the process. Those people are fucked.

Yes, it's totally neat being able to grow a human being and when you start to feel this little creature wiggling around and then actually responding to you, it's indescribable. But dang, I'm ready for it to be over. I'm an impatient person to begin with and my patience for this is quickly wearing thin. It's physically exhausting lugging this big belly around. Sometimes Lowell will stand behind me and "hold" the baby and every time he's all "Oh man, it's really heavy!" My skin is going numb from the skin being stretched and my belly button actually hurts sometimes when it's touched or I've been wearing a shirt that rubs. There are things that people never talk about.... like, being constipated, getting hemmoroids, AND how they make you pee in a cup every time you go to the Doctor for a check-up.

It gets harder and harder to pee in that damn tiny cup the bigger and bigger you get. You're in a public bathroom so you don't want to touch anything...your belly is huge and your thighs are fat. It makes is difficult to wedge the cup through in front. But then going around back in nearly impossible while you're limber and not walking around with a watermelon strapped to you. You'll eventually wind up peeing on your hand at some point and that sucks.

Anyway. I digress. Today came and went and no baby yet. I am officially 40 weeks pregnant, definitely way more pregnant than I even expected to be in my whole life! Everyone is now putting their money on Valentine's Day. I'd be alright with that! I very much hope to be able to have a drug-free delivery (we'll see how well that actually pans out when the labour thing actually starts)... so being induced would be a bad start to the drug-free thing. They say that you get a burst of energy and the whole "nesting" phenomenon is an indication that baby is coming soon. I did make Lowell take everything out of the hall closet and re-organize it while I sat down the hall and supervised. That's nesting right?

I think back to the night before we had our second ultrasound and I kept talking to Kittenheart and saying "Show your butt tomorrow, please show everyone your butt." Now the mantra has changed a bit... "please come out, we want to meet you already! Please show everyone your actual butt"

Things I know about Kittenheart

39 weeks tomorrow, still no signs of baby. I alternate between feeling pretty good and then also feeling GIGANTIC, uncomfortable, achey and impatient. Definitely impatient. I'm ready to meet this baby and be able to lay on my back again.

Things that I already know about the Kittenbaby....

-She likes when I eat grape jelly

-She consistently has a heartrate of 130bpm

-She recongnizes our voices and Eileen's meows

-She sleeps from 11am or so every day until about 2pm. It's nice because I get a brief window of not getting kicked and nudged constantly

-She does jazz hands and what feels like a boxstep simultaneously, all day long when she's awake. All day long. All day and ALL NIGHT LONG.

I really am looking forward to meeting this little person and not being beat up from within anymore will be a very nice perk. It's very interesting how you can feel such affection already for someone you've technically never even met yet!

38 weeks 2 days and stilll stretchin'

I've been bad at sitting down and writing "real" posts lately. I have an ever-growing list of topics that I wanted to ramble about... but alas, not enough attention span to spit it all out. So here we are, another filler photo entry.

38 weeks!! When I thought I couldn't get any bigger, I have! The body is seriously amazing. I'm shocked that I've somehow managed not to get any stretch marks yet. HOW IS THE SKIN STRETCHING LIKE THIS?



And this belly seems like a distant, distant memory....