The End of the Second Trimester...

This past weekend marked the beginning of my 27th week of pregnancy. Although the end of the 27th week is "officially" the end of the second trimester, we'll be travelling then so I thought I'd post today. Here are a couple of photos of me from the weekend:



The second trimester is supposed to be the "easy" one, but that was not really my experience. I think I suffered more from exhaustion in the second trimester than the first, I had a lot of trouble sleeping, and my heartburn was fairly unpleasant (not that I'm complaining). My appetite was also pretty minimal up until about 20 weeks. At this point, I'm back to eating normally, but my total weight gain of 12 pounds is a little lower than the recommended range. I expect that I'll catch up eventually, though! I also managed to catch some sort of virus in mid-April that resulted in the worst cold I've had in years. And I couldn't do much about it other than rest and drink fluids. At this point, though, I'm feeling great and looking forward to the last three months! My heartburn is under control with twice-a-day Pepsid AC and my daily Claritin is doing a good job of keeping my early summer allergies at bay.

The baby is extremely active and getting stronger every day. At this point, one of our favorite activities is to watch my belly while he's kicking and flipping. It is pretty amazing to see my whole belly jerk and bounce. Sometimes a big kick on one side will completely deform the shape from round to almost conical. Wierd.

We've been doing some thinking about names, but we're planning to wait until after the baby is born before making a final decision. Current favorites include Leif, Logan, Liam, Dane, and Everett. You can see we like the "L" names! Middle name will be either Baekeland or Reilly (family names from earlier generations).

Our neighbor gave me some maternity clothes over the weekend, so now I have a few cute summer dresses, which I'm sure will come in handy if this summer is anywhere near as hot as this past weekend! E Ben also bought me a few new things for Mother's Day, so I'm doing pretty well on maternity clothes.

We had a productive weekend around the house, cleaning and organizing and making some decisions about the nursery. We even ordered the carpet and picked a paint color! Now the pressure is on E Ben to get the painting done before the Home Depot guys install the carpet... We're looking forward to our trip to Tucson this weekend. E Ben will write about that once we get back.