19-week update
This week has been good - there has been a lot of movement recently. The other night, Julian even felt a kick for the first time - he had to keep his hand on my belly for quite a while, but he did eventually get a kick.
I've had a few headaches, but they're mostly in check, I hope. I also got some really bad heartburn for the first time, which is something I never get. But one of the "19-week" guides on the Internet said this is exactly when it appears. I'm writing it down not to complain about it, but just to remember for posterity when various symptoms kicked in. In any case, I have a great book of home remedies which I finally consulted and it suggested grating some ginger in hot water. Seems counterintuitive that ginger would help with heartburn, but it cleared it up immediately, and it had been lingering for 24 hours - so that really works (or else baby finally stopped pressing against my stomach). Anyhow, I ate an enormous cheeseburger for dinner tonight, and heartburn stayed away, so I credit the ginger.
I'm still doing some running, so that keeps me feeling pretty well. I think we have settled on possible names, but we'll be keeping those under wraps for a bit... every now and then I think it might actually be nice to know the sex so we could give the names a trial run, but Julian is deadset against it - he even tried to cover my eyes today during the ultrasound when the tech was in the legs region! I can tell you, there isn't much danger of me being able to tell - I thought the stomach was the mouth!
While I felt a little anxious before the ultrasound, it was absolutely wonderful. We could see baby's hands curled up in front of his face, could see it open its mouth and wiggle its little toes. Julian got to stay with me the whole time, which was great, because at the private clinic we went to for our early u/s, they only let him in after doing the measurements. Baby wriggled around quite a bit. We had a student tech and she took her time, which was nice as it meant more screen time for baby! S/he loves the camera!
The only thing was kind of annoying was that they ended up doing the nuchal fold measurement tests even though we had not requisitioned that part and had not done the maternal blood test that helps interpret them. The test has a high rate of false positive so we declined to save ourself the worry. I thought about piping up, but then I didn't. After all, I don't have to ask for the results.
But all in all they were extremely lovely, and gave us 5 (!) photos of the little one even though we only paid for 1.