halfway

...and then some! I meant to write when my baby ticker noted 20 weeks so far AND 20 weeks to go, but the past couple of weeks have been busy. And there's that whole EDD discrepancy so maybe I was at the halfway mark one week and five days ago, or maybe just five days ago. Either way, I think it's safe to say the glass is at least half full.

The main development in baby land over the last couple of weeks has been movement. I've been feeling flutters and flicks that might have been the baby moving since right around the week between Christmas and New Year's. That was pretty early, but the movements I was feeling did seem to get more frequent and stronger over the next couple of weeks. Still, by our check-up on the 11th, at 18 weeks 1 day, when asked if I'd noticed any fetal activity, I couldn't answer with any real confidence that what I was feeling wasn't gas! But on the evening of January 17th, I felt, with confidence, internally and against my hand, which was resting on my belly, what I'm putting in my pregnancy journal as the baby's first real discernible kick. The next week or so was pretty sporadic but he's been pretty active since about the middle of last week and seems to have a pattern down. I feel him moving around almost every night when I first go to bed and just about every morning when I first wake up, before I get out of bed, and then after almost every meal if I'm sitting down. If I'm up and moving around it's pretty rare that I feel anything. One of his most active periods occured this past weekend, possibly because I'd had a few sips of his father's diet Pepsi earlier in the day. I felt guilty for consuming caffeine and possibly keeping him up all evening, but it was pretty cool to feel what had to be somersaults performed in my belly.

Otherwise, I finally had to put my step exercise equipment away as The Firm workouts I'd been doing pre-pregnancy and continued to do for the first four or so months had become a little too intense, even in their modified versions. My main outlet now is walking and Gaiam's pre-natal yoga DVD, which I love. Some of the reviews on Amazon complain about how instructor Shiva Rea doesn't pronounce the 'h' in 'exhale' and how annoying that is, but compared to the other pre-natal workouts I've sampled, that's the least of my gripes. One of the first workouts I tried was Leisa Hart's FitMama. Now that I have a few other workouts to compare it to, I think it's pretty good (especially as my waistline expands I welcome the easier workouts), but at the time I couldn't believe how incredibly boring it was. There are essentially two main sections (plus some labor and delivery prep and stretching at the end) - salsa and yoga fat burn - and in each section you learn four or five moves and repeat them over and over again. If I can get through to the end, I do feel like I've gotten a decent workout, all things considered, but it's so monotonous that I can rarely bring myself to even get started. I was tempted to try the Perfect Pregnancy Workout, since it seemed like the favorable reviews were from women who specifically cited boredom with some other workouts. I wasn't exactly in the best shape of my life pre-pregnancy but I could run a few miles without stopping. The fitness level of the reviewer pre-pregnancy is vital to accurately gauging their review of a particular workout. Anyway, when a product is well rated I of course immediately jump to the few one and two-star reviews and was sufficiently freaked out by this one. Granted, this woman may have miscarried for other reasons, the fact that she did so after doing this workout two days in a row possibly being coincidence. But the workout is led by a Cirque de Soleil performer and some of the examples of positions she leads you through I'm not sure I'd be able to get into and out of if I was perfectly svelte, let alone now.


I finally found something that falls somewhere between boring and questionable in Erin O'Brien's Prenatal Fitness Fix. The sound quality on the DVD's not great, and the music she sets the workout to is essentially modified nursery rhymes. Conceptually I can dig that but nursery rhymes don't exactly provide the best tempo for counting reps. At any rate, I enjoy the workout, which is based on pilates, sports conditioning, and body sculpting moves that don't require any weights. Some of the pilates moves I skip over, partly because they feel a little too intense, but mostly because even with a carpet and folded blanket underneath, laying on my side like that kills by hip bone! Anyway, I'm anxiously awaiting Gabrielle Reece's new release from my Netflix queue. It's designed for the first two trimesters, so by the time I get it, I'll only have about another month to try it out! By the time I find the perfect pregnancy workout, it'll be time to move on to the postnatal category!

On that note (i.e. this pregnancy flying by!), it's already almost time for an updated belly pic. I'll be back this weekend with the 5 month update.