Great news from the doctor!

We had our follow-up appointments with the doctor this past week. Our first appointment Thursday was with the ultrasound technician to check on the location of the placenta. Good news! The placenta has moved up 1.5-2cm, and the doctor said this means we should be able to have a normal delivery, barring any other complications that may arise during labor that may necessitate a c-section. Yay! Baby B is already head down, which the doctor said may or may not change. There wasn't any sign of those pesky choroid plexus cysts, either. Baby B was moving around like crazy and the tech must have been enjoying talking with us because she kept moving the transducer around even after she checked everything she needed to. She even pulled out the 3D one and spent a few minutes playing around with that! Baby B had his/her hand in front of their face the whole time, but we got some great shots of their hand and half their face. On the regular 2D ultrasound we got to see Baby B open up his/her mouth, stick out their tongue, and gulp in some amniotic fluid (great for lung development). It was so fun to watch! We also got to see a bit of hair on the back of his/her head! Baby B looks healthy and is weighing in at 2 lbs 13 oz right now. His/her heart rate was in the 140s (I don't remember the exact number) and the levels of amniotic fluid looked good.

Then we saw the doctor, who said everything looked great and my weight gain was right on track. This was a doctor in the practice I hadn't met before, since mine is out on maternity leave for another few weeks. By the time mine comes back, I'll have met every doctor in the practice except one. This is nice because if it's time for me to deliver after hours or on the weekend, the on-call doctor will be the one delivering Baby B - so any of the five docs in the practice. Anyway, back to the appointment Thursday - after I talked with the doctor a bit, the nurse came back in to give me a flu shot and take some blood for my glucose test. I drank the glucola just before my ultrasound and that stuff was gross! It wasn't as horrible as I had geared myself up for, but it wasn't very good either. I had the lemon-lime flavor, so it tasted like really sweet, really flat Spr.ite. They were also running a blood test to check for anemia. Apparently I'm not anemic and don't have gestational diabetes, because the nurse said she would call on Friday if either of those tests came back abnormal, and I never got a phone call. Woo hoo!

Thursday night we had the second of our childbirth classes, which are also taking place at the hospital. We talked about the stages of labor and learned some comfort measures to practice at home. Can I just say I never knew that tennis balls made such good massagers? Seriously, Matt rubbing my lower back with that tennis ball was awesome. We stopped on the way home to pick up some tennis balls of our own :) We also have a paper with a bunch of different positions for laboring that we're supposed to try before next week so we can figure out what we like/don't like and we aren't trying to figure everything out from scratch when I'm actually in labor. Labor still kind of scares me, but I'm liking learning more about it and what we can do to help me manage the pain when it actually comes time for that (though there will be an epidural at some point).

I'll make another post soon about the little getaway Matt and I took this weekend (our "annual small town fall retreat") but I'll leave you with this 29 week photo from the corn maze we went through yesterday :)