26 Weeks

Your baby now weighs about 2 pounds and is about 13 inches long. You’ve reached the end of your second trimester and now time may seem to crawl along as you wait through these final weeks. Just remember that soon you will have a new little one to hold and love!

This week the eyes are opening and beginning to blink. Before now, the eyes have been sealed shut so that they can continue to develop the retina. Baby’s eye color, depending on their coloring and ethnic background, may be dark or brown, or they could be grayish blue. Depending on your baby their eyes may change colors during the first few months after birth. Eyelashes are growing now, as is the hair on their head.

Taste buds are continuing to develop and they are improving their sucking and swallowing motions. Brain waves become stronger this week, which affects the vision and hearing. The smooth brain is now forming grooves and valleys.

The bronchial tract develops this week and the lungs are growing. If your baby were born now, it would have an 85% chance of survival, but the lungs are still very immature. Little boy’s testes have completely descended at this point and although your baby is rapidly putting fat on their body, the skin is still very thin and the veins are visible.

Almost finished the second trimester! Belly continues to expand at a rapid pace. The weather has been relatively cool and I have been feeling pretty great. On the weekend my hips started to feel a bit sticky and today I was almost limping. I have been using the birth ball and hopefully that will work it out. I just feel like I have to find the right stretch or something and they'll unlock. I'm glad for yoga and for the childbirth classes because both do movements that are so beneficial to the pregnant bod.

Starting to get comments about baby's gender. Pretty much universally declared a boy. The other night baby was moving around so I put Andrew's hand on my belly. The baby put on a show for Daddy! I have not felt this baby move so much as she or he did while Andrew's big warm hand was on there. It was fun. All the activity made him think it was a boy. It's true I'm carrying basketball-style, just like I did with Micah. (But I'm also not as heavy as I was with Eva and my hips haven't opened up yet like they did with her the moment I conceived). The timing of conception leans toward boy. But we both thought that Eva was a girl and let ourselves get talked out of it by other people. I'm going to go with Eva's declaration and continue to assume it is a girl, but not be surprised if it's a boy.

We have been kicking around names a lot more lately. Haven't settled on anything but it feels good to get serious about the names.

Yesterday in class we heard that one of the students had her baby that morning. A three hour painless labour. Her husband didn't even make it- he was still putting on his scrubs when the baby emerged. She was hoping for a waterbirth but there was no time for that. She was very pleased with how her birth went. Faster isn't always better (it can be harder on Mom and baby) but this one went really well.

We saw a number of water birth videos today. I think it opened some students' eyes to the possibilities. Most of the women moved around quite a bit according to what their bodies were telling them. All of the women held their babies immediately. The births felt so... simple. Straightforward. No bustling around, no special tools. Just Mom working hard, Dad supporting, and baby finding its way to the outside world. Sometimes the midwife/doctor would pass the baby to Mom, sometimes Mom and/or Dad would catch the baby.

Lucia did go over some of the benefits. I wished that she would have provided a little more information. The other students and husbands sometimes ask questions, but I wonder how many questions are left unasked and unanswered. That said, maybe Lucia's mission is not to provide all the answers but rather to expose people to the possibilities. And hopefully the couples pursue the options that speak to them. It's tough, because many of these couples have doctors who are not very open to changing the ways that they have traditionally managed birth. And it is hard to change your OB partway through a pregnancy. But I'm sure the classes have a positive impact on the experience of some couples and that is awesome.