35 Weeks and a Bed Rest Update

We made it to 35 weeks!

For some reason 35 weeks seems like a comfortable number. 34 weeks was the milestone, but 35 weeks is even better. All of my weekly emails tell me that she's weighing about 5 1/2 lbs and that all of her major development is already done, she's just adding fat from this point on. I'm still hoping she'll hang in there until at least 37 weeks (maybe 39?) but feel much better knowing we've made it this far instead of the much scarier 33 weeks.

I've officially been on bed rest for a week and a half now. Here's a little brain dump about how it's going:

1. Once I reached 34 weeks, I got a few more privileges in that I can be up a bit more often, go upstairs to the baby's nursery once a day, etc. But I can tell if I try to do too much that I start to feel bad, so I have to spread things out. Take a shower, rest, fix lunch, rest, unload the dishwasher, rest. And by rest I mean at least an hour or so of lying down on my side. If I try to do two (or three) things at once my belly starts to feel tight and crampy. It may just be in my head, but I'm definitely not chancing it.

2. We found in the hospital when my contractions were pretty regular when lying on my back, that if I switched to lying on my side they were all but killed. So I've been doing LOTS of side lying. I had visions of getting so much blogging, computer work, writing thank you notes, etc done while on bed rest. But minimizing the time I'm sitting upright has made that difficult. Pretty much the only things you can do while laying on your side are read, watch TV or sleep.

3. The first week I watched entirely too much HGTV. Now I'm watching entirely too much Olympics coverage. When I go to bed at night I try to count the number of sports I've watched that day and the count is usually around 10-12 (canoeing anyone?!).

4. It's sad when you've watched so much TV that you actually get excited when a new commercial comes on (even if it's a bad one), because you're so sick of seeing the same ones over and over. (It's been a long time since I've watched this much non-DVR'ed TV).

5. All of this side-lying has meant lots of pain in my hips and sometimes knees. And my elbows are chafed from propping myself up constantly to read or watch TV. Gross, huh? And lots of heartburn too. Eating a meal and then immediately lying down afterwards will do that to you.

6. My mom and sister came up for the weekend and it was so great to have them here. I would have been mortified for anyone else to see my house in the state it's in, but my mom stepped right in in doing some tidying and deep cleaning. They also washed about 6 loads of Ava's clothes, blankets and sheets and helped organize the nursery some, so I feel a lot better about the state of things in there.

7. The nursery still has a ways to go on the decor front though. I've been doing some online browsing and shopping of course, but I just can't seem to make up my mind on some things. And there are a lot of things I just can't make progress on until I can get out of the house and look around for myself. So while I had planned to have her nursery completely done before she comes (and of course a big blog reveal), I've come to terms with the fact that that just might not happen. I may still be finishing things up weeks after she's here and that's ok. But I promise, there will eventually be a big reveal!

Overall, I'm in pretty good spirits. It hasn't been easy, and sometimes another two weeks of this seems so daunting, but I'm thankful that it's been uneventful so far. And Lee has been great, doing all of the shopping, cooking and cleaning. (Ok, let's be honest he's always done all of the cooking, so that's not much different.) And Sugar has been keeping me company too -- she's a very good napping partner!

Here's to another two weeks of boring bed rest and watching obscure Olympics coverage!