16 weeks and counting

I am now officially over 16 weeks (16 weeks 2 days today). I have still been feeling excellent. I am starting to feel a lot more pregnant lately. In the last week or so my belly has really started to fill out a lot more, and you can tell that I am pregnant now depending on the shirt that I'm wearing. I am not sure if I have been feeling the baby move yet, I suspect that I have started to feel some movement but it's very soft. I only notice it when I am laying in bed to go to sleep and I lay really still. It kindof feels like gas bubbles bubbling around in there. Not sure yet if that is the baby or if it is indeed just gas. Hopefully I should be able to start feeling it a lot more distinctlly in the next few weeks.

We got to have another ultrasound just before 16 weeks. Unfortunately the ultrasound tech that usually does one every 4 weeks had a family emergency so she couldn't do it. We did a more informal one with our lame machine in OB. The baby was moving like crazy the whole time we did the ultrasound so it was hard to get really good pictures. I didn't realize the extent to which I really look forward to those ultrasounds until I wasn't able to get one as planned. I'm hoping that the tech will be back at work next monday and she can fit us in for an ultrasound when I'm closer to 17 weeks. She is always able to get much better pictures than we do with our machine. One thing that we could tell with the OB machine is that the baby is getting A LOT bigger. We could hardly fit the whole baby on the screen because it was so big. Next time we do it I'm sure that we will only be able to look at one part at a time because it will be too big to get all of it on the screen.

I also had my doctors appointment for 16 weeks. She was very happy with how things were going. I had gained 5 pounds since my last appointment (I blame at least 1 of those pounds on the water I was drinking to generate the pee that they wanted) which is an appropriate weight gain between appointments. Supposedly I'm supposed to gain about a pound per week from now until the end of the pregnancy. If I can do that then hopefully I will stay within the recommended weight gain for my size. I am still trying to work out and eat "right" (easy mac and cookies are on the pregnancy diet, right?). Lonnie had to leave work to make it to the appointment and got there in just enough time to hear the baby's heartbeat. It was really strong and really loud which means that the baby is getting a lot bigger now and is healthy. She didn't measure my uterus like I thought she would but I suppose that may start next visit. They drew some blood at the end of the appointment for what's called the quad screen. This test tests for proteins(I think) that show up in the mom's blood if the baby has a number of defects. It tests for down syndrome, and spina bifida among others. We'll get those results when we go to our next appointment in a month. I see my doctor again on May 27th for 20 weeks, and I have scheduled the 20 week ultrasound for the 29th with one of the other doctors that I work with. This ultrasound is where most people find out the sex, but we aren't going to find out and are going to wait for the surprise in the end.

In other important news, Lonnie's job is going very well. He started on April 3rd and has now been there for about a month. The assistant chief called him into a spare room and told him that he was going to make everyone look bad. This freaked him out a little bit but then she went on to explain that his first report that he did was one of the best that had ever gone out of the office! She now calls him "Hemingway" as a joke to play off of his writing skills. Apparently around here being able to put words together to make a coherent sentence and thought is a hot commodity. He's been enjoying having more to do around the office now that he is no longer stuck reading the penal code for hours on end.

That's our life for now!