28 Weeks / 7 Months

Behold, the 7 month bump:

Excuse the headphones, I was multitasking - taking pics while catching up with Jac ;)

At this point, most people have a comment of some kind to make about the size of my belly. Luckily, its usually been complementary which has definitely been nice. But at this point, and especially after looking at these pictures, I can't help but believe they're all just being polite. Or perhaps many people just assume that 7 months pregnant is supposed to look much bigger than this when in actuality, the huge bowling ball of a belly doesn't truly come on until later on in the process? Or maybe I'm lucky and my little lady is waiting it out before she packs on the pounds and makes her presence undeniably massive. I don't know, these are just but a few of some of my working hypotheses. 

What I do know for sure if that other's comments tend to leave me feeling mostly positive with a side of slightly nervous so that I find myself googling "how much weight gain is too little" on one day and "how much weight gain is too much" the next. It doesn't help that as she changes positions, my belly shifts like crazy so that within an hour I can go from a small hill to a gigantic mountain or vice versa. This morning when I got out of bed and caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror I almost had a heart attack. I literally yelled out to Sean as I grasped my stomach. He said something to the effect of, "whoa!" with his eyes pretty wide in surprise. I kid you not, it looked like I wasn't even pregnant. While this sent me into a complete panic as I mentally catalogued my sleeping positions throughout the night and whether they could have endangered my baby girl, Sean was more intrigued than worried. In the end it only took about 5 minutes before things returned to normal and I felt her kicking around in there but it was sooooo bizarre. Pregnancy is so weird. 

Anyway, 7 months in things are still going really well. Its definitely getting harder to sleep as of this week - I can no longer sleep on my stomach, I'm too terrified to sleep on my back, and now I have a ton of pain in my right butt and thigh so I'm generally restricted to sleeping exclusively on my left side - but my energy level is still pretty good and on most days I feel pretty normal and like my non-pregnant self. Hormonally, things are getting a bit chaotic again but its different than previously. Whereas in the first trimester I was nothing short of a raging biatch at random moments, this time I'm just so quick to become tearful. The other night I cried during a Huggies commercial simply because it had a newborn baby in it. I don't even think I was aware of the storyline of the commercial, it was literally seeing a tiny baby and thinking about how we'd have one that small too made me sob. 

Another thing thats new is that I feel Braxton-Hicks contractions pretty regularly. I think its partially due to the fact that Vanessa told me when I was having one when we were together in France, which then made me more aware of them when they happened after that. Its pretty strange and cool. They're definitely making my motherly instincts kick up a notch. 

So yeah, thats your week 28 round up. On to the next 12(ish) weeks...At the same time that 3 more months feels like tomorrow, it also feels like a million years away. I wonder how that will change as time passes...we'll see I guess :)