At 18-1/2 weeks, I’ve officially retired my pre-preggie wardrobe. I’ve been wearing my pair of “fat jeans” in comfort up until this week, when I discovered that zipping them up would require me to suck in — which, honestly, isn’t possible anymore. I suppose I could still wear them with a bella band and live in denial for a few more weeks, but I figure that I might as well relent and embrace my new preggie body. I also stopped wearing my cotton, button-down dress shirts to work last week when I found my protruding tummy straining against the fabric and looking quite unkempt. Hubby, in his ever-diplomatic way, said gently, “I think it’s time you start wearing your maternity clothes. I’ll take you shopping to buy more clothes, if you want.”

So, today after Hubby came home from work, we hit Motherhood Maternity in Waikele. Hubby is my favorite shopping companion. He has a knack for choosing items that I would never have considered myself that end up looking great! He gives me objective feedback and is never insulting when he critiques an outfit. This is particularly helpful since I might often rationalize a poor fit if I like the color/style, but Hubby will gently talk me out of it. Hubby is a man’s man, so you’d never think that he was a closet fashionista, but he is.

I left with a few new pieces, nice additions to my growing maternity wardrobe. When I got home, I did a quick purge of my closet and dresser and filled a trash bag with items to donate.

It’s the first step to embracing the baby bump.

When you’re pregnant, the last thing you want to see on your cute cotton panties is red.

Last night, just before retiring to bed, I discovered that I had started bleeding for no apparent reason. Immediately, thoughts of complications, months of bed rest, or even worse: miscarriage, flooded my mind. I headed straight for my “What to Expect…” book and turned to the “when there’s a problem” section on bleeding. From the reading, I determined that since the bleeding wasn’t heavy and wasn’t accompanied by pain, that I could wait until the morning to call the doctor. In the hours that followed, it was difficult not to let the what-ifs plague my thoughts. I fell asleep with my hands on my tummy, lifting silent, yet tearful prayers for Baby Champuru.

This morning, I called the doctor’s office as soon as they opened and they squeezed me into the schedule.

The nurse took my weight and recorded in my chart. “Wow, you gained a lot of weight,” she remarked. Pregnancy is the only time it is acceptable to make comments about a woman’s weight. I didn’t think I had gained much weight at all, but then I remembered that I had also lost a good amount of weight at the beginning of my pregnancy thanks to the travails of morning sickness.

The doctor emerged from an exam room and peered at my chart, making notes. “You gained 8 pounds?!” she exclaimed.

All of a sudden, I felt like I had to justify myself, “Well, I seem to be eating a little better than before and I had lost a lot of weight in the beginning…”

She seemed satisfied with my stammering excuses,“okay, so you’re back to normal then.”

Just yesterday I weighed myself with my bathroom scale and I was 5-pounds less than the reading on the scale at the doctor’s office. Either the shredded mini wheats I had for breakfast were sitting in my stomach like a 5-pound brick or my bathroom scale is wrong. I blame the cereal.

Then she joined me in an examining room with the Doppler. She scanned my abdomen for what seemed like forever and I didn’t hear anything on the monitor. She kept clicking a switch and I started to get worried. Was she having a hard time finding the heartbeat? She must’ve saw the alarmed look on my face because she said, “it’s not you, it’s this machine. I can’t even get it to turn on.” Phew!
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With the help of her nurse who has a way with electronics, she managed to get the Doppler working and quickly found Baby Champuru’s strong heartbeat. “The baby is just fine!” she announced and switched off the monitor.

The doc did an internal check, reviewed my ultrasound results from the specialist, and determined that the bleeding was most likely caused by the placental sac of an embryo that began to form but didn’t make it. (This is the anomaly that they found in my ultrasound that had caused some concern initially.) It was degenerating and was now being expelled. She said that this was actually good news since it’s better for it to be expelled than to back up and “bother” the current pregnancy. Yes, please don’t bother Baby Champuru.

She also reported that the results from my integrated blood screen were excellent. “Baby got an A+ on this test!” doc said. That also means that I don’t need to do an amniocentesis. Thank God!

So, good news all around. Also, doc scheduled me for another ultrasound with the specialist to follow up, which means more pictures of Baby Champuru in a few weeks.

This whole episode made me realize how fragile and precious this pregnancy is. It truly is a gift and a blessing, one that I will not take for granted.