19 weeks!

19 weeks! WHOOT! One more week til I'm officially half baked! The time is flying by, but I've heard the second phase is a bit slower than the first. Well, I hope that is not the case for me. Although I am really loving and enjoying having Keifer grow inside me, I'm very excited to actually meet this little critter we've been waiting for years to meet!

Babycenter.com tells me: How your baby's growing: Your baby weighs about 8 1/2 ounces, and he measures 6 inches, head to bottom — about the length of a small zucchini. His arms and legs are in the right proportions to each other and the rest of his body now. His kidneys continue to make urine, and the hair on his scalp is sprouting. This is a crucial time for sensory development: Your baby's brain is designating specialized areas for smell, taste, hearing, vision, and touch. If your baby is a girl, she has an astonishing six million eggs in her ovaries. They'll dwindle to fewer than two million by the time she's born.

You're just a week shy of the halfway mark. You may notice some achiness in your lower abdomen (perhaps extending to your groin) or even a quick, sharp, stabbing pain on one or both sides, especially when you change position or at the end of an active day. This is round ligament pain, and it's caused by the stretching of the muscles and ligaments that support your growing uterus. It's nothing to be alarmed about, but if the pain continues even when you're resting or becomes persistent and severe, call your practitioner.

Ahhh, yes, the round ligament pain. At some points in my week, I have the sharpest pain. Sometimes it is on my right side, directly below my rib cage, around the gall bladder area. A few times, I've actually let out a sharp cry with the pain, because it can get pretty intense. I find myself massaging the bottom of my rib cage quite a bit lately. I treated myself to a prenatal back massage the other day, and my back is full of knots, as usual. But it felt so good to get some of the newer knots that are PG related worked on. I'm also finding it more difficult to lean over to pick things up, or to lean over and do my work with the kids at work. And its still early, I realize this!