McNair Life: Week 10

Your astonishingly tiny baby has been hard at work growing as fast as possible—almost doubling in size in the past three weeks! Amazingly, you’re in for a repeat size doubling performance within the next three weeks! Your tiny champion still weighs less than a quarter of an ounce but has already completed the most critical stage of their development. Using Doppler technology, your doctor or gynecologist can let you hear their tiny rapid fetal heartbeats this week (145-165 beats per minute!). Chances for miscarriage are greatly reduced when the heartbeat can be detected, so take a sigh of relief if you’ve been needing one—it hasn’t been an easy ten weeks! What’s more, they’re getting ready to make their first baby poop! Your little one’s major organ systems are developing, including a functioning digestive tract capable of moving food all the way through their bowels. The final shiny gold star on their fetal behavior chart for the week: your little scrapper has already developed defense mechanisms to protect them on reflex.

And how's mom doing? More good news for mom: the placenta has grown substantially in size and function and is now beginning to manage some of your child’s hormones, finally taking some of the hormonal burden off of you! Since the placenta has gradually taken over the hormone production for your baby, you should finally start to notice that much-awaited decrease in morning sickness symptoms. Like everything else, though, this is just a general guideline... if you have lingering effects for another couple of weeks, don’t fret (or fret, but don't blame us)—pregnancy is not a standardized procedure so much as an individual journey

This sums up what I have been trying to explain to people. When you aren't pregnant you can't grasp this happening (or I couldn't anyway), but I really haven't been hungry...I feel yuck before I eat, so I eat then feel worse. How aggravating! At least I haven't thrown up, I still feel lucky and blessed for my lack of morning sickness. Everyone asks "Have you been sick?" I say no and they immediately say it is a boy. I had a lady at the swimming pool in Dallas tell me I'm having a boy too, she said always remember the lady at the DFW Holiday Inn that got it right!! We will see in late October!

So we made it back from Texas Sunday night about 7:00. The trip home was fine. There were lots of Louisiana license plates on the road. It was so sad :( Everyone had their cars packed with their belongings and their pets. I wanted to cry. Texas was tons of fun, even though we never made it to The Cheesecake Factory haha. Brian and I swam a lot. One day we were at the pool from 9 to 4. We even had an hour and a half nap by the pool. We had it all to ourselves and it was indoor. We got lucky! It was good to see dad too...we hadn't seen him since Christmas in Colorado. He is getting ready to go out of the country and work for a year or two, so it was hard telling him bye.

We loved the Grapevine Opry! It was a great show and they are very talented.