Thirty-Three Weeks

Today marks week thirty-three in the pregnancy. According to BabyCenter, the baby weighs a little over four pounds (think about picking up a pineapple) and has passed the seventeen-inch mark. She is rapidly losing that wrinkled, alien look and her skeleton is hardening. The bones in her skull are not fused together, which allows them to move and slightly overlap, thus making it easier for her to fit through the birth canal (good thing!). (The pressure on the head during birth is so intense that many babies are born with a conehead-like appearance.) These bones do not entirely fuse until early adulthood, so they can grow as his brain and other tissue expands during infancy and childhood.

I have been getting more Braxton-Hicks contractions lately and continue to feel the baby move around quite a lot. I also think I jinxed myself over the recent girls' weekend by telling my friends that I had not really felt the baby have hiccups as often as I remember feeling Elsa have them. Since saying that, I feel like I have noticed hiccups more over the past few days. Tiredness seems to overtake me more these days too, which makes for a weary mommy by mid-afternoon, and I often feel bad for Elsa that I do not have as much energy to devote to playing with her, cooking more entailed meals, etc. We still manage to make it through, though. And I still seem to find myself running around doing things and rarely sitting down (as is my nature) regardless. Hey, it is really all preparation for what being the mommy of two is really going to be like!