I couldn't do any video, but they loved it. It actually showed up Saturday instead of today and I told them to go ahead and open it then. They are thrilled! Glad to have them know so I can bug someone other than just my husband about how stupid tired I feel all the time. I guess my mom's only real symptoms were being super tired and some headaches without any nausea. I hope that symptom severity is genetic....so far, so good!

It's our 6th anniversary today, so looking forward to a nice dinner out.

Happy anniversary!!

Happy Anniversary! also, the onesies came out so adorable! Glad your family is so happy for you.

Hi All! I've been gone forever....clearly I don't log on here when I'm not tracking my food so sorry about that! Congrats to all of the newly pregnant ladies!!

I'm trucking along at 31 weeks, overall still having a relatively easy and healthy pregnancy. In the past few weeks I've had some morning hot flashes, where I feel lightheaded and then get an uncontrollably uncomfortable hot flash. My doctors say its due to not eating enough protein in morning, so I'm trying to focus on that. Otherwise, just getting bigger by the day, or at least it feels that way! We have our first shower this coming Saturday, so waiting until after that to really start putting the room together or making a to-do list of everything that needs accomplished in the next 2 months.

Here is me last week, at 30+4:

@jennamae102 Thanks for checking in! You look great and I'm glad to hear things have been going well!

@SheilAnneSmith So glad the appointment went well! Bask in the joy!

Sweet! Thanks for sharing, guys.

@Alioth The finances suck, I have a $5,000 out of pocket maximum on my policy and I expect I'll get mighty darn close or hit it. Watch the ultrasound costs, I am 20 weeks at Christmas but pushing them off to 21 weeks for my anomaly ultrasound so it happens after Jan 1. It's a $840 ultrasound and I want to make sure I get credit for that towards my maximum in the year baby will be born!

Our OB office does that global billing deal, but I have declined to make payments ahead of time because I'm too controlling to pay them for services they haven't rendered. It doesn't include any labs or ultrasounds, their estimated fee was around $4k. Global billing irritates me as I want to see line items for each appointment and see how it's all being billed out and covered. There is too much grey area to it in my opinion. Hospital fees for me (and baby) will be on top of the OBGYN fee as well.

Is your birth center just asking for the payment ahead of time, then going to run the billing through your insurance at the end then?

I told my boss after my 8 week appointment when I got to see baby and knew everything was going well, but I hadn't been sick thankfully and it wasn't too hard to hide. I told the group I work with daily at about 10 weeks and am just letting it spread as it spreads now.

@Alioth Unfortunately, I've gone around and around with them already trying to get a more detailed breakdown...which ended in tears, frustration and curse words! They also said they'd mail me something a few weeks ago...not surprise it hasn't arrived. I don't want to stress about it any more, so am just pretending it doesn't bug me.

Anomoly Scan is what they call the big 20 week ultrasound, where they can find out gender too. $840 is what they bill, supposedly the insurance agreements adjust it down to about $500. The 8 week ultrasound was billed at $333 and adjusted to $249. My insurance covers the first $500 of ultrasound, so it was covered at least but there is not enough left to cover the other one this year. For $99 I can go a private place 70 miles away if I'm really dying to know if we're having a boy or girl before Christmas!

Just because I'm an overthinking, what happens if insurance rejects the claim but for some reason you end up having to transfer to the hospital? Just thinking there would be a risk of having $3-4k to the birthing center and then your out-of-pocket to the insurance on top of it or would the insurance recognize that you paid that amount out-of-pocket to the birthing center?

Glad your appointment went well!! It seems like my wait until the 8 week appointment was super slow, then all of the sudden I'm 13+5 and my pants aren't fitting well and I am wondering if it's all going to happen too fast. LOL.

My co-workers are very excited, they all have grown kids or kids about to graduate high-school. I'm not sure what they'll want to do later, my husband has some cousins nearby that are retired and talking about planning something when we told them this weekend. Most of my friends and family are in Oregon though, so I'm not sure how it'll shake out...maybe one in Idaho and one in Oregon? That's what I did for our wedding receptions.

Super late to the party but @jennamae102 you look beautiful! Congratulations to all of the pregnant ladies on here!

I'm sorry I only posted one short post instead of the promised bombardment. That one post got cut short and after retyping the whole thing 4 times I gave up and didn't log in to MFP again for months. I don't even remember what the end of that post was supposed to be, but here is a wall of text to continue the story. Feel free not to read this. This is the first time I have written this anywhere so it may be long and rambly.

I did manage to work all the way until my last scheduled day. I had worked out with my boss to take vacation starting 1 week before my due date (conveniently on a Monday) and then the full 12 weeks of FMLA leave. My last day was a Friday and I had my regular pre-natal appointment at 3:00, so I just worked until I had to leave for the appointment. I remember as I leaving work that day, I stopped to say goodbye to a coworker. She asked how I was feeling and I gave my usual complaint of being so ready to be done. She guessed that I would like a few days of vacation and then for the baby to come out a few days early. I told her nope. I was done. I wouldn't care if he was born that night because he was already full term (38+4). Little did I know....

At my appointment, my blood pressure had finally crossed the line into high risk territory. On top of that I was extra swollen and had a bad headache the last two days that wouldn't go away. Those are all signs of pre-eclampsia. I didn't have protein in the urine (thank goodness!) but my bp was still high when the doctor checked it again. After some discussion with the high risk doctor who happened to be in the clinic at the time, I was sent to the hospital to OB Triage for monitoring. It was now 4:00. I called Leo, told him to feed the pets, grab the bag and come meet me at the hospital. While there my bp did go down to elevated normal. I was having very mild contractions but nothing noteworthy. It then turned into a discussion between the doctors and Leo and I about whether to send me home and have me monitor my bp at home, have me return to OB Triage the next day for more monitoring, or induce labor since I was so close to 40 weeks. The risk of me winding up back there with elevated bp and possible pre-eclampsia and now being "real" high risk was high enough that we decided to induce. It was probably about 7:30pm at this point (poor Leo didn't get his pizza and beer for dinner). The nurse wheeled me into labor and delivery and starting get us all set up. She very nicely fed me (decent sandwich, fruit cup, chips, cookie, and juice) and then started the induction at 9:30pm.

TRIGGER WARNING. Slightly traumatic birth with positive outcome. Not intended to scare anyone but just for an outlet for me.

The induction was done using a Cook's foley (didn't know this was a thing) and miso(?). The first 15 hours went fine - got some sleep, contractions increasing but manageable, getting up and walking around every once in a while. Then they started the pitocin. Oh the many nasty things I could say about that drug. My contractions quickly became unbearable. They were soooo painful and worst of all, instead of being 5-10 minutes apart like before, they had become 1-2 minutes apart sometimes with one starting before the last one even ended. I opted for pain medication. The nitrous oxide was useless. The fentanyl (is that even the right drug? goldfish memory) helped but not much. After only an hour like this I begged for an epidural. The anesthesiologist came in, got all set up, and then had to leave for an emergency situation. FOUR HOURS LATER, she was back and I got the epidural. Ah bliss! I could still move my legs some but couldn't bear weight on them. After a while I could feel contractions a little but not even remotely like before the epidural. The only downside was that they had me turning over increasingly frequently because the baby wouldn't like a position and his heart rate would drop. It was already low. There had been a few conversations between the medical staff about his heart rate baseline being low and then having to drop it lower around hour 16. Of course with the epidural, turning over was a pain in the butt.

Unfortunately the baby's heart rate eventually dropped too low. One minute I'm trying to sleep and the next there is a flood of doctors and nurses in the room unhooking me from all of the equipment. Thankfully the head resident was making a point to calmly but quickly tell me exactly what was happening, the concern, and what they were going to do. Because of that, I felt fairly calm for myself and even the baby. The part that really upset then and still today is that Leo had been asleep on the couch/bed in the room and while all of the activity woke him up, nobody was talking to him. The next thing I know I'm being wheeled out while Leo is left behind. They are running down the hall so fast they are crashing into walls and doors while asking for my verbal consent for a c-section in case there isn't time for the paperwork. The head nurse gave me a what I think was liquid adrenaline that she told me to shoot like tequila (while my whale of a self is lying sideways and partially paralyzed). I mentioned Leo and she said that once they got me in the operating room (in the L&D ward) and stabilized, she would go talk with him. They got me in the room, hooked me up to monitors and baby's heart rate was back to normal. They decided to wait for the high risk OB to come evaluate the situation before taking me back to the room. In the meantime someone brought Leo in (I later learned they never actually told him anything, just brought him).

In a deja vu situation to deciding to induce, the high risk OB gave us the choice of returning to try to labor more and possibly have a natural delivery or have the c-section then while things were stable. The risk was that the same thing would happen again and it would be a true emergency c-section versus doing it while stable and having it not actually be an emergency situation which meant more prep and fewer risks. Given how long I had been in labor and how much they had me turning over for his heart rate, we decided it seemed unlikely I would make it to a natural delivery and to do the c-section then while stable. One of the residents had very nicely been keeping my regular OB informed (at her request), and she actually showed up in the middle of night to just be there supporting Leo and I for this. The baby was born via c-section at 1:32am after 28 hours of labor.

Of course, being the hot mess that I am, that isn't the end of the story. I wound up having a small bleed during surgery that they had trouble finding to close up. The surgery wound up taking about 2 hours and I lost twice as much blood as is normal for the operation. I also started shaking horribly. Apparently that is natural reaction both to hormones during labor/delivery and some of the meds used. The shaking was so uncomfortable that they had to raise the head of the bed slightly because I was having trouble breathing. At one point the discomfort was so bad that I desperately wanted to scream "STOP. I'm done. I'm out" and get up and leave. Of course I couldn't. I am so eternally grateful to Leo for staying with me the whole time, comforting me, telling the doctors what I was feeling when I was incapable of talking, telling me they were almost done, and holding the baby skin-to-skin in his shirt at the same time. Thankfully, when the surgery was over they were able to raise me up to a sitting position and the shaking immediately stopped. I then got to hold my sweet baby.