All about Reagan, Part IV: The Second Trimester

Part I: Introduction
Part II: Conception
Part III: The First Trimester

The day after getting out of the hospital from my gallbladder surgery, we moved. I was mostly sitting in a chair directing the movers to various rooms of the house. Now that we were in a new house and I new I was having a girl, I was already thinking of what I was going to do for the nursery.

Just a week later, I finally bought my first baby items. I bought a little pair of Ugg like boots (yep, I'm all about the practical in infant looks) and a little outfit that Reagan ended up wearing for her six month pictures. It seemed surreal to me that after 2.5 years I was finally buying my first little pieces of baby clothes. I hung the items over the closet door in the room we chose to be her nursery. I found myself going in there a lot those first few weeks and just sitting in the empty room envisioning what the room would look like, what she would look like, what she was going to be when she grew up...

Baby names came next. Our first name we both really liked was Madeline. We decided to call her Madeline for a bit to see how it fit. It didn't. When I think of a "Madeline" I think of a sweet, demure girl who says, "yes poppa" and "no mother" and drinks from delicate porcelain play tea sets with her teddy bears and dolls. We knew this wouldn't be our baby. We knew that with all that I had gone through (and would yet to go through), our baby had gone through it too. She had already beaten terrible odds and overcome great diversity, and she hadn't even seen 20 weeks gestation yet. She was a fighter. Our baby was going to be tough, spunky, spirited. She would be the one to wear a girly dress paired with combat boots and jump through the mud puddles after a fresh rain (after being told not to). When I came across the name Reagan and threw it out, it stuck. That seemed like the name that fit our baby girl. So from 15 weeks on, Baby A had a name. She was Reagan.

Because of my PCOS, my doctor tested me for gestational diabetes early at 16 weeks. I chugged down the nasty orange litre of syrupy kool-aid, took the test, and failed hard. I didn't even have to take the three hour test or pass GO. I was sent straight on to the perintologist where I was told precisely what I would eat for the next 24 weeks and how to stick my finger four times a day to monitor sugars. I begrudgingly gave myself the first test prick. Dang! That hurt more than I thought it would. Well, by my calculations I had only 671 more fingers sticks left to go this pregnancy. I started wondering how accurate the results would be if I moved on to toes when my fingers refused to give any more blood.

A few weeks later I got a nasty bout of Bronchitis. I figure it was from all of the traveling I was still doing. Only it just wouldn't seem to go away. I couldn't breathe and just kept coughing. I was sent to a pulminologist where he informed me that I had pregnancy induced asthma. Huh? They have such a thing? Leave it to me to get that. He gives me a bunch of steroids and inhalers and I have to be on them the remainder of my pregnancy.

Amazingly, I am now breathing again and the cough goes away. Only all of the steroids and inhalers wreak havoc on my blood sugars and I'm now insulin dependent. Bill faithfully gives me my shots whenever I am home and I suck it up and stick myself in the gut when I'm traveling.

My doctor found out I was still traveling and put the kibosh on that at about 24 weeks. I can't say that I was disappointed. I worked from home the remainder of my pregnancy and began to pour myself into all things baby: the nursery, buying clothes, registering for items. I was getting so excited for Reagan to make her debut! I would play disco a lot around the house and in the car. Whenever YMCA or Celebration came on, Reagan would start kicking away and things were finally starting to feel real. I could feel her, she had a name, she had a nursery, we were really going to have a baby!

Me at 28 weeks and counting, in the start of Reagan's nursery

To be continued...