33 Weeks - Swollen Feet

This week baby is the size of a medicine ball...

Here's what's going on with baby this week...

• The baby is now 4.4 pounds (2 kg) and around 17.5 inches (44cm) in length.
• The diameter of the head is about 8.5cm.
• The baby fuzz, lanugo, is disappearing.
• Your baby drinks about a pint of amniotic fluid a day.
• You may gain a pound a week (500g) for the rest of your pregnancy.
• Half of your weight gain will go directly to your baby

The baby is using it's lungs to practice breathing by inhaling amniotic fluid. Your baby is drinking about a pint of amniotic fluid a day now and urinating the same amount. The early baby fuzz, lanugo, is disappearing now and being replaced by actual hair. The nails of your baby are now long enough to reach to the tip of the fingers or beyond and may need trimming as soon as they are born. They may scratch their face even before birth.

The big news this week is lung development—baby's respiratory system is almost completely mature. That means if your baby was born this week, odds are he'd be a healthy bouncing baby with a just a little help from his friends (aka, the NICU). Some of the specifics are:

Your baby can now detect light and tell the difference between night and day (of course that ability will miraculously disappear once he's born and up all night screaming). His pupils will constrict and dilate in response to light. If you shine a flashlight on your belly, your baby may shy away from the light as if to say, "Cut it out, Ma. You're soooo annoying.

"The bones in your baby's skull are soft and are not yet fused together. In other words, now is not the time to teach him how to do a headspin while breakdancing. This pliability allows the bones to overlap; making that trip down the tight birth canal possible (and resulting in that surprising cone head look your baby will sport for the first few days post-birth. Don't worry, it's totally normal and that's what hats are for.)

Your baby will continue to pack on the pounds gaining around ½ pound a week from here on out.

He's rapidly losing that wrinkled, alien look and his skeleton is hardening. The bones in his skull aren't fused together, which allows them to move and slightly overlap, thus making it easier for him to fit through the birth canal. (The pressure on the head during birth is so intense that many babies are born with a conehead-like appearance.) These bones don't entirely fuse until early adulthood, so they can grow as his brain and other tissue expands during infancy and childhood.

Here's me at 33 weeks...

So, for the last 3 days I have been getting swollen feet and ankles, especially by the end of the day. It's frustrating, because I feel good, and have a lot to do, but I have to keep stopping to put my feet up. I may have done a little too much on Saturday, but I'm so excited because we got SOO much stuff done!

The nursery is finally done!!!! YAY!!! All we have left is to put the flooring into our walk-in closet and do the baseboards in there and then install a closet system.

I'm getting ahead of myself though. Earlier in the week, Nathan taped and mudded all the screw holes and drywall joints. Then he textured the walls and inside the closet in the nursery.

Our wonderful and amazing sister-in-law came on her day off and painted the exterior walls and the inside of the baby's closet. She did a phenomenal job and it turned out amazing. It was so much fun to see the walls look like actual walls!

So, we spent over 12 hours on Saturday working on the rooms. We started our day waking up early to go to a couple of garage sales we saw posted on Craigslist and got some great little boy baby clothes for really cheap. Then we came back and got started on the house. This time I can say that I really did help! I did a lot actually...and not just a lot of watching!

I started out by sanding the large dresser and all the drawers that still had to be sanded so that we could stain and then seal them. I woke up with sore hands the next day from the power sander I used, and then after using the sander, I went over everything again by hand with a much finer sand paper.

Nathan finished mudding and then later, after it had dried (which took most of the day), he textured the inside of our closet. He also installed the tack strip in all the areas we needed to re-tack the carpet, and he rented a carpet kicker and cut and kicked the carpet into place.

I painted all the baseboards and trim and Nathan installed all of these in the nursery and the outside of our closet. Then, while he was texturing, I spackled and caulked all the trim and baseboards in both rooms and the baby's closet. The next day, Nathan painted the inside of our closet and then finished the nursery by installing the closet system and the doors. Here's the finished product. Doesn't it look amazing!!!

Have I mentioned yet what an unbelievably, amazing husband I have? :-)