28 Weeks and On the Mend

Well, today Little Anna is 28 weeks along.  That means that she weighs over 2 pounds and is almost 15 inches long!  She can now blink her eyes and is putting on fat in preparation for life in the outside world. 

So, we have two things to celebrate at 28 weeks:  we're now in the third trimester, and am officially off bedrest!  Whoo hoo!  The bedrest was just for a week, but boy did I feel like I wasn't getting a THING accomplished!  Here's what happened last week...

A week and half ago, I had terrible flu-like symptoms, so I left work headed for the OB's office.  They checked me out and said it was probably just a virus and to come back in two days if I didn't feel better.  But, by dinnertime, I was so miserable, I called the on-call doctor and he advised me to come in based on my symptoms.

So, Mark took me to the Franklin Woods Hospital ER where they immediately took me back since I had talked to Dr. Hallman earlier (yay!  No waiting ~ whew!).  It was evident I was dehydrated, so they hooked me up to an IV and started doing tests...white blood counts, cell type counts, vitamin levels, temperature, lots of baby monitoring, flu swabs, etc.  My blood counts came back slightly elevated indicating some infection, but they just weren't sure. 

So, I stayed the night.  The flu test came back negative.  Then finally a culture came back showing an odd protozoa called Cryptosporidium. 

"Crypto"sporidium...is that like "Crypto"nite?  It sure felt like it could take Superman down!!

Apparently I had picked this up either in the pool at the beach the week before or in Boone Lake that Sunday.  It was odd, though, that I really only dipped in waist-deep both places, and no one else that was with me was sick.  So, apparently I just became sick because I was pregnant and the immune system is a little down in pregnancy.

Finally after 3 nights in the hospital, hooked to an IV for rehydration the whole time, my symptoms went away and I started to feel better and be able to eat again.  Thank goodness they did put me on bedrest (therefore out of work) for a week, though, because I've never been so weak in my life!  Thank goodness for Mark, because I have no clue how I would have handled little firecracker Ben in that state.  Fortunately, I was able to rest and each day got a lot better.  My checkup yesterday with the doctor went well, baby looked great, and so now we're on our way back to normal ~ whew!!

In baby news, Anna is kicking a LOT these days!  She really gets active when something tightens on my stomach, like tight pants or the monitor they use to check her heartbeat.  Last week, I felt her get the hiccups for the first time!  Coming up:  in two weeks, it's time already for the 3D/4D ultrasound!  We're so excited and totally curious to see if she resembles Ben in utero or not....we should have some neat pictures and maybe even a video from that!!!

I've really been thinking hard about her nursery lately.  I have two totally different ideas of "looks" for the room, and am having a hard time either picking one, or trying to incorporate little bits of both into a coordinated third idea room....either way, I better get going SOON ~ only 12 more weeks until we meet our baby girl!! :)

Briarwood Safari 2011

Our most recent adventure (besides being locked in the car, ha!!) was to the Briarwood Safari.  It's about an hour from Johnson City out in the middle of nowhere...but absolutely FULL of really cool animals just roaming around for you to see!  You drive through in your car "Jurassic Park" style and can feed them.  This, of course, attacts them to your vehicle so you can get a closer look. 

So, we bought 7 buckets of feed, and we were off into the safari.  The first animals that you come to are the emus...or, as we called them:  Veloceraptors.  They were JUST LIKE the ones in Jurassic Park that stalked the car the whole way through!!  It was a little scary at first - we had our windows TOO far down, because they just about climbed in the car with us ~ yikes!  They were really after that food, and we got a huge laugh at how jumpy we were over a bunch of birds pecking at those buckets.

Mason and Chandler had a ball feeding the animals.  Ben was interested for a few minutes, but mostly just enjoyed "driving"...as you recall, his MOST favorite thing to do :)

There were some REALLY big animals there like buffalos and zebras, water buffalo, etc..so we mostly just fed them by hanging out the sunroof.  That way, they weren't in our face, slobbering in the car. Thank goodness, because some of them were pretty disgusting up close.  Mark had a nice concoction of chewed up food pellets and buffalo slobber nicely smeared on his window by the buffalo's crusty beard...Mmmmm!

Mason had fun playing with the "Zorse" (cross between a zebra and a horse), and here's Chandler up close and personal with some kind of llama or something.  We all really like the deer...they were gentle and you could feed them out of your window.  Ben even kept saying, "Bye bye deer!"