Well, I am now entering my 15th week of pregnancy. Thankfully the morning sickness has abated! I am feeling more energetic generally, though I haven't been sleeping as well for the past couple of days. I think getting back into the swing of teaching has been hard, but I will find the rhythm again soon. Apparently the baby was the size of a peach last week and by the end of this week will be as big as a softball! If I concentrate and gently press in where the midwife uses the baby monitor, I have just started to be able to feel movement a little bit. Apparently in the next couple of weeks I will be able to feel the child move more readily.

Over the holidays I discovered a message from my midwife that my body was in ketosis, a starvation mode, in which your body burns muscle rather than fat. Tim had been concerned that I was not eating enough, but we then tried even harder to make sure I was getting enough calories to support the baby and I. At our last visit to the midwife, she declared that what we were doing seemed to have worked and encouraged me to keep eating. We are excited that I can now eat a little bit of chicken, since in the last few months meat of any kind has sounded horrible.

I took a fall last Sunday and had a less major one on the Wednesday before. Time to slow down, make sure I am hanging on to something on stairs and uneven ground. Even though I was scared at the time, the baby and I are perfectly fine. I was so reassuring to hear our little one's heartbeat on Monday afternoon at the visit to our midwife.

I am busily reading the books Spiritual Midwifery, Active Birthing and Your Pregnancy Week-by-Week. This morning at a friend's house, I have picked up The Diaper Free Baby. There are many things that make more sense to me about how childbirth and parenting are dealt with in other societies and this is just one more example. In many countries, I have discovered, children are potty-trained by the time they are one years old. While the name of the book might lead one to think that it is about not diapering at all, in reality it is about learning to recognize the signs that your child needs to use the restroom and taking them to do that, rather than having them go in their diapers. Certainly an interesting concept and I am fascinated to learn more.

I am getting more and more excited about this baby and it is feeling ever more real!

I will try to update again soon.