Do I have a baby in my tummy too?

I haven’t talked much about the baby in my tummy since I first told River and his reaction was pretty noncommittal. He hasn’t asked much about it since, nor has he commented on my growing belly.

But this afternoon he asked me for an airplane ride, where I balance him on my feet and raise him up in the air. I’m afraid I’ve moved beyond my capacity to do that for another few months and wanted to explain to him why.

I showed him how big my stomach is and told him there is a baby in there. “When it moves, I’ll show it to you,” I said. For the first time, it really seemed to register that he understood.

“We have to find the baby inside,” he said. “We have to look for it.”

I told him it would come out in three months, after his birthday, and he raised three fingers to count the months. A little later, he lifted his pyjama top and looked at his own belly. “Do I have a baby in my stomach too?” he asked. I told him no, that his belly was small, and mine was big. Mark insisted I explain that only women have babies, which I added on.

Though I think I’m still just shy of the third trimester mark, for the past week or two, I really feel like I’m there. I’m having trouble sleeping, I have to push myself up off of chairs/sofas, usually at an angle, and I’m generally feeling large and not very flexible. I’m spending a lot of time shopping online for maternity clothes (or at least looking), hoping that if I get things I feel good in, I’ll be better able to handle what I think will be a rough three months. But then, there is that part of me that thinks it’s crazy to spend money on stuff that will last a maximum of three months. So I picked up a few things from freecycle, am going to scout out maternity clothes at a big used children’s product sale next weekend, and am treating myself to a couple of used quality items on Ebay. I may even allow myself the splurge of two new shirts by my favorite manufacturer.

Last pregnancy I was a fan of the Gap. I loved how I could order by mail and return for free anything that didn’t fit. It was inexpensive and looked decent. But I found that some of the pieces didn’t hold up so well with time.

This time around, I’m a big fan of Isabella Oliver. It’s very expensive (thus my Ebay scouting). But so beautiful. Some mothers on a parenting group recommended it, saying that the clothes worked well in the fourth trimester, which was a period in which I struggled to find things to wear last time around. Today I wore the black portrait top I picked up on ebay and for the first time, felt good about myself while showing my bump. Here is a picture in a lovely urban parking garage – somewhere around 26 weeks.

mandated repeat HIV tests for pregnant women and newborn babies

Today at the ob/gyn they took my blood and the doctor ran off the list of tests she wanted to run. Some of them – such as the glucose test, an iron test – made sense to me. Others I wasn’t so sure of the purpose, but didn’t argue. Until she said HIV test.

“We already did one earlier in the pregnancy, but we have to do one more,” she said.

“Can I skip that? I haven’t been exposed to any risks since the last time and it’s a waste of money to test for it again.”

Now that we are paying for a larger chunk of our medical expenses, I am paying more attention to the tests that are ordered and doing my best to refuse the senseless ones. With prices as ridiculous as they are, even 20% of a single blood test is a significant expense.

“Yes, it is a waste,” she said. “But our state is high-risk for HIV. So we have to test twice during the pregnancy. If we don’t, they will test the baby at the hospital.”

“They can force me to have my baby tested?”

“I’m not sure what the rules of refusal are,” she said. But she also indicated that perhaps they wouldn’t notice I didn’t have the second test.

I told her I wanted to skip it. It’s great to keep an eye out for HIV and to be ready to treat infected babies quickly. But I’m not high-risk. And I don’t want to have to pay for unnecessary tests because of some blanket rule. Nor do I want blood drawn from my newborn baby when there is no chance whatsoever that it’s infected with HIV.

“If they do catch it at the hospital, they will probably give you a chance to take the test again instead of testing the baby,” she said.

I just googled it and found out that indeed, my state has a law requiring testing of all pregnant women in the first and third trimesters, “unless they refuse.” It says if the HIV status of the woman is unknown, the baby will be tested, unless the mother has religious objections. Is my HIV status going to be “unknown” because I was only tested in the first and not the third trimester? If so, I am now developing religious objections. And I’m going to advise my pediatrician of those objections.

The ACLU has an interesting article on the topic from 2001. The CDC has some explanation of a screening policy here. And there is an interesting overview here.

It seems a common reason for opposition to mandatory testing is related to privacy. I’m opposed to the policy based on a belief that no one has the right to extract blood from me or my newborn without my permission, especially when there is no compelling medical risk. I’m also opposed to my family and my health insurance paying for something that has no medical value. I resent the state saying it knows more about my risk factors than I do.
Reaching out to women at risk and in need is great, especially in countries where pregnancy may be the only time when women have regular contact with the medical system. But applying blanket testing requirements in cases where women don’t want to be tested or where testing is a waste of resources, rubs me the wrong way.
If you live in a state with one of these rules, how did you handle it? Do you think such policies make sense?

A large solid object

Week 26 and I feel myself with a large, solid object within my belly that is starting to cramp my movement. I had to walk up some of the uphill parts of my ride home today. I really struggled when my yoga teacher asked us to do an inversion – lying on our backs to raise our legs and midsection into the air. As a child, I used to love doing that. I’d bring my feet all the way to the floor behind my head and hang out. As a non-pregnant person, I could do it. This evening I felt like a dying chicken as I tried to push my legs upward and my hefty mid-section wobbled back and forth.

This thingy is squishing my veins and organs when I sleep in my favorite position. And it’s making it hard to bend over.

It seems not so long away to imagine that we’ll have a new family member in just over three months. But when I think about continuing to move, to sleep and to live with this big object in my belly for another 14+ weeks, it seems like a very long time indeed.

The joys of approaching third trimester.

Big juicy steaks

I’m wondering if the fatigue I’m experiencing this week could be due to low iron levels. So I’ve been trying to up my iron intake the past few days.

Last night I pulled some steaks out of the freezer. I purchased them about a year ago on sale, but they were big, high-quality steaks – 3 slabs of meat of about a pound each.

I soaked them in this marinade for 24 hours, Mark put them on the grill, and they were sooooo good – moist and tender and flavorful and juicy. Yum.