16 weeks

This week, baby is about the size of an avocado:

Bones are forming in baby's ears, which means s/he can now pick up voices. Which means s/he hears a lot of Evelyn's happy squealing and shouting "NO!" when we ask her questions. Baby is about 4.6 inches long and weighs about 3.5 oz. S/he is beginning to grow hair, eyebrows, and eyelashes this week, along with some tastebuds! (Guess I better start choking down some veggies!)

I've been feeling pretty good the last week or so. I'm perpetually tired, but nothing compared to the exhaustion I felt in the first trimester (when Tim was the only one I could complain to :P) I couldn't get myself off the couch (or off the floor, depending on what Evelyn was doing), had zero motivation (took me two weeks to get a hat order out to a very understanding friend), and I napped literally every afternoon while Evelyn napped, and I still had zero energy. Ugh. Now I just constantly feel like I didn't get enough sleep, which is making me a bit snappy and short on patience. Otherwise, we're doing pretty well. 

At my last appointment, I was advised to cut back on my sodium and increase my protein to maybe help stave off a second bout of pre-ecclampsia. It's not proven to help (since they're not sure what causes pre-ecclampsia in the first place), but at least I feel like I'm doing something about it, rather than twiddling my thumbs. Evelyn and I have also been going on at least 3 walks/week and Jill gave me a prenatal yoga DVD I'm going to try to start doing before bed a couple nights per week. Aside from being tired, I've been feeling pretty good. And I do check my blood pressure once or twice a week. All my readings have been in a healthy range so far. Fingers crossed it stays that way.

In other news, I got my first paycheck from doing QA testing for Tim's company, so I'm happily typing up this post from my brand new laptop :) There's nothing wrong with the old one, really, but it is 7 years old and getting slow and clunky. We're considering finding a college student in need to pass it on to, or wiping it clean and loading it with the programs Tim works on so Evelyn can have her own laptop with educational toddler-friendly apps on it. In the meantime, we've gotten back into using ABCmouse since the new laptop has a touch screen, and that's far more toddler-friendly than using a mouse or touch-pad. She's enjoying it much more now :) She is really soaking everything up right now. She has a new word or phrase every time we turn around, she's dancing to music all the time, and she even tries to sing along with some familiar songs. She's learning people's names now (but still calls me Daddy >:| ), and you should have heard her playing with Zach on Saturday-- all please and thank you and sharing! 

Alright. Time for bed. Maybe I'll be less sluggish tomorrow...

(21 days until the ultrasound!)