First Trip to the Dentist

Aida had her first dentist appointment last Tuesday and she did so great. I kind of forgot about it until a couple of hours before so didn't really talk about it much with her. Maybe that was a good thing because she didn't have any sort of anxiety or nervousness going into it. I told her the dentist was going to clean her teeth and we practiced opening her mouth wide but that was about it. We did have long wait for our appointment and the office had lots of toys and kid's books about going to the dentist so I was able to read her a couple books. They described the chair and the tools and what the dentist would do so that was good.

In the chair, all ready to go

The nurse came in first and did the cleaning. Aida had no problem with it, opened her mouth right up, let her clean her teeth, giggled when the nurse sprayed the water in her mouth and did the sucky tube thing (that is the technical name, by the way.) She even let the nurse do some flossing with no fuss.

Sprawled out in the chair, I love how she's got her foot propped up on the light stand

Open Wide

We had to wait a bit for the actual dentist to come in so Aida took the time to check out her duck's dental hygiene.
She even did some work on me and while I let her use the mirror and the flossing tool in my mouth, I had to draw the line at the sharp, hooked scrapy thing (another technical term.) I wouldn't let her near my mouth with that tool, the duck was a lot more compliant then I was.

The dentist came in and did a quick check of her teeth. He counted the teeth on top and told her she had 10 teeth and then asked if she knew how many she had on the bottom. Aida replied "10" immediately so then the nurse and the dentist thought she was a total genius. Not sure what else they thought she would say.

After the check up, the dentist told her she didn't have any "teeth bugs." Aida looked at him and said, "No, I don't have any caaav-i-ties," really enunciating the word cavities in case the dentist might have trouble pronouncing it.

All Clean!

She really is just a fearless, curious little girl who has no problems with new or unfamiliar situations. She just wants to play and learn and talk to people. I'm so lucky to have such an awesome daughter, an awesome daughter with really good teeth! :)

30 Weeks

Here I am, already in the third trimester of my second pregnancy and I haven't really said much about it. I've been meaning to do a post for weeks to talk about this pregnancy but I find by the end of the day I'm so beat that all I'm willing to do is sit on the couch with my feet up or go read in my bed. Imagine that, pregnancy makes you tired, who knew?

I would have to say the biggest difference between this pregnancy and my first is the relaxed attitude. I still take my prenatal vitamins every day, drink lots of water, take lots of walks, don't eat the forbidden foods but I'm not checking websites or reading message boards every day (or ever), I'm not following along in my Your Pregnancy Week By Week book, sometimes (I'm sorry to say) I even lose track of what week I'm in and have to plug in my dates to an online calculator so I can figure out if I'm 24 weeks or 26 weeks. There is definitely a "been there, done that" feeling as far as normal pregnancy symptoms go but that doesn't mean the level of excitement is any different. I didn't know what I expected but I'm just as excited for this little guy as I was for Aida, especially as we are nearing the end.

Also, knowing that we are having a boy has made this pregnancy unique compared to last time. Besides the obvious of buying the cutest little boy clothes this time around, the imagining what it will be like is so much different. After spending the last 3 and 1/2 years raising a little girl, I just have a feeling that doing it all again with a little boy will be so different. I know that every child is different, regardless of gender but everybody keeps telling me "raising a boy a SO DIFFERENT then raising a girl." This is a whole new world Zack and I are being thrust into and we couldn't be happier to get to have the experience. (Although, we still don't have a name picked out, we are the worst name-picker-outers ever!)

Overall, I feel a little bit healthier with this pregnancy. I have a little more time to devote to taking care of myself since I'm not working full-time and sitting at a desk 8 hours a day. I started going to a chiropractor every other week for adjustments at around 20 weeks which I think helps immensely. I had really bad sciatica with Aida and the minute I started developing it again with this baby, I made an appointment. Even after the sciatica went away, I kept going. I just think it makes me feel better overall. I was doing a prenatal yoga video pretty regularly for awhile but I've slacked on that in the past month as I've started to get bigger, which is probably when I need it most but oh well.

I will admit, now that I'm 30 weeks I'm starting to get nervous about going into pre-term labor. Aida was born at 35 weeks because my water randomly broke and I really, really, REALLY don't want this baby to come early. We are going to make sure we have everything ready this time at around 35 weeks just in case but I just want this baby to wait it out. The way he is positioned right now, the placenta is in the back and he laying sort of diagonally across my belly, which means I can really feel all of his movements and he moves all the time, especially at night. It also means that some of the movements are really low in my abdomen and this makes me so nervous. When my water broke with Aida, it was late at night and right after I felt two sharp movements really low in my abdomen. My doctor says everything looks fine so far and I know if the little guy decides to come early there is not much we can do about it, but I really hope he decides to hang around in there a little bit longer.

I feel bad but I haven't taken many pictures of myself during this pregnancy. I guess that's another symptom of 2nd pregnancy, no week by week belly pictures. But I know that my family wants to see pictures and I know I will want to have some pictures of what I looked like during this time so I tried to take some tonight.

Here is a picture of me on my 31st birthday, back in July when I was almost 5 months pregnant:
And here I am tonight, at 30 weeks, wearing the same shirt (sorry for the quality, the lighting in our room is horrible for this type of thing, if you click on the picture it should make it bigger although I'm not encouraging that):
Woah, look at that belly! I definitely feel like I have gotten exponentially bigger in just the past few weeks. It's all of the sudden hard to get up off the couch, I'm having trouble tying my shoes, I'm starting to feel the waddle when I walk. Here is another picture that shows more of the profile:
But enough about me, let's take a look at the real star of this show. Since Aida was pre-term, I had an ultrasound at 28 weeks to make sure everything was still OK in there. And here he is, looking healthy and happy and hopefully in no mood to make an appearance until the end of November: