Pregnancy Update

I am getting close to the five month mark! It is kind of hard to believe. My morning sickness has finally subsided, but about the time those ailments faded, I got hit hard with a cold. Most of it has gone away, but I haven't quite been able to shake the annoying cough. The only entertaining thing about having a cough is that my belly button has already started changing, and every time I cough, the entire thing pops out for just a second. Matt was nearly in tears one night laughing at it popping in and out.

I'm still waiting for the "energy boost" that I keep reading about. I'm glad the sickness has faded, but I'm still pretty tired most of the time. My appetite has increased quite a bit, but without the boost in energy, I have to be very careful to not just sit around and eat all day! I know a person is supposed to gain some weight during pregnancy, but an increased appetite and no energy to do anything sounds like a bad formula for extreme weight gain!

I feel the baby moving quite a bit now. Usually I just feel general wiggliness (I know that isn't a real word, but it seems like the best descriptive word for this case), but sometimes I'll feel very clear kicks or punches. This morning while I was still in bed I yelled for Matt to come look at my belly. For the first time (at least with certainty) we saw the baby moving around from the outside. We saw some very clear kicks and punches, and just some waves across my belly and he or she moved around. It was really neat.

Our appointment to find out the sex of the baby is this month, and we are both really excited about finding out. I still don't have any mother's instinct feeling about whether it is a boy or girl, so I'm just really excited to know. We have done a few wives tales tests but they have come out pretty even with boy and girl results. As it gets closer to the reveal, I'll do a blog post with the findings of our tests, then we'll see how accurate they are. (Side note: I don't get the swinging a ring over the belly one... we tried and it does nothing unless you manipulate its movement... so either people just make that one up, or we have a faulty ring or faulty baby.)