I'm officially in the second trimester! Some books say the second trimester is at 13 weeks but most say week 14 is the marker. Some due date calculators actually put me in my 15th week??? same due date (9/12/09) as always but for some reason they have me a lot farther a long.

My energy is definitely making a comeback, but i still tire easily. I feel a little achy in the stomach area and also my sinuses are usually inflamed enough to cause some horrid pressure.

So I'm a third of the way through and baby's a third of the way cooked. Now the baby starts a period of rapid brain growth, fat buildup and detail work. Highlights this week include fingerprints and much more!

Baby's arms are now in proportion to his tiny body, but the legs are still on the short size in comparison. Meconium, sticky first baby poop, is now loading up baby's intestines.

The baby continues to gain new and impressive skills such as practicing and controlling voluntary muscle movements. The baby's movements are no longer the jerky, uncontrollable twitches of yore—he can now move with graceful control.

The baby now weighs about 1.6 ounces (45 grams) and is about 3.5 inches (9 cm) long from crown to rump, about the size of a clenched fist. The baby is sporting a downy coating of hair called lanugo that keeps him nice and warm. Baby fat will accumulate over the next few months, allowing most of this hair to shed. The baby’s genitals are now fully developed, but we wont know or find out the sex until our next ultrasound appt., which is on April 28th. The baby also starts to produce thyroid hormones because the thyroid gland has now matured.

And yes, as my friends who saw me yesterday can attest - im apparently starting to show. i still think its me being bloated, but whatever. i think if you didnt know me though and didnt know i was pregnant, you would just think i was slightly getting a bit of chub. fuller cheeks, fuller breasts, fuller thighs and definitely a fuller tummy. all the books say you can start to feel the uterus move out of the pubic bone and into the lower abdominal region. you can feel the top of the uterus if you laid down and used your two fingers to press down on your tummy. my midwife did this and helped, but i still couldnt "feel" anything. i could not tell the difference between fundus and whatever else is around there. she even said she could feel where the baby was. lucky her. see what lack of education and experience gets you? faking a feel up of your fundus and baby, thats what. baby likes to hang on the right side at the moment. and now whenever i roll from side to side a little too quickly (but what was once a normal movement for me), i get some horrible side pains or cramps, which is considered round ligament pain.

oh and i got bored and did those baby morph things. um not so cute. a couple of them had the baby look mixed - not me and charlie mixed but i guess for them mixed ethnicity is only black and white. i did do the vw baby thing and here is, under their impression, what our baby would look like:
the other attempts at it were not so, um successful. i think the best one that had the skin tone right and the hair (bald, actually with slight wisps) was this one site but the eyes and mouth were blank cause the program couldnt align ours properly. so it turned out to be kind of creepy.

Charlie has been in LA since Friday morning but is getting back tonight with his Grandma's car, the Volvotron. Now it will be easier for us, especially when baby comes, to visit our friends and families in LA more often than not, YAY!