26

Baby stats this week:

• The baby is the length of a cucumber!!  Around 15 inches long!
• Weighs between 1.7-2.2 lbs.  (and feels like it, geez!)
• Our kid is the next Mia Hamm..or Muhammed Ali.  It really digs kicking and punching me at the same time.
• It's so big that I can actually SEE where it is in my belly sometimes! Last night you could see it's head sticking out of one side of my belly and feel the bum near the bottom.  How CrAzY is that?!

26 weeks is 6 1/2 months.  I read that this week our baby could actually survive if it decided to meet the world, although it would have no fat on it whatsoever.  That's a fear of mine, the baby being premie.  I actually had a nightmare about it the other night.  I've been having lots of dreams about baby us and labor and the like, but this was just kind of lumped all my fears into one.

I dreamed that we went in for our next appointment and they admitted me to the hospital because I went into labor.  I ended up passing out from the pain and they couldn't wake me up.  The doctor assumed the pain was too much so she gave me an epidural.  Well, that made me so loopy and out of it that I couldn't push, even when they told me to, so they did a C-section.  I was still so drugged up after they took the baby out that I couldn't even focus enough to hold my own precious baby.  They told me it was a girl (which was shocking as everyone tells me it's a boy these days) and asked me what I wanted to name it.  I could barely even remember what names we had decided upon.  It was so horrible!!  

I know that I need to have real expectations for birth.  I know that it may not work out exactly as I have planned. So maybe these dreams are to prepare me for varying scenarios.  Regardless, I just hope that I have confidence in myself enough to make the safest decisions for my baby.  I don't want to be clouded by the temptation of medications or let my fears convince me that my body that it wasn't made to do this, because I was.  I know that.  I was wonderfully and fearfully made.  Jesus tells me so :)

Oh, and here is this week's pic (or what I like to call evidence of the baby-growth explosion!)