Little Hiccups: Bumps

Wednesday, 29 May 2013

Bumps

In spite of my current illness, my little pregnant belly has recently popped out quite a bit. I'm now finally at the point where strangers are noticing that I'm pregnant. It's only taken 20 weeks!
Until recently (and by recently I mean this past weekend) friends kept telling me that I didn't look pregnant. To me however I thought my belly was pretty big. I'd look down and all I could see was a big round belly. But to others apparently it wasn't so noticeable.

20 weeks with my pregnant friend who is 2 weeks ahead

This has all got me thinking about how my pregnant belly compares this time around to my first two pregnancies.

With Ava I was relatively small until about 16 or 17 weeks and from there on my belly grew quite steadily until it was huge toward the very end. Luckily it was the only part of me that ended up huge!

With Lola I was showing much, much earlier, grew a huge belly pretty quickly and for the last few months co-workers were sure I was about to pop any day now. I guess this is pretty normal for second or subsequent pregnancies.

So this time around with Number 3 I had expected that my belly would be big pretty early on. This hasn't ended up the case. The big difference is that with Lola we were living in the suburbs in Australia where a car is required to go pretty much anywhere. This meant that while I was pretty active with pilates, yoga and running around after Ava I wasn't getting a huge amount of incidental exercise as I drove everywhere. Now that we live in hilly Berkeley and we don't have a car I get a huge amount of incidental exercise: walking Ava to school, walking the girls to their activities, walking to the supermarket, walking to run errands, walking to doctor's appointments... Anyone who knows me knows that I have a tendency to be running late which means that most of this walking around is actually speed walking! And of course, half of it is uphill and it's all while pushing a heavily laden stroller.

After my recent stint in hospital and another health scare I've had to start taking it a little easier and not walk around so much and not at such a high speed. This could explain my belly suddenly popping out! Although I'm keeping my fingers crossed my suddenly larger belly is the result of my little one having a much needed growth spurt.

As I've been thinking about my belly I thought I'd share some week to week photos that I took throughout my pregnancy with Lola. I had intended to do the same thing this time round but all my spare time has been spent (so far unsuccessfully and rather stressfully) house hunting.

So here's a look at my belly's progression with Lola from 15 weeks through to 38 (I delivered 2 weeks early). I tried to wear the same dress for all of the photos for comparison but there are a few different outfits thrown in. There are also a few missing weeks as we were busy with a major house renovation but for the most part they show the steady progression of my big fat belly! And boy, was it big by the end!