18 Weeks

About the baby:

In the 18th week, your ligaments continue to relax and joints start to loosen as your body accommodates the rapidly growing uterus. It may have been difficult to differentiate between baby movement and gas, but probably starting very soon (maybe even this week) you will definitely be able to easily define the movement of your baby. 

The ears have settled in their final position, but probably still stand out from the head. The tiny little map of veins your baby has is still visible beneath their translucent skin. The nerves are beginning to be surrounded by myelin.

Start brushing up on your lullabies — in the coming weeks, your baby will be able to hear! The bones of the middle ear and the nerve endings from the brain are developing so that your baby will hear sounds such as your heartbeat and blood moving through the umbilical cord. He or she may even be startled by loud noises!

Your baby's eyes continue developing — they're now facing forward rather than to the sides, and the retinas may be able to detect the beam of a flashlight if you hold it to your abdomen.

Until now, your baby's bones have been developing but were still soft. This week, they begin to harden, or ossify. Some of the first bones to ossify are those in the clavicles and the legs - the stronger to kick you with!

I think overall I've been feeling much the same. No major differences. I'm still very tired all the time, but… oh well. 

Yesterday, I had a panic moment. Being my mother's daughter, at the grocery store I rammed my cart into an end cap and it like bounced back and hit my stomach pretty hard. It hurt! Within about a half hour I started having some pretty moderate cramping, which by the time I got home had escalated into severe can't-stand-up-right cramping. We freaked. We called our office's on-call nurse, she said I was still at a stage in pregnancy that the baby should be far enough below the belly button to have been protected, but told me if there was any spotting (or other discharge) to go to the labor/delivery ER. Even so, she told me to try and stay off my feet as much as I could for a day or so and drink a lot of water. 

I checked baby's heart rate a few times and it's still good. But I'm still having some sporadic, mild cramping. *sigh*

I have started feeling the baby move! I actually felt it on the day of our gender reveal ultrasound, but wasn't sure at the time if it was actually baby movement. But, the same unfamiliar feeling happened again the next day and the next and started getting more frequent and more pronounced.

It still isn't very often. The best way I can describe it is sort of like a fluttering or muscle twitch. It feels very similar to the feeling like when your eye is twitching. 

It's one of the most amazing things I've experience so far in the pregnancy and I can only imagine how much more awesome it'll get as those little jabs do get more pronounced. 

Seriously ladies, this isn't something you want to miss out on. 

I've always heard and believed about a mother's love for her unborn child, I loved my child so much before they were ever even conceived I thought I knew what to expect! I spent a lot of time preparing my life for a baby. I waited until I'd been married six years! I got a lot of stuff out of the way in my life that I wanted to do. We worked hard and have been blessed with an impressive savings. I planned and prepared and planned and prepared. But, even with all that, the love I feel for my baby is much greater than I anticipated. I love this little boy more than anything else, he's my whole world already. How much more will that be the first time I meet him face to face?