Say “Cheese and Peanut Butter!”

This past week was a rather uneventful week from my perspective, but certainly not from the growth and development of the babies!  All three babies are now the size of raspberries and are about ½ inch long. It makes me wonder, if I am only carrying 3 raspberries, why does my belly look like I have 5 layers of pancakes instead…needless to say my belly has recently “popped”!  Our babies are starting to get their facial features including lips, eyelids, a jaw, a nose, ears, and pigment and nerves in the eyes.  Last week the babies got buds for arms and legs which differentiated and now you can see the hands, fingers, feet and toes! The heart is beating near its fastest rate during this time of growth, at about 150 times a minute, over twice as fast as our heart beats!  We thought our babies were budding geniuses last week…now both hemispheres of the brain are developing. Other developments include the appendix, pancreas, and liver which is already producing red blood cells. And, I saved the best for last…one of the more important developments this week is the umbilical cord. Each cord now has distinct blood vessels to carry both oxygen and nutrients to the baby and wastes away from the baby. Talk about a lot of development in one short week!!

I have now moved from weekly appointments to every other week, this week being an off week. However, I did meet with a nutritionist today and she was very complimentary on my progress. I’m up a whopping 9 pounds already—and yes, 100% of it is in my belly (would be great if it stays there!). I kept asking the nutritionist for different ideas for protein sources since meat is one of the items that isn’t settling well.  It always seemed to boil down to either cheese or peanut butter, so it looks like I’ll have a lot of them for the next 7 months! I kid you not when she was telling me to have cheese on everything—even popcorn and apples!  So, the motto for the week is cheese and peanut butter…hopefully I don’t get sick of it!

Next week we will have an OB appointment and it will be so neat to see the development over the past two weeks…I can’t wait!! Jay and I might just have to celebrate with some cheese and peanut butter!  Next week’s blog I’ll post pictures…see you then!