Pregnancy - week by week

The day after this picture was taken, I found out we were pregnant.  I had suffered four previous miscarriages and the thought of getting pregnant again seemed impossible.  Kc and I were celebrating the end of summer (well, maybe not celebrating, more like mourning) and the beginning of school with sushi and martinis.  Imagine my utter excitement when the pregnancy test said "positive" and my utter horror realizing what I ate the previous night.  Ha!

I was monitored very closely my first twelve weeks.  I had weekly blood tests to see how my hormone levels were growing...a good sign of a growing baby.  Our first ultrasound at 12 weeks was a huge sigh of relief.  We had no idea if this baby was healthy but we knew it was surviving and that was a big deal.

At fourteen weeks our baby still looked good and showed no signs of Downs Syndrome (a huge concern because of my Advanced Maternal Age).  We still didn't know if our sweet child had Frasers Syndrome but we were so excited this pregnancy was advancing.

At fifteen weeks I could barely see my toes.  This was my seventh pregnancy and my body was quite used to growing.

At sixteen weeks we found out we were having a sweet baby girl!

We celebrated Noah's fifth birthday at Disneyland.  At this point I was twenty-five weeks pregnant.  One of my friends who is a nurse commented that we were also celebrating Ava reaching "viability".  These were Baby Girl's first Mickey Ears.

At twenty-nine weeks I already felt so very big.

I keep growing...

and growing...

and growing.

This was my last week of work.  I felt as though Ava was going to pop out of my non-existent belly button.

 This was taken the morning Ava was born. 

I went out for a walk in the morning and met friends for lunch.  My contractions were becoming more and more frequent during lunch.  On the way home, I called Kc and told him that my contractions were five minutes apart and "it was time".