For months I've been hearing other women at my yoga class talk about their babies having hiccups, and I was starting to think that Jackson just wasn't a hiccup-y baby. Until now. On Tuesday morning, I was lying in bed watching my tummy (this has become a bit of a morning ritual with me) and I noticed very rhythmic, soft movement. Sure enough, the little guy had the hiccups. The same thing happened again this morning. Brian and I joked that maybe we should scare him to help him stop (don't worry: we didn't), but it's actually quite cute and apparently a perfectly normal part of his digestive development.
Another fascinating tidbit about his digestive development: I read this week that he is starting to lose the hair that covers most of his body until now, called lanugo. This is shed into the amniotic fluid, which he then swallows. Sounds gross, I know. But it serves a purpose: when he swallows the little hairs, it stimulates his intestines into beginning their normal function. When I think about the miraculous way that every little detail, even shedding hair, plays an important role in preparing a baby for birth, I am just blown away.
On a more ironic note, I'm also blow away that the baby is shedding his hair at exactly the same time the cats are shedding theirs -- unfortunately (or maybe fortunately), they don't swallow their excess hair and it means a lot of vacuuming for Brian and I. Right now, we have two vacuums in the house -- our vacuum just returned home yesterday from the repair shop (ask Brian to explain why that was a cheaper option than buying a new vacuum, like he initially wanted to do!) and my mom's vacuum, which she dropped off on Monday because she was horrified by all the cat hair covering the carpet when she fed the cats on Sunday. We thought it was pretty funny and a little embarrassing that the carpet had reached such a magnitude of hairiness that Mom felt compelled to drop off a vacuum.
As of today, we have 50 days until Jackson's due date. This is very exciting for me for a number of reasons. First of all, I can't wait to meet him. But second of all, I've started to get pretty uncomfortable by the end of the day. Maybe it's because I'm on Spring Break and I'm trying to get a lot done (so far I've organized the nursery, sewn a dust ruffle for his crib, and I'm working on the duck wall-hanging right now). Whatever the reason, my stomach and back have been killing me by about 6:00 at night. Poor Brian comes home from work to see me waddling around with an exhausted look on my face and no dinner on the stove. He's been great about it, of course, but I'm not looking forward to going back to work on Monday if it means I'm going to feeling this way every evening! Hopefully, it's just because of my/our disrupted schedule or because Jackson is expanding his current surroundings that I'm so achy this week, and by next week I'll be back to feeling great. Otherwise, we are in for a long 50 days.
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