Sprout is now the size of an onion!

Baby's skeleton is hardening, changing from rubbery cartilage to bone, and fat is finally accumulating around it. The umbilical cord is getting thicker and stronger, and those little fingers and toes are now topped by one-of-a-kind prints.

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We had our 16 week appointment last week and everything went well. Doctor measured me and said that Sprout *our nickname for the baby - we didn't want to use peanut, as we had used it before and wanted something different. Someone suggested Sprout and we love it!* is doing well. The heartbeat was in the 140's, which is a bit lower than before but he said that it's normal for the heart rate to go down a bit as their brains grow a bit...and it only went down from 150 to 145, so he wasn't concerned. Me, on the other hand... He also felt comfortable enough for us to go back in 4 weeks as opposed to 2 weeks (we have been going every 2 weeks since we first found out). This made me extremely nervous at first, but he knows what he's doing and we both (my husband and I) feel very confident in his care.
He measured my belly and moved my due date up a few days from 1/30/10 to 1/27/10, which I believe is either the due date of my cousin or the due date of my husband's co-worker...can't remember. He scheduled us for an ultrasound on September 2, where we will see Sprout since the last time at 7 weeks, check to make sure everything is going well and to see if we have a boy or a girl. We're both finally allowing ourselves to be excited and have, we think, picked out two boy and two girl names that we want to use. We have middle names picked out for both but won't be sharing the names (at least the first names) until the baby is born.

We haven't picked out any nursery colors/themes or anything like that yet. We don't know yet what room we are going to use either. We are going to attend some free product classes (pumps, strollers, carseats, cribs, highchairs, etc.) at a local toy store as well as look into taking the classes at the hospital - we are going to check to see if our insurance will cover a portion or all of the costs or if we can use it towards our Flexible Spending Account. We'll see.

My morning sickness/all-day sickness has returned, being worse at night around dinner time. This is exactly how it was during the first trimester and with the first and third babies (I was exhausted and famished with the second baby).

My sister-in-law just gave me a HUGE box of maternity clothes -there are quite a bit of clothes for summer and a few items for winter. I'll need to go get some dress clothes and some fall/winter items - my best friend said that Old Navy has an outlet store by her house and they have some great deals with maternity clothes. There's also a couple of consignment shops in the area that I want to go to but (and this may sound weird) I don't want to go by myself. Maybe someone would love to go with me?! :)

Other than that, not much is going on. I've been spending my days just sleeping and resting. I'm going to shower and go work on my best friend (and her family)'s Christmas gift..yeah, I'm slow! We're just hanging out around here - the dog is wanting to go out but it's wet and she won't and the cat is sleeping somewhere...it's a good day!