26 Weeks

I made the mistake last night of surfing over to fertilityfriend.com and spending some time reading the pregnancy message boards. I found that by and large the posts fell into 3 categories:
1. Baby gear talk for first time parents. Along the lines of "what kind of diaper bag should I get". Fascinating discussions for first-timers but once you've got 3 diaper bags and 5 carriers (yes, okay I went a little overboard there) you should probably avoid those types of conversations.
2. Talk about all the bad stuff that can happen. Pre-term labor, preeclampsia, bed rest; you name, someone on the board had experienced it. Of course, I felt strangely compelled to read all those posts. I'm now re-evaluating all the various twinges and pains of my body.
3. General talk about pregnancy and new-baby issues. Topics from "how do you stay laying on your side all night" to "will you co-sleep". I found some of these threads informative from a purely comparative point of view.
All in all, probably not the best-spent hour of my life. I promise not to do it again. I remember with G that I avidly read and contributed to message boards. I don't remember the talk of bad stuff phasing me that much. I guess I thought I was invulnerable.

Speaking of twinges and pains, the pain on my left side is getting worse. Before it would only hurt at the end of the day and laying down at night brought relief. Now it hurts throughout the day and wakes me up at night hurting. I guess I'll have to bring it up at my midwife appointment this Thursday although I hold out little hope that she'll have any solutions. I'm going to pull out my nursing bras and see if any of those help.

Yesterday afternoon I called up J to ask him about something. He sounded a little weird. He told me about how, when he was driving to Detroit yesterday, he was passing a car when he hit a patch of ice and spun around several times and ended up in the median. He was damn lucky as he didn't hit anyone and the only damage done was a mud flap got torn off. I could tell it had shaken him.

Of course, after that my question paled in comparison but what I needed to know is if he had noticed a decrease in the quantity of hot water. Seems for the last few days my showers have been getting shorter and shorter. Yesterday by the time I finished washing my hair (the first thing I do) I had the knob all the way over to hot and there was only lukewarm water coming out. He had indeed noticed and advised that I call BIL. He came over and could find nothing wrong with it except that the dial that goes from HOT to VERY HOT was turned to its lowest setting. He turned it up some and so we'll see if maybe it's just a case of little hands touching what they shouldn't have been touching. Worst case is that we have to replace the hot water heater. Gotta love old houses. But it looks like this one is about 13 years old so I guess it's probably about due.