Just Chillin'

OMG! If I didn't know any better, I'd think my baby is ill! Or at least REALLY SLOW and oxygen-deprived! They say that it's normal for a baby in belly to kick 5-50 times per hour on average. If the baby moves less, something's wrong. This one made about 4 moves YESTERDAY. That might have been just below textbook amount if I had been awake for just one hour... Grrrr, I know that the baby has it's own sleep cycle but 4 moves in a DAY?!

It's recommended that the mother tells her doctor a.s.a.p. if the baby is not moving enough. If I took this seriously I would be visiting my doctor almost every day.

I tried something today! I had read on the Internet that if the mother drinks a glass of cold water or eats something sugary the baby will surely move and also, some babies react to shaking or poking the belly. I know my baby is way too chilled to even nudge when I eat sweet stuff and I had already tried poking and shaking with no success. So as an experiment, I drank a glass of cold water rapidly. The first minute really disappointing - I knew she was chilling leaning against my left side. She shifted over to right side and leaned against my belly. "Enough movement for today, mommy". "Heeeeey!!!!!". I poked my belly and still nothing! A little time later when I had already given up she started squirming, gave me a kick, a few punches, shifted to the left side, and made herself comfortable.

Babies are usually said to be most active at night. That's because during the day they hear and feel all sorts of things and it's fun and interesting. They even see light through the stomach so they notice when I change clothes. They react to all sorts of stimuli and play with anything they can - mostly with their only toy: the umbilical cord. During the night everything suddenly gets dark and quiet. No one's talking, the mother isn't walking around, no keyboard clatter and no music. The baby gets terribly bored and starts to make a havoc. This is actually one reason why pregnant women often sleep badly during the night. Baby gets bored and starts kicking and protesting to get some entertainment. Cute, right? And totally explains why my baby is so inactive when I'm awake, right?

Wrong! She's very calm even during the night! I do appreciate that I can sleep uninterrupted until my alarm goes off but this is ridiculous! Even when I wake up to turn my side I can feel that the baby is calmly sleeping. Turing around wakes her up and she moves a little to find a better position and then falls asleep again. That's definitely not her active time! My baby is awake during the day. I can feel her turning around sometimes. When I walk fast, she sometimes stretches out her limbs for better support - sometimes I feel her pressing her back against my belly, sometimes a limb or two near my bellybutton. When something startles me and my adrenaline level goes up, she moves very rapidly for a couple of seconds. And then she's calm again and doesn't move for HOURS!

She entertained me on Wednesday though. I was sitting in the quiet office room in the laboratory and listening to music on my earphones. She must have got really bored because suddenly she started nudging me all over. I haven't felt her being so restless ever before. Yet it still didn't feel like something is wrong. It just felt like she got fed up with all the quietness and started trampling to ease some of that frustration. "awwwwwww poor thing". So I took my earphones off, turned the music up a little and held my earphones against my tummy.

The moment I put the earphones near her she immediately stopped trampling to hear the music better. It seems she really likes HIM. When the song ended (and I didn't even notice at first because I was doing other stuff) she got restless again. Ah, she likes just my kind of music. I played her another HIM song. I continued working with the earphones in my lap and my playlist on random. Suddenly the baby started moving a lot in a very distressed rhythm. I picked up the earphones to find out what was playing. I heard Korn with some really angry shouting and dark loud metal. I smirked and played some HIM which calmed her down. She also likes Evanescence and it seems to entertain her a great deal. I decided I wanted to continue listening to music and took away the earphones in the middle of an Evanescence song. She reacted by moving around disappointed. Yay! She MOVED!

To make the situation even more ridiculous - this is supposed to be the prime time of baby movements. Earlier in pregnancy baby is too small for the mother to feel the movements (or at least the mother feels only the strongest kicks) and later in pregnancy the baby is too tightly crammed in there to have room for moving around so much. Well, I really can't imagine her to move even less than now! We'll see.


By the way, here's one EXTREMELY failed automatic advertisement link. I saw this under a serious article about premature birth, the causes, risks, and how to prevent "losing your belly".


Many women get outie bellybuttons when pregnant. My bellybutton is still an innie - or actually more like a flattie. I used to have a birthmark just above my bellybutton. Looked almost like a naval piercing. Now it's moved up 2 cm.

PS! Now she decides to move! She's turning and tossing and nudging me. She's giving punches to the ribs, the bladder, the surface of the belly... Ah, that's so much more fun than before!