Strong "like Conan, or like Valeria"

We've been asked by our midwives to start doing fetal movement counting, where we were asked to set aside 2 hours during a time at which the baby is usually active and count how long it takes to register 10 movements... and if ten isn't reached, to try again a few hours later. The idea is that if the baby were in distress, the number of movements would decrease from the usual habits and we should go in to see our practitioner for more high-tech monitoring.

It turns out that it doesn't require 2 hours to be set aside... in fact, it has taken baby less than 10 minutes, consistently for the past week. Our record is 3 minutes! These are not actually during the most active times, which tend to be later at night (and it's been easier for us to do the monitoring after dinner). I think we just have an especially active baby, which friends of ours very helpfully pointed out that the baby must clearly get from me. :)

Stephanie was nice enough to get me the special edition Conan the Barbarian DVD for my birthday. The most major selling point is that it has this absolutely hilarious commentary with the director and Arnold, wherein they keep saying that everyone wants to be "strong like Conan". We watched it right around the time that the baby started kicking much more powerfully, so of course, that's become the new tagline for the baby: strong like Conan, or, because we don't know if it's a boy or a girl, perhaps strong like Valeria.



We've reached 28 weeks today and so far, all is still going well. Baby is kicking strong like Conan/Valeria more than ever, which is very reassuring! We had a really great childcare and breastfeeding class this weekend, which was filled with demonstrations which were much more helpful than just reading about the techniques had been, which were free of charge at our hospital. We've even got our bedroom all set up now, so we're really starting to feel more ready for baby arrival.