While I’m sure most of you haven’t even noticed that I’ve been MIA on the blog for most of the last two weeks, I wanted to update you on what’s going on over here.
First, let me go back to December 19th when we had our ultrasound to check on Baby Percy and find out the gender. We were so excited to get a peek at our new little girl that day! Telling the kids was a lot of fun and they were really excited. And to clarify, I didn’t want a boy, I just thought that Percy was a boy due to how I’d been feeling — more like James’ pregnancy than Charlotte’s. Just goes to show that every child is different, even in utero!
It took us a few weeks but we finally were able to settle on a name for our new little girl.
Now, this all ties in with where I’ve been for the last few weeks because our family contracted Fifth’s disease sometime over Christmas break. Fifth’s is a really common childhood viral infection (aka “slapped cheeks”) that didn’t show any symptoms in our kids until they came down with the rash. At that point they’d been contagious for apparently 10-14 days and ended up spreading it to Jason and I.
Fifth’s is usually something that you get as a child and then your body develops an immunity to it (like chicken pox). But, even though I had it as a child, my body didn’t develop the immunity. Fifth’s in kids is not a big deal and barely affected our kids. Fifth’s in adults is not a big deal either, except the results of Fifth’s (arthritis like joint pain) can cause some severe pain. The only time, typically, that Fifth’s can be a big problem is…when you’re pregnant.
So, for the past few weeks we’ve been dealing with this. I’ve been referred to a specialist in Birmingham to keep watch on Hadley and ensure that her blood count doesn’t get too low and she doesn’t retain fluid. He wants to see me every two weeks for the next eight weeks, but at our first appointment Hadley was doing fine. As a side note, one of the neatest things about this is getting to see H more and finding out that they can determine blood count in a baby via ultrasound! They measure the velocity of her blood through one of her veins in her forehead and can tell by the velocity whether the blood count is acceptable.
In addition to this stress, I’ve been having fairly debilitating pain in my joints. Two weekends ago I couldn’t pick anything up in either hand because the pain was so bad which definitely meant that I couldn’t type! For the past few days the pain has gone away and I’m praying that it stays gone.
I hope to pick blogging back up this week but I tend to do all of my blogging on the weekends and just set my posts to post during the week but the pain in my hands has prevented me from doing that the past few weekends. We would appreciate it if you could join us in praying for Hadley’s safety and for a pain free time for me. I was 27 weeks on Monday and am entering my third trimester which is unbelievable but also reassuring that the bigger H gets, the better she’ll be able to handle the virus if it passes to her.
