Its the last day of January! This is very exciting because tomorrow will be February, which is one month closer to March, when Alexandra is due!

I haven’t run in a whole week, and I haven’t even done anything physical during that time either. I have seen almost no improvement in my hip. It was really starting to get to me, and I was thinking about swimming to try to get some exercise, but the truth is that I am also afraid to swim because I’m afraid it will make it worse. Swimming is about as low impact as you can get, but when you swim, there’s not a whole lot of stability for your back/hip area. If this pain is caused by an instable SI joint, I worried that it may just delay my healing even further, and lets face it…at this point, I really just want to be able to walk and move normally now, I can let the running thing go until after delivery. Every time I get up from a chair, roll over in bed, walk up stairs its a truly wincing pain that just won’t seem to go away.

So yesterday I thought about biking. Since the only time when my hip doesn’t hurt is when I’m sitting down, I figured maybe this would be one exercise I could do that wouldn’t irritate it further. So today I tried riding the recumbant bike at the gym. My back was kept stable the whole time and my hip didn’t hurt. Since I was only moving my legs it took a while for me to get breathing hard and start to sweat, but it was still a workout and I totally loved it. I didn’t sweat or get my heart rate up nearly as much as running would have for the same amount of time, but I was able to get 30 minutes of exercise in and that did my mood a whole lot of good. I needed that!

As far as the pregnancy goes, I’m officially getting really impatient. I don’t want to go into labor prematurely, but having her come just at full term would be great. 🙂 Besides the hip thing my body just really seems to be changing. Some of it may be due to my inactivity over the last week but I’m finding I’m just uncomfortable and tired most of the time now. At night I can’t seem to find a comfortable position, but I do feel like I go into periods of hard sleep and usually have strange dreams and then wake up sometime in the middle of the night with an aching back, a full feeling bladder and lay there tossing and turning trying to fall asleep again before the alarm goes off. So I spend a lot of the day feeling like I’m in a fog.

My hips really continue to pop and crack quite frequently. Yesterday I spent a good portion of the afternoon feeling sort of nauseous, like I did during the first trimester. I’m hoping that these are signs that labor is only a few weeks away. I read that frequently in the days before you go into labor you get a huge spurt of energy and go on a crazy cleaning binge. This hasn’t happened yet, but I’m waiting for it.

Baby moves a lot still and has been getting the hiccups quite a bit. I just can’t wait to hold her and look in her eyes. Until then, I’m just counting down the days…one…at…a…time!