May 30, 2008

My appointments will be every 2 weeks now... I'll try not to bore you with details each time, but since this is the first appt since my hospital stay....

We're going with 33 weeks as my date for now. Fundal height is measuring 34 weeks. Boo is doing great, I'm doing great. My weight is holding steady at 178. Blood pressure fine. Nothing exciting to report! She'll do the GBS swab at my next appointment.

The really good news is that Boo probably weighs close to 5 lbs by now (if the u/s was accurate and providing Boo is gaining the 'norm' of 1/2 lb per week)... and the NICU won't release babes until they are at least 5.5 lbs. So, if Boo is born early, providing s/he is healthy, there might not be a NICU stay after all!

I got my medical certificate so I can draw sick leave until my maternity benefits kick in once Boo arrives. Talked about staying on this modified bed rest until 36 weeks, but she agrees that after 34 weeks I can start to relax a bit.

I needed to have 600 hours to qualify for mat leave. When I got my last pay from job #2, I calculated that I still needed about 100 hours. But I wasn't worried because I had at least 3 weeks of full time work left at job #1. So when I stopped working 2 weeks shy of my goal, I was panicking. But when I got my record of employment from job #1, I discovered I somehow pulled in a total of 727 hours between both places since January. Not sure how I did it, but whew!!!!

So I qualify for up to 15 weeks of paid sick leave (payable at 55% of my weekly earnings, so not very much) and then I get my full mat leave!!! Wahooooo!!!! Such a relief!! Still waiting for the sick leave to kick in - I probably won't see any money until the end of June, and by that time, with my luck, Boo will be here. Thank god Jay is working so we can pay our bills, buy groceries and pay for the nanny to be here. But his salary only just covers all that stuff, so things are tight.