Pictures

Ok, I'm finally posting belly pictures for weeks 23 and 24. I will be 25 weeks on Friday.

23 weeks:

24 weeks:

I had my 24 week check up today. Everything seems to be moving along fine. I heard the heartbeat right away this time. Nice and strong! I got my belly measured for the first time, although i didn't ask what the measurement was. I wouldn't really know what is normal, etc. anyway. The doctor gave me an A+ for this visit.

I've gained 15 pounds so far in almost 25 weeks. When i asked her if that was ok she said "Oh yeah...you can gain lot's more weight!" Ummm...no thanks, but at least i know i have some wiggle room still. It is pretty amazing to think that next week I'll be 2/3 of the way done with this pregnancy.

My next appointment i get to take the glucose test for gestational diabetes. I have a bottle of orange fluids to drink an hour before getting my blood drawn. Yuck. It looks like Traiminic that i used to take when i was sick as a kid. I have a feeling there will be a lot of gagging the morning of January 14th (my next appointment).

I have monkey bread cooking in the oven as i type for my Dad and Lisa's dinner visit tomorrow! They just arrived this morning so Ellie and i are off to see them in a little while. I leave Lou at home because he's grumpy around other dogs. Ellie needs to burn the energy, lord knows, so she'll come along and hopefully refrain from raising hell once we arrive.

I'm using a new recipe i got from Sue Brunton tomorrow. I hope it comes out as good as when she makes it - but it's doubtful. I usually have bad luck with those types of things....but we'll keep our fingers crossed. There's always monkey bread for the main course ;)

Finally...we got snow yesterday. It lasted a while and did stick. There is still some on the ground but it's starting to melt. Good riddens! I don't enjoy the snow unless it's a weekend where we have nothing to do, and need the excuse to stay in. Katie also told me they had snow in Sacramento yesterday. What is going on?!?!

Anyway, that's all for now.

Enjoy the rest of the week!

Ohhhh yeah....i pulled a dumb move on Sunday and fell down our entire flight of basement steps. It does sound funny, i know, but at the time i was scared shitless. I felt so bad for putting the baby in danger. We called the doctor right away but there wasn't much they could do. She just told me to take it easy and feel for kicking, etc. and keep an eye out for bleeding. Thank god I fell on my side and NOT my belly which the doctor said is good. I have a sore hip (nothing new there) and hurt my arm, but was so thankful that the baby seemed to be ok. Apparently pregnancy causes you to lose your sense of gravity as well. I just chalk it up to another one of those things that nobody bothers to tell you about when it comes to being pregnant.

xoxoxo

Updates

Ok, I've been bad again about updating this. We did take a picture last week for 23 weeks, but of course i haven't loaded it yet. I will admit we almost totally forgot to even take one! I'll load it so i can post it next time around with my 24 week picture.

Speaking of, i will be 24 weeks tomorrow...which makes me 6 months pregnant. Where does the time go?!?!? Anyway, there are a few updates worth mentioning...

First of all, i think I've mentioned on here before that all the baby dreams I've had so far, even before i knew i was pregnant, were dreams that involved me having a boy. Well, that went out the window the other night when i had a very vivid dream that we had a baby girl. The dream was very funny and strange but we had a little girl and even named her the name that we have chosen should we have a girl. Apparently, after telling my sister, i come to find out that she had a dream that we had a girl on the same night. Doubt it really means anything but it is fun to see how things can change during your pregnancy - and how your brain will play tricks on you like that.

We did get the baby bedding, which i think is perfect considering we have no clue what we're having and i was trying to avoid any characters, etc.

Here's a link to the bedding:
http://www.rhbabyandchild.com/rhbc/catalog/product/product.jsp?productId=rhbc_prod142239&navCount=1

I will warn you that it tends to look blue on most people's computers for some reason, but the color is a sage and is very pretty. They have it displayed on the site in both a girls room and boys room - so that really sold me. So depending on what we have i can either add blue or pink and i still think it will look good. Most of the accents I'm going to add in the meantime will be white and silver.

I also created a registry on the site since there are some cute things that would be great to add to the nursery.

Now we have to paint the walls, get carpeting put down and then deal with the furniture. Speaking of...I'm hoping to order that in the next week or so. We're going with an espresso color. Something that we can use for any gender and many more babies to come (the word many is up for debate - I'll get back to you once this one arrives).

We also went to Babies R Us this past Saturday and created our main registry! It was fun, but quite overwhelming since you really don't know what you need if you've never done this before. Nathan had a lot of fun scanning everything he saw...i mean everything. I had to regulate a few times, but we managed to get through the store without making a scene. It took us about two hours.

Here's a link to their website. You can look us up by name:

www.babiesrus.com

I have to admit, the things that you really need for a baby are expensive. I felt so bad (and a bit nervous) about choosing certain things, even though i know we need them. BUT i had a few people tell us just to add what we need and want and see what happens. So that's what we did.

I'm a bit annoyed with the Babies R Us site and how they listed our items. There aren't images for everything, which is fine, except that there are some main items at the bottom without a picture and who the heck wants to sort through something that doesn't give you a visual?!?! I, myself, enjoy a visual and will admit that i may not pay attention to something on a long list of items if it doesn't catch my eye. So...our infant car seat is lost in that list without a picture, along with some other necessities, but whatever. I'm over it...kinda.

So at this point in my pregnancy the baby is a little over 11 inches long and weighs one pound. They say that sometimes Daddy can even put his ear to your tummy and hear the heartbeat. I had also just read that at this point the baby's moves are strong enough and the baby is big enough where you will probably see your tummy move when the baby does. We just tested that theory before i logged in to update this - i felt the baby moving pretty good so i lifted my shirt and you could see my belly jumping like crazy. It's so much fun.

Tonight after dinner Nathan put his face on my stomach and started talking to the baby...he kept saying "are you in there?" and all the sudden the baby kicked him right in the face! It was so funny! I have to say, finally feeling the baby move more, and knowing it's not just gas, has made this experience so much more real and fun.

Well i guess that's it for now. My Dad and Lisa arrive on Wednesday for a few days. I can't believe the holidays are upon us, and Christmas will be here in a couple of weeks.

Work has continued to be dreadful, but i have 7 1/2 days of vacation still and those start next week when my Dad and Lisa arrive. Then I'll take off the day after Christmas and the entire following week. When i get back to the office I'll officially be a Bank of America employee. We just got a firm wide email before i left today letting us know that Bank of America will be cutting 30,000 to 35,000 jobs in the future. Nice. Someone forgot to add in "Happy Holidays" at the end of that email. Jerks.

I promise there will be pictures in the next one! We're slackers lately.

Love to all!

xoxoxo

P.S. Happy Birthday Auntie Laura!!!

Long Overdue

This blog is way overdue...sorry. We had our appointment a week and a half ago where we got an ultrasound and got to see the baby. Our appointment was at 8 a.m. I did this thinking that we wouldn't have to wait - but boy was i wrong. They didn't take us until 8:50 a.m. By that point i was pretty pissed off, but also excited to see the baby again.

We had no idea - but the ultrasound process at 20 weeks takes an hour. They go through and measure all sorts of things to make sure the baby is growing how it should, and to see if your due date is still accurate. Apparently I'm right on target since the doctor didn't say anything to us. She also said that the baby looks great!

And yes...we managed to NOT find out what we're having. When she got to the "goods" she told us to look away. We did, but it was hard to not just look over real quick. I did say to her "if i look, would i be able to even tell?" Since i don't have a trained eye i thought maybe i could look and just guess....but she said "It's quite obvious to me what it is right now, so if you don't want to know then don't look." Not sure what that means, although most people are translating that into it being a boy. A part of me, and i think Nate, wish we would have found out, but now we have no choice but to be surprised which is still exciting.

At one point Nate did sneak a peek, but he said he had no idea what he was looking at.

Next was our trip to California. We had such a good time. It went by way too fast, as i expected, and now with work looming tomorrow I'm wondering why we even came back.

It was very interesting to see what everyone out there had to say about their gender guess. Since they hadn't seen me since getting pregnant i figured they would be better at guessing since they would notice changes in my face, etc. The consensus for the most part is boy, but a couple of people said girl. People still say my face hasn't changed and that i don't look pregnant from the back - but man when i look at pictures i think i look so fat. I really do think the camera adds weight - but maybe I'm just trying to make myself feel better.

There were a couple of people who also said that my stomach is pretty big for 5 1/2 months (you know who you are). Until those comments i didn't think i was doing that bad in the size department...but I've now resorted to being a little self conscious about it. I mean i love having a belly (what the hell is the point of being pregnant?), and i don't' think i look that big, but you can't help but let it bother you a bit when people tell you you're big already. Either way, according to my doctor, I'm right where i should be, and there are a lot of people that are much bigger then me at this point in the pregnancy. So there.

One of the greatest parts of our visit was a baby shower tea party that my mother-in-law, Vickie, threw for me along with Sarah and Natalie. It was at the cutest little tea house in Lafayette, and we had such a nice time. I got to see so many people i hadn't seen since the wedding (!!!), and we got so many cute things for the baby.

Since i didn't take an official 21 week picture while we were there, I'm using the following as that, as well as a chance to show off some cute pics:

And for the 22 week picture:

I want to comment again on the size this week...but i won't.

I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving! We had three!

xoxoxo

Kickin' It

This weekend was my sister's Sweet Sixteen party. We had a lot of fun. My brother stayed with us from Maryland and since the theme was Hollywood we all got to get somewhat dressed up for the occasion. I'm not usually a fan of dressing up much, but when you're getting fatter by the day you'll take any excuse you can get to make yourself look somewhat attractive.

Here's my 20 week picture, dressed up for the party last night:

It took us three hours to decorate on Saturday morning. I literally went in my pj's thinking we would just drop off the centerpieces i made and the 76 cupcakes i did. Once we arrived the decorating ended up taking a little longer then anticipated.

Here are a couple more shots worth including:

The Birthday Girl.

John dancing to his signature song: TNT - by AC/DC

Mikey - wearing a pair of glasses that the DJ gave out, and lookin' good.

All in all it was a good time. Today we've been really lazy just recovering. First we went to the diner for breakfast where i devoured eggs benedict (eggs poached hard of course). Then it was back home to nap and watch football.

I got the title of this blog from the baby who has been movin' and groovin' all this week. I can actually say that i feel the baby move now. There is no guessing with these movements - it is definitely the baby. Friday night i was laying on the couch and started feeling kicks - pretty strong ones in fact. So i had Nathan come over and put his hand on my belly. He got a bit impatient, but i told him to just sit there for a minute. Sure enough the baby kicked Nathan's hand nice and strong! I'm so glad that he finally got to feel it for himself, since I've been talking so much about how i can feel it.

We have our next doctor's appointment this Wednesday. We get our ultrasound (where most find out the gender), and then I'll get weighed and meet with the doctor. Since my appetite has kicked in since my last appointment I'm curious to see what the total pounds will be this go around. I also have something that i have never had before - a sweet tooth. Almost anything sweet makes me happy these days, which i still have to be careful with since i will eventually get tested for gestational diabetes, something i don't want!

Other than that we're gearing up for our California trip. I can't wait - as I've mentioned in my past two posts. The weather got really cold here all the sudden, and I'm ready for a break from work. I'm also ready to be home since it's been too long.

So...the next post will be from California!

This Thursday marks 5 weeks until Christmas. Where does the time go? This past week also marked my half way point for this pregnancy. On Christmas, I'll be officially in my third trimester. Amazing.

That's it for now! More to come from the Golden State :)

xoxoxo

19 weeks!

Well i'm doing better this week with posting my picture more on time...kinda. I guess since i just blogged, even though it was late, i kept feeling like it wasn't time to post anything yet.

Here's my 19 week picture:

it's not the best picture...but you get the idea. It's hard to tell which part is my gut and which is a shadow from my black shirt. Oh well. Better luck this week with my next one.

Speaking of this week - on Friday i will be 20 weeks pregnant! That's half way done. Not only that, but i'll be a week away from flying home to California for a week. Woot woot!

Nothing new otherwise. I took this funny picture of Ellie. She actually slept like this on Nathan:

A week from tomorrow is my next appointment. We'll get another ultrasound and i'll get weighed in. More on that next week!

It's cold here - hopefully not everyone is suffering from winter weather already.

xoxox

18 Week Picture...Finally!

Once again - sorry for the delay, but the long awaited 18 week picture has finally made it's way to my computer:

I'm definitely showing to the point that strangers can tell. I catch people staring at me like I'm a freak all the time. I think sometimes it's because i look about as old as a 16 year old on the weekends. Sorry - but i do my hair and makeup 5 days a week...Saturday and Sunday are my days off even if i do look like a teenager.

Anyway - apparently in the pregnancy world, 18 weeks also means I'm in my 5th month. Don't ask me why - this is my first time too - but it sure is nice to move up one in the month bracket. I came across this nifty little chart online and thought it was helpful. I should be clipping this out and posting it on our fridge:

Two and half more weeks until we're off to California! Yah - freakin' - hoo. I can't wait.

Sorry for the short blog. Hopefully i'll have more for the 19 weeker.

xoxoxo

Insanity

Insanity. It has ensued at work and has no end in sight.

This is my excuse for not yet blogging for my 18th week. I do have a picture but it won't be posted tonight. Sorry.

Unfortunately, my 5th finance fire drill of the week (kindly note it's only Tuesday) has me working yet again at 9:30 p.m. at home, after working at the office all day.

They keep saying this Bank of America merger is a good thing. Those are the people who clearly aren't pulled into these fire drills.

Anyway, hopefully i can come up with something a bit interesting to write about when i do post my 18 week picture. I hope to make that tomorrow night. I'll be sure to ask Bank of America for permission to devote time to blogging from now on.

Good night!

xoxox

P.S. I hope you all voted. Seriously - if you didn't don't complain. Period.