We're pregnant!! (23 weeks)

I thought for sure I would be more on top of blogging once I was pregnant, but... I'm not. I have been journaling better, which is good, but I'm more than halfway through and haven't blogged yet! Whoops...

Finding out:
I was actually very surprised to learn that I was pregnant. I know a lot of people who have taken a few months or longer to get pregnant, so I was fully prepared to have to wait patiently. But I knew there was a chance, and I thought I might be a little late, so I decided I'd better test just so I knew. I went to the grocery store to buy a test and some groceries alone. Brian said later that he should have been suspicious at this point, because I usually make him go to the grocery store with me... but I didn't want to get him unnecessarily excited/scared/whatever emotion I thought he'd be when we found out we were pregnant, because I was really pretty sure that I wasn't!
Anyway. I came home, and immediately locked myself in the bathroom. I waited the 3-5 minutes, fully expecting a negative. I actually thought it was for a minute, because it wasn't very dark and didn't show up right away, but then I started to see a line. Then I panicked. I don't know why, but I was very worried that Brian would be upset for some reason. Brian never gets upset about anything, so I think I was mostly just freaking out. After a minute or two of that, I decided I'd just go out and tell him. He didn't freak out at all, and it was great!

ALL the pregnancy tests... I was crazy!

I think we were both a little shocked... we talked about it a little - when I thought I'd be due, that kind of stuff. Brian decided we should commemorate the experience somehow, so we got takeout and rented What to Expect When You're Expecting. That was about the extent of our celebration. I think we were both excited, but it was just so weird! I definitely didn't feel pregnant, and I had been pretty certain that it wouldn't happen so fast for us, so it didn't feel real at all. I actually ended up taking several  other pregnancy tests in the next week or so, because I just couldn't believe it.



Announcing:

I've only been the baby for six months!!

We told Molly right away. She's a dog, so we knew she could keep a secret! After that, she went missing for a while, and we found her contemplating her impending big-sisterhood under the piano bench. We think she's warmed up to the idea a little, but it was a lot to take in at the time.

I was going to wait to tell any humans until WAY later. I know a lot of things can happen in early pregnancy, and I was sort of in denial still... At one point, I wanted to wait until I had been to see my doctor, but that was way too long. We decided to announce a few days later on New Year's Eve.


We had to be kind of sneaky, because we were having a party with friends, and we weren't ready to announce to anyone except our family. We took this picture before anyone came over, and sent it our parents and siblings at midnight. It felt kind of lame announcing over text, but we weren't going to see everyone for a while and wanted to share! Everyone was very excited. I'm a little sad we didn't share in person so I could see their reactions (I'm told a few of them were pretty entertaining!), but it was still good.

First trimester:
My first trimester was awesome. I kept waiting for the morning sickness, food aversions, crazy cravings, and other pregnancy symptoms I always hear about, but nothing happened. I'm very lucky, definitely not complaining. I felt 100% fine, which really didn't help the whole not-feeling-pregnant thing. I was pretty exhausted most nights, but that was the only noticeable difference, and it just meant that we ate out more often and I took lots of naps. I feel like the biggest jerk when I talk about this, because I know a lot of people who really struggled with morning sickness and other issues. We just got really lucky I guess!


My first appointment was in February. They did a short ultrasound to confirm my due date (I'm conveniently due on Labor Day), and we got to see baby for the first time! It was the weirdest feeling to actually see something growing in there, since I still didn't feel any different. Baby was measuring right on track, and we even got to see a few wiggles! After weeks of worrying about not feeling pregnant and wondering if everything was ok, this was all very reassuring for me, and I was sad the ultrasound was so short!

Gender Reveal:
The anatomy scan was in April, but my mom helped convince me to go to a private ultrasound place to find out what we were having a few weeks earlier. I ended up being really glad we did, because the pictures from that scan came out WAY better. Anyway, when I was about 16 weeks, we drove all the way down to Murray to see baby again. I was really nervous. We would've been happy with either a boy or a girl, but I was scared I would be disappointed for some reason. Or that we would get there and something would be wrong with the baby (I worried about this before pretty much every appointment, because I STILL didn't feel pregnant yet..).

Everything was totally fine, except that baby would not cooperate! The ultrasound technician said that baby was "lounging," arms up by the head and basically all sprawled out. We could see everything except the area we were most interested in (baby is modest I guess?). The cord was in the way, and baby was not budging. We tried for half an hour. The tech would look for a minute or two, say "nope, still hasn't moved," tell me to try something to get baby moving around, and leave us alone for a few minutes. I tried walking, lying on my side, drinking cold water, lying on the other side, praying, pleading, and threatening, but baby was comfy and didn't want to move. The tech said that she thought it might be a girl, but couldn't say with any certainty. Just that she hadn't seen anything that looked like a boy yet, but the cord could just be blocking it...

Drama Queen!!

I was pretty bummed. We had to drive all the way to Murray! Luckily we actually had a few things to do in the area that day, and Fetal Fotos let me schedule another appointment to try again the next week. I spent the weekend willing baby to cooperate. I guess the only way to move the cord out of the way is if baby physically grabs it and moves it, which was weird to think about. I bought some sugary snacks to eat before we went, in case that motivated baby to wiggle enough, because we were not going back again if it didn't work this time!

The second appointment went much more smoothly. It took about five minutes. The tech confirmed that it was a girl! And took a few cute pictures for us. Baby was being a little dramatic this time, she had her arm up over her face like "Fine, I guess you can look at me today!". I guess all my threats worked, I'm obviously going to be a great mom!


Second trimester so far:
I'm 23 weeks as of today! So I'm actually pretty close to being in the third trimester, which is CRAZY. It feels like it's going so fast!  I'm told that will stop once I start getting giant and the weather warms up, but currently things are moving right along.

The anatomy scan was four weeks ago. It was not as exciting as I had hoped it might be. They confirmed that baby is a girl, and took all the measurements they needed, but it was so fast! The tech tried to point out what she was measuring, but there were a lot of things and we didn't really focus on anything much. I'm glad that she was focused on her job, but I was a little sad, since that's the last time we'll see baby for a while. She did a few 3d pictures, but they are kind of creepy and I can't even tell what half of them are, so I'm glad we have the pictures from Fetal Fotos. We did find out that I have an anterior placenta, which was reassuring, because I hadn't been able to feel baby moving at all yet and had been wondering why.

I did finally start feeling movements last week! Just a little bit, here and there, but it finally feels real now! It would feel more real now anyway, because I'm visibly pregnant. I didn't show for a long time, but I've gotten a lot bigger in the last few weeks and feel huge suddenly, and I still have 17 weeks! I should probably be taking cute bump pictures, but I don't have any good ones to share, and I feel super bloated so I probably won't take a lot. Someone at work asked me if I was "multiplying" the other day (yay for working with nerdy people...).

Anyway, that's about it so far. We're working on the nursery. I have quite a few projects I'm hoping to get finished over the summer. My fingers and feet are already swelling up, so that should be fun when it starts to get hot. But things have been so easy so far, a little water retention is nothing to cry about! I'll try to write more regularly about this, but no promises!

Home improvement projects

    Still the worst at blogging. We've been pretty busy with the holidays and everything,  but I thought I'd post some updates!

     First, we loved our Christmas (and New Year's) decorations. This was our first year actually decorating, so I had a lot of fun getting it all together. Brian did the lights outside, I made the wreath and found most of the ornaments. There are lots of penguins (I may have a problem). We also had a few religious elements (we may have ended up with three nativities), but I put them up after everything else and failed to take a picture before we took it all down... Next Christmas!!

  (Also, I tried like 8 million times to take a cute picture of Molly with our tree. This is what we got).

 

      Our next project was the window in the spare room. It's not very easy to see in this picture, but it looks directly into the neighbor's porch! The people before us had a curtain over it, but we never got around to that. We found some film stuff to put over it, and now Brian can roam around in his underwear without fear of traumatizing the neighbor children.

      It ended up with a few seams (it was kind of tricky to apply in straight lines) but we like it!

  

   Last project: the breakfast nook! Our kitchen is pretty tiny, and we pretty much never ate in there because our table didn't fit very well. Actually, it fits into the corner perfectly, but then there's hardly any room for chairs, and forget about inviting any people over for dinner!!

 

      While we were furniture shopping, I found this breakfast nook set, and thought "That would work so much better than the table we've got!!" I was so excited that I bought it right then and there. 

      I made some bad furniture decisions that weekend! We also brought a futon, which we assembled before we realized that it didn't fit where we had intended to put it. Luckily we found another place for it, and decided we should measure the corner before we tried to install the breakfast nook set. It was 1.5 inches too small. I was very disappointed, but happy that we found out BEFORE we unpacked and assembled everything. Moral of the story: measure your house and potential furniture before you spend hours assembling things...

    Since the set wouldn't fit, I decided to make one. I found the exact same table sold separately on amazon, and bought some storage benches to use for seats.

     I decided that I wanted it to look a little more like a booth, so I made this fancy seat back. I didn't document that process very well, but I used some quilt batting, fabric, a few large pieces of cardboard that we saved from the bench boxes, and LOTS of staples. I need to tighten the fabric up a little, but we like it so far! We'll see how it holds up. It's not the fanciest, but I can mount it on the wall with command strips (because we hate nails..), and it was way cheaper than an actual booth seat!

  

    One day I'll post more pictures of our whole house, but we're still working on a few things (also it's currently a disaster), so I'll save it for later. We really love it here though!! The neighborhood is awesome, and our neighbors are great. Maybe I'll post about that one day too, but no promises.