Belly pics!

Here are some pics of how I've been growing (I think our baby will be roughly 30lbs or so...)

In the home stretch...

I'm in the home stretch now with 5 weeks until my due date and I'm definitely ready to be done being pregnant! :)
Everything is getting really sore and uncomfortable and I'm getting tired of wearing the same pants everyday :)
At my 34 week appointment my Dr. said that everything looked to be right on track and that her head is already down and in position. I go to my appointments every week now and at the next one he'll start to check to see if I'm dilated. I'm hoping for an end of June baby but we'll see.

I have to get one more test done (called group B strep) and then I'm done with testing. We also won't be having any more ultrasounds unless the Dr.'s not 100% sure of her position. I was hoping to have at least one more but at this point I don't want to ruin the surprise of what she looks like.

The Nursery is Done! (almost)

We've been working on the house non-stop the past month and have a lot to show for it. Not only is the kitchen completely redone, we've also semi-finished the basement, added a pantry and ripped out trees from our front yard that we've been meaning to do for years. On top of doing all that, we've nearly finished the nursery. The only thing left to do is put her crib together and finish decorating which we should be able to do today :)

Here are some pics of the room - when it was our guest room it was pretty plain and painted a lilac color. Mike was able to paint the ceiling, install a new ceiling fan and paint the walls (antiguan sky and lambskin if you're wondering). :) He also painted both of her doors, put new hardware on them and put up a chair rail. He's quite the handyman!

What do you think?

Getting bigger...

I'm definitely getting a lot bigger! I'll have to post a belly pic soon.

I'm 27 weeks now and I'm getting kicked constantly. She sure does like to move! She also has a very strong love of orange juice (I drink a carton every 5 days or so and crave it ALL the time). According to the averages - she's 2lbs. and about 15 inches long, has hair (including eyelashes) and can open and close her eyes. She can also hear everything a lot better, but I'm pretty sure she's been able to hear Mike and I for several weeks now (apparently we're sort of a 'loud' couple) :)

Everything has been going fairly well - A few bumps but nothing major.

My next dr. appointment is on the 14th where I'll have to do the dreaded glucose test. I'll need to drink some gross liquid and then they will test me for gestational diabetes. If all goes well, I won't have to do the more intensive testing (fingers crossed).

We're hoping to use April to get her room done. The bedding and bedroom set is teal/aqua blue and chocolate brown and I LOVE it! It was hard to find blue and brown nursery items that were still girly but I finally found what I wanted. Her crib was delivered last week too so we're almost ready to start. We have to pick out some paint colors first though...

13 weeks to go!!

Sorry about the lack of updates...

So, I have not posted any updates in a while and apparently we have some avid readers (thanks!!) so here's what's been happening...

The lack of updates does have an excuse. We 're in the middle of gutting out our entire kitchen and redoing the entire thing. This means we can basically use two rooms in our house right now and we've been having to eat a ton of carry out. Plus, in the midst of all of this, we had a scare and had to go to the hospital. In hindsight, not the best idea to do a bunch of remolding while I'm pregnant but it beat the alternative of doing it once she got here. (also, I'm no longer allowed to wield a chisel and hammer to rip up the kitchen floor - but it was fun while it lasted) :)

On Sat. Feb 28th, I was having a lot of pain in my abdomen that lasted the entire day. Sometimes it would get increasingly worse and the middle of my stomach would be rock hard. Mike and I, of course being novices, thought... maybe it's her head??? It wasn't. I was having contractions. On Sunday the pain went away and I felt a lot better - which prompted the floor removal - but then around 4:00 I started having some spotting. After a lot of crying, I called my doctor and he told me to go up to Beaumont to get checked out. This made Mike and I even more nervous (I think we were hoping for a "happens all the time, don't worry about it" response).
On the way to the hospital, she was moving and kicking like crazy so I felt a lot better knowing that she was still okay. The hospital was great - we walked right in, I got hooked up to a monitor for contractions within 5 minutes and examined about 5 minutes after that. Apparently the contractions from Saturday caused a small amount of bleeding so that's what the spotting was. Whew! The midwife we saw at the hospital was right, if it's not one thing in pregnancy it's another!

I don't really have a lot of restrictions except for taking it easy, which I thought I had been doing, and not being so stressed out. This means my days of staying at the office until 6:30/7:00 are over for now. I actually have felt much better this week now that I've been making my self leave by 5:30.

The plus side of this is that Mike now knows the way to the hospital and we both know how to get to the labor and delivery area. Plus, we got to see her face on the ultrasound! No profile this time, she was looking right at us.

It's a girl!

So a few of you were right - most notably Mike...

We had our 18 week appointment today and we found out that our little baby is a baby girl! We're really excited - now there will be a little mini-me :) I think that thought makes Mike a little nervous but really happy too.
Everything looks really good with her. We need to go back in two weeks for another ultrasound so they can get some additional pics of her heart. I guess they need to take pics of the heart from a lot of different angles and she wasn't cooperating for one of them. So... more ultrasound pictures! I would get them everyday if I could. I love seeing her move around and 'wave' to us, which she was doing again this time.
Isn't she cute?














By the way - We are no longer allowed to hang out with the Matzkin-Bridgers, the Ousleys or any of our other friends that have baby boys. This little girl has a very protective father and you can never be to careful. :)

15 Week Appointment

We had our 15 week appointment today. I was really hoping for an ultrasound and (possibly) finding out the baby's sex. Unfortunately, neither of those things happened.

We met with the doctor and listened to the heartbeat which is always amazing. Then we went over a few questions we had and that was it. We would have had the blood work done to test for down syndrome today too but Mike and I opted not to have it done.
Now we go back in 3 weeks to have our 18 week ultrasound. That's when they'll measure the baby to make sure everything is on track and be able to tell us their sex! (as long as our baby cooperates)

More news to come...