10 Weeks to go and feeling good!!

Holy cow!! Only 10 weeks left!! Already feeling huge!


Last weekend was pretty busy. We loaded up some firewood from a friend of Justin's house. I only carried two pieces at a time, promise!! Things Justin makes me do when 7 months pregnant! (cell phone pictures)



We also got to visit with one of Justin's uncles down from Indiana, as well as the rest of the family. So that was a lot of fun. Got to see all the family kiddies for the second time in 2 weeks, which was great because I hadn't seen them since Christmas! I got some semi-homemade maternity skirts from my mother. Thank goodness she can sew! My $2.88 skirts will be great when I'm melting later this month from the yucky GA heat.

My favorite show to watch at night these days is the "Dancing with Baby Y" show!! He seems so active in the evenings (maybe that is because I am more relaxed and have more time to pay attention). It is super fun to watch my belly move around while he busts a move inside. I really think I am going to miss it when he arrives!! It is like a secret code we have. Thankfully Justin gets to feel him move and see him move also. Last night he got a kick in the mouth for talking loudly to my stomach! I think that Baby Y has also been trying out for the circus with all the acrobatics he has been doing when I'm falling asleep!

30 Weeks belly shots!! Still working that wonky belly shape! Yes, those are one of my 2 pairs of maternity pants. Still holding onto the rest of my regular pants for now though!


Tried to put on one of my shoes while standing on one leg last weekend and pulled something so that has been hindering me this week (probably didn't help when I walked on the treadmill on Monday). After sitting for a while my hip/back area aches a little now, so I definitely have the pregnancy waddle when I first get up this week. I'm hoping some of that might go away when my pulled muscle feels better. Justin says the waddle is here to stay. :-) I think this pregancy thing really is contagious because I have 2 co-workers in my office and 2 regional co-workers who are all pregnant too! Copy cats!

Got our first gift for Baby Y from a non-family member yesterday. It was a super cute farm themed play mat thingy from Kerri and Todd. I already took it out, put it together, played with it and put it back in the storage bag. :-) Just a little excited imagining Baby Y playing on it! I'm hoping to pick up his crib from my friend Kim who is giving us her crib on Monday after my next doctor's appointment. Now, if we could just make room in the hall bedroom to put up the crib. :-) I'm off all day Monday 4/27 for Confederate Memorial Day! Have you ever heard of such a thing?! It is my favorite totally insane and unnecessary holiday, especially since it means a day off!

Hope everyone has a great weekend!!

28 weeks!!

Wow! Only 84 days to go!! I'm up 6 lbs total and got some good kudos from my doctor since apparently I will start gaining rapidly in the coming months and will really get huge. No gestational diabetes for me! And the lemon lime glucose drink was actually not as bad as I thought it would be. I am a smidgen anemic, so have to increase the iron, but other than that, all is well with Baby Y! He sure is a mover and a shaker! I really think he must be rearranging furniture in there because he is constantly on the go! He is most active on the right side, which is interesting. I went to a breast feeding class on Tuesday, which was great and very informative. Hopefully all will go well in that area but I was totally at a loss before the class so I'm glad I went!

Celebrated my birthday last weekend! Thanks for all the sweet cards and emails! Nice low key day (minus the communication snafu with my mother for meeting up for lunch!) and yummy homemade cake I got to take home from my mom.

Snowed again this week but back up to 73 degrees again today and the pollen is back to get us all. Everything is coated with the green/yellow tint of spring in Georgia. :-)

Here are the 28 week belly shots! One covered and one uncovered!


Still wearing my regular pants but I am cheating and using the rubber band extention trick I learned from my friend, Meaghan. I am still looking a little lopsized in the belly area, no good round belly for me yet but I blame that on Baby Y and his furniture arrangements.

Hope everyone has a Happy Easter!

Baby stuff is overwhelming!!

Justin and I went to register for baby stuff this weekend. Thought it might be kind of fun. It was a disaster. We are just not shoppers and there was just SO MUCH STUFF to look at. I know that we don't need everything and we recognize that a lot of stuff is totally insane and unnecessary, but weeding through it all is exhausting! We must have spent at least 3.5 hrs at one store and just had to leave before we lost our minds. Then this morning I looked online at the reviews of some of the items we picked and apparently we tried out and liked some duds. 401 reviews on our stroller and it had only 2 of 5 stars. aghh!! I thought we could register at another store the same day we did this one but I was mistaken!! Will have to try again another day. We did get to enjoy dinner with Brigette's parents that night at Ted's Montana Grill and celebrate their 39th Wedding Anniversary! So the night ended well.

On a lighter note, my mother and I went to a church clothing sale last week and got way too many cute things for Baby Y. She even got a stroller for their house for $20. Score!

Speaking of too many cute things, the baby product I'm obsessed with and is totally unnecassry but awesome nonetheless, are these baby/toddler socks from http://www.trumpette.com/. Those of you who know me well know I love wacky socks myself, so I cannot help but love these socks. I love ALL of them (except the ones with golf tees on them), especially the mismatched ones. They can be found for cheaper on other websites, but they are still unnecessary regardless of cost. But SO CUTE!

I've been sleeping on the couch. No, not because I'm in trouble with Justin, but because my hips ache no matter what I do when I sleep in our bed. I have about 6 pillows in the bed and it just doesn't help, so I'm alternating nights on the living room couch. So sad! :-( But Justin tucks me in and made me a nice fire last night to keep me toasty since it was down in the 30s again.

Have my gestational diabetes test this Friday. Whoo hoo. Looking forward to drinking the bottle of yucky stuff. What I enjoyed is that they gave me options of flavors. Lemon-lime? Orange? Fruit punch? Is any of that really going tomake it taste better?! I doubt it. Will let you know how it goes.

By the way, Baby Y is the size of a sock monkey this week, in case you were wondering. :-)

25 1/2 weeks down and 100 days to go!!

Last weekend we did a lot of baby stuff! Did a tour of the second hospital in town and made our decision on which one we will be using. That will make my doctor's office happy as I have at least 3 people ask me about that at each visit. Basically, both are nice and I'm sure are fine but one you labor, deliver, and recover in the same nice sized room with pull out bed for father, the other you labor and deliver in one room, then about an hour later are moved to another room for recovery. I do not want to be moving around, neither does Justin, so that really pushed us to our decision. We did our first "baby stuff" browsing at 2 local baby stores, which really overwhelmed me with the amount of crazy baby stuff that is out there and the costs!! Just the bottle aisle at Target was insane--how many types of bottles could there really be?! Justin was much calmer. :-) We also went to a CLOTH DIAPERING Class!! Yep, that is right, we are going to try cloth diapering. I will say it is way more advanced and user friendly than when my mom was folding giant diapers up for my "everything gives me a rash" hiney. It greatly disturbs us to think of the number of diapers in our landfills (the 3rd largest type of landfill waste) and the fact that they will be there for over 500 years. And certainly some people will try to argue the use of water and electricity for cloth diaper care, but I'm not going to get into that here. :-) We will also likely hang most to dry, which cuts down on energy used and how cute will nice clean diapers look on the clothesline drying in the breeze?! And I am frugal so the cost of disposables over time hurts my feelings also. There are 4 main types of cloth diapers these days and we are going to probably use a combination of 3: prefolds, fitted, and pocket. We will be registering at a local Athens store for these if anyone wants to contribute to the cause. :-) Check out these cute, not to mention as easy to use as disposables, cloth diapers:



Baby Y is one busy dude!! He is moving all the time now! If we are patient and watch, we can also see him move my stomach when he is dancing around in there! Very cool and a little odd. :-) He isn't keeping me awake or anything yet, but I can imagine as he gets bigger and is still so active it will be interesting. We also found our crib set (baby comforter) at Tractor Supply Company. Hee hee. I was there to get birdseed for my dad and found one with a farm theme and John Deere, which will go perfect with the room already in place. Not to mention it was way less expensive than the crazy (but cute) ones I have seen in the stores and online. They cost more than our comforter set!! And since they really shouldn't use the bumpers til they are older and same for the comforter, you are really paying for a sheet they will pee/spit up on. Guess I shouldn't work in advertising for any baby crib set companies. :-)

Speaking of keeping me awake, I am having a horrible time trying to sleep now. I have some tendonitis in both hips, which I found out a few years ago when I was jogging more. Sometimes they just ache when I am trying to sleep. Now that I cannot sleep on my back or stomach, I have to alternate sleeping on my sides, which has now resulted in crazy aches. All night I have to switch back and forth, and the hip that was hurting when I was laying on it is still hurting when I turn on the other side and makes it very hard to sleep. My doctor told me to put a pillow behind my back so I'm not fully on my back but more tilted to one side. I was doing that with a regular pillow but that wasn't working too well so I went out and bought a wedge shaped pillow to use. Course the wedge is probably a little to big for what I need it for, so I am sleeping all kinds of wacky now and poor Justin gets to wake up every time I'm rolling around and moving pillows and such. Yesterday was awful because I was folding clothes and packing up some things and was sitting on the floor for a few hours and that did a number on my lower back and my left hip was aching all morning. Already falling apart and still have 3+ months left!!

I am planning to get a 5 session photo shoot from some great local photographers, http://www.stylizedportraiture.com/, which includes a Maternity (i.e. giant belly) session, newborn, 4 mo, 8 mo, 12 month shots of Baby Y plus two albums, storyboard of all the baby sessions, and 20% off all other prints. It is a little expensive for me (but they are actually doing a special so it is a bargain) so it is my birthday gift to myself. :-) Check out their baby shots, it is addicting!

Here is the most recent belly shot taken by famed photographer and super husband, Justin:

Random baby info and Yellowstone Pictures!!

Forgot to mention in February that we started being able to feel the baby! I was feeling the odd tummy sensations for a while, but on 2/15 I was able to feel him moving with my hand on my stomach. It was so amazing!! Justin was able to feel him later that week and he was so excited!!

Did I mention that I have been sick with some sort of cold/funk for over 2 months now? Congestion and coughing, it has been really annoying. Poor Justin is worn out in the mornings not only because I wake him up when I get up to go to the bathroom, but also because of the random fits of coughing or blowing my nose to breathe. The congestion has gotten better but the coughing gets worse at night. I am allowed to take some over the counter things, but those never work for me anyhow. The doctor thinks it must be a virus and will just have to work itself out, but shouldn't harm the baby, which was my bigger concern. Had an appointment last week and everything was looking good with the baby. My doctor says I have only gained 3 lbs since November, but there must be something wrong with their scale because I feel huge! My pre-baby chub must be relocating to my stomach, but doesn't seem to be missing anywhere else...:-)

Yellowstone Pictures!! (warning: there are a ton!)
Yellowstone was so amazing! So different in the winter than spring/fall, even though only one part of the park was open. We had SO much to do and see!! And the park was so quiet with very few people there. We never had to wait to do anything, even meals although there was only one place open in the park to eat, we were fine just walking in when we wanted. One day we stopped in the middle of the road to take pictures of Big Horn Sheep Rams for over an hour and were passed by only 2 cars. We took a snow coach tour to Old Faithful, which was fun, but tiring as it took about 8 hrs round trip (stops along the way though). The people we rode down with were nice, can't say the same for the people on the way back (example, they didn't want to stop at the last bathroom stop which would mean another 45 minutes til the end of the trip before we stopped. Thankfully our guide/driver was super and he stopped for the pregnant lady). You can click on the photos to see larger versions.

Bison digging in the snow


Big Horn Sheep Rams (first time in 8 trips we have seen any rams and we saw 7 on this trip!)

Gray Wolf howling!

Black and Gray wolf (they were meeting up with another wolf further up the hill). We also witnessed some wolf procreation (it is mating season after all).

One of 3 Bald Eagles we saw

Coyote

Lovely sunset in Lamar Valley area

Snow Shoeing!! This was SO much fun! It was our first time and you would think we would take it easy, but no, we do a 5+ mile round trip hike our first time out! It was worth it though!

Pregnant lady DID go to the bathroom in the scary and very cold bathroom before we headed off, but we just knew the bathroom at Tower Falls would be open for use because there was no way to hike off trail to make a pit stop in the woods. Unfortunately, we were met with this lovely sign when we got to the 1/2 way point:

Another fun day snow shoeing at Wraith Falls:

"Ghost" Trees


Can you see the sparkling snow?!

Yep, that is Justin snow shoeing in a t-shirt.

Canary Spring (Mammoth Hot Springs)

Just after watching Old Faithful erupt:


Next to Gibbon Falls




Yellowstone Winter Beauty

Firehole Falls

Small "spike" Bull Elk

One of many huge herds of elk we saw in and out of the park

Pronghorn

Mule deer (we saw HERDS of these on our way to and from the park)

Coyote we encountered on our snow shoe trip. We were the only ones to see him.

This was just outside the cabin we rented in Gardiner our last few days. The family was super and the views were unbelievable!! Deer and Elk were outside the cabin each day!

http://www.headwatersbandb.com/

Hope you enjoyed! I still have hundreds more!