Happy Birthday Brub!

To the BEST big brother in the world...

HAPPY 30 YEARS!!!

Love you.  :)

Nutritious AND Delicious

Tonight, eating "well" during this pregnancy looked a bit like this:

And by "a bit" I mean EXACTLY.  Plus the ever beneficial seltzer water.

I really should get to the grocery store...

The Two-Legged Puppy's Close Up

Well, kind of...

Jan 13, 2012 (7 weeks)

Jan 22, 2012 (8 weeks 2 days)

Feb 12, 2012 (11 weeks 2 days)

And here's where I became lazy...for a few days...which turned into weeks......

March 25, 2012 (17 weeks 2 days...before dinner)

I feel like it's kind of hard to tell in these pictures how much my belly has grown!  But when I try on my pants...I know it has.  :)

We find out the baby's sex on April 23rd and I'm really excited, but also really enjoying this time of not knowing. Partly because EVERYONE has an opinion.  And for the record, everyone so far thinks it's a girl (including Hubster's dream-self, apparently).

So we'll see!

The Night Sammy Was Eaten By a Snake

To set the scene, I'm at Mom's house standing with her in the dining room, looking out the window.  My brother is outside, standing on a ladder to clip the forsythia bush.  The forsythia is in full bloom and looks like a giant yellow balloon.

Suddenly the window, screen and all, disappear so there is just a giant hole in the wall.  And Sammy (our black lab baby) decides to jump through it.  Not sure exactly where she came from...but bear with me.  At this exact moment, I see something yellow moving near the base of the ladder that Ben is standing on.  This yellow something is partially camouflaged by the forsythia until it moves out from under the bush.

At which time I realize that it's a GIANT YELLOW PYTHON!

(http://wallpapers.free-review.net/15__Yellow_python.htm)

Ugh.  I've got the willies just putting that picture in here.  

So, Sammy goes chasing after said giant snake.  And the snake clamps its giant jaws around her face!  Then wraps it's body around her throat.  I panic, and my mom/Diego/whoever was there (it's blurry at this point), just kind of stare.  I decide that the ONLY thing I can do is unwind said python from my poor child's neck.  So, I grab the python by the tail and start to unwind.  I end up picking Sammy off the ground in the process and she's inches from my face.  As I struggle with the python beast, Sammy seems to realize that things are not going well for her.  And she gives me one last, very sad, "goodbye Mommy" lick on the face.

AND THEN I WAKE UP.

Who dreams about their dog being eaten by a giant yellow python and saying goodbye???  Needless to say I woke up mildly panicked that my dog was gone.  

Thankfully she was curled up on the bed with me.  I spent probably 15 minutes petting her and telling her I loved her and telling her to stay away from pythons.

All of that to say that, hands down, the weirdest pregnancy symptom I've experienced is crazy dreams.

So, I guess I should count myself as lucky.

Mutant Baby

Mara, this is for you...

So there was this time when I thought I had turned my 11 week old fetus into a mutant...and it happened like this:

My company does health screenings, among other things.  And to help the office employees understand what it was like to go through a screening we had one at the office.  It was the typical, finger stick for cholesterol, blood pressure, height, weight.  And they also do a body fat measurement using this thingy:

(From: http://www.sears.com/shc/s/p_10153_12605_SPM257530729P?sid=IDx20101019x00001a&ci_src=14110944&ci_sku=SPM257530729)

All my numbers were good and I didn't even have to tell anyone I was pregnant (which was my main concern because at the time no one at work knew about our impending tiny human).  About a week later, I was at a screening event for a client.  All was going well.  Until I saw a big sign:

PREGNANT WOMEN AND THOSE WITH IMPLANTED MEDICAL DEVICES SHOULD NOT HAVE THEIR BODY FAT MEASURED!

Exclamation point and all.  Oh my how my mind started racing.  And my heart started racing.  And I started thinking about how awful a mother I already was and how I MUST have turned my child into a mutant.  This progressed over the next 12 hours to the point where I called my OB clinic (only to leave an unreturned message), I called my husband demanding he bring home a doppler to make sure this kid was still alive, and I even called Mom to cry about how I must have done something awful.  The weird part of this all was that I KNEW, I mean absolutely logically and with every scientific ounce of knowledge I possess (and that the internets could convey), that it didn't hurt the kid.  But I could NOT stop thinking about how I'd turned the kid into a mutant.

I feel like I've been really lucky throughout the first 14 weeks of this pregnancy.  Next to no nausea, no crazy exhaustion, few food aversions, etc.  And I've been pretty rational.  There haven't been any crazy incidents of crying after reading a Facebook post or yelling at Hubster for something random or anything. So, now we all know I didn't get through the first trimester without at least one crazy story.  :)

In the end, my anxiety finally abated, but not after I realized that this completely irrational thoughts will probably continue to pop up in my life for the next forever.  :)  But I'm looking forward to it.

The jury is still out on whether Diego is looking forward to it though!

Give It Up

Lent started more than a week ago, but, as it extremely applicable to baby-baking, I wanted to share my lenten resolution.

For Lent, I generally try to take on something.  Every year for the past few during I've devoted time to read the Bible.  And I'm doing that this year.  It's a wonderful way to start the day.

I'm not one for giving up sweets or drinks or most other things.  And what mother-to-be wants to give up chocolate chip cookies or Wheat Thins?  I haven't really had cravings, but giving up any food just didn't sound like a good idea....

So, I've also decided on something that is both a "give up" and "take on"...I will be letting go of anxiety this year for Lent.  With this tiny human on the way, there's always something to worry about.  (I'll tell you about the time I was drowning in anxiety because I thought I'd made the baby a mutant with a body fat machine sometime soon.  Mara, you'll love it.)  Whether it's remembering who we've told about our good news, or what I ate, or heck if we're ready for this, I'm giving it up.  I could be anxious every single second of every single day and I've spent my fair share of anxious moments in the past two weeks.

[Side Note:  Did you know that it's SERIOUSLY a full-time (and often stressful) job to tell people you're pregnant?  I wish someone had told me that.]

BUT I QUIT!  I don't have the time or the energy or the willpower to be anxious.  So, I'm not going to.  Don't get me wrong, this is a daily (hourly) struggle.  But I think in the end, it'll all be worth it.

Appropriate Timing

So the blog has been neglected.  But the house, husband and pups have not.  I'm considering it all a win, in the end.

And it is only appropriate that my last post was on September 1, 2011 because on September 1, 2012...

There will be a new child in the house.  :)

I am going to do my best to update this blog with baby-growing information and general how we're doing  insight.  Diego and I are really looking forward to our new addition, as well as the next 6 months to get used to the whole idea!!

Also, the blog is going private (as you may know by now) because I'm not all about sharing every detail of my life with all of the internets.  This also explains why there hasn't been and won't be a giant Facebook/gchat/Twitter/Washington Post announcement about our news.  

I look forward to sharing this new chapter with the people in our life who we love so much and I'm also sure it will be really fascinating to look back on when the tiny human is here!

Cheers!