Looking Forward

It's so hard at this point to not just want the next month or two to go by really quickly.  Now that I'm 31 weeks, I keep thinking, "Do I really have to wait!?"  But then I remind myself all the wonderful things that are going to happen between now and when he'll be born. 

It's almost spring time and it will be wonderful to enjoy the weather before it gets crazy Alabama hot.  I'm lucky enough to have two baby showers being planned for me, one here in Huntsville this coming Sunday, and the other in Chattanooga on March 19th!  I really looking forward to seeing a lot of friends and family that I haven't seen in a long time.

Unfortunately, I have things to look forward to after he's here too!  At least two of my friends from college and coming to visit us over Memorial Day, and we're hoping to be able to go to our family's lake house (Tate) in the middle of June.  Sounds like so much fun!  I have visions of Connor at Tate every day.  It's part of my visualizations for labor and birth.

Here are some pictures of the nieces playing in the lake last year.  I hope I get to take more pictures of them and their new cousin this year in just a few months!

30 Weeks and a Rocker!

I thought I would feel  different once I hit 30 weeks, but nothing magically happened.  I'm still having an easy pregnancy and the anxiety didn't get more intense, but less.  I've been worried about labor, letting it become this huge thing, until the other day I was like, "Look self.  Labor will be at the most a two day ordeal that I will forget most of and will result in my baby being here.  Stop stressing."  It helped a lot.  Positive self-talk is great!

Yesterday I went to our outdoor mall with my friend Britni and her son Parker, who just turned one.  We happened upon a really great Gymboree sale and I got a lot of clothes for Connor's first year.  I still have a long way to go before I have him covered, but I have two showers coming up in the next few weeks, so I probably won't get anymore clothes until after I see what other people have gotten him.

What I did get him is his adorable coming home outfit!  I love it so much!  It's so tiny!

Our nursery is coming along well too! We just got our awesome glider rocker, which Patrick assembled and then fell asleep on.  He said it was just too comfortable.

Here's the rest of our furniture, covered in Connor's new clothes.

First Childbirth Class

Becca and I went to Crestwood Hospital tonight for our first of four childbirth classes. Crestwood is where we are planning on meeting our son. The class had 15 couples, most pretty young first-time parents like ourselves.The instructor, Denise, started by going around the room asking everyone about their goals, fears, and what they hoped to learn. A surprising number of ladies were essentially just afraid of pain and had the goal of "as little pain as possible." Some went so far as to say, "By any means necessary!" Becca and I were relieved that there were a few mothers who were interested in attempting a natural childbirth (no interventions unless truly medically necessary). One of them even mentioned that she was interested in HypnoBirthing, so that it made Becca feel a lot more comfortable mentioning it herself.

HypnoBirthing: We're going to try it!

We got to watch an extremely funny stand-up (or in this case, sit-down) from Bill Cosby on the whole pregnancy and childbirth experience. My favorite part went like this:

Bill Cosby: Isn't that the baby's head?

Doctor: Yeah, but it's stuck...

Cosby: Well get the salad spoons!

The video is here: Bill Cosby, Himself (Sorry, readers in the distant future, if this link doesn't work. I bet you can still find the video online though! The internet must still exist, since you are reading this blog.)

He made a lot of faces like this...

In the class, we covered things like: how to know if you're in labor, what symptoms of late pregnancy are normal and which ones you should call the doctor about, relaxation techniques, etc. It was a pretty good class.

We stayed a little after class to talk to the instructor. We wanted to know if we could expect the nursing staff to have ever heard of HypnoBirthing. Then we found that she had actually birthed her second baby using HypnoBirthing! She said it was great, her best birthing experience, and the only reason she didn't do it for her third baby was because it had to be induced for medical reasons and she couldn't keep up. Another success story, very reassuring!

Finally, I asked her whether she recommended a doula, and whether she thought couples who hired doulas were generally happy that they did so. She was very pro-doula, and that went with my natural inclinations that we should at least really consider hiring one. So maybe there'll be another post here on that some time in the near future!

As time passes, we only get more excited! We love our little buddy!

I miss you, but I haven't met you yet

I want my baby to be here!  I mean, don't get me wrong, I want him to come when he's ready and big and fat, but I also want him to come and be with me so I can snuggle him and give him kisses.

There are a lot of commercials on TV that have newborn babies on them and every time I see them it gives me an itchy feeling in my belly of anticipation.  I've started getting ready for labor by reading about and working on hypnobirthing.  Since I've entered my third trimester, it's getting time for so many things, like baby showers, lining up a pediatrician, taking baby classes... but mostly just sitting around wondering what he's going to be like, worrying if he's actually going to be a boy, and thinking about how much life is going to change once he's here.

We're still waiting on our last big piece of furniture for the nursery, the glider rocker and ottoman.  There were so many options as far as fabric and wood that it took us a long time to figure out what we wanted.

This is the type of chair that we got, but the colors are completely wrong:

We'll post a picture of the real one once we get it!

Nursery Furniture and Dinner

In my weekly emails about my baby's progress, it's started to include not only how many weeks along I am, but how many week I have left until 40.  Thirteen weeks is much more ominous than 27 weeks!  I hope he is growing as well as he should.  He's supposed to be about 2 pounds right now, and I just want him to get bigger and bigger and stay in there until he's totally ready to come out.  I know we're not ever going to be really ready for him to get here, but we're trying really hard!  His furniture came in and last night Patrick worked on putting his crib together.

Here's what his room looks like right now:

We have lots of things to put up on the walls, but I think we're going to wait until the glider rocker gets here before we do.

I'm really proud of the dinner I made last night, so I wanted to share pictures.  I had the desire to make bread, so I made pretzel bread, which is Patrick's absolute favorite.  I also made chicken and turkey sausage soup, with stock I made myself from cooking down a chicken.

Here's the recipe for the pretzel bread.  It is so very good!

99 Days...

This morning, Becca and I went to see the pediatric cardiologist to check on our son's yet-forming heart. We did this because our niece Gwenyth had a rare heart defect called truncus arteriosis, and we just wanted to be sure that we did not pass on this or any related condition to our little one.

The doctor was very abrupt although not unkind. He barely said a word to me other than to give me directions ("Shut the door. Turn the light off. Turn the light back on."). He spoke a little more to Becca, and the gist of it was that he thought it was a little bit of a stretch for us to think our son would have truncus just because his cousin had it.

We sat down for the fetal echo cardiogram, which was pretty cool. When the heart beats, there are blue and red flashes overlaying the heart. I assume that these represented the different chambers of the heart. Bottom line: the doctor said that he can never guarantee that a heart is perfectly formed before the baby is born, but he did not see anything in the way of structure (chambers, vessels, valves) that was concerning to him. Good news!

I cannot think of a good photo to put in this post... so how about the SleepSack that Becca bought from kids.woot yesterday?

By the way, the subject there, 99 days, is the countdown to the due date. He'll be here before we know it!

Snow, 25 Weeks, Doctor's Appointment

On Sunday night it snowed pretty hard for how southerly we live in the world.  Seven inches at our house in one night!  The temperature hasn't really gotten over 34 since then, so all the snow crusted over with ice and has caused schools to cancel for at least 4 days this week and the Army base Patrick works on to completely shut down for two days, which meant we got a 4 day weekend together! Hooray!  I felt very spoiled just being able to be with him and do nothing.  Usually when we have time together we end up with friends or in Chattanooga, so it was pretty great just being together.  Patrick must have liked it too because this is what I woke up to yesterday morning:

I had a doctor's appointment yesterday which we made the decision not to go to because of the snow, so I managed to get one this afternoon instead.  Everything still looks great, but the doctor decided after we talked about Gwenyth that I should have an ultrasound with a pediatric cardiologist, mostly for my peace of mind than anything.  The likelihood that our baby has anything wrong with his heart just because his cousin did is very, very low but my doctor is all about covering the bases and making me feel good about anything that's going on with my pregnancy (which has been almost nothing).  Our appointment is on Tuesday and I'm kind of excited because it means I get to see him again and hopefully we'll get to see his face this time!

Here's come pregnant belly pictures in the snow: