22 Weeks (August 18-25)

Ohdearlord I'm hungry this week.  Seriously. I can't stop eating. And eating.

Someone must be going through a growth spurt because not only am I more hungry, but I'm sleepier this week too.  Earlier this week I was sitting in a chair after getting home from work and I had no intentions of napping...I woke up 45 minutes later with a stiff neck.  GAW!

I know that I'm supposed to be getting bigger and that I'll put on weight, but this week I've been feeling extra fat. I still try to walk every day, but I've been feeling like I should be doing some other arm/leg workouts.  I'm still waiting for that to happen though...

I had planned on doing some other workouts the day that I accidentally fell asleep in a chair after work. Oops!

This week it also decided to act like summer, even though fall is just around the corner, and the temperatures have been in the 90's every day. It's so sweaty. Ugh.

I've been attempting to find a changing table / dresser that would work for the nursery and every time I think I find one, it ends up being slightly too small, or just a little more than I want to spend. 

I finally found one that I think will work at a thrift store over the weekend.  I'm contemplating paiting it navy, but I'm leaving it alone until we get the crib in the room:

Baby boy is the size of a papaya this week and measures about 10.5 to 11.8: and weighs about 12.7-20.8 ounces.  At week 22, the baby has more developed eyes and lips and is looking even more like a newborn.  The baby is also sleeping in cycles--about 12 to 14 hours per day.  Usually I feel some movement around 8 in the morning and again around 7-8pm usually after I eat a few bites of ice cream :).

21 Weeks (August 11-18)

It's hard to believe that I'm already past the half-way mark! I mean only 19 more weeks until Christmas and we have this baby.  Yikes.

After all of the excitement after the gender reveal party on Friday, I got serious about picking out more decorations for the baby's room since I could finally ask my sister for opinions on what curtains to get, what rug to get, etc. 

I also started organzing closets, cabinets, you name it over the weekend.  It was stuff that I had planned on going through a long time ago but never did, and for some reason, last weekend I felt like I had a reason to start throwing things out and getting things organized for when the baby arrives.

My mom and I went to the Prairie Band casino this week with my work crew to celebrate August birthday's.  We went out to dinner and won a little money at the slot machines.  It was a fun night!

We're also celebrating my dad's birthday and Laila's 4th birthday on Thursday.  I don't think she knows how much her life is about to change in about 4 months! She loves licking babies, so I think she'll do just fine.

With all of the celebrating that we did for my dad's birthday (dinner at the cabin...) we kind of forgot to feed the dog.  Gawd, we're bad parents.  We made it up to her by giving her some ice cream and extra dog treats.

 

 

This weekend Lincoln and I went to Nebraska Furniture Mart to purchase the crib and recliner.  We already have it picked out, so it should just be a matter of confirming we still like it and paying for it.  My parents have generously said they'd pay for the crib and Lincoln's parents gave us money that should pay for most of the recliner we've picked out.  We are lucky ducks.

 

Here's a before picture of the baby's room:

 

 

Here's a picture of it in progress:

 

This week the baby is the size of a pomegranate (sometimes I wonder how they pick the fruit/veggies that they compare the size of the baby to....).  He is around 10.5" long and about 12.2 ounces and I've been feeling a lot more movement this week too!  During week 21, the baby's digestive system preps for the outside world; he's manufacturing meconium--the tarry black substance that will be in the first dirty diaper. Sick. 

We're having a......BOY! -20 Weeks (August 4-11)

Lots of exciting things going on this week!  Most importantly, we found out what we're having on Thursday!

We also registered at Buy Buy Baby over the weekend and for whatever reason, I was really excited to look at all of the baby things that they had in the store.  I think Lincoln was a little bit overwhelmed...the good news is we're done (for now) and we hopefully won't have to go back in to the store to do any registry stuff.  We can handle most of it on the interwebs for now.

We did get to park in the first spot at BBB; it was raining, so the prime parking spot was helpful!

 

 

This whole week most of my thoughts were consumed with what gender the baby was going to be. I think all of the thinking about what it was made my sleep a little interrupted....for whatever reason I've been waking up between 2-3am every night and unable to fall back asleep for a good hour.  It has not been awesome, but luckily I haven't been that tired when I wake up in the morning.  It hits me when I get home around 4:15 and I need a nap!

 

Lincoln and I went to my sonogram appointment Thursday afternoon and the baby was very active!  I'm thinking it's because I had a delicious lunch right before I went to the doctor!  After doing all of the normal checking of all of the vital organs and stuff, we were finally able to see what we were having. I think some of sono pictures look like an alien....

 

We decided that we would find out at our appointment but wait to share with everyone else until Friday when we'd do a gender reveal party with our family and a few close friends. 

 

I thought that I'd found a cute idea that no one else had used before and then I noticed another friend who was pregnant used it this week also!! 

 

I just wrapped silly string in brown paper and put both pink and blue ribbon on the can and at our party, our nieces and nephews will just spray it out at each other.

 

UNFORTUNATELY, the silly string that was supposed to be blue, came out white!!  What the heck!?   I even had two different brands of silly string from two different stores and we shook the cans up, but something didn't work out right! I guess it has a slightly blue tint to it....ugh.  Oh well!

 

 

Luckily, I made some blue cupcakes, so it was pretty clear what we were having!  My sister was convinced for the longest time it was a girl and had even been bringing me girl clothes that we wore when we were little.  I know she's still excited either way, and honestly, for the longest time, I thought we were having a girl too!

 

 

Here are some pictures from the sonogram of our little guy:

 

I think he's throwing up a peace sign here!

 

He was not shy about showing us what we were having!  I think he looks like a little frog in this picture!

 



 

 

 

This week the little guy is about 10.2 ounces and measures about 6.5" or about the size of a banana.  It's hard to believe that I'm already halfway done! At week 20 he has working taste buds, and is gulping down several ounces of amniotic fluid each day.

 

 

 



19 Weeks (July 28-August 4)

I'm tired.  Way more than I have been through the whole pregnancy so far.  All I want to do when I get home from work is to take a nap!  I'm also having an issue of getting out of bed in the morning.  Ugh.

Other than that, this week has been pretty uneventful.

The weather has been so cool for July, it's great!  I find myself looking forward to fall weather even though the temperatures should be near 100 normally for this time of year.  The highs have been in the low 80's and the lows in the 60's.  It's been great!

One bad/strange/disgusting thing did happen this week....you can read about it here.

We did get the baby's room painted this week.  Here's a link to the colors before.  This is what the room looks like now:

Now, I realize that this color may lead you to believe that we're having a boy with our color choice, but that's not the case.  I just found a cute room on pinterest that I thought could be cute for either gender using a color similar to the above.  I'll share more pictures as the room comes together, but this is the color of the room!

We find out next week what we're having!  We can't wait!  In the beginning I thought we were having a girl...then I thought we were having a boy for awhile....now, I have NO IDEA. We've tried taking some of the quizzes online or seeing what the old wives tales say that we're having, and apparently, we're having both.

This weekend we have a wedding in Kansas City, so we're planning to do a little shopping for a crib, recliner, and to register at Buy Buy Baby while we're there.  I'm excited!

Here's the bump this week, it's slowly starting to stick out more! I know there will come a day where I'll want it to NOT stick out as much....but nearing the 20 week mark, it makes it a little easier for people to believe me when I tell them how far along I am if the bump is showing a little bit!

This week the baby is the size of a mango and is measuring about 6" long and weighs about 8.5 ounces.  The baby is developing a protective coating over the skin called vernix caseosa--it's greasy and white and it may be present at birth.  The baby is also working on its five senses.  I have been feeling a lot more aches and stretching in my lower abdomen and aches in my legs lately, which feels great....

A poop story to trump ALL poop stories.

OK, I don’t know if this story will be as funny in writing as it was in person but I’m going to try…
 

This morning my coworker and I had to go to Atchison to show a foreclosure property to a couple who had expressed interest in the house. We were about done going through the property and the wife disappeared for a while. The husband and I were talking in the kitchen and I could kind of hear the wife banging around in cabinets somewhere. My coworker went back to kind of check on her and as she was doing that the wife came walking out of the bathroom. I noticed that she had some brown marks on her gray sweats that I didn’t think were originally there, but I didn’t think much of it.

As she came walking through the kitchen I noticed that a little something fell off of her pants onto the kitchen floor. She then started rummaging through the kitchen cabinets.

Her husband asks “What are you doing?”
She replies: “Well, I went to the bathroom.”
Husband: “It’s all over your pants!”
Wife: “I know, I’m trying to find some rags. There have to be rags in here somewhere…”

In my head I’m saying “no, there are no rags in this house. It was been cleaned out and vacated for months!” I finally respond that I think I have something in my car. I run out to my car and find a stack of napkins and some Kleenex. On the way out to my car, all I can think is WHAT THE F just happened?! As I walked past the bathroom, there was visible poop on the bathroom floor and on the outside of the toilet.

I bring the stack of napkins back in and she takes off towards the bathroom. Meanwhile, we continue talking to the husband and she makes her way back to us with more poop smears on the front and back of her pant legs.

We finally make our way outside of the house and they continue talking about the house. At this point, my coworker and I are thinking “JUST GET IN THE CAR AND LEAVE!” They finally leave and the wife leans in to mean and touches my arm with a poopy hand and says “you’re going to need a bucket of water to flush that down…”

My coworker and I go back in the house and begin laughing uncontrollably and crying from laughing so hard. We have no idea what just happened. All we know is there is poop everywhere. Not only in the bathroom, but on the kitchen floor where a kernel dropped either from the outside or inside of her pants, I have no idea where it came from, but she was also rummaging through the kitchen cabinets with poop covered hands!

The strangest thing about this whole story is how calm and non-chalant these people were about what just happened. I mean the wife shit herself. The husband acted like this was maybe a common occurence? Or that it had at least happened before or something...she never apologized or even looked embarrassed about this. She just kept talking away with poop all over her pants.

We have no idea what to do after they leave the house…we walked back towards the bathroom, thinking we could clean it up a little or something, even though our only cleaning supply is a box of Kleenex, but the smell was so foul, it took all of our energy to not puke in the house.

We decide to lock up the house and leave. Immediately I put as much hand sanitizer all over my hands and arms as I could and we made our way to a coffee shop to wash our hands off a little more. 

We still can’t stop laughing.

I called my mom to tell her the story because I knew she would appreciate a funny poop story; that and my sister was working and my husband was golfing, so I knew she would answer. She could hardly make out the story because I was laughing so hard. After finally hearing what happened all she could say was: "I don’t understand!"

The only thing we can come up with is that she maybe hovered over the toilet and completely missed and poop ended up on the back and front of her pants, on the floor, and on the toilet? Or that she tried to wipe with her pants (there was also no toilet paper in the bathroom). Or maybe she thought she had her depends on this morning and then realized too late that she didn't??

We make our way back to the office and try to figure out how we’re going to tell the rest of our coworkers about our morning. We can’t stop laughing. We realize that this story may sound completely made up, but it is totally real.

I had to email the company that we have clean out houses for us to see if they could go and clean up the bathroom sometime soon. Luckily, they’re awesome, and they’re going today to get rid of the poop. Imagine trying to write an email as professionally as you can about needing them to go clean up a bathroom in a house that they just recently cleaned out because someone shat all over the place. I had to mention that they might need to clean the kitchen floors and cabinets because the poop made its way in there….

Needless to say, this morning has been an eventful one and probably one that I will NEVER forget. And, who knows, maybe we sold a house in this big, poopy mess.

18 Weeks (July 21-28)

Besides being a little more tired than normal, this week has been flying by and I've been feeling really good.  I've been noticing that my appetite is slowly coming back.  I've been able and wanting to eat more meat than in previous weeks.  Which is good!

Lincoln and I have been trying to walk more.  I usually take the dog on a 30 minute walk after work (unless it's raining or too hot outside), but we decided we both could use a little more cardio in our lives.  Our original plan this week was to get up and walk before work.  This week the temperatures have been in the 60's and 70's in the morning! It's been awesome!  My alarm, however, has not been awesome.  It goes off...but then I somehow manage to turn it off either in the middle of the night when I get up to pee, or right after it goes off around 5:10 am.

We finally made it out later in the week and it's amazing how much better I feel during the day.  It also probably didn't hurt anything, that we were both exhausted the night before and went to bed around 9:15...exercise is such a funny thing, especially if you do it in the morning.  It's SO hard to get out of bed, but once you're up and moving, it's rare that you regret that decision.

I decided to go ahead and purchase our carseat/stroller because I found it on sale at diapers.com, it was over $100 off of every other retail store AND they had free shipping AND I got a $25 gift card...it was really too hard to pass up.  Plus, now that I have it early, I can wheel Laila around the house in it.

She might look scared, but her tail is wagging :)

 

One evening Lincoln and I took Laila on a little longer of a walk than she was used to and I think she would have preferred that we took her in the stroller.  She came home and laid around like this for quite awhile:

 

 





 

The past few weeks my obsession has been with sweet corn.  My family grows it, so in the summer, we really have an unlimited supply.  One night for dinner I ate three ears.  THREE!  I had some other veggies, but otherwise, that was pretty much all that I ate.  As I mentioned above, my appetite is slowly coming back, so more and more things are sounding better to eat, which makes it easier to cook meals at home for Lincoln and I!

 





 

 

I really haven't felt like cooking or baking much up until this week.  However, I got home one night and made this knock-off Panera bread Chicken and wild rice soup--it was so good! Almost as good as Panera's and I'm sure much lower in fat and calories (also I realize it is the end of July and not the best time of year for soup making, but it sounded good....).  Along with the soup, I made Chocolate Chip Banana Bread cookies, and monkey bread.  Lincoln was gone for the night, so I spent most of it in the kitchen!

 

I am slowly starting to show...I think.  Most of the time it still looks like I'm bloated. 

 

 

 

This week the baby is the size of a sweet potato and is about 5.6" long and weighs about 6.7 ounces.  The baby is growing pretty rapidly and I should start feeling more hungry.  The baby is also yawning, hiccuping, sucking, and swallowing as well as twisting, rolling, punching, and kicking too.  So far, there's been one time where I think I felt the baby move...but I'm not 100% sure.  It's still early, for new mom's, they say you may start feeling the baby move between weeks 18-26. 

 

 

 

 

 



17 Weeks (July 14-July 21)

This week was such a better week for me!  Phew! I am still feeling really good and my attitude seemed to be so much better this week (or at least as much as I could tell...)

I golfed Tuesday night at women's league and it was so incredibly sweaty. There were much hotter days last year, but I could enjoy a few cold beers to keep me cool...water helped this time around, but I still was having a hard time enjoying myself because of the heat.  I didn't last too long!

We finished priming the baby's room! It looks so much better just being primed!  It's so much lighter and brighter in the room now.  We're excited to pick out a color and get the room kind of put together.

On Wednesday, we celebrated my birthday (just a few days late!) at work by going to a Hibachi Restaurant in Topeka.  It was so fun and the food was really good!

Thursday, I took the day off and went shopping for maternity clothes with my mom and sister in Kansas City.  I found so much stuff at Destination Maternity.  I was a little scared to tell Lincoln how much I spent...I didn't feel like I bought anything that I absolutely woulnd't need--I got some basics--jeans, dress pants, leggings, and a few shirts that I'll hopefully be able to layer with a cardigan in the fall/winter.

I definitely felt more pregnant when I tried on maternity clothes!  I've been wearing my regular pants and have been using a rubberband to keep them up, but I've been feeling like it makes my belly look weird.  The maternity pants definitely make my belly show up a little more!

 

 

This week the baby is the size of an onion and is about 5.1" long and weighs about 5.9 ounces.  The baby is putting some meat on it's bones and is growing a stronger, thicker umbilical cord.