Prayer

Please pray for this precious little boy and his family (http://jamescamdensikes.blogspot.com/). God is the Great Healer, he hears our prayers.

"Where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I amonug them." Matthew 18:19-21.

baby shopping

So far we haven't bought beano much. We are waiting to find out if bean is a he or a she (one month away!). For as long as I can remember I had said that the day I find out I'm pregnant, I'm going to go out and buy something special for the baby. That we did. The very day our doctor confirmed our pregnancy we went to Target to get something special for bean...something we would always remember. So, here we went, the first time down the baby isle (for our baby anyway). As we walked down each isle, we became more and more overwhelmed. What would be something special. We looked and looked. Nothing felt "special" enough. And then...Craig said, "hey look, they even make baby toilet brushes!" Confused I looked over at the item he was talking about. There it was...a baby toilet brush...aka a bottle brush. Of course I had to laugh and Craig didn't understand what was so funny. When I explained to him what it actually was, he said, "I'm glad one of us knows what we're doing." Of course the toilet brush had to be bean's first thing we bought him. So in hiser's room sits bean's toilet brush just waiting for hiser's arrival :)

Last weekend, we decided to venture into Babies R Us. Oh boy. Is that place ever overwhelming. SO many things to buy, so many choices. We weren't planning on buying anything....we were just planning on looking around but then we came across a little bassinet that I just had to have. There are certain things we do want to keep gender neutral for future kiddos we may have and a bassinet is one. So there it was. Absolutely perfect for our little bean. As soon as we got home, I had to have it assembled!

Craig working hard in the baby's room. This room needs a lot of work!

I was making sure it was high enough so I can reach bean from our bed. It is complete with a little light and some nice music. Love it. Perfect. And yes...it just so happens to match our new duvet cover :).

16 weeks

Craig is always asking to take pictures of bean's growth progress. He is one proud papa! Here is bean's growth at 16 weeks:

Goose decided he wanted to be in this one too. He is a proud big brother :)

I think papa is shrinking. Hmmmm...maybe I'm eating more than my share at dinner :). I am eating for two ...so that's okay :).

Some exercise

The one thing I have been told over and over is keep active while pregnant. Easier said than done. It doesn't take much for this pregnant mama to run out of breath these days so exercise has its challenges. Nonetheless, I've been keeping active. Craig and I have been walking most nights of the week after dinner, yesterday I went on a 3 mile walk with some friends, and last weekend we went on a bike ride. I struggle with "not over-doing it" since I like to push my body when exercising. Knowing there is a little itty bitty inside me though, I bring it down several notches...especially since I run out of breath so easily. So here are a couple of pics from our bike ride...and I know...I have to be super careful not to fall (my mom said so ;)). We took it pretty slow and even stopped by at a cupcake store on the way ;).

Summer beginnings

Finally...summer has arrived. We have been getting temps in the 90's the last couple of weeks...and all I can say about that is...it is about time. Our yard was in some great need of TLC. Since our house was unoccupied last summer the yard did not get a lot of (if any) tending to. So as the weather got nice, we went outside to take on our yard. I pulled a lot of weeds, pruned some trees, and planted some flowers. Craig got our sprinkler system up and running (our grass was looking pretty dead), lawn fertilized, lawned mowed, and he got our waterfalls up and running. The waterfalls are new territory for us. We've kind of been making it up as we go, but we 'think' we have it figured out. We had originally thought that the waterfalls would kind of be an 'every-so-often' sort of thing that we turned on. After talking to our neighbors however, this isn't the case. Apparently the waterfall runs all summer long, 24/7. If you don't do this, every time you run it, it has to be cleaned out. We have really been enjoying them so far, and they are pretty low maintanence. The sound is wonderful and we loving leaving our windows open at night to hear it.

Here are some pics of our yard work progress so far:

Craig mowing the field....it sure looked nice when he was done.

My flower pots. The flowers have to be kept up high so that the deer don't eat them. I planted the other two by the door hoping that the deer wouldn't get brave enough to come that close to our house...but we'll see. The one one the right is already dying however. The root ball kinda came apart when I planted it. I may have to replace it. :(

The backyard waterfall. It is tempting to throw some fish in it ;).

first trimester - check - done

I have to say…coming out of the first trimester has been VERY nice! Quite honestly, I never thought I would be one for morning sickness, and it turns out I wasn’t…I was one for night sickness. I never got sick enough to actually “throw-up” but the notorious pregnancy nausea seemed to set in right before dinner and got worse after dinner. This made for some interesting dinner adventures, as NOTHING ever sounded good. Cooking has been out of style in our house for the last 3 months. The smell of cooking food, forget about it, I won’t touch it. The thought of cooking any food, forget about it. So…our dinners went like this: I would ask Craig to pick anything to eat, anything that he felt sounded good, since nothing sounded good to me. He would name one, or two, or three…more like 10 ideas only to find me gagging at every suggestion. Finally, I would just pick one and not think about it, and then my dedicated husband, would go get it (remember…no cooking in the house!), I would try not to think about it, and then it just had to appear in front of me. After the first bite, I was okay and was usually pretty happy to eat whatever. By that point I was usually so hungry, I consistently violated the #1 pregnant lady rule: do not over fill your stomach. So there I was, night after night, with a full stomach nauseous as could be (ugh!). Dinner time has been quite the adventure, but needless to say, I have been seeing less and less nausea as the days go by.

Even though food is sounding better, there are still a few things I still can’t bring myself to smell, touch, look at, or certainly eat.

1) Steak (mind you…this is usually by far my favorite food in the world!).
2) Hamburger (ugh, sigh, yuck! – and yes…I used to LOVE anything cow!)

As far as smells. Hmmmm…let’s just say I smell everything. I cannot believe how smelly my office is! Golly! I don’t know what it is. Either my pregnant nose is hypersensitive or folks in my office started to fail to shower just about the time I got pregnant. The other smell I can’t stomach…leather. Weird I know. Some days this one seems to be getting better, but then it comes back. Every morning when I come downstairs, there is this leather chair that just sits and stares at me in the face. I can’t even look at it. The thought of sitting in it makes my stomach really icky. And my poor husband. Here he has finally finished his dream movie room, and I can’t watch a movie in there to save my life. The furniture has some leather on it!!! I have to say, I have made my way down there a few times in the last couple of weeks and watched some movies…so things are getting better!

Other than that, the pregnancy has been going very well. I think I feel bean moving around every now and again, but I’m not sure. It is still really early to feel much. Last night however, I don’t know what the bean was doing, but dang…he was doing some maneuver that felt really strange!

My 16 week appt. is already in a couple of weeks (no ultrasound during this visit), and then the ultrasound we’ve been anticipating…the 20 week! We get to find out if bean is a boy or a girl. We have the perfect boy name picked out (we still have to give it a test drive for a few weeks before we announce anything), but not one girl name (sigh). We are convinced our bean is a boy, so we aren’t too worried but we need a name just in case...