119 Days and Counting!

I am so excited!  I love that the number of days till our baby comes is getting lower!  When we are finally under 100 days left I am going to be so happy!  I can't wait!

So I am now 23 weeks along, and am getting bigger all the time and I have been enjoying some new symptoms lately.  Some are good, some are bad.  But the bad symptoms are off and on so it is good.  The best thing is being able to feel our baby move all the time.  Every day I feel her more and more!  Brad has also felt her many times, although definitely not as much as I can feel her.  I am looking forward to when we can see her move through my stomach... The timing hasn't worked out yet, but I'm sure it will soon!  Other new things - did you know that your belly button skin is actually incredibly soft when it is all stretched out and near enough to the surface to feel?  Pretty funny little trivia if you ask me :) 

I have also been having sciatic nerve back/leg pain in the right side.  I have also had some pretty painful round ligament stretching in my stomach, mostly on my left side.  But neither of those things have lasted.  The back pain was for about a month, and the stomach muscle pain only lasted a few days.  So now I am feeling great!  Just more easily tired than usual.  I did a bit of exercise plus shopping and shooting (don't make fun, guns are heavy!) yesterday, and it totally did me in today!  Oh my...

So here is a current belly photo.  Below that, my new boots Brad got me for Christmas, and below that, all the outfits that our baby got for Christmas.  She is going to look so cute!  I am in love with every single outfit that we have so far.  And we have a lot of clothes already!  It is so fun.  Brad and I even gave each other clothes for our daughter for Christmas, we are that excited :) The pictures at the bottom are the beginnings of our nursery.  The room is a mess, but we have put together the rocking chair and changing table anyway... We are too excited to wait!

It's a girl!

We are having a girl!  We are so excited!  The ultrasound was so much fun!  I feel like writing a lot of exclamation points right now just thinking about it!! Ha ha.  So to decode the above pictures for you, the one on the left is a picture of her little bottom and two legs spread with nothing in between, so she is definitely a girl! The one on the right is a profile of her face with her little arm up in front of her face.  She is so cute already!  And according to everything you can learn from an ultrasound, she is perfectly healthy and developing great! We are so happy about that. During the ultrasound she seemed to be waking up from a nap.  At the beginning she wasn't moving around very much, but she got more and more active during the half-hour examination, eventually doing huge stretches for us, arching her back and neck, and then flailing her arms everywhere etc.  It was adorable!

So for months now, I have been thinking that our baby was a boy.  I guess I didn't realize how completely convinced I was of this until we got into the ultrasound and the tech said it was a girl. After she said that I felt so completely shocked and kept thinking, "Is she sure"??  Because seriously, all I could ever imagine was having a boy.  This is probably because because that is all I am familiar with because of my three nephews.  I didn't meet my niece until she was a toddler, so in my experience, infants are always boys :) This is a bit ridiculous, I know.  But I just couldn't wrap my head around it, so after a few minutes, I asked the tech to check the gender again!  The second picture was more obvious, and I was finally convinced.  It took a little while to picture being the mother of a little girl, but I have definitely adjusted mentally.   I am so excited! I am so excited about how excited Brad is as well.  He is going to be the best dad.  And he is really happy about having a girl.  But within about ten minutes of leaving the ultrasound, he very seriously looks and me and says that he is already worrying about her.  Worrying about everything I think, but he did mention that he was specifically worried about teenage boys and his daughter... :) Ah, so cute!

So we have to address my guilt about the fact that it has taken me so long to write this post.  Don't make the mistake of thinking that I am anything but SUPER excited, I am just a long-term planner and so my first reaction to the ultrasound and being at the half-way point of pregnancy was to go into planning overdrive mode. Every time that I get on the computer I have been so busy doing research on things that we need to buy for our daughter, it has been a week and a half and I am just getting around to writing this.  But I have already pretty much planned the nursery with its furniture, sold my desk to make room for the crib and am close to deciding on which car seat and stroller I want.  Yay!  Plans help me feel calm. There is so much to do still, including figuring out our moving situation, and tons of decisions to make, I think of very little else, but I feel confident that we can get it all done... And I think it is going to be a lot of fun!

19 Weeks

We really need to get better at this picture taking thing.  In this one I look so short! Oh well.

In other news, we have begun our Christmas decorating! We got off to a good start when Brad's mom gave us this adorable wreath for our door.  I love it!

Thanksgiving

18 Weeks

I know this picture is not the best, but oh well.  It is about the belly anyway right? :) Please say yes!

In honor of Thanksgiving and my gratefulness for new-found energy and nausea free days, I have actually begun to attempt to exercise!  It feels so good!

Pregnancy Update

December 8th is going to be the 2nd best day of our lives!! We have an ultrasound appointment scheduled for 3:30 p.m. on 12/08/2011.  This will be awesome for so many reasons. Obviously because we will get to see our baby for the first time, find out the gender, and get pictures of the baby to take home.  But also it will mark the halfway point of the pregnancy, and mean that our little munchkin will be here in just a little over 4 months!  And one of the other awesome reasons I am looking forward to this day is because by that time it is almost guaranteed that I will be feeling the baby move.

Speaking of the baby moving, I think that might already be happening a teeny bit.  But I am not sure.  I do know that I feel very light "fluttering" movement where the baby is sometimes.  If it really is the baby, that is amazing! I just feel bad that it will be a little while before Brad will be able to feel any movements that are happening as well.

It is a little crazy that the halfway point of my pregnancy is so close to our 1st anniversary.  It feels like we have been married longer than a year in a good way, but also it is so surprising that we have been married this long.  A year came up so fast!

So once I find out the gender of our little bell pepper (that is the current size of the baby) all the fun decorating and shopping can commence.  I am so excited! I'm not going to go crazy, but I am already feeling the nesting itch.  I want to clean out our spare bedroom and spare closet and sell furniture we don't need on ksl so we can make room for the baby's things!  We are selling a desk and a set of dressers, and possibly a book case.

So a few other notes on how things are going...
Cravings: mandarin oranges, I still eat a bagel and cream cheese almost every morning at work, and I love Zupas.  I like fast food less and less.  Also I can't eat the same thing (leftovers) as often as I used to.
Weight gain:  a girl can keep certain numbers to herself don't you think?
New symptoms: a bloody nose and a bigger pooch

Last thing - I am SO excited for Thanksgiving!! Yay for a break from work and being with my whole family all while eating tons and starting the Holiday season off.  So excited.

Lincoln Doxey Plowman & our Kansas City trip

We went to Kansas last weekend to visit my new nephew and his awesome parents. We bought plane tickets to visit before we got pregnant, but the trip was extra awesome because we were able to learn a bit about how to take care of a baby and what we is in store for us in 5 1/2 months.  It was so much fun!  And it seriously is just almost unbelievable how cute Lincoln is.  I am in love with him!  And he absolutely melted Brad's heart.  The unfortunate thing though is that he was so cute, we were holding him and cooing over him so much that we didn't take very many pictures of him.  But I will post what I have. 

Look at how happy both of these guys look! And Lincoln is just so tiny!  And when he is asleep he looks so perfect I thought he looked like a little doll. I love this picture! And I am so excited for our little baby to come! Baby hunger is never worse than when you are already pregnant and you get to hang out with a newborn. It is so exciting but difficult to have patience to wait for your own baby to come!

As new babies should, Lincoln slept a lot.  I was lucky enough to always get to sit next to him in the car while he did while we were driving places.  He was such a perfect little angel! I did a lot of staring at this guy over the course of the weekend.

So we did try to do a few things other than hang out at home with Lincoln and Jessica and Scooter.  We would have been fine with just doing that because it was so much fun, but I think Jessica wanted to get out a little since she has gone out very little since Lincoln was born.  The first night we went to Jack Stack's an amazing BBQ place downtown.  It was SO good!  The next night Brad and I went to the Sprint Center which included the College Basketball Hall of Fame. There was very little "Hall of Fame" and lots of activities to do there.

Brad never looks short, but the guy in the picture is huge!  He can't be life-size.

Maybe I can count this as my 15 and a 1/2 week picture.  The stripes on my shirt do a pretty good job of showing off my growing baby bump.  It has gotten a lot bigger since my last picture. We are excited about that! At my last doctor's appointment I was told that everything is growing well and measuring on-track.

This makes our feet look so small! The footprint my foot is in is supposedly the size of Shaq's.  Crazy!

Brad has a much more appropriate expression on his face than I do in this picture :) The rest of the time at this museum, we played basketball till my arms got sore.  They had various heights of hoops that you could practice dunking on, passing drills you could do, free-throw timed competitions, and 3 point drills as well.  It was fun and way more of a workout than I expected.  And Brad loved it of course.

On Sunday we visited Church history sites that are in the area.  The photo on the left is the visitor's center at Independence MO.  I took the picture on the right because in the very background across the street is a site that Joseph Smith dedicated for a temple.  Our church doesn't currently own the land that it is on though, so a temple isn't going to be constructed there any time soon.

Across the street from the Independence visitor's center is the headquarters of what used to be the RLDS church (now the Community of Christ since they denounced the Book of Mormon to become more mainstream Christians).  It looks like a fancy metal ice cream cone to me.  They are the ones that own the land that a temple will someday be built on.  I will be interested to know how that miracle occurs.

This is the visitor's center for Liberty Jail. There is a replica (left) inside the rotunda (right) that is actually pretty cool.  I didn't know that they were in such a good prison, i.e. thick walls, guard upstairs locked in with them, layer of smaller rocks to block the hole if they drilled through the wood etc.  I also learned that they made multiple escape attempts.  This was such a fun trip!

Halloween

Happy Halloween everyone!


Here is a picture of our costumes.  We had a very festive weekend, going to a haunted forest, a party, a double date, and our ward's trunk-or-treat.

It was way fun!  And yes, we are already are using our child to inspire our family themed costumes...

14 Weeks

I love/hate being pregnant! When yet again I feel disgusted by the sight of all food known to man I hate it.  When I see my little bump growing, I love it.  If that sounds a little bit hormonal, it probably is.

But the good news is that my nausea and tiredness are both abating to the point where I feel like getting ready enough to take a decent picture and then blog about it! Oh my, it has been a long time since I have felt normal, so I am really excited to be in the second trimester.

But pregnancy so far hasn't been too awful.  Most of the time.  I have only thrown up twice but I have just felt really nauseated for the past three months.  But that is a lot better than some people have it, so I try to think about that a lot and count my blessings.

So I have only had two appointments so far, and each one has been at a different doctor's office and I have to say I only recommend one of them.  If anyone needs a gynecologist I recommend Valley OB/GYN.  It is a group practice, but I am totally fine with that.  Anyway, it is awesome because at the most recent appointment, we got to hear the baby's heartbeat.  It was the funnest thing I have ever done in my life!

It took a little while for the doctor to find the heartbeat, which made Brad really nervous, but the doctor found it and it was so loud and fast! It was amazing! We loved it so much! As soon as he took the Doppler thing off my belly I immediately wanted to hear it again.  We are totally going to try to listen to the heartbeat with a stethoscope later on on our own.  I'm so excited!


The other good news is that I got maternity clothes! I am still transitioning into them.  The maternity pants don't stay up super well, but when I safety pin my normal pants and then accidentally pop the safety pin open, they don't stay up super will either.  But my appetite is finally kicking in so I am assuming that my belly is going to get bigger very soon and help keep the maternity pants up! Woohoo!

Redemption

Brandon Flowers (lead singer of 'The Killers") is a Mormon and he has a video on mormon.org.  You can watch it here.

I found this to be very interesting, so I of course Wiki'ed him.  Even as a Mormon, I find it fascinating that a rock star is a Mormon.  And I always love it when people who are famous are Mormon.  It makes us seem more normal.  Which is good, because I really don't think we are that weird.  But this story reminded me of a theme in life that I absolutely love - redemption.  Stories of people overcoming are just the best.

The twenty minutes I spent reading up on Brandon Flowers on the internet made it clear that he has had his share of struggles living exactly what he believes all the time.  But "there is still a fire burning" for him in regards to Mormonism. And the fact that he acknowledges both his mistakes and his testimony is the winning combination that will lead to repentance and more happiness as his actions better align with what he really wants in life.

I love this. I love that we all have the ability to choose and to change. I love that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a church for sinners.  I think that when we are truly trying our best, we are in a state of triumph.

Clearly, Mormons aren't the only ones who triumph over their problems.  Which brings me to one of my all time favorite movies, "Walk the Line" which is about Johnny Cash. I have also read about him on Wikipedia.  And it is true that Johnny Cash was definitely not a perfect person.  In fact he did some pretty terrible things.  But he decided to change, and he never stopped fighting to become better.  I am sure it was really wearying for him that he had to keep checking himself into rehab for his addiction to amphetamines, but the point is that he kept doing it over and over. 

There is a guy in our ward that just got re-baptized into the church, and I loved hearing his story as well.  It was painful to hear about because he clearly had to go through a lot of pain to admit his mistakes and change who he was, but the result made me so excited for him! His future is so bright.

I just think that there is really nothing more noble than changing yourself for the better.  And I think that there is nothing to be more grateful for than our Savior and Redeemer who gives us enabling power to do what we wouldn't be able to on our own, after we have done all that we can do. I hope that I can be the type of person who never gives up on making changes for the better.

Guess Who?

We are way excited!!

Mr. Handyman

Girls like guys with skills.

I like this guy because he has major skills.

The skill most crucial to getting our car fixed for the lowest price possible was his "I must conquer every challenge" mindset. And I am pretty sure that 100% of the time he conquers anything he sets his mind to.  I am so proud of him!

So the side mirror got hit by another car, and torn off, and Brad bought the part online and fixed it all by himself.  It was awesome and saved so much money.  Good job honey!

My Husband My Hero

Brad and I went to Newport Beach with my family this past weekend and it was awesome!  We had so much fun hanging out with everyone, laughing at Eli and his adorable antics, and playing at the beach every day.  

Maybe a little too much excitement happened at the beach on our second day though - we were all pretty much done with the beach for the day so Brad and I went back in the waves to rinse the sand out of our swimsuits.  While we were doing that we got a little distracted when Brad was teaching me how to dive through the big waves.  So without noticing it we got pretty far out there as we were trying to find bigger waves to dive through.  Soon I couldn't touch the bottom any more, and big waves kept coming one right after the other.  Pretty quickly, I was feeling panicky because I couldn't get enough air.  Lets be honest even though it’s dramatic  - I felt like I was drowning.

This is where Brad’s heroics come in.  He was able to keep track of me in the waves and started coaching me to either jump/swim to try and go over the wave or to duck under it and hold our breath.  After a little while, I was literally just hanging on him and trying to use his height to get some air.  As we were drowning, several thoughts ran through my head.  First, I wished that I had enough breath in my body to yell for help from the lifeguards.  Second, I thought, “Oh my gosh, Brad and I are going to die here together right now.”  But Brad kept me above water and calm enough that I wasn’t choking/swallowing any sea water and he kept us from being pulled out even deeper.  So when I finally saw an opportunity in the waves to get to shore, we raced for it.  My muscles were burning so bad because of lack of oxygen, but we made it.

Two lifeguards met us with their little buoys in hand at the edge of the water.  They apparently had been on their way to get us.  I was so ridiculously dizzy at this point.  They told us to sit down for a while, and if my dizziness didn’t stop we were supposed to let them know so they could have a medical person check on me.  But after five minutes or so of lying on the beach I got my breath back.  The lifeguards also explained that we were in a riptide and we should have swum parallel to the beach to exit it instead of trying to fight forward.  I didn’t know that, and in the panic of the moment Brad forgot. 

I quickly started feeling guilty because I clearly had been contributing to Brad’s drowning instead of helping him like he was helping me. But also I was so glad that Brad was with me during this little adventure.  I am almost glad that this happened because is not everyday that the love of your life saves your life, and it made me love Brad even more.  He was so selfless during the entire episode, thinking of me the whole time and doing whatever he could to help me - it was so sweet!  I am so grateful for my tall, strong man and this experience reinforces my desire to have him with me at all times! He's my hero! :)

Sunday Blues

Do you know what the best remedy ever is for the Sunday blues? (Sunday Blues: the depression you feel when you know that the weekend is drawing to a close and you have to go back to work after a truly awesome weekend.)

The cure is Galaxy Quest.

This is seriously the most underrated movie, and also one of the funniest movies ever.  Brad and I quote it constantly. The characters are hilarious and so is the plot.  I highly recommend it because it is funny the first and 50th time watching.  Check out the link on Rotten Tomatoes where it scored 89%.

Some of the things that made our weekend so awesome include: a dinner birthday party for my aunt at Porcupine Grill (such good food), a farewell party for Lene (we LOVE you!), breakfast with Brad's friend Aaron, the Provo Farmer's Market (yay for fresh produce AND cute earrings), 7 Peaks (yay for the pass of all passes), our awesome and amusing Nursery class, and a fabulous Sunday dinner of Pioneer Woman's Pasta with Pesto Cream Sauce using our homegrown basil!

You can see why I have good reason to mourn the conclusion of such a weekend.

The only down side was that our tire blew out on the freeway on our way back from SLC.  But it was all good, we survived it without a scratch which is all that matters.  It was definitely an adventure though.  Standing six feet away from cars flying past you at 70 mph is slightly nerve wracking I must say.

Anyways, watch Galaxy Quest! "By Gripthor's hammer, you will be avenged!"

My Favorite Book

Check it out...

http://mormon.org/book-of-mormon?cid=bom-email

New Calling

So I don't think that I have mentioned on our blog how we got put in a family ward with some big boundary changes that happened a few months ago.  We were definitely sad to leave our BYU married student ward after only a three month stint, when we were just getting more settled in.

But we have been enjoying our new ward and love to watch all of the kids in it during sacrament meeting.  Because there are a lot.

But now we get to watch them in a much more up-close and personal way because we have been called to be nursery leaders!

Our first day was this Sunday, and we were a little nervous for the first fifteen mins or so when we had to experience the several distraught children crying (hard) for their parents.  It was so sad!  But we were eventually able to woo them with puzzle time and singing time and by the time we got to snack time, it was all downhill from there.  After that they just ran rampant with two tubs of toys and a slide that made them all quite happy.  None of them even fought over toys.

Pretty much all of the kids were really well behaved, and we had few problems.  We easily learned their names because you say kid's names a million times when you are trying to direct them to do something.  Such as telling them to not climb on the table, not eat things off the floor, not eat crayons, not push other children down the slide etc. :)

On the whole, I think it was pretty fun and not as hard as I thought it was going to be.  (There were four adults in there though, which won't always be the case.) They say that we might even get to go to relief society/priesthood and sunday school some weeks once they call another couple to trade off with us. 

I have already noticed an increase of interest in things like children's songs/music, the magazine "The Friend" and the kids section of the lds.org website.  Did you know that there lds.org has a place where your kids can "color" online while church music is playing?  See link below in case you have kids. Pretty nifty.  The church is true!  And we love snack time!

http://lds.org/ldsorg/v/index.jsp?vgnextoid=21bc9fbee98db010VgnVCM1000004d82620aRCRD&locale=0&sourceId=dab73d141154d110VgnVCM100000176f620a