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!