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...