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.