Nice bum...

We had a fabulous ultrasound this morning! The little guy looks great, is measuring right on target, and weighs a whopping 1.5 lbs! :-) Rick was particularly impressed with the view of the heart--it was pretty amazing that we could see all four chambers pumping away! I was also impressed with the butt shot. Heeheehee. I particularly like that the OB labeled it "Butt Cheeks" for us, just in case we forget what we're looking at. She (the OB from New England Medical Center who is not my regular OB but a specialist in maternal fetal medicine) said unless my doctor feels otherwise, she doesn't expect to see me back in their office. I'm a regular, boring, everything's-fine patient, which is great news!

Mmmmm...deep fried turkey...

Hi everyone! Hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving and a nice long weekend. Mine was fabulous! We spent Thanksgiving on the Cape with Rick's family. It felt like it had been a long time since I saw everyone so it was good to catch up. Rick was in charge of the turkey this year, which was exciting--he deep-fried it, so it was extra tasty (and oh-so healthy, I'm sure...). :-)

We continue to work on the nursery. The paint stripping is coming along nicely, and I finally organized all my scrap glass so it's ready to be picked up by a volunteer for Artists for Humanity any time they want to swing by. What's left in the nursery (a desk, my drafting table, and 2 small bookshelves) will be moved to the sun room as soon as we give the floor in there a good scrubbing.

We finally have our next ultrasound on Thursday! Very excited to see the baby again. I really hope we get some good pictures from this one, however I have a feeling this kid will be wiggling too much to get a good shot of him. Ah well, he'll have all of his life to become more photogenic. :-) I'll let you all know how it goes afterwards.

FYI, I finally decided to make the blog public since a number of people had problems with the private log in process. So now that's it's easy for all to read, feel free to pass on the link to anyone you think would be interested in reading it.

That's it for now! Have a good week--

-Suzi

Belly Picture, as Promised

Finally found time to snap a couple photos of the belly! First is the straight on mug shot. It's obvious I'm pregnant in the photo but from that angle I just look a little chubbier than normal. Then, the Side View. The belly in all its glory! It's definitely getting bigger! :-)

Please excuse the fuzzy photos (and my weird hair--just had it done the day before so it was looking rather flat and flippy). We tried to take the picture in the room with the most light but still it was too dark for a good photo. Ah well.

On another note, we've finally started working on the nursery! Rick moved some furniture upstairs and is working on paint stripping, while I slowly find new homes for all my art supplies and general studio crap. AND I think we've decided on a theme: Aliens.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!

Tough week to be pregnant!

As if the super-painful UTI wasn't enough, on Monday I came down with a nasty cold as well! And let me tell you, getting a cold when your pregnant is no picnic! What could I take to make me feel better? Robitussen, the plain variety, which does NOTHING. And I could use Luden's cough drops, which also do NOTHING. I am allowed Benedryl but only take one right before bed to help me sleep through the congestion--since it's aimed at allergies and not colds it essentially does nothing but knock me out.

So I tried a couple non-traditional cures. First on Monday night was the Nasal Rinse. Be warned, this is totally gross! Essentially you lean over the sink and squirt a steady stream of water up one nostril--it rinses out your sinus cavity and streams out the other nostril. Many people rave about it and claim that it works wonders. For me, it was traumatic and horrible and made me throw up. I should have guessed that I wouldn't enjoy this since I find getting water up my nose to be one of the worst feelings in the world and one of the chief reasons I don't swim more often, but I thought if it was under controlled circumstances I'd feel better about it. Nope. Granted, I did breathe a little better afterwards but it really wasn't worth it. I'd rather be congested.

Then I tried going to my acupuncturist on Tuesday to see what she could do for me. Tuesday was really the worst day of the cold. So for nearly an hour and a half I laid on my side with needles sticking out everywhere, and while normally I barely feel the needles, something about being sick made me painfully aware of each one. After about 45 minutes I got really fidgety and wanted to be done, but was stuck there. It was possibly the worst appointment I've ever had. But once again, it did make me breathe better and feel less crummy for the rest of the night.

Still feeling a little sickly today but I'm definitely on the mend.

Hope you all are doing better than I am this week, and I promise a new picture of the ever-growing belly will be posted soon!

Oh BOY!

So much has happened this week!

First, as you can probably guess from the title of this post, we found out we're having a boy!! Suddenly this feels so much more real--I'm not just having a baby, I'm having our SON. Whoa. :-) Now I feel like we can finally start thinking about names. Unfortunately all we've come up with are names we will not be naming our son...Dweezil, Qbert, Aquaman...

So how did we find out about our son when we weren't supposed to have an ultrasound until after Thanksgiving? Well, we had a bit of a scare last week, which turned out to be nothing too serious but still freaked us out a bit. I was having some lower abdominal pain, and by Wednesday night it got to the point where I could barely get into bed because it hurt too much to swing my legs up. Took me 2 hours to get to sleep because the pain wouldn't stop. I almost drove myself to the ER but finally fell asleep. Plus the pain was almost too steady--it's wasn't cramping, didn't come on in waves, it was just PAIN.

The next day I went into my OBs office first thing, and she did a bunch of tests ruling out any of the scarier problems, which included an ultrasound. Everything was still fine! It was so reassuring to see the baby and make sure he was ok. He's a very active little guy! Didn't slow down much for pictures, but we saw what we needed to see! We got a print out of his face, but it's a head-on shot so it's honestly a little freaky. The picture is a big forehead, one eye that's super-clear and one that's fuzzy, and a nose. I thought about posting it but I think I'll wait for the post-Thanksgiving ultrasound picture to introduce him to you all.

Oh, the reason for the pain seemed to be a UTI. The test results for it won't come back until Monday, but I've been on antibiotics for a few days now and feel much better already. Only an occasional twinge of pain but that's usually only after I've been sitting or standing too long. Today, in fact, I've felt pretty dang good. But then again, who could feel bad after a breakfast of peach waffles with whipped cream and kielbasa? Yum...

Bad Baby Names

I didn't intend to post today but a pretty freakin' funny web site was brought to my attention and I had to share: http://www.notwithoutmyhandbag.com/babynames/. It's been challenging reading this while at work--I just can't help snickering...

I also thought I'd share baby Webson's horoscope for today: (Aries) You are loaded with energy right now, but today is not the day for forward movement. Considering that I've been feeling quite a few kicks in the belly today, I thought it was apt. :-)

-Suzi

One step forward

We're one step closer to starting the nursery project! I actually cleaned the attic and made space for all the stuff that's currently occupying the nursery-to-be! Granted, most of my cleaning involved pushing full boxes into the far corners of the attic and throwing out the empty boxes, but that's pretty much all it took. There were some unpleasant discoveries (RIP little mousy mouse), quite a few moments of "so that's where that is!", and there are some things Rick still might want to go through and throw out (the huge box of VHS tapes, for one) but all in all it's looking pretty dang organized. Now I can start labeling things in the nursery according to where they should be moved, which makes me feel like progress will be made soon. Ahhh...

Of course all this attic cleaning was done at the expense of a paper I have due in 10 days for my Textiles class, but I've come to the realization that even if I write what I consider a crummy paper, I'll still get a decent grade. I can't tell if it's because I have an unrealistically poor view of my own writing or if the college just has low grading standards. I think it's the grading standards, and I'm not just saying that to be humble. I can't go into more details without insulting others in my program, so I'll leave it at that.

Have a great week, everyone--

-Suzi

The Nursery. Yikes.

A number people have recently asked me about the room that is to be our nursery--if we've started decorating, if we have a theme, how things are progressing, etc. The answer, illustrated by the attached photos, is that we have done little or nothing so far, and obviously have a long way to go before it's anywhere near ready. And yes, I am feeling stressed about this. I know that I'm only halfway through this pregnancy but given the amount of stuff we have to do, I just don't know that 21 weeks is enough time to do it all--especially since I'll be taking classes until mid-December so I essentially have no free time to work on it until after the holidays.

In an ideal world, we would tear down the wood paneling (and since the paneling seems to be glued directly to the walls we'd also have to tear down the plaster behind it, which would also mean taking down all the wood trim around the windows and doors), refinish the trim, put up new plaster, refinish the floors, oh and I really wanted to build out a new closet since the one in that room is pretty small. In the real world, however, we know that all can't happen. Not even close. I mean, considering the fact that we've been "working" on the dining room for the past 2+ years and it's still not done, we have to be realistic about the nursery. So here's the new plan: Clean all my crap out of it, strip the wood trim, paint over the wood paneling, fix the window that won't stay closed, find a large area rug to cover the floor, and build a radiator cover so little Junior Jr. doesn't burn his/her little hands when s/he starts scooting around the room. Rick, who has been diligently stripping the trim in our sunroom, is about ready to move his operation into the nursery whether or not I move all of my stuff out. So I need to find a place to put all of my crap, pronto. Our attic is a disaster and we need to spend a good few hours rearranging everything up there before I can think about moving anything. I have someone lined up to give about 8 boxes of scrap glass to but coordinating a time to do it might be challenging. I think my drafting table and a set of bookshelves can be moved to the sunroom as soon as Rick is done with the paint stripping in there. And while it has helped to write all this down just now, I still feel a bit overwhelmed. Ugh.

So yeah, how we're actually going to decorate this room is far down on the list of stuff to think about when it comes to the nursery. We have to take this one step at a time, and decorating is at least step 17...