Pregnancy Weeks 30 - 31

 During week 30, we continued going to our baby classes, and we learned about epidurals and c-sections.  This pretty much cemented my decision to get an epidural for sure!!  Also during this week, Cody was able to feel the baby moving around in my tummy!  It's exciting for him to get to feel her.  She still hasn't kicked for him yet though.  I think that her feet are facing down because I really haven't felt any big kicks from her recently.  I think her feet are pretty low, because I can feel her kicking, but it's not like the big kicks that I felt before when her feet were up in the air.

My work also threw me a really nice baby shower!  I really wasn't expecting a whole lot from everyone, so I was truly blown away by everyone's generosity!   We had a nice lunch and everyone shared their baby stories/advice, and we got quite a few things that we needed for the baby at the shower too.  It was very very nice!

During week 31, we got to go to our baby basics class.  I learned that babies don't need to wear hats and mittens in the house or they'll over heat!   I did not know that at all.  We also practiced changing a diaper and bathing a baby during class.

Another exciting thing that happened this week is that Ms. Abigail Elizabeth Delia was born on Nov 13th at 8:11pm!  I'm am sooo excited that Becky and I both had little girls and that they will only be a couple months apart!  I am sooo excited for them to grow up together!  We got to go and snuggle the baby for a little bit before going to our baby basics class on Thursday night.  I can't wait to get more snuggle time in with her!

So something that has been going on for literally my entire pregnancy... but I don't think that I've mentioned it before... is Cosmo's dilemma.  He has always climbed onto me and laid on my chest to cuddle.  However, in order to do that he has to step on my belly to get up to my chest.  And ever since I've been pregnant I haven't been letting him step on my belly.  So he has been a very flustered cat, and has been trying to figure out a good way to get snuggles without stepping on my tummy.  He has actually started to lay on Cody's chest and cuddle with him (which he never did before). This is him contemplating how to get around my baby bump. Poor kitty!  I don't think he gets why I won't let him step there.

Baby Shower 11-2-19

Our baby shower was on 11-2-19.  My mom had been extremely excited for our baby shower, and she had been working with Hannah and Becky for months to plan it.  So many people pitched in to help setup/clean up... or to bring food or other items to our shower.  And it turned out SO beautiful!  It was one of the nicest baby showers that I've been to, and I'm so thankful for everyone hard work to making it look nice.

Here is our present area and back drop.

Here is a wide view of all of the decorated tables in the hall.

Here is an up close of the tables.  My mom had little baby bottles with cashews in them, pink beads, and Janel made really nice chocolate covered pretzels.

Here was our activity wall.

We had a head band making station... where the materials were available for people to make the baby a headband, and they really came out nice too!

Here was a section to write a funny saying on a diaper.  I'm really excited to look through these during her first changes!

Here is the diaper cake that Hannah and Sam made which I thought looked adorable!  After making mini- diaper cakes for Becky's shower I appreciate just how much work goes into making these!

Prize wall and a special platter from Aunt Becky to me!

Here is our cake that Cody's mom got us.  It was a cupcake cake...  which I absolutely love!  It looks like a real cake, but everyone can just tear off a cupcake and go.  No one has to serve and slice the cake... I think it's much more convenient.

Here is just one wall of all of the food that we had.

The punch... especially the spiked punch version was a big hit.

We played a game at the shower, where little babies were put into ice cubs and you had to get the baby out of the ice cube in order to win. Once you got the baby you shouted, "My water broke" and you got a prize.

Here are some pics from around the shower...

Besties!

Sitting with mom, aunt Karen, and Cody's fam

More fam pics!

Love this picture of Hannah and her Gram!

Dad with the Douglas crew.

My momma and my aunt Karen!

Next it was present time!  And boy did we have a lot of presents!  Everyone definitely showered us with tons of gifts.  We ended up filling up Cody's SUV and Deb's full of stuff!!

Here we are opening stuff up. 

More opening!

I realized pretty quickly that I wasn't going to be able to bend down to pick up all the gifts after the first couple of gifts.  So my mom was our present helper and she got a chair to put the "Next up" gifts on to help us out haha.

  

We had a "baby is brewing" kettle that was a timer.  We had it go off at certain intervals during unwrapping presents.  Whenever it went off... whomsoever gift I was opening at the time got a gift.  I thought this was a cute idea.

 

Hannah was our trusty note taker.  She did a really good detailed job writing down everything that we got.

We got a lot of big items at our shower... we got our travel system, monitor, high chair, crib, activity mat, bottles, baby carrying wrap, diaper bag, baby rocker... plus tons and tons of clothes, blankets, diapers/wipes, and other misc needed baby items.  We couldn't believe how generous everyone was and we really appreciate everyone getting us all of these gifts for our baby!

After presents I noticed that everyone was starting to leave... and I was like oh no!  I want pictures of people with the backdrop!  So a few people left already, but we were still able to get some pics!  Here are my aunts and my dad!

Preggo Buddies!  The whoooole time leading up to my shower we weren't sure if Becky was going to make it to our shower or not.  Her due date if officially one week after our shower.  I'm so glad that she made it!  We got to hang out together at the end and chat, and I really appreciate all the time that Becky spent on our shower so close to her due date! 

Another person who I am so thankful for!  My mom worked so hard to put on such a nice shower for us.  I know that she has been thinking about and planning for it for months.  Love my momma!

With my mommy and daddy!  

 The girls! I can't wait for our next picture with our next generation.

Nelly bug!  She was so nice to offer to make the pretzels for our shower and help set things up beforehand.

Deb and her "dancer" pose!  It's nice with Deb being retired now that she can come up all the time to visit us, and that she was able to make our shower. Even though Deb is helping to plan a whole different shower for us in Hancock she still helped pitch in with this shower too. 

With my besties!  Love these two!  Hannah was a huge help planning the shower and setting up our activity area/decorations.  And Sam was my photographer at the shower and took all our pics!

With Hannah's fam!

Picture with Cody's fam!

Overall, our shower was a wonderful day and I couldn't be happier with how everything turned out!  We were there for about 4 hours from when it started until when everything was cleaned and packed up to go.  I'm so glad that so many people were able to attend our shower and celebrate with us.  We were able to get everything out of the two SUV's and into our house!  Now it's time to sort through everything and figure out what else we need for baby!  Thanks to everyone who came and/or who gave us a gift in lieu of being able to make it... we truly appreciate it!

Pregnancy Weeks 25-29

Here are some more weekly pregnancy pictures and highlights!

Here is our 25th week picture.  I don't think that anything really big happened during this week.

Here is our 26th week picture.  I don't think that anything really big happened during this week either...  Cody's STILL waiting on being able to feel the baby!

This week Cody and I started taking a 6 week birthing/baby class!  We decided to take classes the same place as Becky and Bobby, because the Cleveland Clinic's programs were much superior to Southwest's classes.  This week we started to talk about the labor process and comfort techniques.  We also started to learn how to do breathing/relaxation exercises... which to be honest... I wasn't a huge fan of doing.  We were supposed to bring in two pillows and a blanket to lay on the ground to do the exercises, but the whole time I was too uncomfortable to really focus on it.

This week I had a doctor's appointment.  Baby's heart rate was 152 and she was measuring exactly on track.  We also continued with our baby classes... this week we learned about the natural child birth process.  Cody and I also narrowed down a top 3 name list for baby too.  We aren't ready to share yet though, we want to say "this is her name" and announce it that way.

We didn't get a downstairs shot of me during week 29 (oops!)  But here I am at our baby shower during week 29!  This week was a fun week for us!  We got our crib delivered to us and I cleaned out and organized the baby's room.  I had a lot of things from our wedding and other various stuff in there that didn't belong... so I got that all cleared out before our baby shower.  Speaking of baby shower... that was another HUGE milestone for us this week.  I have a whole separate blog post on that so I won't go into too much detail here. But we were very blessed and lucky to have so many people that care so much about us and our little baby!

Pregnancy Weeks 20 -24

During week 19, we found out that baby is a girl!! And the day after we found out we were flying to Seattle to go on our Alaska Cruise. Up until this point, baby had the nick name of "Blue." Once we were on our flight that just didn't seem like a good nickname for her anymore. As the plane was taking off, she either really HATED it or LOVED it, because she moving around like crazy! So we started calling her little "Twinkle Toes." Flying while being pregnant was definitely a different experience for me, because I was worried about the baby as we were landing and taking off. I kept bracing her so that wouldn't get bumped around too much. It was also different because of my swollen ankle! My left ankle started swelling up and being super painful around week 18 in my pregnancy. Like SO swollen that I couldn't even wear my shoes anymore! I had to go to the store before our cruise to buy a new pair of shoes that were a WHOLE shoe size bigger than what I normally wear so that I could walk during our cruise! I also had to wear compression socks during our flight.





During week 19, we found out that baby is a girl!! We thought that this would be our last trip on our own, but I soon found out that wasn’t really the case because I was taking her into consideration the whole trip. Obviously, a big difference was that I couldn’t drink like I normally do on our trip. Luckily, we had an awesome bartender that made me delicious non-alcoholic mojito drinks that I like. I also had fun doing different poses trying to show her off. But of all that, my ankle was really the most impactful. It hurt so darn bad that I could barely walk up the stairs on the ship. We had to rely on riding the elevators MUCH more on this cruise than we ever have in the past.







By week 22 I felt like I was showing enough to start taking weekly bump pictures! I also started a possible name list for baby. I went through the top 1000 most popular names in 2018 and 2017. I knew that I didn't want to name her anything crazy, so if it a name wasn't within the top 1000 most popular names, it probably wasn't something that we were going to pick. Now just waiting for Cody to do the same thing so that we can compare our lists and come up with a narrowed down version.






This week I started to be able to feel baby kick on the outside!! I'm still at the point where it's pretty infrequent, so whenever it happens I tend to get startled and jump. Cody wasn't around the baby at the "right time/right place" this week to get to feel her yet.





This weekend my mom and I went to the Medina Red Wagon sale. We were there on half off day and went a liiiiiittle bit crazy when it came to buying baby clothes!!






During week 24 I had another doctor appointment. This was my glucose test to test for gestational diabetes. I had to drink a bottle of a fruit punch flavor glucose drink. BLEH! Within 5-10 minutes of drinking this stuff, I literally felt sick to my stomach. I honestly didn’t know if I was going to be able to keep it down to take the test. I had to wait an hour from when I drank it to get my blood drawn. Luckily, I was able to hold out and make it to the test. I was so miserable though! I sat there getting my blood drawn, knowing that I was going to run to the bathroom right afterwards, and my blood came out the slowest it has ever done in my WHOLE life! It was literally going at the speed of filling up the tubes 1 drip at a time. But will power! I did make it to the bathroom in time! Ugh! I really hope that my blood work comes back good, because if not, I’ve heard the next step is to do a 3 HOUR glucose test! OMG! I honestly don’t know if I’d be able to do it. So fingers crossed I get good news when my results come back!








In my appointment room, I was met within a few minutes by my doctor (so refreshing to have a doctor that doesn’t keep you waiting for an hour to get to talk to them). Baby’s heart rate was 168 and she was really active because of the glucose drink. The doctor also measured my belly and said that the measurements were right on track. I started talking to her more about my ankle and how badly it hurts me. She asked me if I’d ever broken or sprained my ankle in the past… well when I played basketball I did roll my ankles quite a bit. And at one point they hurt so bad that I had to wear ankle braces to play. So she said that’s why they are hurting me now! She said that pregnancy makes you pay for old injuries. Even though that I haven’t had trouble with it in years, she said that pregnancy brings that type of stuff out in you… especially during your first pregnancy. She said that knees and ankles were even more susceptible to this than other body parts. At this point, I’m seriously hoping that this goes away after pregnancy, because it’s no joke! My ankle hurts more now than it ever did when I was younger. Sometimes it goes real stiff to where I can barely move it, and just to lightly touch it hurts pretty badly. I hope that this isn’t a peek into my elder years! But my doctor’s reasoning does make me feel a bit more validated. The last appointment that I had, we had to book with a different doctor because we were trying to squeeze in finding out the baby’s gender before our cruise… so it wasn’t our doctor that I talked to when I told her that my ankle was swollen and hurting. That doctor basically just shrugged and said “Well swelling is super common with pregnancy… it happens to most women. Nothing you can do.” And I’ve been thinking for the past 5 weeks since, that I don’t believe that most women have pain like this even if they are swollen… I was really wondering if this was truly pregnancy related or if I had broken my foot somehow or something! But my doctor’s explanation makes a bit more sense to me. Unfortunately, she didn’t really have a solution to offer to help either, but at least I feel like I understand it a bit better. Throughout this week, I have actively been trying to have Cody feel the baby kicking. She’ll kick at odd times, and usually when he’s not by me. By the time he comes over, she plays possum and stops moving! Cody was even jiggling her around last night hoping that she’d do it… he was trying and trying, and then gave up and went into the other room. Wouldn’t you know she started kicking right after he left! I've got a good feeling that he's going to catch her sooner or later though. I feel like week 24 could be "the" week for him to get to feel her.