30 weeks: A Basketball Fruit (?)

Thirty Weeks: 3.21.12

Photo Thoughts: Well, isn't that a nice basketball fruit up there? Couldn't deal with hunting for an appropriate fruit at the store and I feel like my belly resembles a basketball at this point, so I went for it. Mad props to the high school basketball 'has been' Julia of my past. She'd be so proud. Also, I felt extremely cute in my work clothes on Monday so I set up the tripod and went to town---a first for this pregnancy, but I'm glad I did. Sometimes a full body shot gives you a better idea of my belly size than just a giant close up of my bump. And looking at these pictures, I guess I do sort of look 'small' for 30 weeks, huh? The torso. It has to be the torso. And I'm glad I'm not huge--plenty of time for that.


Size of baby: Um, a 'cabbage' according to BC and a squash or a cucumber according to TB. Have done all of them. And therefore, had to think outside of the box. These last 9 weekly shots might get a little tricky.

Cravings: Not a whole lot this week. I still love to eat but little girl is still giving me a break from constant hunger pains.

What I love: Hitting my 30's! Yep, this is my golden week of pregnancy when my weekly progress matches my age. This pregnancy feels extremely real to me, just so you know.

What I'm looking forward to the most: Cuddling my girl. Nursing her. Dressing her. Watching her with Truman. Mostly all of it.

Worries: Nothing, really. I love weeks like this.

What is different this time around: At 30 weeks with Truman I had experienced a major belly growth spurt, was getting really annoyed with the general public's comments on my bump, and was shocked at how active Truman was in the womb. This baby girl is also pretty darn active this week, I'm still mostly annoyed with the general public, and although my belly is still pretty big I think it's sort of evening out compared to my first pregnancy.

Symptoms: It's getting pretty hard to move in any direction but forward. Meaning, getting up from the ground, sitting up from the couch, bending over all cause me to grunt and moan and feel pretty ridiculous. But otherwise, I'm still feeling awesome and cannot complain.

Sleep: Love it. No issues. Thank you, God.

Movement: Crazy amounts. I have yet to get a decent video of her punching my insides but it's pretty freaky and I wonder if other people can see when she is going nuts. Probably not. They are usually too busy deciding what idiotic comments to make about my bump instead.

The belly: Round, hard, and carried pretty high this time around. Belly button is pretty much out. No stretch marks but still with the itchies. And my linea negra is coming back to life! I feel like it never really left anyway.

Milestones:  For me: my golden week! For baby girl: she is over 15 inches long, almost 3 pounds, and is at the max for her amniotic fluid this week. So weird to think she is really gearing up to be on the outside.

Amusing comments from the general public: The usual suspects, such as but not limited to: 'When are you due? Oh, you are really small. You aren't even showing.' One patient changed it up and asked how many more months I had until baby was born. Putting it like that really made me think, and when I said 'Two-and-a-half more months' I shocked myself with how CLOSE that seems. And of course, she was shocked, too. Whatevs.

Best moment of the week: A few things: first, my OB appointment last week on Thursday. BP is still fabulous, weight gain is fine and still a little less than where I was with Truman, my OB is amazing, and we are now into the bi-weekly appointments! Also, she gave the thumbs up to having a birth photographer in the room and I just can't even think about that without getting incredibly excited. Secondly, I got 16 new maternity tops lent to me from two of my girlfriends. Is there anything better in the world than expanding your wardrobe, for free, right when you are in a slump with everything in your closet? I think not.

House renovations, take three: The Kitchen (ie the motherlode)

I feel it's time to give you a sneak peek of our beloved baby in the new house: the kitchen remodel. But first, let me clarify because there have been a lot of questions about this---we are NOT living in the new house yet. We spend nearly every waking hour there each weekend and go over there every week night once Truman is alseep (in-laws listen to our monitor for us) and because of this amount of insane work we've completed, we have officially scheduled the moving van to come on Friday, April 6! This is VERY exciting you guys. It's going to be our house---the one in which we actually live, instead of the one that we just work on all the freaking time. There will be tons of projects to do once we move in, for sure. But at least our kitchen and bathrooms will work and I'm hoping to have most of my painting done at that point, too.

So anyway, about the kitchen. It's not done yet but man, it's getting there. So let's just jump right into some mind-boggling before and after pictures. Well not 'after' pictures, really, but a 'current' picture to show the progress we've made. Ta-DA!!!

Before:

Current:


Seriously. Look at more before and current pictures with me:




Whoops. Still have a lot of work to do on the back wall, huh? That's okay, plans are under way for an awesome storage/mudroom area. And yes, that is a laundry shoot you see for the giant hole in our wall. Can't cover that baby up anymore!


Are you as excited about this as we are? I cannot believe it's starting to look like a real kitchen.  Would you like to know what all we've done so far? More pictures, first.

During the renovations:





And now for the details. At first, I wanted to ditch all of the existing cabinets and start from scratch mostly because I hated the country 'loopy' detailing on the cabinets and the upper row just seemed like too much wood, too. But after some major soul-searching, we agreed to keep the cabinets, pop off the ugly trim, add more modern trim, and then add glass to our upper cabinets. I had to push for that glass (which isn't yet installed, but it will be soon) and the little frames inside the holes and I'm SO glad I did. I love it so much I could barf. And I totally stole this idea from Pinterest, of course.

We hired our handy-man neighbor to convert all of the doors on the cabinets to the newer trim and he also cut out the hole for the glass. Then Nate and my in-laws did all the sanding, repairing the wood, priming, and painting 3 layers of white paint on both the bases and the updated doors. We used Benjamin Moore's Advance latex paint and one of BM's oil based primers after a lot of people online have reported that the Advance stuff is fabulous for painting cabinets. It's freaking expensive paint though, man, but I suppose it's worth it. The crew did the primer by hand with a brush, but then Nate became obsessed with his electric paint sprayer and did the remaining coats of latex paint with that baby. HUGE time saver, my friend. Messy, and not my style, but it did save them days I'm sure.

Cabinets:




We ordered our hinges online and love them, and then we finally found knobs and pulls that we adore after looking for freaking weeks. We ended up finding those at Home Depot in the back 'fancy designer' section of the store where there are no prices and you can't find the same things online without using them. We figured the pulls would be way out of our price range but after a few phone calls we discovered they are going to be just fine, and should arrive in about 2 weeks! I don't want to show you a picture just yet though because I'm sneaky like that. But we love them.



Countertops:


Yes, we went with granite counter tops. I realize that is very trendy and we did consider many other types of stone but kept coming back to the properties of granite. We found a little 'mom and pop' family owned shop in town and had a freaking BALL looking through the giant slabs of granite in their warehouse. Seriously. So much fun, and it was hard to choose but we picked this 'Colonial Gold' after leaning towards a lighter shade that would tie in our maple floors to the room. Originally I thought I wanted a super dark black color, and then I thought I wanted really REALLY light gray, but this is a happy medium that I'm glad we selected. Can't wait to see it pop even more with a great wall color and back splash!

Appliances:






Ah, our stainless steel appliances are one of my favorite parts of the kitchen, obvi. First of all, we have a freaking DISHWASHER which we have gone without for the past 4 years. It's high time to enjoy this puppy, right? We also got a new fridge with an ice maker (again, an upgrade from what we have now!), a gas stove (another upgrade!), and a fancy new washer and dryer for the basement (huge upgrade because they are massive and I can't wait to do gigantic loads of laundry in them). We got all of our appliances from Sears and got great deals on each---some from the 'outlet' store, or 'scratch and dent' place and some from the real Sears. We are going to take our current stainless microwave with us when we move and put it above our stove to complete the kitchen appliances.

So what's left to do? Well, besides the entire back wall of storage we also have to prep and paint all of the woodwork in the kitchen to be white. So the 3 windows and 3 door frames along with baseboards will be converted soon. Then I will probably be the one to paint the walls in there, and I'm deciding between a pretty khaki color or maybe even a gray or light aqua blue. Nate plans to polyurethane the cabinets with at least one coat to really seal them off and keep our pricey paint protected. Then we'll add the pulls/knobs, do a simple white tile back splash, and I want to make pretty curtains for the windows, too. Nate still has to install the faucet we purchased and I'm pretty sure they have more plumbing to do for the dishwasher, but overall it's really coming along! Oh, and I'm not sure if any of the pictures show the HIDEOUS overhead light in the kitchen but that puppy is going bye-bye as soon as I get the green light to shop around.

And that is that. Our beloved baby at the house that is really more of Nate's child than my own. I just give my opinions and demand certain things to be done (like the glass upper doors---but can't we all agree that was a good call on my part?) then I step aside and let the rest of them do the hard work. I didn't even pick out any of the appliances and allowed my husband to make those big decisions. Don't worry, I'm still there working my pregnant butt off but it always involves painting or cleaning up other rooms. More posts on that coming soon. But until then, I'm just going to keep staring at pictures of our kitchen. :)

29 weeks: Butternut Squash

Twenty-nine weeks: 3.14.12







Photo thoughts: I thought I hadn't worn this tank top before, but whoops. I did. At 26 weeks. And man, look at the difference in just the past 3 weeks...



Size of baby: A butternut squash according to BC, or just a squash (for this and the next 3 weeks) according to TB. Happened to have a squash downstairs so I didn't even have to shop especially for the fruit baby this week!

Cravings: Still feeling surprisingly content with food lately. I mean, I love sweets and really don't limit myself at all with food but I'm not as famished as before.

What I love: I want to take a second to reflect on something that I've been thinking a lot about this week. You might remember that the beginning of this pregnancy was a freaking nightmare. I had spotting, then a scary amount of red blood one day that soaked through my pants at work. My ultrasound that day showed a baby with a beautiful little heartbeat, but as my OB said, she was still really worried about this baby. She had never seen a baby make it with such a large subchorionic bleed like mine. A few weeks later, during my weekly follow ups when this baby girl was plugging right away like a champion, I asked my doctor more about my bleed. She showed me her formal report from that scary visit at 6 weeks and in plain old black and white she had written, '....most likely a pending miscarriage.' My baby girl was not supposed to make it. The odds were stacked against her and the future of this pregnancy was really, really bleak. I still remember feeling a sense of hope though, and I have no idea how I was able to hang onto anything positive at that point. But I did. And here we are, in the third trimester, with a baby girl that apparently likes to cause drama. And I could not be happier for this amazing gift. I love being pregnant. And I love that after such a rough start I've had a wonderful pregnancy so far. Not a day goes by that I don't feel thankful and humbled by this entire experience.

What I'm looking forward to the most: meeting our baby girl in 11 weeks-ish. Amazing.

Worries: Didn't make time to worry much this week. I guess as I inch closer to my 34 week mark, when my BP suddenly sky-rocketed last time and all hell broke loose with monitoring me for pre-E, I am a little anxious that it will happen again. But my OB claims there is only a 25% chance of history repeating itself so I'm trying not to think about it too much. I really think now that I'm only working 20 hours per week instead of 40, and I'm not nearly as physical in my job, maybe my body stands a chance to avoid the stress that might have caused pre-E? We shall see.

What is different this time around: Last time at 29 weeks I had my first experience throwing up during pregnancy, I had to stop running three days per week because I realized I was actually having contractions during my runs, I'd gained 25 pounds already, and my belly was looking legit! This time I still haven't actually thrown up, I'm definitely not running, I've gained about 22 pounds, and my belly is still much larger than it was the first time around (but maybe not SUCH a big difference anymore). I remember taking that 29 week belly pic last time down in Missouri---can't believe I'm already this far along right now, since that picture sort of seems like yesterday in a way.

Symptoms: A little bit of acid reflux at times, a sore back if I over do it, and it's definitely a struggle to sit up from laying down. I mean, really---for 29 weeks I have it pretty good right now.

Sleep: Love. Still quite comfortable and may require an occasional nap at times.


Movement: She's still shaking her stuff in there. I notice that she does a lot of really fast/crazy movements, rapid-fire-style, and it sort of makes me wonder what in the heck she is doing. I want to ask my OB at my appointment this week if baby girl is even close to being in head-down position yet. I have a feeling she isn't.

The belly: Getting rounder by the day. My belly button is as out as it's ever been and the skin around it is super itchy. No stretchies just yet....hang on there, skin of mine!

Milestones:  She is 2.5 pounds and 15 inches long and for me, personally, this is a fun day because it was Truman's original due date (Pi day!). Also, we are inching up on my BFP anniversary with baby Wren on 3/24. It's amazing to think it's almost been an entire year since that pregnancy began. Not really looking forward to hitting the other milestones with that loss--like the day after my birthday when we found out baby Wren was gone, or the anniversary of when I started the failure drug cytotec to induce my miscarriage (Mother's Day weekend), or the anniversary of when I started gushing blood and had to go to the ER (June 1), my D&C on 6/13, etc. It's sort of nice to think that at the tail end of those milestones, I should have baby girl in my arms to get me through the pain.

Amusing comments from the general public:  I had one really sweet patient ask me when I'm due (which still catches me off guard at times, like---wow, I guess I'm really pregnant!) and when I told her 'end of May' she was shocked. She said, 'You are so tiny!' I explained that this is my second child and I am showing even more this time, but that my long torso helps tremendously. She followed that up with 'I have a granddaughter who is tall and thin like you and she never shows much with pregnancy either.' And THAT, my dear public commenters, is a nice way to tie up a conversation about a pregnant woman's belly. Very sweet and not rude or demeaning. I'm happy to have a pleasant experience every now and then. :)

Best moment of the week: This whole week has been such a blur since we've been at the new house each night and all weekend long, working our fingers to the bone. But I think overall my highlight would have to have been this amazing weather we are having. It's supposed to get up to 70 sometime this week and our entire family is soaking up this glorious sunshine while it lasts. Can't wait until its officially spring, and I'm really looking forward to having baby girl during a great season of the year, too.