NBR (Not Baby Related)

I'm taking a quick deviation from my usual topic to post an awesome quote by Hank Steinbrenner, a man who I generally can't stand. It seems as though he's trying to weasel his way into the good graces of Yankee fans everywhere:

“Red Sox Nation?” Hank says. “What a bunch of [expletive] that is. That was a creation of the Red Sox and ESPN, which is filled with Red Sox fans. Go anywhere in America and you won’t see Red Sox hats and jackets, you’ll see Yankee hats and jackets. This is a Yankee country. We’re going to put the Yankees back on top and restore the universe to order.”

(Oedipus Bronx, New York Times)

Still an ass, but at least he's trying.

Filler - Entry #1 to Stupid Things That Make Me Cry

I forgot, stupid things that make me cry was the original intent behind this blog. That said, here's my first (and long overdue) entry about things that make me cry.

We watched the Pillsbury Bake-Off on Food Network a few weeks ago. I know, you're thinking "What could be so sad about the Pillsbury effing bakeoff?!?!" Well, besides the fact that there was all kinds of yummy food being prepared for me to drool over (but not eat), one of the finalists that they were profiling really tugged on my heart.

There was this woman named Anna, and her recipe was for Baked Chicken and Spinach Stuffing. Even though the recipe itself was a little scary (the base of the stuffing was dunkable waffles and the syrup cup from said dunkable waffle package provided the sauce for the chicken) her story was fantastic. Pregnancy hormone-induced fantastic? Probably. So anyway. This lady is married and she has a 4-year-old daughter. In her interviews she talked about how much she loves to cook and wanted to bake things all day, maybe have her own coffeeshop at some point, but that if she won the $1 million prize she would squirrel most of it away into savings so that she could send her daughter to college and secure retirement for her and her husband. They also interviewed her daughter about why she wanted her mom to win, and the girl said that if her mom won she wanted to get a bounce house for the backyard. So the competition went on, more interviews were done with the other contestants, but I really wanted that little girl to have a college education AND a bounce house in her backyard. (really, who doesn't?)

It comes time to announce the winner and suprise suprise, the waffle chicken lady won the million bucks! She was so excited to win the grand prize. See?



Here's the million dollar meal:



So as the show is wrapping up and the credits begin to roll I'm on the couch sobbing because I'm just so so happy for her, and so excited that they won't have to worry about saving for college, and they have a good outlook on life and that she really, just really deserved to win. Then they show their little family in their backyard, complete with little daughter playing in her bounce house, just so effing excited that she has HER OWN bounce house in her own yard. Such a happy ending!

I guess you just had to be there.

Finally Feeling (somewhat) Functional

I made it in to the office on Monday and lasted a whole 2 hours before I headed for the door. Thankfully yesterday and today have been more manageable. One of the many downsides to both of us being sick at the same time is that we have no food in our house. I mean nothing good to eat. We're in desperate need of produce and food stuffs that aren't soup and I can't wait to go grocery shopping after work. Of course the lack of anything substantial in the house comes right at the time when I'm just absofreakinglutely famished for whatever reason, and all I have for lunch today is soup. I'm so ungodly tired of soup! I want something chewable. All I can think about is the caramel cadbury egg sitting on the coffee table at home. Mmmm.

Anyway, I used our sick time to get through a large chunk of baby bargains. It was helpful and incredibly overwhelming at the same time. Plain stroller or travel system? Infant-only carseat or convertible? Crib with stationary sides or drop-down? Just the tip of the iceberg, peeps. Why is it that 99% of the high chairs for sale are ugly?

I've complained enough for today, hopefully I'll have something of substance to talk about in the days to come. Nothing exciting going on in baby world or life in general.

17 Weeks

We're still sick in our house, so this will be short and to the point so I can return to sitting on the couch watching bad TV.

17 week picture:




I've had nothing but soup in the past 72 hours and even the pint of Ben & Jerry's stashed in the freezer doesn't hold much appeal :(

Ew, Respiratory Virus :(

I started feeling slightly crappy Wednesday afternoon and it got progressively worse. By the time we got home last night I had a fever, so I'm working from home today. Yay for that, I can DVR some smut daytime TV and watch it at lunch. I think I'll tape The View and 90210 then hang out on the couch for an hour while I eat my soup.

This will sound really stupid, but I'm going to post about it anyway because I can't be the only one who has ever felt this way. I feel guilty for getting sick. I feel bad for our little fetus hanging out in there. At the NT scan they had me cough to make it bounce around so they could get the right measurements, so now every time I have a coughing fit I picture it being woken up and bouncing around involuntarily and it makes me feel bad. I'm trying to think of it as maybe being fun like jumping around in one of those moonwalks/bounce houses. I liked those a lot when I was little.

Anyway. Our copy of Baby Bargains came in the mail yesterday, along with the Boppy pillow I ordered, so I'm going to read it, take notes, and do some additional research for the next 17 days, then we're going SHOPPING the weekend after the big ultrasound. To make it even more convenient, IKEA opens in 19 days! I can't wait.

So send my happy get well thoughts, and some for my dear little sister in Brooklyn who is also feeling crappy. Thanks!

Fun Stuff I've Found

So we went to two of the three main places we planned on searching for a crib and we have a front-runner:



It has clean lines, it comes in the right color, and it's a convertible/lifetime bed.

I also came across some awesome room decor in a magazine ad, but the ad was for furniture, not the bedding, and I couldn't find it anywhere I looked. I was hanging out on the Nest last night between work and teaching when I noticed a post on the 2nd Trimester board that was looking for "Mod Turtle" bedding. Not one to ever ignore a post with "turtle" in the subject I clicked in, followed the link, and was so happy to find the turtles I had been obsessing about for weeks!



We wouldn't get the whole set, of course, but I love the rug and the mobile. I think we've decided not to get too involved with bedding options but there's an awesome baby blanket that I might have to have :)

In other, more exciting news, we have movement! I'm 99.9% sure that I felt it move a little bit this weekend. Nothing huge, but exactly like it's been described to me by others - like popcorn popping in your uterus.

Countdown to replacing "it" with a gender-specific pronoun sits at 20 days, in case you've lost track.

Weekly Photo Update

Work has been kicking my ass this week so I haven't had much in the way of lunch hours to update.

Here I am at 16 weeks:



Charlie says it isn't consistent with the other pictures because I have different pants on, but my poor blue yoga pants just aren't so comfortable anymore :(
I've had those pants for 10 years and I'm going to be sad when I can't wear them.

We went to the Melting Pot for dinner last night. I ate pretty minimally all day so I could fully enjoy the entire dinner, especially dessert! They had a special dark chocolate and raspberry fondue that I had been looking forward to for weeks. It was everything I hoped it would be and I'm STILL thinking about it 12 hours later.

We started looking at cribs this weekend since there are three different stores we want to check out in three different parts of the city. Better to break it up into small trips than spend a whole day driving around, because neither one of us has the patience for that kind of thing. We want to have it decided before we find out what it is (22 days!!!!) so that we can go buy it the weekend after. Super exciting, I know.

First Baby-Related Purchase

I said from the beginning that I wasn’t going to buy baby clothes for a while, at least until we know what we’re having (26 days until we find out, for those of you keeping track along with me), but that was before I remembered these:



I bought them for my dear SIL Heather as a shower gift back in October and when we found ourselves pregnant a few weeks later this was the first “object” that popped into my head. I needed them. They also had a hooded bath towel, a bath robe, and some other miscellaneous matching accessories. I made myself wait an agonizing 7 more weeks, until after the NT scan showed us that we had very little to worry about. By the time I got to Target the whole line was on clearance. These little turtle slippers were all that was left. (of course, one turtle is better than no turtles at all!)

However, all was not lost! I was delighted to come across this fantastically awesome outfit while shopping at Kohls:



Green is a nice, gender-neutral color, right? I’m not going to buy anything else for a while though, I promise. C is already muttering things about “thinning the herd” and “too many turtles.” I’ll just have to toss some red sox stuff in the basement to make room :)

I really have two things I could post about today, new clothes for me or our first purchase for the bebe, but I figured I’d save one for tomorrow so I have something to kill time at lunch.

First of all, here is my 15 week picture:



I don’t think it looks much different from last week, but my students tell me every Monday that I look bigger than I did before. I’m never quite sure how to take it. Generally speaking that’s not something you like to hear “Wow, you look fatter than you did last week!” Of course, all that changes when you’re pregnant! Along the same lines, I don’t have any pants that fit without the Bella Band so we went to the Gap Clearance Outlet this weekend and I bought 2 pairs of maternity jeans for $10 each. They are SO comfy!! I never knew comfort like this existed. I should rent them to other people for thanksgiving! The elastic waistband is HEAVEN.

Anyway. Here is a picture of me in my new jeans:



C isn’t the best at photographing people, not surprising, being that he spends his days photographing factory equipment, so they never come out quite right :)

I also experienced my first pregnancy-induced irrational craving on Sunday night. I wanted a small hot fudge sundae with soft serve vanilla ice cream from Dairy Queen SOOOO bad. It was really late in the evening and in the single digits, so it was a difficult choice between going out to satisfy my needs or staying at home in my comfy clothes in front of the fire. I ended up staying home and had chocolate milk instead. Definitely not a suitable substitute.

So after class last night I decided that we would be having hot fudge sundaes for dinner. It was 10 degrees and blowing snow by the time I got to DQ, but I sure as hell got what I wanted. I was also supposed to put gas in the car but it was so cold and windy that I got 3 gallons in and called it quits so I could get home to enjoy my dinner.



Bebe needs calcium, right?!?! (disclaimer: by this point I had already consumed my 6 servings of fruits and veggies, so no guilt trips!)

It was super tasty and worth every extra second I spent out in the snow.

Found a Daycare

Yes, it seems early, but there are centers with waiting lists stretching into November so this was something I wanted to have taken care of. I took suggestions from co-workers, researched the Ohio 4C website, and narrowed my choices down to five centers in the area where we work. Two of them ended up being WAY out of our budget but I set up tours with the other three. What a freaking adventure that ended up being!

I visited the first center last Monday, and the second I walked in I considered walking right back out and not even staying for the tour. It was loud, the infants were screaming and the older kids were running wild. It was dirty, there was food all over the floor. Granted, it was lunchtime, but that was a whole other issue - they had veggies, fruit, chicken nuggets, and cookies. I saw SO many kids only eating the cookies and throwing out the rest of the food. (I love cookies as much as the next person, but seriously.) The director was nice (even with the missing teeth), but her office was a disaster area. There was garbage all over. She took me to the infant room and the cribs were in bad condition, some of them were the painted metal kind and the paint was peeling away. Hooray for eating paint chips! The big infant room, where the kids are learning to crawl and walk, didn't have any playmats or soft flooring; they were all just crawling around on the dirty linoleum. Their pacifiers were dragging on the ground and they just shoved them back in their mouths. I know they're busy, but seriously. The ratio of kids to staff wasn't that great, either. It just didn't strike me as the type of environment I would want to leave my child in for 8-9 hours a day. No bright colors, limited toys, staff was watching TV in another room. They knew I was coming and it was still dirty. You'd think they'd clean it up for a tour.

I went to the second center on Tuesday. It was better than the first one but still not quite what I was looking for. I was in the hallway between the toddlers and pre-k while I was waiting for the director and the pre-k class was watching TV. The toddlers were supposed to be napping, but one of them wasn't cooperating and the staff member was just screaming at him and dragging him back to his spot by the arm. I didn't appreciate how rough she was with the child. The infant room at this place was much better, the cribs were newer and in obviously good condition, the staff members were all really nice, most of them had been there for more than 5 years and they seemed very competent and caring. I liked the center because it has a lot of open outdoor space and it's not in a corporate setting and the staff members all have a lot of experience in child care. Again though I was concerned about the lack of playmats and the staff to child ratio seemed too high for me (I believe it's at the state maximum). I was also surprised that there weren't more stimulating colors and it just seemed kind of blah to me. Not what I think of when I picture an early childhood learning environment.

The third center was having an open house on Thursday night so we were both able to visit. Thankfully it was exactly what I was looking for. It's a great place, lots of colors, stimulating toys, very attentive staff and a very small ratio, there are 2 infants to each teacher and it's a very small center. There is no time spent in front of the television, the infant and large infant rooms are wall-to-wall soft flooring and playmates, and all of the kids looked happy. It's Montessori-based so they do a lot of reading and once they're a bit older they move into the Montessori classroom. The infant room is closed off from the rest of the center and it’s painted in very relaxing colors with soft lighting. There is “donuts with dad” day once a month and a whole bunch of other fun events that we can look forward to as Baby G gets older. The sanitize the entire center three times a day while the kids nap (using organic solutions!), which puts the other centers who only do it once a week to shame. They also have webcams that parents can sign into so they can keep an eye on what's going on. Perfect for my OCD :) We sent our deposit in the very next day.

So all in all I learned that not all daycare centers are created equal. Some are definitely more equal than others. If we’re laying out that much money for a daycare center my kid sure as hell better not be propped up in front of a TV set watching Maury all day and left to squirm around on a dirty floor.

New Due Date

At my 14 week appointment yesterday they told me they changed my EDD to August 2nd. It’s only 2 days and, in the grand scheme of things, won’t really matter much, but it’s nice all the same. Better sooner than later! So everything looks good, heartbeat sounds fine, I’ve gained 6 pounds and they said that’s just perfect given where I started. Most of it's probably in my boobs anyway. It’s still scary to see the numbers go up on the scale but I’m sure I’ll get over that psychological block soon enough.

Here is my 14 week picture, taken on Sunday just before we went on our weekly coffee run to Dunkin (pardon the ugly pajama pants, my clothes were in the dryer):



I don't particularly care for the photo, but in the interest of consistency I'm posting it anyway. OB says the growing is right where it should be, underneath the belly button, and she's very reassuring that it's mostly uterus and baby (which is now softball sized), not just fat, which makes me feel a little better, considering most of the ladies on the Nest report not getting any larger until much further along.

We also decided on a daycare, but I'll save that for another post.

Catching Up

So here's the short(er) version of how the next 2 months played out in our world. Charlie and I talked the next day (November 27th, if you’re keeping track) and decided that we wouldn’t really tell anyone until after the 1st trimester when we were officially out of the “danger zone.” We figured it would be hard not to tell anyone but it would be a lot easier than having to “untell” people in the event of a disaster.

I went to work and didn’t tell anyone but figured that it would do no harm if I told two of my good internet buddies, especially since they didn’t live in town and there would be no danger of them leaking my secret to anyone else. After work I went to my night class and didn’t tell anyone, then decided on the drive home from campus that not telling “anyone” certainly didn’t mean not telling my sister, so I called her to share the news. She was excited, to say the least, and I was so glad that I had decided to let her know. It was nice to tell SOMEONE. I lasted another week before I HAD to tell someone else. Not telling “anyone” also didn’t mean not telling my BFF Erica back in Jersey, so I emailed her and swore her to secrecy before I dropped the bombshell. I think she had an idea what I was going to say:

"hey jene whats up hows everything so you wanted to tell me something?!! i might be able to guess...is there a lil bun in the oven..i hope ,i hope ,i hope..:)hit me back asap..luv ya Erica"

It was really great to tell her because she’s the same age as me and has three adorable little boys of her own, so I had someone to talk to about all the fun and not-so-fun things that go along with pregnancy. I was still feeling really good, but the thought/smell/taste/idea of eggs made me want to puke.

We went for an ultrasound to figure out how far along I really was and got this awesome picture of the little bean:




And this is what my stomach looked like at 6 weeks (definitely bloated):





Christmas came and went and we didn’t tell anyone, then on New Year’s we told our buddies Kate & Matt because it would certainly be obvious when I wasn’t drinking, especially around copious amounts of vodka, which I sincerely miss.

I had my 11 week appointment on January 7th and got to hear the heartbeat, then had an NT scan on the 10th and we got another nifty picture of the bean, which was actually starting to resemble a baby at that point:




And my stomach grew a little, I had gained 2 pounds by this point:




The next weekend we had to go bra shopping because they weren’t fitting (ahem!) neatly into the ones I had. I got measured and thought I was going to have a heart attack right then and there. I won’t go into detail about the actual size that I have become, but let’s say they went up at least 2 sizes and if they get any bigger it’s specialty stores only from here on out. We also started telling everyone at this point. The grandparents and aunts/uncles to be were understandably excited. I would be too!


13 weeks:





Which brings us to today. So now that you’re all caught up, it’s onwards and upwards from here.

And So it Begins

I've decided to start a blog so that I can keep track of my pregnant life and all the fun stuff that goes along with it. I was emailing a friend a list of the stupid things that made me cry and she suggested I start a blog about it, so here it is! Here is a picture of us back in August, long before this strange trip began:



This is what my stomach looked like before I got pregnant:



And here's how it all got started:

It was the Monday after Thanksgiving and my pants were a little snug. I didn't think that I had eaten enough food stuffs over the holiday to account for the crazy bloating I was experiencing, so I went to Kroger and bought some FRER tests on my lunch break. I was anxious to get home and see what was going on, but I was teaching a class at the time and that evening was our last meeting so the groups were all presenting their research projects to the rest of the class. It was the longest night of my life.

Once class was over I headed home, told Charlie I was going to take a test, and saw these two lines that changed our lives (and my mental stability) forever:



Not quite believing what I was seeing, I headed downstairs to inform Charlie of the results. "It's positive." I said. His response? "What's positive, your belly button?" The cynical engineer didn't see the two lines that were glaringly obvious to me, so we headed off to Kroger at 10:00 that night to buy a digital test.

After lamenting over the crazy amount they charge for piece of mind, the original test results were confirmed.




And so it began, as I experienced my first sleepless night of many, filled with anxiety and excitement over this new life that we were now responsible for. Sure, we had the cat, but when the cat starts bugging you at 3:00 in the morning it's totally acceptable to kick him off the bed. Baby? Not so much.

Of course, we wouldn't want to leave out our furry family member, the original furbaby, so here's Einstein: