A Poor Attempt...

...but I think it's the best we're going to get. This picture is now three weeks old, oh well. Hopefully before too long we'll find out if this baby is a boy or a girl! At least you can see him/her all stretched out! The past four days, I have occasionally been able to feel the baby move! This makes me soooo happy. K and I were discussing this today. We composed a list:

Things That Are Good About Being Pregnant
1) You feel the baby move.
2) You get a baby at the end.
3) You can use it to get out of anything.

There was a fourth, but I can't remember it right now. We agreed those are the only nice things about pregnancy and that all the rest of it pretty much sucks. But, you gotta agree, #2 makes it completely worth it.

My Little Lemon

The doctor's office was able to squeeze me in early so I went for a long ultrasound to determine my due date. I got some great pictures of Baby. S/he was very active - at one point stretched all the way out, saw little legs, hands, and head. My official due date is April 18. In my head I am still planning on April 22. That way I can go late and not freak out (too much). That's the idea any way.

So the baby is about the size of a lemon, but you'd never guess that from the size of my abdomen. Maybe if I'm feeling ambitious tonight (unlikely due to all three of us are down with colds right now) I'll try to get these ultrasound pictures onto the computer. No promises. :)

Photo credit: Lady Lunchalot

Recent Pics

Snuggled up for fall.

Daddy doing what he does best.

And my jazz hands. While cleaning.
We went to the beach a couple weeks ago and Baby E was in heaven. She walked all over the beach and chased seagulls. And eventually ended up in the water up to her ankles. Cooooold.

Successfully using a spoon!

Rearranging the cleansers.

Playing in the backyard.
Dh has encouraged Baby E's love for pumpkins. It's adorable. She found one yesterday small enough to carry around.

Today was Stake Conference, which is when a bunch of area congregations meet together for a big meeting. It was nice because 1) it is 2 hours long (as opposed to regular church which is 3 hours), 2) I brought my knitting and made real progress on a little hat for Baby E and 3) there were some excellent talks, including one I really enjoyed about the true nature of love and how this applies to marriage. It was hard because I had to sit on a hard chair for 2 hours and my butt was killing me by the end.

Tonight we went to K's house for dinner. We had steak. This is K's idea of a pun. Steak for Stake conference. Dinner was delicious and fun was had by all. We even stayed late (Baby E was behaving herself), so Baby E ended up going to bed an hour late (7 pm).

I am 14 weeks pregnant. My morning sickness is waning, mostly only feel it in the evenings and not too badly. Woo-hoo! Now it can fade away to a distant, terrible memory again. My stomach is starting to pop out but all maternity pants are still too big. I wear them anyway. Also stretchy pants. Please don't arrest me, fashion police. My main symptom now is gassiness. Ha ha Also I'm quite bloated by the end of every day.

Dh is threatening to punish me if I don't stop blogging right now. Apparently it's time for some QT time.

Book Meme

Stolen from Hollow Squirrel.

Bold those you’ve read.
Italicize books you have started but couldn’t (or just didn't) finish.
Add an asterisk* to those you have read more than once.
Underline those on your To Be Read list.

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi: A Novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveller’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian Halfway through...
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera Just bought this off Amazon
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum Just checked it out of the library
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984 Loooove
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Ubervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables People, it's huge. I made it to the mid-600s. Halfway.
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States: 1492-Present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon Just too, too much
Oryx and Crake
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

This list tells me I get distracted a lot and should try finishing things more often. Oopsie.

Feel free to steal this. Tell me in the comments so I can come see your list.

My First Prenatal Appt, Some E Pics and a Belly Shot!

Dh, Baby E and I all schlepped our way to the ob/gyn this morning for my first prenatal appointment. Everything went swimmingly. Baby E was charming and well behaved, Dh was there fulfilling his role of supportive husband perfectly, and I threw up in the trashcan before we left! Woo-hoo! We got an ultrasound, sorry no scanner so no pics, but Baby #2 was moving all over the place which was really fun to see. Moving all limbs. In fact, we even saw its fingers. The doctor said..."that doesn't look like an 11-week baby (today I thought I was 11w3d). It looks at least 12 weeks." She took a few rough measurements and kept coming up with more like 12w5d!!! Holy cow.* She moved my EDD up 3 days, thinks it will be more after an in-depth ultrasound scheduled for the end of the month (crappy HMOs...). So that's exciting! I did think my uterus came up out of my pelvis awfully early. I love the idea of being an entire week farther along. One less week, with none of the wait!

One of Baby E's favorite past times: digging in the garbage.

Note the milk on the floor. NOT being drunk. I feed her lots and lots of cheese in hopes it will compensate for her relentless refusal to drink milk. (And yes before you ask I have tried adding Nesquik, strawberry Nesquik, and heating it. None of that works. Dh once got her to drink 1% but that doesn't help us very much, does it?)

Baby E, my little homeless child.

This Ziploc is a great hiding spot!

12.5 weeks, according to the doctor's rough estimate. Note pajama pants.

*So apparently Dooneybug you should listen to NOTHING I say about FAM because apparently I suck at charting and was at least a week off on my ovulation. I don't know how this happened! My signs are textbook! My chart was crystal clear! And yet, the baby don't lie.

On Motherhood

"Virginia Woolf expresses [this] view in A Room of One's Own: 'Money dignifies what is frivolous if unpaid for.' Georges Seurat's 'Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte' -- now a crown jewel of the Chicago Art Institute --and many of Vincent Van Gogh's works -- which eventually set record prices at auction -- went unsold in their lifetimes. Would Woolf have said these painting were frivolous until the market established their worth? I think not. No more frivolous are a mother's efforts to create masterpieces of daily living for her family, although the market sets no price on them."

-- F. Carolyn Graglia, Domestic Tranquility

In Which I Enjoy the First of the Month

Dh left this morning for a conference over in the southern US. He will be gone four days. Before he left, he kept thanking me for being chill about him going. Maybe I should pretend to be grouchier? I don't know. Instead I just enjoyed being thanked for something I hadn't really thought about. Ha ha

Then since it is the first of the month and that means $$, I went to Target. Where I actually behaved myself very well and bought boring things like diapers and pajamas for Baby E. My only splurges were new fishnets (I found out Sunday all mine had holes) and a fun pair of knee-high socks. I also went to the grocery store where I allowed my cravings to fill my cart. Therefore I bought: bacon, french bread pizza, a baguette, and Kaukauna cheese. Um, yeah. My fruit cravings don't start until the second trimester, yo. The only fruits I can stand right now are apples and grapefruits.

By 3 p.m. Baby E was banging her head against my thighs in utter boredom and I was so over that so I headed over to K's. Luckily I found her in the midst of baking pumpkin-chocolate chip cookies. Fab timing, huh.

Tomorrow I will be 11 weeks. Perhaps I should post a belly pic soon since I am showing a little bit now. It will just have to wait until Dh gets back.

Fall arrived in western Oregon in a big way this weekend. Rain, rain and more rain. Friday we went up to the mountains for a drive to enjoy the fall colors. Dh and I both enjoy mountain drives. For various reasons, we haven't been up there driving around for about 2 years. This drive was fun, just a little long. After 4 hours, Baby E was losing it and I didn't feel so hot from all the driving. When we got home, I yakked and somehow managed to burn my esophagus. Burning pain for the next four hours. SOO not fun. It also aggravated my stomach so I got sick twice more! Bleh. Needless to say Friday night sucked for me. We watched Disturbia, which was interesting enough.

Fortunately by Saturday morning I felt 100% better. We lazed around and then Dh worked an OT shift from 2 pm - 1 am. So Saturday was not really so fun.

Sunday I magically got my entire class of 15-year-olds to participate. The past few weeks it's been getting worse and worse and I've been feeling bad about that since I'm pretty sure I'm not just supposed to referree the name calling. I noticed Sunday's lesson had lots of questions. Everyone's name went up on the board and I announced whoever had the most points by the end of the lesson would receive a prize. Half the class ignored me and talked for the first half of the lesson, but gradually everyone got sucked in by the lure of the prize (which was a secret). By the end, everyone was involved, raising their hands, flipping through Hebrews. It was beautiful. Apparently I should do this every week. The prize? A candy watch. The winner was thrilled.