Second OB Appointment, 12.5 weeks

Hooray!!  OK, so we're a few days shy of the official 2nd trimester, but we're calling it good.  We just had our second OB appointment today and all is well!

For those of you just finding this out, obviously, we're pregnant.  Click here to read from the beginning.  If you skip that part, let me just tell you I won't be posting these to Facebook (to spare everyone the pregnancy details if they're not interested) but you can type your email address in the "Follow by Email" box to get updates when there's a new post.  I've been taking "belly" photos, but really there's nothing to see yet.  I was pretty bloated for a while, it went down, now I think it's back, but I'm not sure I can call it a baby bump yet.

Baby Gibbs is due January 25, 2013.  If you do the math, it will appear I got pregnant before Trevor got home.  For those of you who haven't been down this road yet, they start counting pregnancy with the first day of your period, not when you actually got pregnant.  But, again if you do the math, we really didn't waste any time!

Here is the post about our first appointment.  As for today's appointment, it was a quick one.  Well, after almost an hour and a half of waiting it was quick, gotta love the doctor's office!  The doctor came in, asked a few questions, then got out the doppler.  She assured us sometimes it takes a little bit to find the heartbeat, but it really didn't take long at all, phew!  A solid 160 beats per minute and we were happy :) As for symptoms, they've been gradually getting better the last couple weeks...for the most part.  I'm off the Zofran completely and surviving on half a Unisom in the evening.  Luckily, my "morning sickness" is actually "evening sickness" and Unisom helps with nausea and happens to be a sleep aid-works very well.  My boobs are sore, especially when I wake up, but I can deal with that.  My gag reflex is as bad as ever.  That's the only thing that's caused me to actually throw up...6 times now.  I gag on pills or food quite a bit, but if I gag twice-bad news!  Fatigue is getting better, but I'm getting the occasional headache and lightheaded at times, usually after a shower.  All in all, much more manageable than a few weeks ago!

We quickly started making phone calls and it's been so fun to share the news!  For those of you who continue reading, I'll be posting some first time mom questions-I'm sure I'll have plenty-I'd love some input in the comments.

-A

Saturday the 14th.

I've been looking forward to this weekend for some time now.  Thankfully, I have no Friday the 13th horror stories to tell, but what I can tell you is I'm a fan of Saturday the 14th.

Trevor was sick last week.  I'll spare you the details, but luckily he was feeling better by Saturday.  Rowdy let us sleep in a little Saturday morning, then we got ready to head to Stillwater for my cousin Drew's graduation open house.  We got there shortly after my dad did and had a nice visit with my dad, Drew, my aunt Karon and a few of the other guests.  Drew made a great photo slideshow and it was fun looking back at all the photos.  Tony, his brother, had some awesome cornrows back in the day-I had forgotten about those.  

After the graduation party we stopped home to let Rowdy out and meet up with David, Jenny and their dog, Tripp, before heading to party #2.  One of our very good friends Adam fell for a lovely woman, Meg, he met while vacationing in Mexico.  After he made two trips to visit her in the Boston area, it was finally her turn to come visit him...and meet a lot of people!  Someday I'll devote an entire post to their cute, mushy, romantic love story, but today let's focus on the slip 'n slide party.

Now when I say slip 'n slide, I'm not talking the standard premade type you can buy at Target.  This thing required 30 pool noodles, two (or three?) sprinklers, baby oil and a huge yard.  I took this photo at about the 2/3 mark, so this isn't even the whole thing.

If I told you Adam's parents made him chug this beer while slip 'n sliding, would you believe me?  You should.

We moved onto a few rounds of bean bags that dragged on forever and ever.  It was fun regardless and we had some good laughs and great conversation.  I love getting to know new people.  Meg and I have been emailing for a while now so it was fun seeing the person I have gotten to know via email come to life.  Does that make her sound like Pinocchio?  She's totally cooler than Pinocchio. 

As the night went on, there were more laughs, more conversations, and more slip 'n slides.

These two went down wrestling-what a sight that was.  David and Jenny spent the night with Tripp.  The dogs played hard this morning and, bonus!, Rowdy has been napping all day.

I hear our kabobs are almost done-perfect timing. 

-A

Independence Day.

We had a great 4th of July-both the day of and the weekend afterwards.  We both had the 4th off and it was miserably hot.  I spent most of the day inside because heat and I do not mix.  I did get Rowdy's pool out for him so he could splash around in it.  Trevor, on the other hand, mowed the lawn and hoed the garden.  Bless his heart.  We had a nice quiet afternoon before the whole family arrived for potluck dinner then fireworks.  Everyone brought good food and the house was packed.  My dad brought some firecrackers and Elliot and Parker got a kick out of those.  Speaking of those two, they got pretty dirty playing in the sandbox so we washed their clothes and put them in Trevor's tan army shirts.  They looked like little Monks.  Anyway, we found a spot to watch the fireworks here in town and they were really pretty good!  Parker (5) even said "Woah! I bet the fireflies are saying this is even cooler than our light!"  He was pretty impressed, jumping at each firework, saying it was his favorite, with many "WOAH!"s in between.  (Trevor took some photos on the 4th and I've been procrastinating this post waiting to get them from him, but we've been pretty busy.  I'll add them later.)

Since I don't work Fridays anyway, I took Thursday off too and just made a big, long weekend out of the 4th.  Trevor had to go back to school Thursday and Friday though.  Saturday we joined John, Mari, Calen, Linnea, Jon, Moe, Jon, Nicole, Kourtney, Shannon and all of the kiddos on Elysian for some fun at the cabin.  

   
We started the day on the water trampoline while some of the others went out for a boat ride and tubing.

Then kayaking and paddle boating.

 

My dad got us some fireworks a couple weeks ago and we knew it would be best to save them for the lake...good plan!  They were awesome!

 

And when the bugs got too bad, we headed inside for game time.  We started with Trivial Pursuit, a very old Trivial Pursuit, but that didn't go so well since many of the answers were as old as the game itself.  We switched to Mad Gab which was much more entertaining.

Hopefully you all had as much fun this past week/weekend as we did!

-A

10 weeks, 4 days

No photo with this post.  I've been procrastinating the post because I've been waiting to take a photo, but that's just not happening.  No worries, there's really nothing to see yet aside from varying levels of bloating.  The good news is that by varying levels of bloating I mean it's actually gone down some.  Let me back up a bit...

A couple days after that first appointment we headed to visit family in Wisconsin.  I had been feeling pretty good minus the constipation issue.  I was still in need of nausea relief so I was taking Zofran, but the side effects of that were no good.  I decided to give it a shot without Zofran and have now been off it for about 10 days.  Throughout the day I feel good enough without it (at least to make it worth getting rid of that yucky side effect), but evenings are no fun.  Evening sickness is probably better than morning sickness because I can be lazy and just go to bed.  Also, I've started taking Unisom to help with that which is a sleep aide, much better to be taking that at night than in the morning.  All in all I've been feeling pretty darn good, relatively speaking.  I have to really make an effort to drink plenty of fluids and my appetite isn't completely normal, but I don't feel like death all day.  Oh, one more fun tidbit:  my gag reflex is awful.  I gag on my pills, supper, yogurt, when flossing my teeth, you name it.  Twice I've thrown up from gagging, not nausea, gagging. 

Less than two weeks til our next appointment.  I'm feeling pretty good about things, but still anxious to make sure there's still a solid heartbeat!  I'm sure I'll be nervous in one way or another the whole time, but I'm hoping my mind will be at ease to know we made it to 12.5 weeks and all is well.  And, bonus, that's when all of this stops being a secret.  CAN'T WAIT.  We have a couple get togethers/parties coming up that are going to be very tricky to hide.  I can come up with excuses not to drink, but no hot tubs, no slip n slides, no water skiing/tubing and no drinking get a little obvious.

I'll do better on an 11 week photo this Friday.

-A

Slacker.

Wow.  I've totally been slacking with the blog the last few weeks!  I think regular life is starting to catch up with us, which is good, but I need to find a time to sit down and document it.  To be honest, this blog is a fun way to let others know what we're up to, but the real point is to journal all the fun things we do for ourselves.  I want to be able to look back and see all the fun things we've done and re-read the stories behind our photos.  But, in order to do that, I need to stay on top of writing these posts.

Now, let's play catch up.  Since our awesome salmon dinner we've been busy!  Adam invited us for delicious food and drinks for his sister's graduation party.  Georgia invited us to her birthday party, water balloon fight and all.  Trevor has been playing softball every Monday night and doing quite well.  He also just finished his first summer session class, enjoyed it for the most part-should be getting a good grade, too.  Trevor and Tyson went to the Air Show in Mankato-it was hot and windy, but they both thoroughly enjoyed it.  On Father's Day Trevor went golfing with his dad, my dad, Dustin and Carson.  Then I went to visit my Grandpa with my dad and we stopped at Minnehaha Falls and Sea Salt.  Last week I went to the Big Brothers Big Sisters summer picnic with my Little, Alea.  We had walking tacos (one of my favorites), did some crafts and played some games.  And, finally, this past weekend Trevor and I went to visit my aunt/uncle/cousins in Wisconsin.  They're a really fun bunch and well worth the four hour drive.  We went to the Henry Vilas Zoo then to their friend's house for an afternoon party.  We went to a local pizza place for supper then played the Would You Rather board game.  Rowdy got to have a fun, long weekend with Candace and friends at his doggie daycare, everyone wins!

Hopefully I didn't miss anything.  It's been a busy month!  Each of those things probably deserves its own post, some photos at least, but it was just time to get caught up.  As for post-deployment reintegration, we're both relived that, so far, things are going great!  After our big, scary post a few months back, I think it's safe to say we learned some valuable lessons last time.  It's been an adjustment, yes, but we've been doing really well communicating everything.  And, I must say, the hubs has really stepped it up.  I'm not blaming him for how things went last time, not one bit, but he's been pretty impressive working hard around the house and with school all while adjusting to real life again.  Life is good and we are blessed.  Our weekends aren't looking too bad this summer (at least not compared to the usual) so we hope to enjoy time together and with our loved ones.  More soon-I promise!

-A