Written by andrea on May 6th, 2009
I had the gestational diabetes test this morning and it looks like I’m in the clear!!!!!!!!!!!! I had them do both a finger stick and draw blood just so I wouldn’t have to wait until Friday for results. Thankfully, the midwife thought that was a good idea and my finger stick number was great so she doesn’t foresee much of a different story from the drawn blood work. Yeah!
Aside from that baby is doing great. My blood pressure is still perfect. And all is good! Again, another YEAH!! I start going to the midwife every 2 weeks now until 36 weeks when I start going once a week until I deliver.
Well, it is an absolutely perfect day outside so I’m going to go sit on the porch with an ice tea for a few minutes before I get busy doing some more household stuff.
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Written by andrea on May 5th, 2009
This afternoon I’ve been taking some of the new baby clothes out of its packaging and getting it ready for laundering. Everything is just so cute.
Now that the baby room is painted and we’ve converted a big chunk of the room into the baby room, I’ve finally got places to put things. We still don’t have a dresser in which to put most things, but I have closet space and shelving space to use. I’ve got one whole shelf devoted to blankets. I’ve got maybe 8 receiving blankets, 5 normal blankets, 2 fitted crib sheets and some water-proof pads. So I’m feeling good about my blanket supply right now. I might want to acquire more crib sheets eventually though.
I’ve been having fun actually finally getting a chance to look closely at all the wonderful things folks have given our baby.
It is getting harder to move and breath because the baby is growing up into my rib cage and really pressing on vital organs. I can still bend over, but it has become this awkward semi-squat move so I don’t squish baby & myself.
Last night Dave heard the baby hiccuping. He said it sounded like a drum inside my belly. And he got to feel a few more kicks and watch my belly poking outward randomly with baby movements. That was pretty awesome.
Tomorrow is my glucose test day to determine if it looks like I’ve developed gestational diabetes. I need to make a little list of things to ask the midwife tomorrow. As we are getting further along, I’ve actually got more questions than I did at the beginning.
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Written by andrea on May 4th, 2009
My priority plan today…take a nap! I did not get a nap Friday-Sunday and I was so tired by like 6:30PM each of those days. So today, I’m back to taking my little one hour nap so I can be conscious for the evening.
Aside from my nap, I need to go to the grocery store & return horribly overdue library books. And around the house I need to do at least two loads of laundry, work in the baby room some more and clean the bathroom. So my day isn’t too crazy at all.
I might remove tags from some of the new baby clothes and wash them since Dave made closet space available. It will be nice to finally see what we have and think about what else we need. Obviously, getting the crib and dresser/changing table is a priority, but I’m also concerned that I might not have enough clothing yet for this little babe. A lot of stuff is just going to have to wait until the baby arrives and we know the gender.
For dinner tonight I think I’m going to transform some leftover KFC chicken into quesadillas. I’ll just shred the chicken, place it on a tortilla, add cheese, salsa, jalapenos, sour cream and grill until warmed through. I’ll probably serve that with a small side salad. Should be pretty yummy.
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Written by andrea on May 4th, 2009
Saturday morning my brother-in-law and sister-in-law came over and painted the baby’s room with Dave. I hung out with my niece and nephew playing tag, card games and eating lunch. The transformation in the baby room is awesome! That horrid mustard yellow color is all gone! Now it is this very pale green color, very pretty. And they did a great job painting too!
Now the big part of the baby room transformation is converting the room from an office where we stashed a whole lot of stuff into an office/baby room. Saturday evening and most of Sunday we cleared out our desks and the big bookshelves of all our stuff. Then we each decided what we absolutely had to have access to on a regular basis, that stuff we kept in the office and the rest went to the attic. We still have some clean-up to tend too, but we made amazing headway. We opened up floor space for a crib, dresser/changing table, and a chair. One whole big shelf was also made available to house baby stuff. Dave even cleared out half of his closet for the baby’s hanging clothes.
I feel like we’re coming along toward getting ready for baby. My goal is to have the baby room settled by the middle-to-end of June. That way I’ve got whatever time left in July to not worry about organizing baby items, it will be all set.
Dave and I are both concerned about the two cats taking over any of the baby’s stuff. My sister-in-law gave me this great mosquito net like contraption for the crib which was made specifically to keep cats out, so I’m not worried about the crib. But everything else has thus far been fair game for especially Bailey to climb into for a nap. We had to hurry and fold up the stroller because the instant it came inside Bailey immediately climbed into the undercarriage basket for a nap. He also managed to crawl inside the little sling carrier thingy “Snugli” (I think is what it is called). Riley’s been less of a pest about sitting on everything, but if anything is left unattended I’m sure he’d be in it pretty quickly too. I’m just going to have to be really fast about putting things away and covering cozy looking areas off from them. It sure will be interesting with those two once the baby arrives.
Sunday my mother-in-law fell down. Nothing broken, but she got some pretty bad soft tissue ouchies on her thigh that are going to cause her some pain for a while. We went over to help them with whatever they needed and made sure they got dinner. Hopefully, she heals quickly and isn’t in too much pain for long.
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Written by andrea on April 30th, 2009
Last night Dave walks in the door, changed out of his work clothes and started taking care of all these household tasks that he could tell needed done. I’m not very good at all at telling someone I’m slowing down and can’t take care of everything anymore, not even my husband. He did like 4 loads of laundry and emptied all the trash containers in the entire house!
If I stand for too long my belly just gets tired and my back starts aching. And bending over makes me really winded. If the baby is moving and I’m walking at the same time, ARGH…my belly just feels so tired. So taking very frequent sit down breaks is my world now. I’m not complaining at all. It just is my reason for falling behind on my household chores. But thankfully, I am blessed with a great man who totally took care of the situation!! Pretty awesome!
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Written by andrea on April 30th, 2009
I taped all the paint cards up on the wall yesterday and “seaspray” won the baby room color contest. At least that means I don’t have to labor over putting up tape for stripes! Even in the morning light it wins. The color is very, very subtle and the only way you really notice there is a hint of green is if you put it next to something actually white. It should work really well no matter which gender kiddo we have.
Last evening Dave and I began working to consolidate our two desks into one here in the office/baby room. We’ll be sharing my mother’s old roll top desk. I’ve also got two big, tall wooden shelves that my father made back in maybe the late 70s. Dave & I will share one for our office & craft supplies and then the other one will be for baby supplies. We only have two closets in the whole house so storage space is at a premium here.
I wish I could describe how we’re dividing this room up into baby space and office space. My mom came up with the floor plan while she was visiting.
Curtains still need to be figured out and made too. This is the hottest room in the house during summer because the south sun just beams in here, even through the roller shades. Replacing the windows eventually will help, but in the meantime curtains with heft to them will also help considerably.
Oh, and last night I showed Dave the paint cards to get his input too. And sure enough he said of the paint cards that were sampling my idea of two shades of pale stripes that he couldn’t see a difference. I laughed and then proceeded to show him what I’d written here on the blog yesterday about how he’d say exactly that phrase. Impressively, he was able to pick “Seaspray” from amongst the four other paint cards though.
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Written by andrea on April 29th, 2009
A few weeks into the third trimester and everything is still going wonderfully. Baby is active and my belly stills seems to grow daily.
I have to laugh at TV shows that have the third trimester pregnant gal eating hordes of food because, with me, there is just no room in there for an enormous meal and a kicking baby. The other day this show had a pregnant woman say, “stop me if I order three entrees”. Yeah, right! I’ve discovered that eating like 6 tiny servings of different things throughout the day is about all I can muster without feeling overwhelmingly full and borderline sick.
Bending over for any length of time is harder now, but no big deal. Sitting hunched is out of the question or I can’t breathe, but again no big deal. And I’m not having any problems sleeping yet.
So I’m relishing in this time before my belly is just enormous and it is really nasty hot outside.
I’ve got my next appointment with the midwife on May 6th, which is also the date for my glucose test to make sure I haven’t developed gestational diabetes. I’m keeping a positive attitude and praying like crazy everything is okay in that department.
God willing, only 10-13 weeks left to go and we’ll have a wonderful baby to hold in our arms. I’m getting more and more excited to meet this little person. Not knowing the gender is really interesting. Everyone I’ve known recently finds out the gender so you know for a long time ahead of time at least what gender to expect. We’re getting the full surprise. And I really don’t have any internal maternal instinct pushing me one way or another.
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Written by andrea on April 29th, 2009
I have a severe case of undecidedness in regards to the paint color for the baby’s room. At least until we have more than one child, the baby room will double as an office, so I can’t be silly about picking some colors I might have otherwise chosen.
I was planning to do big stripes of two shades of off white/beige like colors. Then standing there in front of all those paint cards at the hardware store got me thinking about other options. So I ended up coming home with maybe 20 paint cards.
I’m actually considering a color called Seaspray which hints toward the green family. It is VERY pale, but is also relaxing. Initially trying to think through pairing a green tinted paint with pinks, if we have a girl seemed off, but now I’m kind of coming around to the idea. I know I’ve seen shades of green successfully matched with shades of pinks. And blues if we have a boy would not be a problem at all.
Stripes are kind of a pain to paint so this new idea might actually save us some time & effort.
If we were to do the stripes, I found two cards next to each other called Puffball and Mission. Who could resist a color called Puffball for a baby room? They are just two very similar shades of very pale tan. But Seaspray might win the day. I still have to show them to Dave; who will of course ask if there is actually a difference between Puffball & Mission and will offer no real opinion in regards to the Seaspray color. But I’ll have involved him in the process.
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Written by andrea on April 23rd, 2009
My mom sent me this list of everyone’s gifts from the baby shower we had back in IL over Easter. All the gifts got mixed up trying to pile everything into the car for the trip back here. I have the list now, on pretty paper so I can put it in the baby’s scrapbook too, and can begin working on thank you notes. We really got some awesome gifts from people. I’m tremendously blessed with lots of loving aunts, great aunts, cousins, sisters-in-laws and friends who might as well be sisters.
And my mom has already made some beautifully sewn items for the baby such as bibs, receiving blankets & a few clothing items. Not to mention the baby equipment my parents have already purchased. I think the baby “travel system” (car seat & stroller) they bought has got to be the absolute “Cadillac” of traveling systems. Those things have every bell & whistle I could have imagined.
So this evening I might work on that project so that we can buy stamps and pop them off in the mail tomorrow.
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Written by andrea on April 23rd, 2009
I had 10 places on my list of places to go today and made it to 8. I missed Bible Study and didn’t drop off my already late library books. But I made it to Walgreens, CVS, the butcher, Shop n Shop (grocery store), Big Y (another grocery store), Target, Family Dollar and lunch with my dear hubbie. I had this long list of stuff I needed so I scoured the ads and found everything we needed, but it just required some running. Thankfully, everything was kind of centrally located so the gas expense of hitting up 8 different places wasn’t too bad.
You know what really burns me is fine print in advertising. Today there was a sale on cat litter at one of the above listed places…a really good sale. And it said that if I purchased cat littler I could earn a $5 gift card too. Well, AFTER I was completely rung up at the cashier, I asked about the card and found out you have to buy TWO boxes of cat litter at one time in order to qualify for the $5 gift card. Good grief, did they really have to put that in fine print? I totally would have purchased 2 boxes. The deal was good and who doesn’t like getting free money to spend. So instead of the sign saying in big print that you can get $5 gift card if you buy this $11 35lb box of name brand cat litter, why couldn’t it have said earn a $5 gift card if you purchase 2 boxes for $22? Easy peasy…but NO they have to put the detail in fine print. GRRR! I was too tired to return the box I had, go get 2 more boxes and go through the line again so the fine print won.
I’m working on a “price book” for myself. I’m tracking the unit price of items we commonly purchase so that I can tell if a sale is actually good or if I’m just being suckered. For example, today I purchased a big bottle of Pantene shampoo and a conditioner for $5.49 each and had a $3 coupon. I’ll work out the cost per ounce so that from now on I can figure out if a Pantene sale is good or not using the price I got on it this time. I’m just doing this with commonly purchased items for our household. It will be interesting if I can eventually track sale cycles and know when to stock up on items. I’m not overly anal-retentive or anything, I just sometimes really wonder if certain sales like “buy one get one” are legitimately a good deal or an advertising scam.
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