Last post for 2008!

Back from Miami.  A lovely time was had by all.  The weather was astoundingly perfect.  80 degrees and sunny with a warm breeze during the day, dropping to a pleasing 74 at night.  Our internal season/time sensors were very confused by 74 degree temps and darkness at 6pm.  To us, if it’s that warm and dark out it must be fairly late in the evening and thus, time for bed. I could get used to it though, but bedtime at 9pm in South Beach is unheard of.

My blogroll had over 100 posts this morning, so out of deference to those of you who will be reading this from a similar vantage point, I’ll keep it short. 

• Today I am 6 months pregnant.  Running out of time!!
• Cupcake kicks and punches and rolls often.  Last night when we stopped at their house on the way home from the airport, Strawberry’s mother got to feel him and I think she was thrilled.  Cupcake says “Hi Bubbe!”
• My feet hurt a lot after walking around all day in Miami, but I did as well as could be expected. 
• Depending on what I wear, I can look not pregnant to the stranger’s eye.  Hence, I was taunted by restaurant hostesses announcing drink specials and questioned by waiters when I ordered decaf coffee.
• We are looking forward to 2009 and all of the success and excitement that it will bring, both to us and to all of you out there in blogland.  Happy New Year!

PS. Oh yeah, bikini pictures.  Here you go!

South Beach 12/28/08

Do you hear the ocean, Cupcake?

Merry December 24th

First of all, happy holiday of your choice! 

We celebrate Hanukkah here at chez Strawberry and Nutella.  We hosted a little party for our parents on Monday night.  6 people is the max we can host for a seated meal in our row house, and that’s only if someone sits on a leather storage cube, as we only own 5 chairs.  Latkes and mini chocolate souffles were a success, gift exchanges were a success.  But Cupcake was being shy.  For the last few weeks he has been quite active at predictable times of the day, such as after dinner.  We were looking forward to having the grandparents-to-be feel and see the kicking.  But despite our best efforts (including me laying flat on my back and poking the belly gently) he refused to “perform”.  Of course, about an hour after they left he was back to his old tricks.  Oh well, all in good time. 

We have noted that his movements have changed since the weekend.  Before, we felt things on either the right or left about 3 inches in from my hip bones.  Now however, we are feeling him VERY low (too low for company, actually) and in the middle.  We suspect that he’s managed to shift himself into a head up, feet down position.  Which is fine for now, but we certainly hope he decides that head down and feet up is far better sometime in the next 15 weeks!

Tomorrow we are off to sunny Miami for a few days (our last vacation before the arrival of Cupcake).  If they aren’t too embarrassing, there might be preggo bikini pictures when we get back.  Oh, and ya’ll better have some BFP’s and some birth announcements at that time, ok?

Slow but steady

18_to_22_weeks

Well, not much visible belly growth from 18 to 22 weeks. If you look closely, you can see the waistline getting less pronounced, and the belly sticking out further at 22 weeks than at 18 weeks in relation to the bust…the picture is cut off on the right the same in both, but the belly on the right is about to touch the edge. But yeah, hard to see a noticeable difference at this point.

Nutella and I were having a conversation the other night about the glucose test. One of the books we’re reading says if you don’t want to drink the orange drink, maybe you can try 18 large jelly beans or a large portion of apple juice. We’re guessing the OB will not let Nutella do such a thing, but we started pondering what else might do the trick and came up with:

• Half a liter of caffeine-free coke
• 25 pixie stix
• 5-10 pieces of maple candy
• 1/3 box of brown sugar (yum!)
• a small jar of honey
• 6-8 candy canes

Anything else you can think of? 🙂

22 weeks, time is flying

Things on my mind at 22 weeks:

• We have the most amazing kid room ever.  It’s huge and beautiful and Cupcake is going to LOVE it.  Hurray for my wonderful wife and mother outlaw for doing such a great job.  I can’t stop staring at it!
• Cupcake got his first taste of roasted artichoke (my favorite food) via me last night.  I made sure to close my eyes as I savored the heart while sending all of my happy food-induced brain chemicals his way.  Strawberry doesn’t like them and it would be nice to share my love of them someday.
• Babies pee and poop.  They need diapers.  We have ideas about what we’d like to try for that.  But we ought to start preparing for it.
• At some point Cupcake is going to have to get out of my body.  I REALLY need to start preparing for that.
• Cribs and furniture are expensive.  Need to get busy shopping for them now.
• The kicking is visible and feel-able on the outside.  Which is weird, and wonderful, and wacky.  And sometimes keeps me from sleeping.  We even balanced a comb on the belly and watched it bounce with the kicking.
• One week from tomorrow we will be on vacation in Florida.  And we will be wearing bikinis. 

 

Project Accomplished!

I took the day off today (it was a free day for me actually) to paint and put the border up in the nursery. My mom came to help and together, we completed a decoration makeover worthy of HGTV.

It’s not rocket science

So remember that a few weeks ago I snagged a high chair off of Freecycle?  It’s a Peg Perego Prima Pappa like the one pictured below.

The person I picked it up from handed it to me all collapsed/folded up for easier transport and storage.  There were no instructions.  When I got it home I fought with it for about 30 minutes to try and get it to unfold.  It’s got many little red levers and pedals and buttons but I could NOT get it to open.  I even downloaded a PDF of the instruction manual for the current model.  No go.

When Strawberry got home she fought with it for about 30 minutes as well, with no more success than myself.  Annoyed and angry, we gave up and shoved the thing to the side of the room and ignored its presence.

Several days later we happened to be at brunch with friends, one of whom is an engineer for NASA.  I complained about our failure with the high chair and he offered to come and give it a try.  I figured, not only is he essentially a rocket scientist, but he’s got 2 kids, so might have some practical hands-on experience to assist him.  Sure enough, he had the thing figured out within 5 minutes and showed us what he had done.  Confident that we now had a functional high chair, we again folded it up and put it aside.

Until the other night, when we were rearranging the furniture in that room. (No, I didn’t do any heavy lifting, thank you.)  We figured we’d give the high chair another run.  And we fought with it.  Seriously, it took both of us together to get the thing open and then closed again.  And let’s not even discuss the removable tray!  So now, we rather hate the thing.  It’s not supposed to be this hard!  I’m all for re-using things and getting baby gear for free, but we are THISCLOSE to abandoning the thing on the curb on trash day.

Whoever came up with pink and blue?

We went to a couple wallpaper stores this weekend, in search of a border for the nursery. The room is already minty green, and we want to put a frog-themed border up in the middle and paint the bottom part a watery blue. We were both pretty appalled at the gender separation applied to wallpaper, knowing this is really just the tip of the iceberg. There were books with boy sections and girl sections, and in the ones that didn’t separate them into sections, there were wallpapers broken out into the girl version, the boy version, and the I-don’t-know version. Ugh.

Anyway, we did both agree on a wonderful border, which was in fact, the girl version because of the softened color palette and thin purple edges. It happened to match our paint colors better and we couldn’t care less about which gender the wallpaper people think it applies to.

Our colors are:

cucumber crush

little pond

And the border in the middle is below, only with purple edges instead of gray:

I’m going to take a day off soon and do the painting and bordering, though we have a bit of cleaning to do before then.

In other news, shortly after Nutella started feeling movement, so did I! This weekend, I felt Cupcake tap my hand twice when it was on Nutella’s abdomen. When she feels stronger movements from within, she’ll let me know and I can usually feel him wriggling around in there. We were really surprised it happened so early and I love it 🙂

Wobble, wobble

BTW, that last post was #100 for the blog.  My how the posts do fly!

So, aside from the big sex reveal at the end of our sonogram, yesterday’s OB appointment was short and uneventful.  I’ve gained 12lbs since before pregnancy, which is just fine.  Though I will let you all in on the fact that 5 of those lbs climbed aboard in the last 10 days.  Thanksgiving anyone?  Other items of interest:

• I should be totally fine to travel by air over Christmas.  This is good, because we already have the plane tix and hotel.  It will be our last vacation before Cupcake’s arrival.   Miami, here we come!
• At this point, there is no reason to believe that I will be unable to have a vaginal delivery.  This was a concern because my mother was told very early on that her pelvis was too small to give birth, even to a 5lb baby.  The OB assured us that she’d already done an internal exam and that my pelvis was a totally acceptable shape and size.
• We got a few more details of what to expect with the RhoGam shot.  They will give me a referral and I will have to go to the hospital to get it. Boo.
• We mentioned our tentative plan of delivering at the birth center located at a neighboring hospital.  The OB joked that we were breaking up with her and we assured her that we are thrilled with the care we have been receiving, but that a hospital birth isn’t our 1st choice.  After assuring her that the birth center is located adjacent to the hospital (only a short wheelchair ride away) she gave her approval.  She did try to convince us that the hospital where she delivers would be able to accommodate most of our labor desires, but my biggest issue is the IV or Hep-loc, which they really won’t forgo.  We told her that we plan to stay with her until after my 28 week screenings and tests.  They have no problem transferring records to ensure continuity of care.

The biggest news is that as of this week I am feeling Cupcake move, which was a big relief to Strawberry before our ultrasound.  The best way that I can describe the feeling is the wobble of a Jell-o mold deep inside my uterus.  These jiggle jiggle feelings are getting stronger each day.  I’m now looking forward to the day when Strawberry can feel them, too.

Well, well, well…

Our appointment today went very well…uneventful which is an excellent thing…everything measuring as it should. But of course, that’s not all you want to know, is it? Well, when it all comes down to it, let’s just say the best things to trust are your grandmother and the Online Magic 8 Ball…

Please say hello to our son!

More 4 day weekends, please

Our dog discovers the joy of her new “pillow”

As the date and time for our anatomy scan draws closer, our anxieties are on the upswing. 2.5 days and counting.