Baby Shower

On Sunday my sweet friends threw Cooper and me a beautiful and special baby shower. All last week I counted down the days until Sunday, and waking up Sunday morning felt like Christmas! There is something really special about having so many of the people you love in one area to celebrate with you. Not very long ago, I truly didn't think baby showers would ever be something I experienced in my honor. In a strange way, that made Sunday all the more special.

Donielle was sweet enough to have the shower at her house. Everything was so clean and beautiful!

The wonderful hostesses (and me)

Donielle, Anne Marie, Lauren, Melissa, Maleah, Jennifer

My mother-in-law, me, and Cooper's "Aunt Resa" (Teresa)

My mom and me

Ingram, Gigi, and my cousin, Stephanie

(Ingram was in my class a couple years ago, and since the first time I met her family, I have loved each of them!)

My Cousins and Me-Stephanie, me, Hannah, and Olivia

Anne Marie, Donielle, Carlee

My fellow kindergarten teacher friends-Heather, Jesse, Denise, and Me

Emily, Leslie, Anne Marie

The Food-My favorite part of any social gathering is the food...you all know my passion for eating...but the food on Sunday was really exceptional. We had a fruit trifle, chicken salad sandwiches, cheese straws, cinnamon pita chips with a fruit salsa, ham and cheese pinwheels, and corn muffins. I thought the diaper cake Jennifer made was so precious, and as an added perk, there is a bottle of champagne in the middle holding the whole thing together. I'm sure Karl and I will greatly enjoy that bottle while Cooper enjoys his own different kind of bottle!

The cheese straws were shaped in C's for 'Cooper', and there was a big blueberry C on top of the fruit trifle. So clever!

Gift Time-Cooper got some really great things! Jennifer did a great job taking pictures of me opening gifts, but my facial expressions in a lot of the pictures were too embarrassing to post! Here are just a few when I didn't look crazy!

The hostesses went in together and got his swing, jumping thing you hang from the door, and a bag of baby necessities.

Sweet little monogrammed blanket

Little Man is ready for game day!

Precious monogrammed elephant

I thought this was such a good idea. Along with a gift, everyone brought a book so that Cooper has his own little library now. This kindergarten teacher believes you can never start too early with literacy!

Yummy cookie favors with a C sticker on them

Thank you so much to everyone who came! It was so fun to celebrate and catch up with everyone!

Karl and I are very blessed to have such wonderful friends and family. I know people throw that sentence around often, but it could not be more true for us. God has blessed us with many wonderful, exceptional, loving people. The same people who surrounded us in prayer, comfort, and encouragement through our infertility journey have also surrounded us in celebration and joy these past 6 months. It warms my heart constantly to feel other people's excitement and happiness over this baby. We are blessed.

Donuts, Cake, Cookies, Pie, Etc.

Those are examples of the foods I'm not supposed to eat anymore. It's funny how much you want things when you find out you can't have them! I failed my glucose tolerance test today after griping all morning long to Karl about how silly it was that I was having to take this test because I was sure I didn't have gestational diabetes and asking a pregnant woman to not eat anything after midnight until at least 11:00 in the morning was a form of torture. My mood was lovely! However, I did get a little chipper when the nurse said if you pass the first 3 tests, then you could leave and not do the last one. I passed the first two, and even said to Karl before the third one that "it was in the bag". Well, my level on the third was the exact number that it was supposed to be less than. The nurse said maybe the doctor would still let me go though. No such luck. My fourth test wasn't close to passing, so then we had to wait to talk to the doctor about gestational diabetes. I felt like a failure. Tomorrow morning I have a meeting scheduled with the diabetes person about my new diet; however I prefer to call it a "special eating plan" because I despise the word diet. ;)

This and That

Since it's been so long since my last post, I feel like I should offer excuses to make up for my laziness...I mean busyness. In my defense, Karl finished our upstairs room (I was fairly certain we were going to need counseling or a mediator to help us through the last month of this project :)), which is our new office, and I keep forgetting to bring the camera upstairs with me to post pictures. I figured without pictures, no one will read anymore, so I keep delaying my updates until I can triumph over the pregnancy brain and remember the stinkin' camera! To add to that, I'm just too lazy to walk back down and up the stairs once I remember I've forgotten the camera. Anyway, this post is just random stuff that's been going on lately. This might get long because I tend to get wordy!

Last Day of School-May 27th was the last day of school for the kids and the 28th was our last day. It was a bittersweet week for me. Karl and I packed up my classroom the weekend before, which felt unreal. I remember standing in that empty room 5 years ago and getting giddy over planning where everything would go and spending countless hours decorating and preparing. Then there I was that last day, looking around at the same 4 empty walls of a room that was no longer mine. It just felt weird. Actually, I did leave one thing on the wall, one thing that was too special to me to tear down. When I found out I was going to be teaching kindergarten, I wanted a coconut tree like the one from the children's book Chicka Chicka Boom Boom to go in my cubby/sink area. Due to my lack of any artistic ability, my dad came to the school one afternoon that first summer, and cut one out of butcher paper for me. We hot glued it to the wall, and it's been there ever since. That tree is just another example of my dad being there and helping me. I just didn't want to know what the room looked like without it.

My Chicka tree in the background

Furniture Frustrations-We were told when we bought Cooper's furniture that it would be here within 6-8 weeks. Imagine my excitement when they called after only 3 weeks and said the crib and dresser were here! Karl picked them up and called my dad to come help unload them. I was so excited seeing Karl pull up with those 2 boxes in his truck! As we waited for my dad to get to the house, we talked about how great it felt to see our baby's furniture, to know that was the dresser we would be spending the next 2 1/2 years changing diapers on, to finally have the crib we were going to watch our baby sleep in, oh the joy! Well, that is until we got the crib unloaded piece-by-piece and realized that it was not our crib. The store had written down the wrong stock number. They told us the correct crib will be here within 6-8 weeks... I'm just hoping it'll only take 3 like the other one! As frustrated as I was by the mixup, it did work out to our advantage. Our crib was more expensive than the one they wrote down, but since that was their mistake, they're not charging us the difference in price. That made this penny-pincher very happy! :) Despite having the wrong crib, we put it together anyway as "practice" for when we get the right one.

Sadie was very involved in helping Karl. What you can't see in these pictures is her barking at each piece-the WHOLE time. She definitely thought this was a game for her!

Pregnancy Updates-Things are going very well. My cervix is starting to shorten again some, but it is still a good, safe length. Little Man is not so little and is still measuring well ahead of his due date. He is consistently measuring 8-9 days bigger than he is. His stomach is consistently measuring even bigger! In last week's ultrasound we could really see those chubby cheeks. I'm looking so forward to kissing and pinching them! :) I had my glucose test last Thursday, and I didn't pass. I was pretty embarrassed (I just don't like failing things). Then I almost passed out on the ultrasound table, which left me even more embarrassed. I get another try at the glucose test this coming Thursday. I'm not very interested in being on the gestational diabetes diet, so my fingers are crossed that I pass!

My favorite thing in the whole world-Each time I feel this baby move and kick my heart fills with a joy that I've never felt before. His active time is between 8:30-9:30 at night, and I look so forward to it each day. Little Man also gets very active any time I drink juice. I ate a donut this afternoon, and those feet starting kicking. Apparently he likes sugar! (Note to self-I might want to skip these sugar rushes until after my gestational diabetes test this week.) Sometimes I can rub where I think his feet are, and he'll kick back for me. Karl and I like to sometimes just watch my belly move in weird ways as the baby wiggles and turns and somersaults underneath. It's pretty special.

I know belly pictures were expected somewhere in this post, but I don't have any! I will try to get Karl to take one and get it posted some time this week. I still love my belly (and the boobs) and enjoy looking at it in the mirror in the mornings to see if it looks bigger!

Graduation Day #2

Graduation Day #1 was graduating from our fertility specialist back in January, and Graduation #2 was graduating from the high risk doctor today. Yes, that's right, we graduated! We have been with a high risk doctor because of my uterus being T-shaped, which greatly increased my chances for having Little Man too early. Dr. G. said he would monitor me up until I was 24 weeks, and then after that we would be out of the scariest part of the pregnancy, and he would leave me with just my ob. Even though I'm not 24 weeks, I still got to graduate today since my cervix has been so wonderfully cooperative lately. Our biggest scare came at 17 weeks when my cervix only measured 2.7 cm. After that, my measurements began to grow as my uterus grew and stretched upward, thus taking the pressure off my cervix. Today I measured over 4 cm, which is really great! Dr. G. said he didn't want to see us again until we were bringing the baby by to meet everyone at the office. :)

I asked the nurse if we could also look at Little Man since I hadn't felt him kick as much in the past week. I was thinking that he had possibly turned himself upside down and had his feet down now. Little Man is apparently trying to work on his flexibility and has positioned himself quite uniquely within my womb. He is head down and legs down too. Which leaves his little bottom facing upward. We couldn't help but laugh when we saw him because it was such an odd position. However, he seems perfectly content to hang out like that right now and was just sucking and chewing on his thumb. He would suck on his thumb for a little bit, take it out of his mouth, chew on it, and then resume to sucking. It was really cute!

Here is a belly shot from today (23 weeks, 2 days). I look awful, but I knew if I posted today without a picture, I might get in trouble with some people!

Working on Cooper's Room

Although I don't have pictures, we are hard at work on Little Man's room. We bought the bedding very early on, and then I suffered a decorator's block (like a writer's block). I'm not a very good decorator anyway, and I'm even worse at spending money. However, Little Man needs his own room, so after a lot of thought, I finally figured out how I wanted his room to look. I bought curtains and a rug the other day, and today was furniture shopping day. Karl and I got up fairly early for a Saturday, got dressed, went to Cracker Barrel for breakfast, and then to the furniture store. I felt like Goldilocks in there. The first crib we looked at was the one I had picked out online and loved but wasn't so much in love with the price; the second one was the one Karl had picked out in the options I showed him online, but it definitely didn't look as good in person; the third one was perfect. I was a little nervous because it was also the only one that didn't have a price tag on it; however, it turned out it was the cheapest of the three and it was 10% off today! As for the glider, the first one was too hard; the second one was too uncomfortable; but the third one was just right! We had a great time, and it was just so exciting picking out furniture for our baby. It was a day that I have dreamed about for a long time!

p.s. Belly bump pictures coming soon...hopefully tomorrow...prepare to be amazed at the growth!

One more afterthought for anyone who may be interested...The Real Housewives of New Jersey, Season 2 starts Monday. As you may recall from last summer, I LOVE this show! :)

National Infertility Awareness Week

Today is the last day of National Infertility Awareness Week. I know it might seem odd to still blog about infertility, but I know that God brought us to and through that broken path for a reason. I hate to put the feelings and lessons I learned behind me and close that door on a time that had such a huge impact on me. In the first weeks after I found out I was pregnant, I didn't think it was okay for me to still feel the "sting" of infertility or to write about it anymore. However, I keep stumbling across more and more blogs of other girls who went through the fight, are mothers now, and still feel the hurt and pain of that tough time. This blog did start as an infertility blog, and I often pray that someone will stumble upon it and find comfort and hope in our story.

Speaking of stumbling upon things, I stumbled upon this video...

What If: A Portrait of Infertility

There are so many "what ifs" in infertility, and I know everyone who's gone through it has been plagued by the same ones. It is hard to imagine how things can work out in those dark days, but imagine it anyway. Let the last "what if" that goes through your mind be "What if this all turns out better than I ever imagined it could?" And you never know, it just might.

Loving this baby

We had an appointment today with my high risk doctor to look at my cervical length, but the sweet ultrasound lady did an ultrasound on my stomach first so we could see what Cooper was up to this morning. Last time we went for a cervical check, they only looked at my cervix, so this was a nice surprise. With each ultrasound I am more in awe of this little baby. The things he does, the way he moves, the rate at which he's growing all just melt my heart! Today my favorite part was seeing him yawn. I didn't know he could do that! As he yawned, we could see his little tongue moving in his mouth. We also saw that Cooper has chubby cheeks today, which he definitely gets from me, but it looks like he has Karl's mouth. It will be so neat to see who this baby looks like.

My cervical length was good. The only way to get a true measurement on cervical length is with a vaginal ultrasound, so I knew the measurement from last week at the ob's office was not truly accurate since it was done during an abdominal ultrasound; however, it was nice to think that my cervix had grown! My measurement today was the exact same as it was 3 weeks ago, which is good. There wasn't any shortening or funneling, and that is definitely a blessing. I hope it stays that way too! Dr. G. said once I hit 24 weeks, he probably won't measure anymore since the baby can survive if born after that point. My goal is to make it to at least 36 weeks, and I can't even tell you how excited I would be if I was still pregnant after my due date!