rainy day

it's been such a dark, rainy day today. days like this, all i want to do is stay in bed and nap and read and watch silly shows on netflix. (ha, i wish!)

no, instead i was woken quite early and quite unpleasantly by a very bad smell. my daughter had woken up with a very upset stomach and her bedding and pajamas were in the kind of state that had me starting the day out gagging. an early morning bath for olive and a load of laundry later, we finally made it down to eat some breakfast. not that either of us had much of an appetite by that point to eat much.

it was a surprisingly productive rainy day. i decided to wash my bed sheets as well, and cleaned and vacuumed all morning. it feels good to have everything smelling and looking nice. maybe "nesting" is setting in already?

i even let olive play with play doh all morning (under closer scrutiny and supervision,) and organized some preschool curriculem i've been meaning to sort out and look at for months. hopefully we'll have the motivation and energy to start on some late this spring after the excitement of baby silas coming wears off a bit.

i've been trying to spend olive's nap time off my feet, either napping or doing something quiet because it helps so much in the evenings with the heavy braxton hicks contractions and swelling in my hands and feet if i have those couple of hours of rest. but today i really wanted chocolate chip cookies, so i spent my afternoon doing that. i'll try to convince myself they were worth it when i can't sleep tonight (and when my midwife disapprovingly informs me i've gained 10 lbs since my last visit.)

i've obviously felt very uninspired lately. i miss working on blogging, taking pictures, and being creative, but i have no energy or motivation to do any of it. thank God for my iPhone, which makes taking pictures and keeping in touch with friends and family so darned easy, or i'd have nothing to remember this pregnancy or the events of the last 7 months by. i'm hoping and praying that after silas gets settled in, i'll find my old self again.

until then, we're still here, getting rather impatient for a special little boy to arrive and shake things up. xox

thoughts

we're well into february - hard to believe! can't believe baby boy will be here possibly next month! 


some friends from church threw me and the boy a sweet little shower. it was a lovely evening of fellowship, homemade gluten free treats, and some sweet presents. (it's still so strange receiving boy items. i guess we'll get used to it soon!)


i know it's not a common occurence, but i've been enjoying my third trimester so much more than the first and second combined. i've felt relaxed, i've been enjoying feeling the baby move, and i am even quite fond of my giant belly. i feel lucky that i've gained very little weight this pregnancy (all credit must go to the long period of horrible morning sickness and the stress of having matt in the hospital in december. i eat way more sugar these days than is good for me,) and i can tell that it's made a difference in how i feel this third trimester in comparison to my third trimester with olive, where every step and movement seemed to hurt. i'm grateful to still be fairly active, flexible, and comfortable. i have even been sleeping pretty well, and as long as i'm careful not to eat anything too late in the evening, have had very little heartburn. God is good.


that being said, i am really looking forward to getting the delivery and readjusting to a newborn over with. i'm anxious to get re-settled so i can get our lives organized and orderly again and get back to doing the things i love to do, (blogging, photography, day trips, projects with olive, etc.) things have been just too distracting lately to do much with olive out of the house, and i'm not counting on them getting any less distracting until this baby gets here.


speaking of olive, she's been giving us some worry lately. last monday she woke up covered in hives, and they're still plaguing her a full week later. she's been to three different doctors, and is taking way too much medicine for my comfort, but i'm at my wits end to keep the hives at bay. she's been so miserable. i don't think i hate anything quite so much as seeing my family sick. it makes me feel very helpless. it was bad seeing matt go through surgery and recovery in december, but funny enough, it's 10 times WORSE seeing olive go through these hives, which aren't life threatening. she goes back to the doctor tomorrow, and i am hoping he will give us some good information as to what our course of action will be. 


i've hardly been on the computer at all the last few weeks, because i've gotten completely absorbed in Suzanne Collins' books, "The Hunger Games." it's easy, silly young adult fiction, but very addicting and i've been enjoying getting absorbed in reading again. i used to read all the time, but since olive was born i can probably count the number of books i've read on one hand. it's pretty bad.


i'm also hooked on "Downton Abbey." i had started it when it first came out a long time ago, and stopped watching halfway through the first episode. (the gay scene turned me off, and i lost interest.) since then, though, several good friends have encouraged us to pick it up again, promising the series gets much better, and i'm glad i took their recommendation. it's a really well done, very absorbing series. looking forward to watching the latest episode on PBS's website tomorrow night!

silas benjamin

[27 week ultrasound]

we decided about halfway through my pregnancy with my daughter that her name was going to be "olive evangeline" (much to the shock of many friends and family members who i'm sure thought we were nuts!)  i was so in love with olive's name, there just wasn't any hesitancy or second thoughts after we put it together.

this time around, no such easy experience. boys names are hard! matt and i had a much harder time finding names we BOTH liked for this boy than we ever did for olive. and the list of names we could agree on was very small compared to the list of girls names we adore.

we read the list of names we agreed on to olive to get her valuable 2 year old's perspective. it was important to us that she like the baby's name, and could pronounce it fairly easily. she immediately liked "silas." and she's called my baby bump that ever since, and will tell anyone who asks about her baby brother that his name IS "baby silas." i've held back announcing that "silas" is definitely this baby's name, because i haven't had that romantic, "i know this is the one" feeling about the name like i did with olive's, but somehow over the last few months he's just grown into his name and we all call him by name now.

luckily the middle name was a piece of cake. because silas is the first boy grandchild to be born with my husband's family's last name, we wanted to give him matt's dad's name. i think silas and benjamin go together very sweetly.

soon

almost 30 weeks over here. other than having a weird case of food poisoning last week that knocked me off my feet for a few days, i've been feeling extremely well. sleeping well, not too sore, and enough energy still to go for long walks and do some organizational work around the house to get ready for this little boy's arrival.

it's coming up so fast, that i freak myself out thinking about it too much, because thinking about what's happening so soon in great detail makes me feel extremely unprepared and more than a little frightened. maybe it's a blessing to be too busy to think too much about it right now. when i was pregnant with olive i had ample time to overthink everything, and STILL all my carefully made plans got thrown to the wayside, and nothing turned out the way i imagined it would.

i'm trying to just roll with the punches this time. no labor and delivery plans, other than getting baby boy here safely and healthily. and no expectations as to what our new little man is going to be like. it was a huge shock to me realizing that newborn olive was just by nature a rather cranky, un-cuddly little person and not the snuggly, content newborn i had been expecting. so this time around - NO expectations. i'm looking forward to learning all about this guy's own individual little personality and attitude after he's born.

some obligatory maternity pictures

some people are so great (and photogenic) that they document each week of their pregnancy through maternity pictures. i applaud their high levels of motivation and self-confidence.

with my pregnancy with olive, i had one...just one...picture of my baby belly taken. i allowed my sister to take it, with much protestation from me, when i was about a week past my due date. as swollen, puffy, and huge as i was at that point, (i don't think it's possible to feel more ugly and unhuman than when you're a week overdue...) i love that picture now, and i feel sad that i don't have any other pictures from that pregnancy.

this pregnancy i've tried to take more pictures. they've all been been taken with my phone, so they're not great, but i'm glad i'll be able to look back at something and remember what it was like carrying my littlest man. :)

[most recent pictures, at 26 weeks.]

i'm still alive. just barely.

i've been feeling pretty horrible lately. i've had no desire to blog. but i want my sisters to keep blogging so i can snoop on their lives, and one of my sisters told me if i wanted her to keep blogging that i should update mine once in a while. (touche.) so here i be.

my brain feels like scrambled eggs so i'll just throw out some [very] random [but true] tidbits:

1. this 13 week old baby is a cunning little saboteur. while on one hand he takes great pleasure in making me sick to my stomach constantly, he won't give me the satisfaction of at least looking slimmer after all of my hurling. oh no. because he's managed to make me feel sick constantly and yet at the same time crave such horrible things as fried bologna sandwiches. i swear. fried bologna sandwiches with mustard are on my mind constantly. i want one before i throw up, and i want another one after i throw up. i'm sorry if this is making you as sick as it should make me, but i'm just keeping things honest here.

2. i love peppermint icebreakers icecubes gum. it is my favorite. it keeps the nausea at bay, especially when i'm in the car. and when i sent matt out to get some for me and he came back with a huge tub of trident white in spearmint instead i was convinced i was going to die. so today i went to target and bought three huge jumbo packs of my peppermint icebreakers icecubes gum. because more is more and more is better.

3. olive is lots of fun these days. she sings all day long, and sometimes into the night when she's supposed to be giving mama a break getting her beauty sleep. she loves drawing pictures, and is already drawing faces and fruit. she draws a really good apple. she knows all her letters, and what sounds they make. she can spell her name. and when we applaud her intelligence, she has started saying in a very serious voice "smart girl." which causes matt and i to just about die laughing. (she's also started pronouncing certain words in a british accent, just like her favorite characters on her favorite show, "kipper the dog." she insists on pronouncing "ok" like "oh-kaiiiiiii.")

4. today i bought my first pair of maternity jeans for the this pregnancy. of course they need to be hemmed, (grr...) which makes me wish grace were around so i could pay her to do them for me!

5. bologna is so disgusting.. why does it sound and taste so good while i'm pregnant? i'm so ashamed.

6. V-8 has become my new best friend. it tastes amazing with the tuna fish that the midwife says i shouldn't be eating. (tuna is another thing i think about all the time.)

and that's about all i can think of right now (other than bologna and tuna and peppermint gum, that is.) hope this is satisfactory, grace! ;)

i promise, it's only one baby.

only 10 weeks, and this belly's poppin'.

this does not bode well.

:\

meet small frey #4

matt and i were nervous wrecks as we went into the ultrasound room at the midwives' office this afternoon. (or at least, i was. my husband has nerves of steel. i have nerves of...what's the opposite of steel?)

we are SO thankful that the ultrasound immediately showed a rather healthy looking peanut of a baby, with a nice strong heartbeat. baby even obliged us with a little wiggle-dance, which was exciting!

we told olive "there's our baby! how would you like a baby of our own?" to which she replied "baby stinky."

we foresee many fun adjustments in the near future!

we're almost 9 weeks along, and our official due date is march 30th, 2012. (which means we might end up with two april fools babies!) :)

...

just a little update for interested family members...

my midwife appointment turned out to be pretty boring. they confirmed my pregnancy, and estimate i'm around 6-8 weeks. i have a more in depth appointment next week, and an ultrasound in exactly two weeks.

nausea and fatigue are reallllly hammering me this week - today's been especially tough. every time i'm tempted to complain, however, i try to remind myself that i'd really prefer to be miserable than have no symptoms, as those symptoms are at least reassuring that my body's working hard on something important. and i also try to remind myself that this won't last forever, (though at 6-8 weeks, it sure feels like it's going to be forever.) :)

thanks for your love and prayers!

so it begins.

it started in ohio, and seems to be getting worse each day.

luckily it gets better by late afternoon, and i start to feel like a normal human being around 6pm.

i'm taking it as a good sign. i never got sick with my two losses. 

midwife appointment in the morning.. hoping that i'll find out how far along we are!