3.27.2009

Supermom


She leaps cravings in a single bound, she can break through the hardest of mood swings, endowed with super-human productivity and resourcefulness, and that super-sexy alter ego (no details allowed without PA folks, sorry) K8 really does qualify as Supermom already. It hit me on the way home tonight, just how I lucky I am to have such a stellar lady in my life. And this post is all about celebrating that.

No matter how you slice it, the load isn't fair. She has to take on 100% of the physical stress of creating life, no small task at all. Not to mention the emotional load that comes with it. Is he moving enough? Is he moving too much? Am I eating right? Did I just break his collarbone with that sneeze? I would trade places with her in an instant if I could, just to give her some relief, but I know it doesn't work like that, and I probably would botch it if I did.

I can see why this can be a tumultuous time for fathers, especially today. I guess it used to be Dads just went of to work and took care of "man things" and left all the hard stuff to their wives. But now, if your wife is anything like mine, it can be downright intimidating just how capable she is. She still goes to work just like I do, and does more than her share of keeping the "family stuff" going, buying presents, keeping the budget, reminding me to shower... (only half joking there). So I guess the last thing that I would want is for her to ever for a second think that she isn't appreciated.

SO darling, thank you thank you thank you. Thank you for shouldering a load that is bringing the greatest joy of our life into being. Thank you for undergoing huge physical changes and the stress that comes along with it, so that we can be a family. I quite literally, couldn't do it without you. Thank you for doing it all with grace and humor. You are super and I love the pants of you!
-Jesse

3.25.2009

i'm out of order?!?! YOU'RE out of order!

...honestly, this whole courtroom's out of order...but thats beside the point. these are some pics that should have been posted before this blog even existed; so there was never any hope of them being in order. still fun to look at!

these are from maybe a week after we first found out we were pregnant. this was probably the 9th test we had taken, just had to be sure! naturally, jesse's immediate reaction was to fake smoke the pee-stick...what a goober. the really funny part is that he put the wrong end up to his mouth the first time. hahahaha.

expectant daddy of the year application photo

thats not where it goes. (4 weeks 3 days)

4 weeks 5 days...from the night we told my parents they were soon to be GRAND. my dad claims he "knew it." i am pretty sure they both totally thought it was just a birthday dinner for me and nothing more. we gave them the books "41 uses for Grandpa" and "42 uses for Grandma." If there was any doubt that grandmas are more useful than grandpas...there's the proof apparently. we will probably just let judah call them whatever he wants or whatever comes out, but we like the names "mom-o" for my mom and either "big daddy" (kind of funny considering my dad is crazy thin and fit now) or "bumpa" for my dad. we'll see if judah complies.

yummy birthday dinner. the first of many "i'm pregnant, i can eat this" rationalizations

EXTRA CREDIT: jesse has his own special blog now. he and two of his best buddies decided to commit to an hour a day of sharpening some of their favorite skills/pastimes, and jesse decided his would be songwriting. i was skeptical at first since he had never seriously expressed an interest in writing songs before, but he wanted to try his hand at actually writing some of his own in addition to singing all the other ones out there. well, he's made a believer and #1 fan out of me! i am truly proud of him. he has written a handful of songs so far and they have all been really good...and i am not just being a delusionally supportive wife here. i tell him where i think the crappy parts are too...but there really havent been many.

anyway, he is posting the songs and writing a little about the meaning of each song/lyrics and how he came up with each one on this blog. he also plans to put random thoughts and ideas he has on life and jesus and minsitry on there, so in case youre interested in any of that, you can check it out HERE

spottieottiedopalicious

since we are such spotty posters, i decided to go back and put up all the pictures we have taken in the past few months. sadly there arent a ton, hopefully we will be more camera-happy when judah is in front of the lens and not us.

this is from our end of 2nd trimester/valentines day date night. fogo de chao...total protein-bonanza. i regret not eating more. (24 weeks 5 days)

snow day! march 1st. i felt it was important to get judah as close to the snow as possible. but really it was just painful. danger kitty looks on from the warmth of the house. he would become arctic cat later that day.

34 degrees (26 weeks and 6 days)


a more conventional snow pic


this is proof of the hatred for the aforementioned "glucola" drink that i had to imbibe at my gestational diabetes screen test. sicko sick. (27 weeks 2 days)


my first ever special-lady parking spot. i have seen these everywhere all my life but have not had much luck finding them now that i finally qualify. on a side note...NO ONE has given us their seat for me when we are waiting for a table at a restaurant or something like that. all these able-bodied men just sit there and stare at my belly (please let it be my belly) while i stand next to them and their cushy seats. jerks!

we never actually went in the store that provided the parking spot. oops? (28 weeks 5 days)


registering at target. jesse is adorable as usual. (29 weeks)

trying to hoist my ever-snugger pants up to an appropriate level. this is the extent of my "weight-lifting" these days (29 weeks 2 days)

3.24.2009

lately

we have had the chance recently to do some fun things and hang out with some favorite peeps, and strangely enough, we remembered to take pictures. dont believe me? well i can prove it.

this is my supercool 94 year old grandpa, fred. doesnt he look amazing for 94?! he is sharp as a tack and i adore him. he took us out to bugaboo creek a few sundays back. love it! judah will be his 4th great-grandchild!

(28 weeks 6 days here...that is not all belly btw, that shirt is still huge on me and bags out in front. soon though, i will fill that sucker up!)


we also went over to the del angels for dinner a while back. tiff and jorge are some semi-new and fully-favorite couple friends (we pretty much had a couples-crush on them until they agreed to be regular double-daters with us last summer) they are the couple that kicked off the baby trend. seriously, they were the very first pregnant friends of ours, and now there are like 20 couples! what trendsetters. hopefully we will follow their example of freaking adorable kids too. this is madison rylee (born 1/27). when i was holding her, judah tried to flirt and was kicking madison in the belly. you might want to hold that thought, judah, i think she can take you right now! she is beyond cute and also the most expressive newborn ever. love her!

madison rylee del angel

we are self-centered jerks and just took their daughter for a pic and didnt even get one with the wonderful parents. i am sure i am going to love it when people start ignoring me and just paying attention to my baby! sorry, guys!

(28 weeks 3 days and no recent shower for k8 here)


this has nothing to do with the baby (i mean besides the fac that its the baby-daddy), it was just a rocking outfit that jesse wore to feed/play with our monster dogs. i call this look "summer-santa-chic" classic! judah will be able to take out all of his rough and tumble boyness on chopper and clifford one day since they are the gentlest of giants. i might fashion a saddle so judah can ride clifford into town for groceries and such.

walk it, red

clifford is undefeated in "tug;" you CANNOT get the stick from him. the carnage in the background is from us putting an old set of wooden drawers back in the pile for the firepit. the dogs mulchified that sucker down to sawdust in about 2 days and scattered the remains about the yard as a warning to other tresspassing furniture.

cliffy-1; daddy-0

I found this amazing site (wordle.net) on a friend's blog that you can go to and put in a blog address or just a random bunch of text and it takes it and makes a cool art thing based on the frequency of use of each word. you can play with fonts and orientations and everything. here is one i made for judah:

3.10.2009

coasting...

so we havent updated this in a while because there is nothing newsworthy really happening right now, and we feel a little boring...(aside from the whole miracle of life thing happening inside me, but its hard to paint that picture in a blog). but for the sake of not going a whole month without a post (thanks aunt jo) i will see what i can muster up.

we are now seeing our OBs every other week instead of once a month. we are rotating between all 4 doctors in the practice and after next week will have met every single one. we are trying not to have a favorite because that would mean having a not-so-favorite...which would pretty much guarantee having that OB on call the day we deliver if God's sense of humor stays consistent. they are all really nice and seem pretty open to our minimal-intervention birth plan (i mean why not? thats less work for them), but they all have very different personalities and ways of communicating. its fun and challenging to picture laboring under the supervision of each one and how the process might be different depending on who we "got."

i have gained 21 pounds total (putting me on track for 30-35 total...fine by me, just keep me away from the fifties!), blood pressure is 104/70, and judah is head down (hopefully for the duration) with a strong heartbeat. i am Sally McLow-Risk. boring for the doctors but great for us!

i had my 28 week glucose tolerance test screening for gestational diabetes last wednesday. it was yucky. i had to drink this huge bottle of nasty orange "glucola "in 5 minutes and then wait an hour and have blood taken to see how well my body metabolized it. if i failed that one i would have to come back and do it again: over a 3-hour period drinking a bottle every hour and having blood taken 4 times during that period (or something like that). no thanks! if i failed that one too, i would be branded gestationally diabetic. it was funny, i knew that i did not want to have GD but didnt really consider how bad it would suck until after i got to work after having my blood taken and waiting for the results. i looked up what all it would entail and got really freaked (especially considering i had eaten half of captain crunch's entire payload of crunchberries earlier that day). having GD can make the baby gain a lot of extra fat, making him much bigger than normal, making a natural vaginal birth less likely. dream-crusher! and then of course i would have to monitor my diet like crazy and maybe even do insulin shots. not quite how i imagined my ideal 3rd trimester. but anyway, the happy ending was that i passed so i dont have to deal with any of that.

here i am laughing in the face of any silly dietary restrictions on free pancake night at IHOP after birth class (26 weeks 1 day)

judah is moving like a little maniac, which has so far been 100% fun. he doesnt wake me up with his "moves" and jesse is able to feel them and see them most of the time now. jesse was actually talking through my stomach to him the other day and he was telling him that we cant wait to meet him and that we are sorry that we are going to cause him some pain right after that because of the circumcision and right after he said that judah gave him a violent kick to the face. it was pretty funny.

sleeping is getting kind of uncomfortable, but no real complaints yet. i will celebrate wildly the day that i get my full bladder capacity back. every bathroom break seems to yield the disappointing volume of an eye-dropper, no matter how sure i am that there is a quart in there busting to get out. additionally, its like there is a bladder waiting list, and as soon as i let out the stuff currently in there, the line just moves forward and immediately refills. we tried to go for a long walk around lake peachtree on saturday and about 15 minutes from the car (and nearest bathroom) i HAD to go. this ended with a shameful attempt behind a tree and wet pants. so classy. i have fantasies of a perma-catheter where i never have to get out of bed or worry about where the nearest toilet is when we are out in nature. sadly, judah is already closer to accomplishing this dream than i am. only boys received the blessing of god's natural catheter.


showing off my wicked tan (lord, give him jesse's pigmentation) at our awesome picnic last weekend at lake peachtree. my super-ladylike position will show you that the peeing my pants incident was already dried and in the past (27 weeks 5 days)


i have also started having braxton-hicks contractions which is way bizarre. one section of my belly will just all of a sudden get really hard...like as if i was flexing certain abs ("abs"...what are those?). at first i thought it was judah's back or something and he was balling up really hard towards one side, but we learned at birth class that those are the braxton-hicks practice contractions: painless, normal, and part of the process. its just weird having a muscle in my body flexing so hard without my permission. i bet its going to be even weirder when that flexing starts hurting like hell!

we are 6 1/2 months done and this is all becoming very real. i mean, we have always known that this little adventure would end with a real human baby, and i have been very aware all along that i am, in fact, pregnant. but that is very different from truly realizing that there is a tiny human living in me that would be an infant that could survive out here in the world if he came right now. mind job! i am starting to get scared about labor and nervous about being able to accomplish our "dream birth" (see below), but indulging those fears and playing them all the way out in my head usually still always ends with a vision of the moment we get to hold our tiny brand new son for the first time, regardless of what kind of birth and delivery it turned out to be, and that is a super emotional and amazingly positive mental image. so we are running towards that. holy cow, i cant wait to meet him.