Every woman with child should live in Blanding...

Some of you might think this is a bold claim, but wait until you hear my reasoning: I am just over 15 weeks along and I have had THREE ultrasounds! That's right, best doctor ever! He told us at our first appointment that he really likes to do a lot of ultrasounds so we should just plan on that - I say FINE BY ME! I have only had two appointments, but I had an extra ultrasound to double check the measurements of the baby last week. Also, I'd be willing to bet a lot of money that my appointments are costing A LOT less than all you pregnant city girls' appointments. I'm just saying... Ultrasounds. Are. Awesome.

updates Updates UPDATES!

Ok, so now I have no excuses left. I’m finally pregnant! Here come the blog posts. This first pregnancy post may be really long and boring for most, but I want to document my pregnancy for posterity’s sake so I’ve got to get caught up on the last three months.



So I thought I was 13 weeks along and due July 20th, but I had an ultrasound today and the baby was measuring over 14 weeks so the doctor moved up my due date to July 11th - woot woot! I really hope this doesn't just mean I'm growing a monster baby...I don't want to birth a 12 pounder.
I was actually pregnant when I wrote my last post, but I didn’t know it yet. We found out the next week. Most of you know this, but we had tried to get pregnant for a couple of years and were starting to get quite frustrated and worried. We had started the process of seeing doctors to see if anything might be wrong with one or both of us. The first weekend in November we went to SLC for Taylor to have some tests done at the University Hospital. We found out about three days later that I was pregnant. Needless to say, when we got the results from his tests a month later and everything looked fine we were relieved, but not super surprised. I thought about taking a pregnancy test the day before his tests, but I figured it was probably a week too early and wouldn’t show up as positive yet even if I was pregnant. I had started having pretty constant heartburn (I always call it heartburn, but it’s actually acid reflux I think) and a little nagging voice at the back of my head kept saying it might be because of a bambino in my belly; but I kept brushing it off because I’d been disappointed a lot in the last two years. When the heartburn didn’t go away and my stomach started getting a little upset too I decided to take a test. It was positive! So I took another one...and it was positive too! I literally couldn’t believe it; I showed the tests to Taylor and obviously he was so super excited. It seemed so unreal at first that it wasn’t very hard to not tell people; also I was so so scared of miscarriage. I was kind of a paranoid mess for the first few weeks. (Disclaimer: Not that it really matters, but the following time-frames are based on how far along I thought I was before the doctor moved me up). The real nausea started to set in around week 5 and it pretty much set up camp for a nice stay. During weeks 5-12 I would wake up feeling pretty good with only minimal nausea, but throughout the day it got worse and worse. By the time I got home from work most nights I was pretty much useless. I just laid around a lot and went to bed way early. People keep asking me if I’ve been overly tired, as that’s a super common pregnancy symptom in the first trimester. As I’ve said in this blog before, I’m an unnaturally tired person always. I didn’t notice any extra fatigue until I got a cold around week 8. Colds always knock me out and this one was no different. This cold didn’t want to go away and it pretty much stuck around for about a month. So my extra tiredness during that month was probably a combination of cold and pregnancy. All I know is that I would pretty much go to bed by 8:00 most nights and I didn’t feel one bit bad about it.
Luckily before I got pregnant I was in the habit of running/working out in the mornings so I have just kept that up. As far as working out is concerned it has worked out well for me that the mornings are when I feel best. My nausea seemed to get stronger and stronger as the weeks passed, so I was getting a little worried that it might never go away. I kept hoping that 12 weeks would be the magical time of relief. The days leading up to the 12 week mark were the worst I’d felt the whole time - I was pretty miserable. Well last week I hit 12 weeks (actually 13 it turns out) and luckily my nausea has gone WAY down. It’s still the most subtle in the mornings and increases throughout the day, but it is soooo much more bearable than before. I never have much of an appetite, but if I don’t snack pretty constantly I get really sick. So I’ve been eating LOTS of crackers, dried fruit and jolly ranchers. I have had zero cravings. For the most part the same foods still taste good to me, even though they never sound good when I think about them before eating. The one exception to my unchanged food tastes is chocolate! Pretty much as soon as I found out I was pregnant I started having the weird weird symptom of a very strong aversion to chocolate. I haven’t had chocolate in over two months and I just keep hoping I’ll be able to eat it again someday. It makes me sick to think about it, to look at it and don’t even get me started on the smell! Ugh. Sweets in general pretty much never sound good to me anymore, but nothing makes me sick like chocolate. Those of you that know me well know that I am huge sweets/junk food person normally. I LOVE to make sweets and I LOVE to eat them even more...well I used to - I hope it comes back. I also have a really hard time with smells, as I think is common for most pregnant women. It doesn’t matter what kind of smell it is, if I can smell it, it’s probably gonna make me sick. Perfume is one of the worst offenders. Candles, air fresheners, food, smoke, grease, dogs...all bad news.
Taylor has been so great through the first trimester. He’s been sensitive and patient when I needed it most. He’s dealt with my mood swings like a champ! He gives me good back massages and he doesn’t use cologne on the days when I’m gonna be around him during the day :). At the beginning we both felt like the baby was going to be a boy. My feelings changed quickly to a girl. I could not care less what we have, except that I can’t think of any boy names that I would actually consider using. Maybe that’s why I feel like it’s a girl... If anyone has good suggestions for names let me know. I’m real picky apparently.
The best news of the last couple of weeks is that I have given my notice at my job and starting on January 26th I am going to just do medical coding from home! Scary and exciting! I feel really good about it and I am so happy and grateful for the chance to stay home with the baby. We’ll still have insurance through Taylor’s job, so it worked out pretty perfectly. This year has already started out pretty much as great as possible, but if we could sell our stupid house in Sandy everything would literally be perfect. I know - now I’m just getting greedy.
Wow, when I said this post would be long I didn’t know it would end up this long. Sorry if anyone is actually still reading at this point. Thanks for everyone’s prayers and positive thoughts. We are so happy and excited for this step in our lives and we’ll keep you posted (not so many details from now on...at least not all at once). Here’s hoping for a happy and healthy baby!

I AM A BAD BLOGGER

Yes, I know I am a bad blogger. I have an excuse though - I really have nothing going on in my life or in my mind that is exciting or interesting enough to blog about. If you have a problem with it then start praying for me to have a cute baby (or even a not-so-cute baby for that matter) and then I'll inundate the internet with posts about him/her to the point that you'll rue the day that you wished for me to have a baby. Until then, I'll probably remain more or less MIA in the blog world. However, I do still love to check all y'all's blogs, so keep 'em coming!

Deco

Ok so this is a little belated, but I wanted to give a little birthday shout out to Deco.
What to say about him...Deco is so incredibly unique. I'm certain that anybody who knows him would agree with me that he is completely his own person. He doesn't conform to others' opinions. He doesn't base decisions on what others think is cool - he just does what he thinks is best for him. Deco is an incredibly hard worker. When he played football in high school other players and coaches were constantly saying how he always gave 100%; even though he was not one of the big guys on the team he played as tough as the big guys. He still works that hard in life. At times in the past few years he has worked three jobs at a time (maybe more?). He works very hard to provide for his family and give them a good life. He is a very loving father and one of the most patient people I know.
Deco and I share a special bond. I think this is partly because of how close we are in age (one year and six days), and also because we served our missions at the same time, speaking the same language. We traveled to Brazil shortly after I got home and we had an awesome trip. He is really good about speaking Portuguese to me...I'm not so good about speaking it back to him. Because of him I haven't completely lost the language yet.
I hope he knows how awesome he is. Love ya D!


In this picture we're standing on the border of Brazil and Argentina and you can see Uruguay in the background...pretty cool.

I am a tired person...

So anybody who knows me very well knows that I require a pretty ridiculous amount of sleep in order to function in a normal way. I have always envied people who can consistently sleep four to six hours a night and still get things done. If I get less than six hours of sleep in a night then it takes me a good week of eight to nine hour nights to start feeling half decent again. I have learned from experience that I really need a consistent eight hours a night in order to think clearly, but even then I'm ALWAYS tired. I probably average about 7.5 hours of sleep on weeknights, which isn't ideal for me but I make it work; then on the weekends I need to sleep a ridiculous amount in order to store up a little bit for the coming week of work. My whole family (minus my mom) is notorious for being able to sleep anywhere anytime. It's not possible to live a productive life and to sleep as much as our bodies want us to sleep, so we have all come to accept the fact that we just have to be tired constantly. I have had to find the happy medium where I get enough sleep to be able to function properly, but not so much that I sleep away all the hours in the day to the point of having no time to get anything done. I have slept through more classes (especially in college) and work meetings than any respectable adult should in a lifetime. I am not even one little bit kidding when I say that I think I might have a slight case of narcolepsy or something similar. It often gets to a point where I have absolutely no control over falling asleep, regardless of the amount of caffeine or anything else that I take into my body. And that can happan at any time of day in really any situation, even if I've gotten a full good night's sleep the night before. I'm not sure why I'm putting this into a blog post, other than I want the universe to know that I'm not just lazy - I really really want to be awake more and be more productive, but my body won't let me.

My seester

First of all I wanna say happy Mother's Day to my mom, mother-in-law, grandmas and all the other moms who influence me. I have been blessed to always be surrounded with fabulous moms who are such great examples and support to me.
Besides being Mother's Day, today is also Kristi's birthday so I wanted to give her a little shout out.
When I was young I remember being taught in church or in school (can't remember for sure...probably church though) that we should pick good role models to try to model our lives after. So we made a list of people that we admired and who we thought were good examples. I don't remember anyone that was on my list except Kristi. She has always been such a fun person to be around and I don't even remember her being mean to me when I was a little annoying girl trying to follow her and her friends around.
Kristi is one of the bravest people I know. Her and Camryn are in the process of breaking Camryn's new horse (Stella) right now. The other day they were in the little round pen and something spooked Stella and she took off at a sprint going in circles. Kristi got right in her path and started waving her arms. I'll tell you what, I would have been finding a way out of that little pen...ain't no way I would step in front of a semi wild horse who was running at that speed. But not Kristi, she just stepped in the way and Stella stopped and calmed down. Kristi used to rappel a lot, which I've done a few times but it scares the crap out of me.
Kristi is a HARD worker. She is an awesome mom and devotes a ton of time to her kids' various activities. Very rarely is she doing only one thing at a time. She usually has her computer doing her coding stuff while also attending to her kids' every need, answering my coding questions and laughing at Jeremy's jokes all at the same time. I hope that someday my kids turn out half as cool as hers. I have absolutely loved living so close to Kristi and her family ever since I moved to Blanding. I'm glad she married someone who my husband can be such good friends with. We love hanging out with them.
I'm so glad to have Kristi as my sister and friend. I love her guts! Happy Birthday Kris!

It's a Boy!

That's right, we're the proud new owners of Elmer; he is a CUTE black shi-tzu puppy. He's the son of Ellie (my mom's dog) so we've known him since he was born. He is so sweet and so far he seems pretty laid back. There are two exceptions to his laid-backedness - He does not like it when his mom bullies him around and he fights back. They get into some pretty ferocious barking/biting matches, but he never starts the fights. Ellie is a really laid back and sweet dog too, so I think she just feels threatened by all the attention he is getting and she'll calm down once we all get used to each other. The other exception is when we leave him in his little sleeping area all alone at night. He yaps and cries like the world is ending. It is the saddest thing ever, but he is not potty-trained nearly enough to let him sleep anywhere else yet.
Camryn named Elmer when he was born and we think the name fits so we decided to keep it. Taylor tries to act like Elmer doesn't completely melt his heart but they totally love each other and he hates it when Elmer cries when we have to leave him alone at night. We love our new doggy!