baby.

So.  This is happening.  Right now.  Inside of me.  A growing baby...

Yup, that's right.  Baby #4 is due April 25th, 2014!!!  We're so excited to bring another baby home.

Now if you have all day, feel free to read on to catch up on the last 7 weeks of baby's life.  :)

August 13^th, 2013 (3 weeks 4 days)
Here comes baby #4!  I’m staring at this blank page and deciding where I should start our next chapter.

Let’s start with vacation.  Over vacation at the cabin in Minnesota Jamie and Emily announced they are expecting their third baby!   While out on the boat Sunday with Mitch and the boys, we were talking about how awesome it is that Cleveland grandchild #10 (wow!) is on the way and Mitch mentioned he thought that we would be making that announcement soon.  I said I doubt it but chuckled that maybe I’ll be sending him a picture of a pregnancy test after I go home and he’s still up at the cabin for the week.  He said he wouldn’t be surprised. J  Really I didn’t doubt it either it just sounded like the right thing to say and I was trying not to let my mind “go there” for fear of getting too excited about it.

Monday, on my drive home with Maddox and Ada, after the flat tire and amidst my battery dying, my mind really started to “go there”.  I was pulling into St. Cloud looking for an auto place to stop to have my battery checked before it officially died and ran into Walmart quick to get Ada some formula which I had forgot to grab for our ride.  We walked right by the pregnancy test aisle and I decided to grab a box.

At this point I had built my emotions up enough that I couldn’t wait and I took it when we got home Monday night at midnight even though it was a little early to test.  It came up negative.  Figured I’d take the other one in the morning since that’s when you’re supposed to, and it was still negative other than if I turned it in the exact lighting my imagination could almost see a line there.  I kept checking back to see if it changed.   I was a little bummed but worked to get my mind back to where we were planning to try for an early winter baby.  I just wasn’t convinced yet though.  After we dropped Maddox off for his first day of pre-k, Ada and I were going grocery shopping and I bought one more box just in case the other ones were too early.  I planned on waiting for the next morning to take one but of course I couldn’t and I took it right when we got home.

This time there was a very faint line that took a little less imagination than the last one.  I knew it!  We knew it!  I took the other one a few hours later just to be sure and there’s clearly another faint line there.

So, here we go!  I don’t plan on texting Mitch a picture.  Besides the fact that he probably couldn’t see the line through a phone picture, I think I’ll wait until he gets home to tell him so he doesn’t have the torture of trying to keep it a secret all week while with his family.  It will be tough, but I want to tell him to his face anyways.

According to my calculations, our baby will be due April 25^th, 2014 (Anzac Day for you Australians out there, which is funny because I was just talking to Lala about Anzac day)!  Our family is turning out exactly as we dreamed it would. So blessed.

8/18/13 (4 weeks 2 days)
I made it until Mitch got home from vacation to share the news with him. 5 days of torture!  He’s so good…he came home with cookie dough ice cream today…a pregnancy staple.  We’re so excited to be expecting our fourth and final child and can’t stop talking about it.  I set up my first prenatal appointments and can’t wait for our first ultrasound at 8 weeks on Sept. 13 (Friday the 13^th…yikes).  We’ve decided to keep it a secret until after that which I think is going to be tough with Ada’s birthday party and Labor Day weekend coming up.  I’m feeling great so far, just painfully tired.

 

8/30/31 (6 weeks)

Not too much to say about being 6 weeks.  I don’t feel pregnant other than the extreme exhaustion.  Do you ladies remember that first pregnancy and how you could just come home after work and relax on the couch all night? This is a picture of me relaxing on the couch now. Three blurry kiddos jumping on my lap.  :)

 

I can’t wait for our ultrasound in two weeks to see the little peanut.

 

 

 

9/3/13 (6 weeks 4 days)

I spoke too soon.  Nausea has set in.  Wish I could curl up into a ball and sleep all day.

 

9/6/13 (7 weeks)

Getting worse by the day.  I’m always painfully hungry, which makes me feel sick, so I eat which makes me feel even more sick (and throw up).  I’m damned if I do, I’m damned if I don’t.  Eating is such a chore, nothing sounds or tastes good even though I’m constantly starving.  Everything smells…I think I could smell ADM from our house the other day or something equally as gross.  And as crappy as I feel, I have a strange appreciation for morning sickness…daily affirmation that there is indeed a growing baby inside. 

 

9/10/13 (7 weeks 4 days)

Dysgeusia: a distortion of the sense of taste.  Never heard of it until I googled, “why do I have such a bad taste in my mouth during pregnancy?”  I don’t remember anything like this in previous pregnancies.  I just want to actually enjoy food again.

 

9/13/13 (8 weeks)

Let’s quit focusing on the sick and focus on this instead.  The tiny little reason behind all the sickness…

 

 

 

This never gets old.  Seeing that incredible itty bitty heart beating inside of me for the first time.  It’s so amazing and so relieving and fills my own beating heart with instant love.  I have to admit I couldn’t tell what I was looking at other than a little blob of a baby.  I actually pointed to a part of the blob and asked “is that the head” and she said “no…that’s the yoke sac” and then she showed me the orientation of the really curled up baby and asked if I could see it and I laughed and lied, “Um…yeah…sure.”  But that tiny little flickering heart is undeniable and a sense of wonder.  I mean seriously, the baby is a fraction of an inch long so its heart right now is just a tiny spec yet I can see it beating already.  There is nothing more miraculous in life.

 

9/16/13 (8 weeks 3 days)

We shared the great news with our families and a lot of other people over the weekend.  Mitch was in Ames tailgating and going to the Iowa/Iowa State game so I couldn’t wait for him to get home Sunday so we could finally tell the kids.  They got big smiles and were asking questions the rest of the night while staring at my belly…”Is the baby going to fall out of you?”  This will be fun talking about the growing baby since they’re both older now.  Maddox seems to recall a lot from my last pregnancy because he keeps saying “Yeah, just like Ada” when we’re talking about this baby and how my belly will keep growing and then we’ll go to hospital to have it.  And he still refers to that whole process as my belly hatching and I think we’ll leave it at that.  I showed them a picture of what the baby looks like right now while it’s growing its arms and legs and they thought it was funny.  Maddox and Grady both think it’s a boy or rather are convinced and won’t even entertain the fact that it could possibly be a girl.  Actually Grady has been talking about having a baby brother since before I even knew I was pregnant.  :)

 

9/27/13 (10 weeks)

Wow, time is flying by as usual!  I’m already ¼ of a way through this pregnancy.  Good news…I feel wonderful (albeit tired)!  This week I finally am enjoying food again and the nausea is completely gone!  Also I’ve had way more energy…not full energy but at least our house is clean for the first time in forever.  While I’ve been saying this has been the worst pregnancy, now that I’m actually through the worst of it, I don’t think it was really much different than my 1^st tri with Maddox, I just threw up a few more times this time (because I’m older and more wimpy now).  With Maddox, I was super nauseas from 6-8 weeks too.  With Grady, it was much milder but lasted a lot longer (8-14 weeks).  With Ada, pretty much no sickness at all.  This one, same story as Maddox (knock on wood).

 

I had an appointment yesterday and although it’s too early to normally hear the heartbeat she wanted to give it a try.  After what felt like hours but was really only minutes of torture not being able to find it, she went to get the cool new handheld ultrasound thing!  Awesome….it’s just like a little phone sized screen with a cord to the Doppler thingy.  After we saw where the baby was hiding, she checked again and found that perfect sounding heartbeat at 175 bpm.  I just love that sound.

 

People have been asking if we’re going to find out the sex.  We’re not planning to this time.  I pretty much left it up to Mitch, since I’ve equally loved both ways of finding out.  Remember, we found out with Maddox, didn’t find out with Grady, and found out again with Ada.  I recalled Mitch feeling a little frustrated not finding out in the ultrasound with Grady but then ending up loving finding out for ourselves “in real life” in the end.  To my surprise, he answered right away that we should wait to find out.  I’m so happy with that choice!