Understatements

Ok, so to say that I'm excited about the holiday season is an absolute understatement. Whoever knows me knows that I ADORE everything holidays. Christmas especially, but the whole holiday season (November 1-Jan 1) I absolutely bubble over with enthusiasm!
This Christmas is going to be extra awesome because it's my baby's first Christmas! I've already started my Christmas Countdown planning (found here) which I've done for the past four years. This plan is the organizational freak's DREAM! It breaks down Christmas planning over five weeks and you can pretty much tweak the plan to fit your own traditions and customs. I could not coordinate Christmas without this!
I also just got Ethan's first Thanksgiving and Christmas outfits! Cute! I'm sure when he's a teenager and I'm showing his new girlfriend pictures of his first Thanksgiving complete with turkey comb beanie cap he's going to loooove his mama! It's the price he pays for having a dork as a mom. :-)

Speaking of first holidays we had an awesome first Halloween with him! His shirt says "I Love My Mummy"! Too stinkin' cute. Adam carved the vampire pumpkin (inspired by my four week long reading session of all the Twilight books...I put it off as long as I could!) and the spider is by moi! We had a fun day and did trick-or-treating for twenty minutes before it got too cold for Ethan to be out and about. I can't believe that next year he'll be walking and able to say something along the the lines of "trick or treat!" Time is going by unbelievably fast!

Back to Me Now

Recently at work I was part of starting a new book club that I named "Dazzlin' Divas Book Club." There's about twelve of us that all share a love of reading and always pass along favorite books to read so we figured we may as well start a club.
The first book we read was the Time Traveler's Wife which if you've read you know how hard it is to get into. It took me about half the book to understand what was going on, but then it got reeeally good. Well, only two of us could get through it in time for our first meeting so needless to say that was kind of a bust.
       So I started thinking what kind of book will all of us most likely be able to read fairly quickly and be able to discuss with some kind of enthusiasm at our meeting? And of course me being the foodie I am, I thought cookbook! The perfect combination of cookbook and novel came in the form of "Confections of a Closet Master Baker" (do NOT say this three times fast) by Gesine Bullock-Prado. This book will make you want to hop the first plane to Montpelier, Vermont and march into her bakery and order everything at the counter.
The author has a wonderful blog here that has demos and a neat commercial for the book. Her memoirs are poignant, heart warming, and will literally make your mouth water. I'm going to *attempt* to recreate her Golden Eggs recipe (it's a glorious yellow cake recipe in which the finished product you dip in melted butter and cinnamon sugar...yum.oh.) for the book club meeting coming up. I literally want to start my own 3:00 pm "coffee and cake" time after reading this book, but I'm pretty sure my co-workers will look at me a little weird.
       Reading has always been one of my favorite things to do, and I'm just now getting back to the place where I carve out time to do just that. My nickname is affectionately the "book club nerd" because I read whatever book is handed to me within two days, but that's just how enveloped I get when reading somebody else's world. It's a wonderful escape from the harsh realities that I face every day working for law enforcement.
       There are many things that I would like to get back into bit by bit. Marriage and babies can be all-consuming if you let them, so occasionally I know I'm going to need "back to me now" moments. Whether it's to read, scrapbook, play piano, or dance a jig (though this will probably be done in my closet in the dark so I can't even see myself) I'm going to take the time to do it.

Really. Bad. Blogger.

Well folks, the title says it all! But right now I'm making a decision to be better about blogging. As in, blog more consistently! The past three months I've been in a time warp known as new mommy-hood. It's an amazing, beautiful, somewhat scary, oh so rewarding roller coaster ride. Motherhood is everything I thought it would be, and so much more.
One thing I have loved about being a new mom are the insta-friends you get when you tell other moms that you just had your first baby. Some women hate unsolicited advice, but I LOVE it because I'm in total agreeance that it takes a village to raise a child. The more people that love and care for a baby the better!
I love going to the grocery store with Ethan in tow and seeing the "I remember when mine was that small" look on other moms' faces. I feel like I'm a member of an exclusive club with endless members all with the same goal of having happy, complete kids. One of my *favorite* quotes is "A baby is God's opinion that the world should go on." (Carl Sandburg) I feel so privileged that He blessed me with Ethan despite my slim odds of being able to conceive.

So now it's on to the "rest of life" and raising this little man. I'm now back at work full time and still love my job. Only now I feel my conscience continuously tugging me toward home where my baby is.
I've also started *trying* to get back into shape. This is something I underestimated while pregnant. I had heard so many women complain of how hard it is to lose the baby weight, but I HAD NO IDEA. There's this thing I affectionately call my "apron" that hangs onto my belly like a stubborn tick. I joined the gym three weeks ago and try and make it there at least three times a week. My endurance is getting better, but this stupid apron won't go anywhere. IT SUCKS. But is so incredibly worth it. :-) So anyway, look forward to reading blogs about stubborn weight loss.
Well, I've got to get back to work. My goal is to post at least one blog this weekend (in the hopes that my husband WHO ROCKS fixes our internet at home). Until then, happy living!

Seriously Delinquent Blog Post

Soooo my last post was absolutely ages ago! I'm sooo horrible about starting a journal or other project and letting it drop. I have somewhat of an excuse, but not really because all I've had on my hands since mid-February has been time! A luxury that is truly bittersweet.
In the early morning hours on February 15th I woke up with horrible cramping pain in my lower back. I got out of bed and moved downstairs to see if it would subside because it was keeping me awake. Well, three hours later they were full blown contractions. Being only 27 weeks pregnant at the time I tried to stay calm and call my doctors' nurse line. They had the doctor on call paged and call me back to investigate the situation. He told me to come to the hospital to get everything settled.
An hour later we were there and an ultrasound revealed that my cervix had begun to efface and needed to be stopped in its tracks to keep me from having the baby. I felt sure before hearing this that these pains were normal pregnancy things and I was being a nervous first timer. Wrong! Deep down I knew something wasn't right. Always trust your instincts.
So basically three days later I got to go home after the doctors had stopped my pre term labor and things were stable. I have been on bed rest since then, however. I was ordered to stop working and stay in a bed or lay on a couch until the imminent threat of another bout of pre term labor was gone.
So for the next four weeks I was really bed rest ridden. My only outings were to the weekly doctors appointments. Finally the doctor gave me the ok to go out to eat or to a movie. Which translated to I can go anywhere as long as I sit down.
Well that worked until I developed pregnancy hypertension (pregnancy induced high blood pressure). So then they told me to take it easy still, and that they reeeally wanted me to get to at least 36 weeks.
So here I am, 35 weeks and 3 days pregnant. Baby Ethan is approximately 5 lbs, 13 oz and out of the danger zone. I'm off of the medication to stop contractions, so realistically labor could happen at any moment. I'm so incredibly ready to have him and be off of bed rest and live the rest of my life in utter happiness. I'm ready for the rest of my life to begin.
So basically I've had tons of time to write in this blog, but haven't felt like I have anything to write about until now. Nothing has been missed, just a whole lot of bed rest and too much time to think!

In other news my bonus room/closet is still a wreck. I've gotten every other room in the house ready for baby and all clean and organized except that one. I need a serious push in the tush! No more excuses now! Maybe cleaning it will induce labor. I'll *try* and keep things posted!

I just realized I haven't posted ANY pictures on my blog yet. Note to self, do that.
Anyway, today I finally finished making the invitations for my baby shower. My mom and mother-in-law are throwing it for me this March, so I had to get on getting the invites sent out! I'm so bad about waiting until the last minute for that kind of thing. I'll post a picture of the finished product as soon as I can download one onto the computer. I think they're very sweet and professional looking if I do say so myself. :-)

I've always loved scrapbooking so making my own invitations and such is more like fun time than a chore. I can get absolutely get lost in pasting photos and tying embellishments onto a finished piece. And of course my favorite part is journaling. I think scrapbooking special memories is so much more rewarding than just throwing pictures in an album. It's hard to describe a memory to somebody while just pointing to a picture. Scrapbooking allows me to convey the emotion behind the times I want to remember.
For my 21st birthday my husband turned the bonus room above our garage into "my room." He installed two giant shelving units as my walk around closet at one half of the room, and set up a desk area at the other end to turn into my scrapbooking corner. It was an amazing sacrifice for him to give me a whole room, and sadly I've let it fall apart. It's become the catch-all for storage that I have yet to organize. My goal for the month of March is to get it completely cleaned out and set up to how we originally envisioned it. I'm going to have a lot more material to scrapbook here in a few months, and I have a feeling I'm also going to need a place to get away to just be "me." You tend to lose sight of yourself when you get married and then have children, so I want to make sure to have an environment conducive to maintaining my original passions.

Tell the story of a memory about your husband that brings you a smile and a giggle every time you think about it!

If ever I am feeling down or just not right I tend to try and visualize the happiest days in my life. Most of the time it can set me in a good mood with the right frame of mind. One of my favorite visualizations has to do with today's "My Husband Rocks Fridays" prompt.
My husband is the amazing dad to a 5-year-old girl. For her fourth Christmas we got her a Dora the Explorer Powerwheels four wheeler. After bundling up to go test drive it we headed outside to our cul-de-sac to see what she could do.
Not five minutes into her first riding session she was standing up on the pedals and whirling around one-handed. She had definately inherited her daddy's risk taker side! Each time she would come up with a new trick she would quickly look over at Adam to make sure he had seen her. The smile on his face was priceless. I could tell he felt so much pride to see his little girl being brave and daring on her new toy.
Evenutally the riding bug hit Adam too and he got out his motorcycle to ride around with Emilie. She laughed and laughed as he slowly rode circles around her and showed her little stunts of his own. Soon she started circling around the cul-de-sac again with her daddy right on her tail. He inched closer, but never quite caught up to her. She had the greatest time racing this big orange motorcycle with her little four wheeler. To here there was nothing greater.
Each time I remember watching them from our driveway it brings a smile to my face.

As I sit here writing this blog my thoughts were just diverted to the fact that I haven't felt Ethan (baby in the belly) move much today. I've been told babies have days where they're super active, and days where they aren't active hardly at all, so I'm not concerned.
I always knew about the common pregnancy symptoms of morning sickness, fatigue, cramps, and such, but nobody ever told me about the mental components of pregnancy. My whole thought process has changed. I can't imagine not being pregnant, and not having this baby boy. Most of my thoughts are consumed by him, and most things I do during the day are for him. It's crazy to think that I didn't even know about him until almost seven months ago.

Eye on the Prize

I've been wanting to start a blog for awhile to document my life during pregnancy. I'm a constant lurker of others' pregnancy and motherhood blogs, so I thought it only right to start my own. I've been journaling since I was seven-years-old, inspired by a cartoon by the name of Doug who writes in his own diary about every day life. Journaling has brought me through life's biggest events, as well as those small things that seem to be little pieces of a big puzzle that has resulted in where I am today.
A little about me, I'm 23-years-old, pregnant with my first child (a boy!) due May 15, 2009, and have been married for over two years to my wonderful husband Adam.
We have been through more ups and downs than I care to recall (the downs, anyway), but have always come out stronger. I feel absolutely blessed to have married a man that turns adversity into triumphs, no matter how small and meaningless. The good times are what we cling onto like a lifeline during the really hard spots.
Currently we're learning to grow closer together through a roller coaster economy that I think my now very possible grand kids will have to pay for much later. My husband's business depends on a good economy and housing market, so you can imagine where our financial state is right now. But through family and other blessings we've been able to keep our home and somehow pay most of our bills...the really important ones anyway. And with a baby on the way there isn't a day that goes by that I don't think "how in the world are we going to do this?" But somehow, some way, things will work themselves out.

I'm not quite sure how to blog effectively and keep things interesting, so bare with me. In journaling it's all about simply reflecting my emotions onto paper, so this is a bit different.
This pregnancy has been everything I always expected, but also a few great surprises. The physical aspects I halfway was ready for. I'm carrying very out front and low, and the baby is positioned feet down, so that has been a lovely experience. Just imagine a little person using your bladder as his personal kickboxing bag. :-) Fun, huh? Keep your eye on the prize is something I tell myself in his most active hours of the day which tend to be early morning and mid evening. Every movement amazes, though. It makes it hit home that there is a human in there that will come out in May and change my world forever.
Today I ordered a maternity outfit to boost my morale and have something to wear that isn't black or gray.
http://www.motherhood.com/Product.asp?ViewSource=&Product_Id=817790011&category_Name=Sets&Category_Id=90011&MasterCategory_Id=9996
I'm so sick of wearing dark colors I could barf. I've always loved wearing bright colors and cute shoes, but maternity wear still has some expanding to do. Since November I've practically worn the same pair of Clarks leather slip on shoes every day. They've kept my feet and ankles from swelling, but I do miss my stiletto heels and 3 inch pumps. Somehow I think if I tried to wear those right now I would resemble an infant just learning to walk. Oh the irony.
I've learned the art of accessorizing as well to compensate for not feeling very pretty elsewhere. Having your whole profile change over the course of nine months is a little daunting. I know what my body is doing, I love what it is doing, but I can't believe that is my body. Each time I catch a glimpse of my belly in the mirror I have to do a double take. Your whole life you obsess over keeping a perfect hourglass figure, and then you get pregnant and give all of it up while the baby grows. It's a hard thing to let go of!
I do feel beautiful, though. I do see a glow about me that I like to call radiant. It's as though the joy in my heart can at last reflect onto my exterior. Being pregnant brings about a sense of wonderment. As strange as my body appears it is doing something amazing. As the quote goes, "Pregnancy and childbirth are our one opportunity as women to assist God in a miracle." I don't quite agree that it's just one opportunity we get, but it certainly is one of the greatest. At one point I was having to come to grips that my chance may never come to experience pregnancy, but God had different plans. And I am so glad He did.

1Cr 9:24
Do you not know that those who run in a race all run, but one receives the prize? Run in such a way that you may obtain [it].