I just got back from my doctor visit. Everything is looking great. Baby’s size and heartbeat are normal and good. My blood sugar was ok. Iron ok. Weight and blood pressure ok.

Then we got to the portion of the visit where I get to ask whatever questions I have. Patrick wanted me to ask how long after my due date I’d be allowed to go before being induced. Neither of us are super fond of the idea of induction unless it is necessary for the health of the baby or um, me. So when I got the very assurred, “Oh you won’t be going past your due date. With diabetes, we’ll probably have you go a week early” it wasn’t exactly the answer I was looking for. If that holds true instead of being due on the day of my last final, I’ll have to arrange to take my finals a week early. Also, that means that this Thursday when I’m supposed to switch to having 9 weeks left, I’ll only have 8. So yes, I’m freaking out a little, feel free to join me!

I know it will all be fine, but right now I’m very nervous about the things that aren’t ready. Especially Patrick and I! So Kelli, I told you there was no way I could hold out until your birthday on May 17th!

Luckily Kelli threw a lovely shower for me on Sunday where I got a lot of great stuff to get us started. The baby won’t be naked. We can bath and groom it. And it will have blankets and a few toys to keep it company. It was very nice girl time to have everyone over and I really enjoyed it. Kelli was nervous as it was her first baby shower to throw, but I thought it was great! It was my first baby shower to attend too 🙂

Oh, I’m also having a pain that I asked about. The great news is that it will get worse as the baby gets lower. And it will probably spread to both sides instead of just one. Ouch.

I just watched a story about a tree in Oak Cliff that is supposed to have the Virgin Mary in it. Ok, the tree does have a shape created by time that does resemble the shape of a women. But honestly, how do you get the Virgin Mary from that? People have spent the last 3 months going to this tree and praying. The people who’s yard it is in are saying that they want their lives back now and so they are selling it.

My first problem with this is that if Mary were going to make an appearance, I seriously doubt it would be as a sketchy figure in a tree in Oak Cliff. Or in a grill cheese sandwhich for that matter!

Second problem is, if you truly belive that is her image and that the tree is holy, why would you sell it on ebay? The couple said they want to sell it because they want to donate the money to charity. How much of the money you ask? Only 10%.

Call me jaded but it seems to me that they discovered this shape in the tree, spread the word until it got popular and are now trying to profit off it. I guess I missed that lesson in CCD!

Today I’m in my 29th week. Tuesday I had another 3 hour glucose test at the doctor’s. Somehow, I managed to walk away once again, without being put on insulin. My dr. said I’m an interesting case. Just what I always hoped for! I’m interesting. So I am contining to monitor my fasting blood sugar and I have to call if it gets over 115. Which makes the fact that I keep craving sweets hard to deal with, but I’m hanging in there.

Today I started to work on the nursery. I primed over the ivy stencils that were on the wall from back when it was a guest room and I taped off everything that won’t be painted. And I also managed to get one wall painted. I’ll post a picture of it when I’m done. Of course I still have 3 walls left and figuring out how to hang wallpaper!

I’ll try to get Patrick to take a picture of me tomorrow so you can see how big I’m getting!

Patrick has actually posted twice in the last two days after only posting once since forever. Is that one of the signs of the end of the world? See, I had to post a third time today just to stay ahead of him!

As I’ve started feeling very large and elephant like the past week or two I’ve been wondering where on earth the phrase “in a delicate way” came from. I certainly feel anything but delicate right now!

Patrick got me a gift certificate for a massage for Valentine’s Day and I had my appointment today. It was absolutly wonderful! The girl talked to me the whole time which would normally drive me crazy, but she was fun to talk to and was asking me questions and stuff so it was fine. I didn’t even realize how much my neck and shoulders hurt until she started working on them. And she also spent a long time on the lower left side of my back where I’ve had a lot of pain the last few months. How nice to be pampered for a whole hour!

Today I had to google myself to look up the Sherman High School website for a friend and found this link:

Amazon.com: Bloomfield rhythms: Books: Maggie Romanski
Amazon.com: Bloomfield rhythms: Books: Maggie Romanski by Maggie Romanski.

If it’s any good, that’s me!

I have a website that I signed up for that sends me emails everyday with information about changes in the baby and changes in me and also keeps track of the time line for me. Today I start week 26 and looking at the chart, that means I have this week and next week before I move on to the 3rd trimester. Man, time is going fast. I thought it would be so slow, and I’m sure towards the end I will feel like it is, but right now, it’s just zipping by.

When I pointed the two weeks out to Patrick his response was, “Man, we’d better get cracking on the nursery then!” So much to do still. And we have only narrowed down the names, but we still have several we are debating. We’ll go buy some of the furniture soon with our lovely target gift card (see the entry on my car). It’s getting really exciting but really nerve racking!

click the thumbnail for a clearer picture.

I found the following story on the yahoo headlines:

SAN FRANCISCO – A Louisiana man claims in a lawsuit that Apple’s iPod music player can cause hearing loss in people who use it.

Apple has sold more than 42 million of the devices since they went on sale in 2001, including 14 million in the fourth quarter last year. The devices can produce sounds of more than 115 decibels, a volume that can damage the hearing of a person exposed to the sound for more than 28 seconds per day, according to the complaint.

The iPod players are “inherently defective in design and are not sufficiently adorned with adequate warnings regarding the likelihood of hearing loss,” according to the complaint, filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in San Jose, Calif., on behalf of John Kiel Patterson of Louisiana.

The suit, which Patterson wants certified as a class-action, seeks compensation for unspecified damages and upgrades that will make iPods safer. Patterson’s suit said he bought an iPod last year, but does not specify whether he suffered hearing loss from the device.

Patterson does not know if the device has damaged his hearing, said his attorney, Steve W. Berman, of Seattle. But that’s beside the point of the lawsuit, which takes issue with the potential the iPod has to cause irreparable hearing loss, Berman said.

“He’s bought a product which is not safe to use as currently sold on the market,” Berman said. “He’s paying for a product that’s defective, and the law is pretty clear that if someone sold you a defective product they have a duty to repair it.”…………

So now we can’t even take responsibility and use our brains to decide when the music playing in our ears might be too loud? What the heck?

On the 3rd I had a sonogram. If we were going to find out the sex of the baby, this would have been the time to try to do that. Luckily we had made up our minds not to find out, becuase the baby was not cooperating, or actually, I guess it was. It had its legs crossed and curled and there was no budging it.

It was moving a lot though. There was one really neat shot of the whole spine were with the way it was moving, it looked like a dinosaur skeleton. Kinda neat. The lady doing it, I guess you’d call her a technician, not sure, was so helpful. Other times people haven’t really told us much about what we were seeing. She explained everything and took all of Patrick’s curious questions. She even drew an outline around the forehead, nose, and chin on the picture of the face to make sure that we could tell what we were seeing. So far, everything is going well and normal and according to my count down we have 3 months and 19 days left. The doctor does say it should be anywhere from May 8-15.

The fist picture is the baby’s arm. The second is the head and body and the third is the profile of the face.

Ever since we got home Patrick and I have been debating what kind of car to get and doing some comparison shopping. What I really wanted was a Escape hybrid. When we started looking at the prices though, we thought maybe a Civic Hybrid or even a regular Civic, which still gets really amazing gas milege, would be a better choice for our budget.

Our big debate though centered around did we want another sedan, which would be more fuel efficient and economical, or did we want a small suv which would allow us to transport bigger things every once in a while. We really couldn’t make up our minds.

Finally, we realized on the 31st that it would be good to buy on in 2005, so we headed out on a serious mission. It came down to the Civic or the Saturn Vue. We’d stopped by to look at something else at Saturn previously and discovered the view was nice and affordable. We went to test drive the Civic and it was nice, but I knew I couldn’t make up my mind until we test drove the Vue too. So off we went to Saturn, and the next thing I knew I had a new vue.

I really like it. There are a few things I’m not crazy about, but in general it’s very nice! I get leather, xm radio (thank goodness!), on star (at least for a year) and stero controls for a year. I even have a little jack to plug in my ipod and play it, I just have to find the cable I need to do that.

I’m very excited to have my own car again. Sam got to go for a ride to the vet and he seems to approve too!

Christmas was great as usual! And even better than last year because we didn’t have to travel to get home.

Christmas Eve day we spent the day with Patrick’s family eating too much good food and watching football. Ok, I wasn’t really watching the game as much as I was watching in amusement how worked up people were over it. From there we went to Andy’s (Patrick’s best friend and second family) family first in Oklahoma and then to his parents. I got to hold his newphew who was born in October.

Patrick and I had volunteered to host Christmas for my family since I’d had so much fun doing it the year before we moved. My parents had passed their 9 ft christmas tree down to us to put up in our front window, but sadly it didn’t fit. So I put up two trees instead and the house was nice and festive. Everybody worked hard to help me get ready by bringing food and helping heat it and set it up. Patrick cooked ham and deep fried a turkey. He was in charge of the meats!

I got to see my brother and his family who I’d missed in all our running around last year and my sister was in town too. My aunt, uncle and cousins came as well as my parents and grandfather. It was great to have a full house. I love to play Martha Stewart, though ever so slightly less graceful under pressure.

My aunt and uncle got all the women these scarves, so Mom, Rach and I had to model them for the camera. Picture to follow when Patrick reminds me how the heck to get it in there.

It was a great holiday and my favorite time of year. Patrick was off for just over a week, but finally went back to work on Tuesday and gave the dogs and I the house back!

(If you click on the picture you can see a version where our faces don’t look so funny.)

And even more on the picking a good time not to be in the NYC area front…the transit system of NYC has gone on strike. On the other hand, I guess Patrick would probably have a nice time being off until they solve everything.

Patrick and I just got back from registering at Babies ‘R’ Us, which was just a touch overwhelming. When we did our wedding registry that was fun. We had all the basics so we just picked out fun stuff that we wanted and there really wasn’t a lot of thinking or choices to make. This was a little different. It was still fun, but it left our heads spinning.

We got the list of suggested needs and set to work with gusto. Our gusto, however, quickly faded as we needed to make choice after choice on items that despite studying up on a little, we didn’t know that much about. And did I mention the list was huge? I had planned that it would take us about 2 hours, but it ended up being the 3 hours that the store had left to be open! And we still want to register at Target! We’ll have to rest up for that, but hopefully the 2nd time around will be much faster.

The biggest stalling point was strollers. We both agreed we wanted to get a travel system (a stroller, car seat/baby carrier all in one) but that was the only thing we agreed on at first. Patrick wanted a heavy duty manly stroller that weighed 28 pounds were as I wanted the one the stroller dude said was their best seller and the number one pick of consumer reports that was only 20 pounds. And for all of you who think I wear the pants, Patrick got his uber stroller because stroller dude said it would last through the next child. But the compromise is, as long as he’s around—he’ll be doing the stroller lifting!

I did get my way on the color scheme though, pale yellow, blue and green. And we are having a frog theme, which may be odd, but the stuff was so darn cute!

We imagine that it will be pretty obvious to anyone who looks at our registry that we weren’t 100% sure what we were doing! But hey, we still have 5 months to figure some of that out. Like where on earth in our house all this stuff is going to fit! Oh well, you live and learn right?

Recently I made the observation to Patrick that tv shows don’t have good theme songs anymore. Well, they may have good ones, but not like in the 80’s when the song was written specifically for the show. Now they either use a new popular song, think the WB, or just have music like Lost.

On the drive from NJ to TX the 80’s station on XM was playing the theme song to Greatest American Hero and Patrick decided he agreed with me.

Who doesn’t remember the words to The Dukes of Hazard, Growing Pains or Who’s the Boss? Even if you don’t want to admit it. Ah, the good ol’ days!

I bought a James Blunt CD off iTunes yesterday and have been listening to it a lot. I really like it. I don’t know if FM radio is playing him at all, but XM plays two of his songs every once in a while. iTunes says he’s like Bob Dylan but I don’t agree. I think he’s like Cat Stevens meets David Gray. I like High and You’re Beautiful the best so far.

I’m getting a little loopey packing. I could have sworn after the move to Jersey followed by a two day move from upstairs to downstairs I wasn’t supposed to pack again. Patrick is busy working from home and helps me when he can, but man we really have a lot of stuff. We are having a “garage” sale tomorrow to sell some things we bought specifically for the apartment. Meanwhile we have no space to put packed boxes and set up for the sale so things just keep shifting around and I can’t really lift much. So I pack a box, tape it and leave it for Patrick to move!

The dogs are completely freaked out and are staying close to us. When I packed in TX they didn’t see me do it, they’d just come in and find more boxes at the end of the day. But here they just look at me everytime I put something in a box. I think they don’t think they are coming with us, or possibly worse, that I’m going to put them in a box soon!

We are really ready to get home. There are a lot of things we like about this area but whenever it comes to driving and customer service we just have to look at each other and say, ahh Jersey. Not that we’ve romanticized TX any, we know there are bad drivers and bad service there too, but it seems those are the exceptions rather than the rule. I think we’ve had our fill of bad driving. Of course that isn’t to say everyone is a bad driver, so if people from my old work are reading this, I don’t mean you!

Ok, back to packing.

We had a busy weekend trying to work in all our last minute sight seeing.

Friday night we went to dinner with friends, and realized we should have spent more time with them. Saturday we went to D.C. to see most of what we missed the last time. We met with one of Patrick friends who I’d not had the chance to meet yet and set off exporing. We saw the Capitol and the Supreme Court and the Smithsonian National Air & Space Musuem.

Today I woke up earlish to greet my first day of unemployment with a smile. Then headed to the doctor for a checkup. Further facing the news of the seemingly inevitable switch to insulin. Boo! No more needles. But I did get to see the baby again and watch its heart beat!

Patrick is already signed up for two trips when we head home. The first week in December he’s scheduled for a conference in Chandler, Arizona and the second or third week “training” in San Jose, CA. I may get to go with him to at least one of them though and I’m more than happy to relax around a pool and shop!

For now, we are headed to Atlantic City one last time!

Now that we’ve spread the news I can finally blog about this! For those keeping track, I will be at 13 weeks on Thursday. My last week of my first trimester!

I’ve already had one sonogram but Patrick was out of town at his first day of work in Dallas and didn’t get to go with me. The doctor was talking to me while she did it and I didn’t realize until I got home that she’d never really explained what I was looking at. I think I see a head and shoulders, but I could be making that up.

So today I had a sonogram that has to be done before you go past 13 weeks. It was much better than the last one. For one thing, Patrick got to go with me. For another, we got to watch much longer and had a clearer picture. We also got to hear the heartbeat for the first time and it was loud and fast! The baby is lying on its back with its neck bent a little and it kept popping its whole body straight up, that’s why I’m now calling it a mexican jumping bean! The jumping was a little unsettling at first, but they assurred us that it was fine and normal. Hopefully you can make out the pictures after they’ve been copied for me and then scanned in. The head is on the left, feet on the right and it’s almost in a v shape.

We had a good but quiet weekend. We finally got to try Peter Lueger’s, a fancy cash only steakhouse that is supposed to be top of the line around here. They have reservations 3 months out, but somehow Patrick got us one for a late lunch on Saturday. It was good and I’m really glad we went, but I think it’s a bit overrated. The steak was charred on the outside and both Patrick and I agreed we could have done without that. Once we got past the charred part thought it was yum! But still, Ruth’s Chris is better. I know, I’m such a steak connosuir!

We packed a little here and there throughout the weekend. ( No, I didn’t lift anything heavy.) We only got 9 boxes packed, but it seems like we worked forever. We got all our book, pictures and cds done as well as a lot of knicknacks. But what I found interesting is that we had an entire box worth of candles. Is that normal? We paired down so much stuff to come here through garage sales and storing things at my parents house, but somehow everytime I look somewhere I’m amazed at how much we will have to pack in the next two weeks! Ugh.