It's Been Awhile!

Between going on vacation for a week and trying to get back in the swing of things at work, haven't had much of a chance to post about all the goings on!

First off, our vacation was great! We loved having the dogs with us at the beach, and they loved the water and sand and everything! We had a nice, relaxing time and enjoyed having some friends down over Memorial Day weekend as well. Ate lots of yummy seafood and we both managed to get pretty sunburned at times!! Hope to post some pictures down the road - and maybe even a video of Star not only retrieving a ball, but retrieving it out of the OCEAN! She denies it now, but the camera don't lie.

I'm somewhere in between 17 and 18 weeks now -- had an appt on Friday at 17 weeks exactly. Everything looked good, and my doctor found the heartbeat pretty quickly, which was a relief. Though apparently I spoke to soon on the last post when I said I all of a sudden looked pregnant, because no less than THREE people told me on Friday that I didn't look pregnant yet! Oh well - maybe just to me and Brent :) (and thanks to some creative dressing as well). But, the good news is that we got our appointment for the "big" ultrasound! On June 25th we should get to see the Nublet and find out if it's a boy or a girl, assuming he/she cooperates with positioning. Yay!!!

I've been reading a bunch lately as well - pregnancy books don't really interest me much because they all say the same thing and well, it's all going to pretty much take care of itself if nothing out of the ordinary happens. "Sacred Parenting" by Gary Thomas is great - talks about looking at parenting as a way that God sanctifies us, much the way that marriage does (as he talks about in our favorite "Sacred Marriage" book). Ina May Gaskin's "Guide to Childbirth" is also a great book with lots of positive stories and a view that birth is a natural process, not a medical emergency that needs to be helped along by doctors every step of the way or else something will definitely go wrong - a breath of fresh air among all the other books about it. (I recently ran into this attitude again when I tried to reschedule my Fri appt for a couple of weeks later so that we could go ahead and get the "big" ultrasound - the nurse freaked out and told me that was unacceptable to have more than 4 weeks between appts so that they could check on me, and tried to guilt-trip me by saying "you know, I would THINK that your appointments would be a PRIORITY." I mean, of course it's a good idea to make sure everything's ok on a regular basis, but it's not like the doctor does much to keep you pregnant, or can do much if something has gone seriously wrong.)

"Baby Bargains" is another good book, kind of like the Consumer Reports of baby stuff - what you do need, what you don't need, how much you need, when to buy it, which brands are best, etc. I've started researching some of the items and we started reorganizing the house this weekend, so that was exciting! Also got to help a pregnant friend pick out colors for her nursery (she was repainting), which was a lot of fun - and I surprised myself in actually feeling like I contributed something to the process. A couple of years ago I would have had no idea of what to suggest - maybe working in the South's ivory tower of decorating knowledge has rubbed off on me through osmosis or something :)