Baby updates

First, this is my profile from a week and a half ago. At 17 weeks I hit the mark where sleeping had become a little harder. I get hotter at night and I have problems trying to get comfortable. As a result, I am skipping the few tv shows that I stayed up for past 10pm and am going to bed earlier. While it still takes a little while to get to sleep, actually being in bed earlier gives me more time to sleep.



Now, at 18 weeks, I went to have THE ultrasound. And it was great! Our baby was pretty cooperative for the most part. When the woman tried to get a closer look at the heart it took a long time cause the baby was being so wiggly. But other than that, the baby measured on target and looks healthy (no cleft palate, the tummy has closed around the cord, no thickening of the neck, the nasal bone was the right shape, and so on). The first thing I said when I got in the room was that we did want to know what the sex was. And the baby was a trooper and we got to find out almost right away!

This was the first thing we saw after the baby came into focus. Such a cute little profile.


Then, she went for the money shot and we found out we are having a little girl!



When she was done doing all her measuring and checking out all the things she needed to see, she went back to the profile. The baby kept putting both her hands to her face, and then one thumb got put in her mouth. So we have a thumb sucker already!



Now, before we even got pregnant we had started talking about names. By the time we went to the doctor's office for the first time we had names picked out for a girl and for a boy. I will wait until we have a boy to reveal that name, but the girl's name we picked out was Georgia Elise. Now, there is a long background for the girl's name. I have been thinking of baby names almost since I was in high school. Now, the boy name, Shawn threw out the window almost right away because the first name was so common in his family that he didn't want to use it. But the girl's first name has always been the same. It was my dad's grandmother's name. She was named Georgia Ann. I loved the name Georgia and thought it was so pretty. I have heard from people that thought it was a little old fashioned, but I figured it was better to be old fashioned than to have a trendy name that will be so common. We went through a long process of finding a middle name that sounded right with Georgia. For some reason I got stuck on the letter E (I thought that a name that started with E would sound good with Georgia). Then I found Elise, and it sounded perfect. It is a shortened form of Elizabeth, and it means consecrated to God. So it sounded pretty and the name had a nice meaning.

Nursery

So, I forgot to take "real" before pictures of when the nursery was a workout room. So imagine the room filled with a big weight bench, weight stand, and a heavy bag with stand (for all you non-fighters out there that is a 70 pound punching bag). For the record, Shawn misses his workout equipment. We didn't have any other spare room to put them in, so the weights went to his cousin's house (they bought the set together many years ago). The punching bag and stand are to be relocated to my mom's house unless we can find someone to buy it from us.

The before pictures are basically just white walls.



Without the windows covered it is hard to tell what paint color that is, but we painted the walls a light beige color and the trim is a chocolate.



After painting, Shawn and our friend George installed dropped down crown molding and behind the crown we put in rope lighting.



Then we finally put the crib in. Once it was all together we put the bumper pads and the bed skirt and sheet on. The theme is woodland creatures.



This is the quilt. The set has a deer, a fox, a bear, a bunny, owls, trees, and a hedgehog (or porcupine, we can't tell which).



Then, we got wall stickers that matched the crib set and put them around the closet.



And over the crib. We also have a little cross over the crib that has a little poem on it.



Then we put the curtains and valances up.



Finally we got the lights behind the crown hooked up so you can see what it will look like.



We are still working on arranging the other furniture in a workable manner. Plus, we are looking for a small bookshelf. When everything is finalized I will put up more pictures.

14 Weeks

So, I started taking profile pictures with the intent to do so every month, but after 8 weeks I forgot to do so at 12 weeks. But I did last weekend for 13 weeks. The funny thing is, I had gained most of the weight that I have gained by the time I took the 8 week picture. Mostly I think I gained that weight from eating lots of little snacks to keep from being nauseous. But the good thing is that I have only gained about 4 or 5 pounds so far.

Here is 8 weeks. The main reason I look big here is that my belt buckle is poking out from the rest of my clothes.



In between pictures I had a birthday (30!). For my birthday my brother didn't buy anything for me, he bought something for the baby. It was Clemson stuff, a little shirt with a matching bib and a banner that I am going to hang outside the door of the baby's room.



This is the shirt under the bib.



And finally, my profile from last weekend. Even though I am essentially the same weight in these two pictures, my body is all shifting around and my belly is poking out way more now. I guess I officially look pregnant! By the way, that is the baby's room. We have started painting. I'll have another post when it is finished.

New Addition

So, we've been trying to get pregnant for about 8 months. On Christmas day I had my last period! We took a test on January 24 and it was positive. We couldn't believe it. I thought the whole time while I was waiting to take it that it would come back negative, but it didn't! That day we told our parents and our siblings. We asked them to not tell anyone until after our first appointment. We went to the doctor on Wednesday and had our first ultrasound. You can see a tiny little peanut shaped baby. We even got to see it's little heart fluttering and hear it's heartbeat. That was about the coolest part of the day. Then we took the picture and showed it off to our parents and let them tell everyone else. I got on facebook that day and sent out a message to our family members that are on there and told them. Then today I put up the picture and spread the news to everyone else on facebook. Below is the picture of our tiny baby.



I already have 4 other appointments scheduled with the doctor. Our ultrasound for finding out the baby's sex is on May 3, for all of you out there wanting to know. As of today I am 8 weeks pregnant and the baby is due on October 1.

So far, I feel tired a lot, and up until last week I felt fine. But then the nauseau hit and I have been trying to find foods that I can eat that will not make me gag. Fortunately I have only felt nuaseau, so that is good.

Stay tuned for more posts on little baby C.

Snow!

So, this past weekend we had a snow storm. It started snowing around 3:30 Friday afternoon and didn't stop until after midnight. We had already planned on going to my mom's house to eat dinner that night. So we went and before we ate we went looking for the baby goats and took snow pictures.

This is in the pasture with the goats looking towards the cow's pasture.



After dinner we stayed and watched a movie and it kept snowing. This is looking out the front door to my mom's side walk.



When we got home we took a picture of the front yard from the driveway.



When we woke up in the morning we took a picture of the back yard from our bedroom window.



When we got home the night before the next door neighbors had been making a snowman, so we took a picture of it the next morning too.



That day we went to my mom's house and Shawn made a snowman. We had lost most of our snow to melting by then, but she still has plenty. We had only gotten 7 inches, but she had gotten 8 1/2 inches.



This is a side view showing the little hat the snowman had on it.



So, we no longer have any snow, but there are still small patches on the ground at my parents house.

More Baby Goats

So, it's that time of year. The goat population has exploded on the Gunter farm. There were four baby goats born one weekend that got really cold and only one of them survived. Then the following week five more babies were born, two sets of twins and one single baby. Then that weekend an animal attacked one of the babies and killed it and another baby has disappeared. The next day two more were born. So as of now, there are six babies.


This is the poor baby that didn't survive the animal attack. This was the only picture that I had of a baby with Shawn. It was cold and Shawn ended up borrowing a flannel jacket I had left at the house in case I needed it.


This was one of a set of twins. They were so cute and tiny and were shivering.



There is an old john boat that my dad has in the field. The babies have decided it is a good place to hide from us. They all eventually ended up under there to huddle for warmth.



Before relocating to the boat, these two babies were hiding under the disc implement for my dad's old tractor. He had a tarp laying across it and it kept the wind off of them.



This was taken during the snow storm. These two babies had some how gotten under on old shed out in the pasture that is only about 6 inches off the ground. I had to just set the camera down and hope they got in the picture. They are facing the other way so you can't see the head.



All in all, there has been a lot of activity at my parent's farm.

Updates

I haven't written a post in sooo long. There hasn't been anything very newsworthy happening and I have been kinda lazy. Then the only big piece of news we had in the fall was just depressing. I will add pictures later when I am at home.

First of all, there was another baby cow born in the fall. It is a very healthy baby boy. And, for a change, it was all red rather than red with white splotches on its face. I can't even remember if the last round of baby goats had been born before my last post, but 4 more have been born, although one died after about two months or so. We aren't sure what happened, but my dad and my brother found it one day when they noticed it wasn't hanging around the other goats.

Secondly, we lost our cat in October. I had been planning on writing a post about it at the time, but every time I thought about it I would get too emotional and not even attempt it. Our cat was an outdoor cat that liked to spend time inside with us, but loved being outside even more. So, one day we noticed that she hadn't come up to eat that morning and looked for her that night when we got home from work. We found her pretty badly injured in our yard. It seemed that she had been hit by a car. After the fact we found out that my father-in-law actually saw it happen, but didn't know that it was our cat. Anyway, we took her to the emergency vet and had to have her put to sleep. We couldn't afford for them to do anything to try to save her and she seemed hurt badly enough that to save her would take a lot. She had completely broken all her bones in one leg and seemed to be bleeding internally. It was a very horrible decision for us to make, but she was in a lot of pain. Even though it has been a while I am still getting teary eyed just writing about it. We plan on getting another cat in a few years, but not for a while. We can't afford the up front vet costs to properly care for a cat and will be better able to handle all of that in a few years. Meanwhile, all the neighborhood cats are sorry for the loss because that means we no longer have food on our porch for them to come steal. I will probably write a separate post about our cat eventually, but as I am a sensitive emotional mess, I won't do that for a while yet.

Thanksgiving and Christmas were pretty uneventful. We saw almost all of our family and had a good time. There was a round of all the people we were related to getting the nasty croupy cold (including each of us). Then, right before Christmas, Shawn's entire family had a nasty stomach bug. Thankfully we didn't catch that. Shawn's birthday was uneventful, just the way he likes it. He doesn't like the idea of getting older, so he would rather not really celebrate. His parents took us out to eat, and since it was New Year's Eve, we went back to their house to watch fireworks being shot off by Whitney's friends.

I did actually make another baby blanket. That makes 6 in about 14 months time. The thing is that I know about twice that many people that have had babies in that time period. I also just found out that one of my friends is expecting their second baby, another friend is expecting her first baby, and I am still trying (ugh!).

Speaking of that frustration, it has been eight and a half months and I am starting to wonder if there is a problem. I know that I should not jump to that conclusion because it took my mom 2 years to get pregnant the first time and a year to get pregnant the second time, and I know other people that tried for just as long or longer. However, when it is you trying to get pregnant, it seems as though it is never going to happen. So when I got my period last month (on Christmas, not the present I was looking for) I broke down and cried for about ten minutes. It was very disheartening.

This whole frustration over trying is probably another reason I haven't posted anything recently. Almost every else's blog that I read is about their newest baby, so I just feel like mine is nothing great to read for anyone. There are only so many cow and goat pictures I can show before people get tired of them. I would just like to have some better news to spread to the world than baby animals being born and cat deaths. So, for now, I will probably continue to post only sporadically.