18 weeks

How far along? 18 weeks

Total weight gain: still 6 pounds under pre-pregnancy weight!

Maternity clothes? mostly regular clothes with a few maternity dresses and skirts thrown in

Stretch marks? no. Faithfully applying the cocoa butter!!!

Sleep: I have always been a good sleeper. Especially since pregnancy hit. Now I'm averaging 5-6 hours a night and I feel great. This is so weird to me.

Best moment this week: Feeling the baby roll around in my tummy during the candlelight service on Christmas Eve!

Miss Anything? breathing normally

Movement: definitely!

Food cravings: nothing big. Still wanting my daily dose of chocolate :)

Anything making you queasy or sick: Chinese, BBQ and anything with MSG

Gender: waiting for January 3rd! I get daily "guesses" from my patients. I've had two different ladies tell me this week they just "knew" I would have a boy, then it was a girl. So who knows?!? I don't have the "motherly intuition" that tells me either way.

Labor Signs: No

Symptoms: Heart palpitations [SVT], frequent bathroom trips, and difficulty breathing at the most random times.

Belly Button in or out? still flat

Wedding rings on or off? off right now. I'm having the worst allergic reaction to my ring. So depressing!

Happy or Moody most of the time: Happy and my hubs says I'm more dramatic than usual

Looking forward to: a week off at HYC with the kiddos and then the Jan 3rd US!!

Surprise!

I last published on Jan 4th. Ouch!!! So this blog has taken many turns, but here we are almost a year later and I'm 4 months pregnant. Surprise!!

I keep thinking, "I need to write that down" or "I'll want to remember this" as I make my journey through pregnancy. Have I done that yet? Why, no. Of course not. So here I am, attempting to capture some precious memories so that I can recall them years from now.

Let's start from the moment we found out. The beginning of September 2011 I was hit with an extreme amount of fatigue and nausea. No surprise there, a nasty bug had been passing itself around to all my patients. I really thought nothing of it. The first week I slept through my alarm the entire week. I wrote it off as stress from a particularly trying family situation. The second week I was hit with the nausea. Again, I thought nothing of it until it started hanging around longer than the required 72 hours. We were in the middle of a college retreat and I felt like I had been run over by a train. Finally, extremely frustrated, I sent the husband off to grab some pregnancy tests (that I was sure would be negative) and then I would call my doctor's office to get worked in on Monday. We ran home, I hurridly took the test (we were on our way to watch a VERY important football game) and waited impatiently for the little pink line to pop up. Imagine my surprise when both lines turned pink! This couldn't be right!! We hadn't planned for this and had taken every precaution to be "safe". I walked out of the bathroom in shock to inform my husband of the news. It took a few weeks for it all to settle in.

We decided to wait to tell our family and friends. We wanted to make it safely through the first trimester and wait until my brother-in-law was married before we spilled the "beans". I was glad that we waited to share the excitement with everyone around us.....I felt so horrible! I slept 12-14 hours a day and spent the rest of the time in a state of nausea and uh....relieving my stomach contents.

Let's fast forward to our first OB appointment. We were both so nervous about what would happen. We ended up having a great appointment, met our wonderful doctor and her staff and then got to see the ultrasound of our little peanut. It was surreal to see the heartbeat go across the screen. There really was something in there!

I'll finish this post with a sweet picture of our peanut at 8 weeks :)

It's A New Season

I love starting over. I love the clean & crisp feeling of a new year. It's a time for renewal, regeneration and fresh commitments. It's also a time to make those dreaded "New Year's Resolutions." Ugh. I despise making 'resolutions' that I know I'll never keep.

So instead, I'm doing something else. With the help of this post and these posts, I'm creating a life plan for the next 6 weeks of my life. Much easier to do!

My goals include financial goals, spiritual goals, organizational goals, fitness and meal planning. I'm creating a series of steps to reach these measurable goals and making myself accountable to others.

I LOVE great resources, especially when they're free! I also love when I read blog posts that share great resources, so I thought I'd do that here. These are some of the things I'm using to help me reach my goals.

Mvelopes: A great financial system. We also love Dave Ramsey!!

FlyLady: Love her household routines. I use the bedtime routine, the morning routine and clean our house using the Zone technique. I also subscribe to her daily Flight Plan (email) and Twitter, which often have useful tips and explain things in greater detail. The greatest thing about "flying"....it's just a few baby steps at a time.

Wii Fitness/Zumba: I use this to get myself moving every day. Zumba is fun and super energetic! It's a combination of intense cardiac workouts based on popular Latin and hip-hop dances. Warning: It does require some coordination, but if I can do it, you definitely can too. Wii Fitness has a better combination of stretching, weights, cardiac and yoga. Wii Fitness also tracks your progress and personalizes a plan based on your fitness goals.

Meal Planning: This is a hard area for me. I tend to be too much of a perfectionist and I find it hard to work with what I have on hand. However, I found this small series on meal planning (written by a SAHM of 4 children!) to be extremely helpful.

Until next time!

Ashley