Nausea Sucks

Let me start this post off with a thankful heart. I’m not puking 24/7 like many other women have done when they are pregnant. In fact, I’ve only puked once (knock on wood!). I know that I’m very lucky for that, but I have some incredible nausea lately and it’s making me miserable. My biggest enemy of the day is my tooth brush. I’ve quickly learned how to brush my teeth just right and avoid gagging that leads to the dry heaving. Ick. It’s just awful. And once my day starts with all that, my stomach just won’t settle down.

Even on good days where I get through brushing my teeth with no trauma, I haven’t been able to enjoy food. Nothing, I repeat: Nothing sounds good. I used to bring left overs for lunch or keep a hot pocket or frozen meal here for lunch. Not anymore. I never know what will sound good, if anything does, and I’ve ended up with some interesting lunches.

I’m in this weird situation where I need to eat to stay healthy, but nothing on earth even sounds appealing. And God Bless Tyler. He has always helped out around the house, but lately he’s been extra helpful lately. Like last week when he called to tell me that he layed out some ground beef and chicken breasts to thaw so that we’d have something for dinner for the next couple of nights. At that moment, I didn’t have the heart to tell him that the thought of cooking either of those made me want to puke, so I told him Thanks and appreciated his thoughtfulness. I have hardly cooked lately. Nothing sounds good and I just am too tired to give cooking dinner a decent shot.  We did eat at home last night, which was nice and didn’t make me sick, so that was a success!

We went to CVS last night and I got these things called Sea Bands. They’re basically wrist bands with a small plastic ball type thing sewn into them that you wear on your wrists. The plastic part sits on a pressure point and it helps reduce nausea due to motion sickness and morning sickness. It’s an acupuncture-ish wonder and so far they’re helping me. It’s not all gone away, but it’s reduced the nausea and in my book that’s a win!

The Waiting Game...

Keeping this pregnancy a secret is about the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Especially after seeing the ultrasound, I just wanted to tell everyone how happy I was. There’s so many things that can happen at the beginning of a pregnancy and we had planned on waiting until our birthday week (mid July) to tell the world that we’re having a baby. Wellllll that plan didn’t quite work out. We just couldn’t hardly wait to tell everyone and we decided that we would share the news on Father’s day weekend.

Our friends Eric & Dana got married on Saturday and many of our friends were together for the entire weekend. I wasn’t sure how I was going to get through the weekend without getting questioned for not drinking. Friday night we had everyone over to my mom’s house to hang out after the rehearsal and we ended up telling everyone there that we were expecting. We told a few people at church on Sunday morning and from there went on to visit my grandparents in Wathena and Tyler’s grandma in Savannah to share the news. After that we put it on Facebook and sent out lots of text messages.

It’s so fun to share our news with the world and have everyone we know share in the excitement and anticipation of our little one!

Our First Appointment

About a week after we found out we were pregnant, we went to our first appointment. We decided to go with Saint Luke’s Northland because it’s close to our house and Tyler’s work. The people in that office are wonderful and we’ve had great experiences so far.

We met with the doctor and went over a billion questions to make sure they had all of the information correct. Then I had an exam, they drew some blood and we were off.

A few days later, we got to come back for our first sonogram. We had hoped to see the baby at the first appointment, but that didn’t happen, so we were really excited to see our baby for the first time. The only way to explain that experience was AWESOME. We saw little baby’s heart beat flickering on the screen and when I held my breath you could see the little blog moving around. Then the nurse turned on the speakers and we got to hear the heartbeat. It was beating 123 beats per minute and that was probably one of the coolest sounds I have ever heard. Up until that point I knew I was pregnant, but it didn’t really feel real. Once we got to see our little person and hear their heart beating, it became very real and we were so happy! They gave us an estimated due date of February 4, 2012.

We went to lunch after that appointment and couldn’t stop talking about it. The heartbeat and seeing the baby was just too cool! They sent us both home with pictures of the sonogram, but all baby looks like right now is a little blob on the screen. Our next ultrasound will be in September sometime to see if Little Sidwell is a boy or a girl!

We're PREGNANT!

After 5 months of “trying,” we are happy to announce that we’re expecting! Little Sidwell will be here around February 4^th and we’re so excited!!

We had just gotten back from vacation and I was feeling very tired and worn down. I came home from work and would sleep most of the evening for the first week back. I kept telling Tyler that I thought I was pregnant and even tested a few times that week, but all were negative. The weekend came and we went out with some friends in Lawrence and had a great time and stayed out until 4 a.m. The next morning, I was feeling funny again and decided to take another test. Less than a minute later… POSITIVE! I was so excited that I couldn’t wait to show Tyler, who was getting ready to go to work, that I pulled open the shower curtain and showed him. He hurried through the rest of his shower and we spent the morning talking about how we couldn’t believe it was finally positive.

The next day was conveniently a BBQ we had planned for our friends and family to celebrate Memorial Day. We originally decided that we wouldn’t tell our moms yet, but after thinking about upcoming doctor’s visits, etc, we wanted to be able to talk with them about everything and decided to tell them when they came for the BBQ. Tyler’s mom got to our house first. She didn’t even get in the door before Tyler told her we were pregnant. My mom, Ted and sister came in next. When I told them, they were screaming and jumping up and down with excitement. We did all the baby talk we could before all of our friends arrived and it became a secret again.

Just to be sure, I bought a digital test and tested again at the end of the weekend. Just as we had expected, it read positive also. I called the doctor’s office to get appointments started and we began our journey for the next 8ish months.