a mix of things...

This last week was spirit week at school. My favorite theme for dressing up is, by far, pajama day. No pajama day this week. Sometimes the kids choose really random theme ideas and I have a hard time finding things that I can wear. Throw in being almost 6 months pregnant, and clothing choices for theme days go way down. Friday of this week was "western day". I had to borrow a shirt from my friend Emily's husband, Mark. I like the shirt, but when it's buttoned on me I looked like a 50 year old man with a SERIOUS beer belly. It was not a day of feeling attractive...for sure. These are three of my favorite ladies I work with. Melissa (in the red bandana) is also pregnant - due two weeks after me, Courtney (in the overalls) is a great person to get advice from - she had a baby a year ago. Most of my maternity clothes are hers and Morgan has the braids. I met Morgan while at K-State. She lived across the hall from me and was one of my residents the year that I was an RA. These ladies make work so much more fun! It's fantastic to have really great friends at school!

Here's a belly update at 24 weeks (I'm 25 weeks today). I think the belly has looked about the same for the last 2-3 weeks.

This is the fabric (and subsequently the colors) for Lauren's nursery. Emily's mom, Cathy, is going to make me a baby quilt and bed skirt. I'm quite excited!

Brian and I (but mostly Brian) are working on moving the office to the basement so we can begin painting and put together the crib and changing table we bought a few weeks ago! Pictures to come!

I've been waiting to see this!

For those of you who don't read Abbe's blog, you should. I LOVE reading about what she has to say, how God has blessed her, challenged her and grown her! She, along with another gal, lead my my small group Bible study at K-State my freshman year of college. The two of those ladies were extremely influential in my spiritual journey. Read THIS particular entry and scroll down to watch the video - it's awesome! We serve a great God!

First Outfit!

EEEKKK! Baby girl clothes are the cutest! This is Baby Lauren's first little outfit!

While we were in Florida visiting Brian's parents, I found this at G.A.P. and put it in my online shopping cart knowing I had to wait 3 more weeks to find out if we were having a little girl. After our sonogram, I went to order it only to find out that the website was out of the sizes I wanted. I called my friend Marie - who works at baby.g.a.p and asked her if they had these items. I refuse to go crazy buying clothes, but this was the one thing I really wanted. I LOVE ladybugs. I just think they're adorable. After some searching Marie called to tell me that the items were on my way to our house - as a gift! Thanks Marie! She's going to look adorable!

Ew.

This is a picture of my sweatshirt after I made dinner this evening.
EWWW.

I was making enchiladas for dinner tonight. I was using canned chicken chunks because it's just easier. As I was draining the excess liquid from the can I pushed the lid in a little too hard and it exploded chicken juice all over my shirt. I stood at the sink in shock for a second and quickly had to peel the shirt off my body.

As I was taking a picture of the juice and chunks on my shirt, I just had to laugh. This is probably nothing to what my clothes are about to experience in about 4 months. After explosive poop, projectile vomit and countless spit-up episodes, I bet I'd gladly exchange a poopy shirt for a chicken juice shirt. Still...I'm way excited for all the things that will come with this precious little one!

Christmas Break - in review!

I thought I should probably spend some time writing a post today since it's a SNOW DAY!!! I'm not sure why...we're supposed to have bad weather later, but nothing's happening yet and it's almost noon. I'm glad to have a day at home since we spent the week after Christmas in Florida visiting Brian's parents. Not much got done around here. All of our Christmas decorations are still up. It still looks like this in our house! Notice the little baby stocking? I thought it was the cutest!!! It's actually the first (and only) thing we've purchased for Baby Fox.

Due to terrible weather around Christmas, we weren't able to keep our family tradition (with my family) of dinner and a movie. We canceled our plans and after Christmas Eve service we had to eat Mac and Cheese for dinner. We were going to be out of town for a week, spending Christmas Day at my parents' house and the following 2 days at my Grandma's house. Our cupboards were a little bare. But we do both love Mac and Cheese - so it was our fancy schmancy Christmas Eve dinner.


Since we were stuck in for the night, Santa came early! Santa never wrapped presents when I was little...so I was a little suspicious that this might not really be from Santa.

Inside the box was the original Nintendo! I was SOOOO excited. I remember spending lots of time at my friend Jenny's house playing this. My parents wouldn't let us have one, so I had to do my nintendoing at Jenny's house. It is exciting at the age of 27 to finally have one. Santa brought Super Mario, Super Mario 3 and Duck Hunt. As much as I love these games....

I'm not very good at them. I just lost my last life. :(

Christmas morning looked like this! We had to wait until around 12:00 until the roads were plowed so that we could make it to my parents' house to open presents. This is what their house looked like that morning!

It stopped snowing enough to finally make it to the movie on Sunday afternoon (we did that since there was too much snow to make it to my Grandma's house). Here's my 17 week bump. I'm almost 19 weeks now - so there has been a bit of growing since then. I felt the baby kick for the first time on Christmas day! It's such a great feeling! I love it!

Monday morning at the crack of dawn we left for the airport to go visit Brian's parents in Florida. I got up at 2:45 a.m. Not fun. 2 days after we arrived I received this picture from my mom. We had 3 more inches of snow on the ground. To keep us from returning at midnight to have to shovel, they went and shoveled the snow off our drive and walk way. What great parents!!! Here's my dad in his awesome one piece snowsuit. He's had that thing as long as I can remember. I bet it is 25 years old.

We didn't do much in Florida. I was grateful to get to rest and relax. I watched lots of football - and was able to talk to my dad about it when we returned. He was shocked and impressed. I'm not really a big football watching girl. One day we did take an air boat ride on a lake in an attempt to see some alligators. My sister-in-law and her husband had arrived in Florida at this time, so going anywhere as six people provided a transportation conundrum. We just packed in. Alicia (my SIL) and I just thought this was the funniest sight (yes, we were also squished quite well in the back).

It has been rather cold in Florida (it was only 55 degrees when we left) that the gators haven't been very visible on the lake. Since we only saw two, the people at the boat place let us hold this!!!!!

It was pretty fun!!!! Yes, the mouth was taped shut. My mom was worried about that :).

Every year I've given my mother-in-law and sister-in-law matching socks. Here's our picture from this year.
Brian and his siblings have a weird (in my opinion) tradition of writing creative names in the "from" line on gifts. This was my favorite!!! Alicia just started reading the Twilight series and asked me if I was on Team Edward or Team Jacob. I'm totally Team Jacob - which is why my gift was no longer from Edward, but from Jacob. I giggled so hard!!!

Overall, the break was fantastic. The trip home from Florida wasn't the greatest. Our flight took off 30 minutes late and we had a 34 minute layover in Atlanta and were quite worried we'd miss our flight. Thankfully when we arrived in Atlanta our next plane hadn't even started boarding yet. We made it to KC to find that - SHOCK- it was snowing again. My parents gave us money to park in the garage parking for the week. We were literally 20 feet from the door and incredibly thankful we didn't have to scrape 4 inches of snow off our car before we drove home. Although it wasn't that warm for Florida - the FREEZING temperatures made me yelp when I first stepped outside. It took 1.5 hours to get home from the airport - when it normally only takes 40 minutes. I'm considering moving to Aruba. Who's with me?

Hair Confessions...

When I was a child and through high school I had extremely thick hair. It was so thick my mom had a hard time braiding it. I remember it would take 2-3 hours to air dry when I was in Jr. High. When I was in high school I developed terrible acne and started taking birth control pills to help it. It worked, a little, and I remained on those pills for a VERY long time. Around my senior year of college I started to notice that my hair was thinner than it had been. It was a big enough deal that I asked my doctor about it, but not such a big deal that I was super concerned. She didn't think it had anything to do with being on birth control, so, I continued taking it as I was still dealing with acne. After college I finally started to love my curly hair. I really embraced it, grew it long and it must really have been gorgeous, because everywhere I went people would comment on it and tell me how pretty it was. It happened so often it was almost comical. The following picture is what it looked like during that time.


A year and a half later I went to Italy with my best friend Emily. My hair looked like this. I was still getting compliments, but not as often.

Two years later (summer 2008) I got to go back to Italy with my husband and parents. The picture below was taken in the exact same place - I was just facing the opposite direction. If you click on the two Italy pictures you can really tell a difference in how thin my hair is in the bottom picture as compared to the top. When we got back and I saw this, I started to get really worried.

This picture was taken a year and a half ago - and it has gotten worse. I won't wear my hair down anymore. I really started to push the issue with my doctor. I wanted to figure out why I was losing my hair. I started doing a lot of research and found out that birth control pills could cause hair loss. After LOTS of talks about it, Brian and I decided that it would be best to see if the pills were causing my hair loss. 15 months later I can tell you that stopping the pills didn't make a difference at all. I have had lots of blood work done. Everything was coming back normal. I started using using nice shampoo, conditioner and hairspray (I have become a total hair spray snob...expensive stuff really works better). Nothing was helping and it was frustrating knowing that there was nothing to be found in my blood work. From everything I was reading online it sounded like there could be something wrong hormonally that blood tests wouldn't show. Infertility was mentioned on lots of sites that were discussing hair loss. I was worried we wouldn't be able to have kids. We started talking a lot more about trying sooner than we were originally thinking, wondering if it would be a long time before we could get pregnant. Brian was coming around to the idea and I was getting really excited to start trying since I had terrible baby fever. Thankfully, infertility wasn't in our cards and we got pregnant rather quickly.

Finally, about 4 weeks after I was found out I was pregnant with Baby Fox I went to the dermatologist and had a scalp biopsy done. A week later I received a call saying that I have female pattern hair loss. Yep, I'm balding. Female hair loss is often an all over thinning instead of the bald shiny top with hair around the neck and ears as is common in men. I am thankful to know that there is nothing "wrong" with me, but very sad to know that this is not going to get better. The only treatment option that was given to me was rogaine...which I can't use while pregnant or breast feeding. I'm guessing a wig might be in my future - and that is a scary/sad thought.

I can't believe how much this plays into daily life. I won't buy certain shirts because I don't like how it looks with my hair up. Getting ready in the morning takes at least 20 minutes longer because it actually takes longer to deal with less hair. Everywhere I go I notice hair. I check out pony tail thickness all time time. I am constantly jealous of women with thick hair. I get angry when women with nice hair don't style it or don't keep it nice looking. Why can't they trade with me? If they're not going to bother to do their hair, can I just have it? Your hair will be the first thing I notice about you...whether you are my friend or a character in a movie I'm watching.

I'll keep you posted if I soon enter into the lifestyle of wearing a wig... Maybe if I do it right after the baby is born people will be too busy staring at the baby to notice that my hair suddenly looks different. :)

29

29 is the number of women I just wrote down on a list - a list of people I know who are pregnant. I realize that this is the stage of life we're in, but seriously, does this seem like a rather large number to you all? I really could make it 32 if I counted people I've never met in real life, but whose blogs I stalk and know of them through friends. Also, be mindful that I've recently had to take 4 people off this list because they've had their babies in the last 6 weeks or so. :) 2010 is going to be a fun year!