Less than 90 days!

I don't remember what I was doing or where it popped up but I was looking at something the other day and there was a little counter that told me I had less than 90 days before this baby is born. That's crazy. In some ways, he can't come soon enough. But in other ways, I'm just not ready.

Shiggy and I were talking before we went to bed tonight. I told him I thought we were all set for the baby. I had my baby shower this weekend. It was way early but one of my co-hosts was going home for the month before her husband gets back and then there's army balls and block leave after that. It just worked out best this way. Well I ended up with a lot of blankets and towels. Not sure what I'm going to do with all of them as I only registered for a pack of 4 swaddling blankets and 4 receiving blankets. Instead I have about 20 with no gift receipt and no idea where they came from. Heck, someone even gave me a used blanket with yellow stains all over it. But it was fun and I got a couple of "you didn't register for this but believe me you'll want it" gifts from moms. And I got a diaper cake. I've always wanted one. It even had a bottle of Moscato discreetly tucked in the middle. My friends are funny.

So back to our conversation. I told him all we needed was a bassinet and we'd be set. He did not agree with me. Then he started listing all the things we haven't bought yet that we might want before the baby gets here like a diaper bag, bottles, a breast pump, etc. He might have a point. I was thinking car seat, stroller, diapers, wipes, blankets and towels was good enough. Man, babies need a lot of stuff. I'm not planning on setting up the nursery or even buying baby furniture until after the baby gets here. We're not sure whether or not we'll be moving in the next few months so it just doesn't make sense to me to add furniture to the mix. Plus I just really don't want to clean out the junk room... But my in-laws will be in here in July so furniture or not, it must be done...

Of course, Shiggy bringing this up gets my mind all wound up and the baby started kicking and it's 12:30AM and I can't sleep because I can't shut my mind off or stop the baby from tap dancing. I think this has been the worst part of pregnancy for me...trouble sleeping. I can't complain because out of all the issues I could be having, this is pretty trivial.

I have the maternity and newborn pictures booked. Now I just have to schedule the birthing classes, lactation consultant and tour of L&D. Oh yea, I also have to do our taxes. Oh well, ready or not this baby will be here in less than 90 days!

Nesting

So I never understood this phenomenon of nesting. I understand getting ready for the baby, but not the increased OCD tendencies. It started with me wanting to make sure I get more chores done every day. Everyone who knows me knows how much I love doing housework...or avoiding it at all cost. The first few days went pretty well. I got everything done before noon including walking the dogs and prepping for dinner. Then I struggled for a few days and thought, wow that was fast. Last week went pretty well. I got everything done, just not on the right days. I also focused more on meals and making cookies. Then came yesterday.

It started out as a normal day of me checking to make sure my neighbor, who had texted me while I was sleeping to ask me to drive her to the ER, was alive. I totally missed her text! She was alive, thank goodness. Then I began my sitting around and doing nothing. My baby shower is on Saturday so I had to make sure the registry was all set. It turned out that I had changed my mind on just about everything and spent hours redoing it. Then I started scouring Craigslist to see what I could get from there. I realized the last day of the President's Day sale at Babies R Us was today and my friend had given me some pretty good coupons. Like a crazy couponer, I started writing down all the deals I could get crosschecking with Amazon for prices. I came up with a list of about 10 things I was going to buy.

Shiggy was doing something in the kitchen and asked for a small plastic container so I opened up the food storage cabinet and everything fell out, including the shelf. What better time to reorganize it. So I reorganized the kitchen cabinets. I found some stuff that belonged in the laundry room and decided to reorganize that as well. Then there was the storage room. Shiggy kept asking me what I was doing and why I was doing it right then. I didn't have a valid reason other than it needed to be done.

Shiggy had to wake up at 2AM for a formation this morning so he went to sleep super early last night. I finished up my shopping list and headed to bed at 10:30. I was tired but I couldn't make my mind stop racing. I also got up to pee 3 times in the course of 2 hours. I finally gave up a little after midnight and came back downstairs. I decided to research nursery furniture. I was trying to figure out the best deals. I didn't end up going to bed until 4AM. I was exhausted but as soon as my head hit the pillow I thought...I have a lot of gifts to make this week. Two of the girls in my coffee are having babies in March. One of them is having her shower on the same day as mine. I decided I was going to make each of them an embroidered onesie, a burp cloth, a taggie blanket and a little tote to put them in. Then my mind went to how Keri made her taggie with the crinkly stuff in the middle so I googled that. I found the most popular material was cellophane so I had to find a place that sold cellophane. But wait...don't I have cellophane bags somewhere in the house? I did and at 5AM, I found them. I got to the point where I could barely function and fell asleep around 5:30 after the baby freaked me out by moving across my belly for about 15 mins. Kicking I enjoy, feeling limbs stretch from one side to the other makes me think of aliens in my tummy.

I got up at 7:30 to walk the dogs and headed to Babies R Us with a friend. I realized prices at the store here are way more expensive then on-line. My 20% off coupons that I thought were going to be a great deal ended up making the price the same as the regular price on-line. So disappointing. It was also the last day of the sale so the shelves were pretty much empty. I am set with diapers for what I believed were months but my friend kindly brought me back to reality and let me know it would probably only last a couple of weeks. No great deals today but made my second substantial baby purchase.

Now I'm back to avoiding housework and feeling like I need a nap. I do have to get to the nursery. It's the only room that hasn't been touched since the week we moved in. The designated junk room. I have 3 more months! I'm also trying to teach myself to sew, embroider and crochet. Looking at cake decorating classes in April as well since my last class didn't quite work out. I feel like there's so much I want to do before I'm cleaning up more barf and poop than I already do! But first, a nap!

Another season of change.

I remember my friend Keri complaining about people leaving her. How she always felt like the one left behind instead of the one leaving. Lucky for me, I've never really experienced that. We've always been one of the first ones to leave or were waiting to leave when people started PCS-ing. I thought Hawaii was going to be another one of those experiences. I certainly wouldn't choose to leave Hawaii right now but I had mentally prepared myself when we first got here to only stay for 2 years. Although, I miss family and friends from the mainland terribly and wish my baby could grow up surrounded by them...I was happy when I found out there was the possibility of staying. But when I got up for my routine bathroom break at midnight, I realized that soon everyone here will be leaving me!

Everyone knows how hard it is for me to figure things out every time we move. I can't find a place where I belong or true friends to hang out with. It was especially hard this time living so far from post and having Shiggy deploy soon after getting here. My friend Marissa really helped me get out of the house and explore the island. In fact, I probably did 75% of my exploring with her in the first 6 months of living here. She's leaving in 3 weeks! She was one of the first people on the island I told about the baby and she won't be here when the baby's born.

I have another close friend who just found out she also might be leaving soon. I always knew Marissa would leave soon after redeployment, but this other one came as a shock. We thought she was going to be here for another year. No orders have been cut yet but it's looking pretty good that she'll be leaving this summer. Then we thought, at least she'll be here when the baby's born. But now even that might not be a possibility.

At the same time that news came about, another friend told me they might be leaving this fall. This is my core group and they're all leaving me as I start this new chapter in my life. Now I know it's horribly selfish of me to want them all to stay and they have bigger and better things coming up for them but still... I'm just sad.

Luckily I have one friend who said she will be staying here forever, at least that's what they're hoping for. It's hard knowing that in the next 2 years I'll see all the people we moved here with leaving one by one. But it's amazing that I get to meet people from all over the world and although we have to say "see ya later" for now, you know there's always a chance you'll get to see them again at another duty station. Ahh...the army life...

Man I'm gonna have my hands full...

So it's a boy! We're pretty excited. I really would have been happy either way. Shiggy wanted the first one to be a boy but he had already gotten accustomed to the idea that it might be a girl and he'd have to teach her all kinds of martial arts to keep the boys at bay. My dad's excited because it will bring the grandchildren count to 5 girls and 4 boys. But knowing the kind of child Shiggy was scares the crap out of me. It will certainly be interesting. I'm trying to get the dogs prepared.

It looks like we have a really good chance of staying in Hawaii for a little while longer with no deployments. But nothing's official yet so we're just playing the waiting game for now. I know we'll feel blessed enough just having a little boy and having his daddy here for the birth. Anything else would just be extra!

I think I'm going to have to go facebook official soon. I was going to keep this pregnancy off facebook, not because it's a secret or anything, just because I feel weird posting something like this on facebook. But in this day and age when almost all communication with long-distance friends and family are through facebook or blogs, it's hard to keep it off there completely. And of course everyone wants to see the dreaded belly pictures. At least now, it's starting to look more like a pregnant belly and less like I need to stop eating girl scout cookies. It's also weird how much bigger your stomach looks and feels when you're looking down at it rather than in a profile picture.

I've started to feel little baby kicks. I try to agitate him daily for my own peace of mind. It's still only a few times a day and I feel like he's mostly kicking my bladder. Shiggy's only felt it once. I find it really weird that I can feel it from the inside but we can't feel it from the outside.

My friend Jordan is going nuts with baby shower planning. She keeps asking if I've registered, picked out a name or picked a theme yet. She also sends me links about names, strollers, car seats, etc. I'm feeling like I might disappoint her with my sad little list of friends to invite. She's funny. I really appreciate her excitement.

Now that the anatomy scan is over, I feel like there's nothing to look forward to until the actual birth. Which still seems soo far away. It's probably a good thing because the conversion of the office into a nursery has not begun and so far the baby has a winnie the pooh blanket that I bought 4 years ago when it was on clearance at Target...and some clothes I bought for other people's babies but never sent out... I'll get there eventually.

Is everything ok in there?

I have to say I've been getting more and more anxious waiting for the next ultrasound. The "what if's" have been piling on hard. It doesn't help that I've barely felt any movement going on in there. I haven't bought a single baby item and went to Babies R Us once only to run out panic stricken. It's still relatively early so I don't really have to worry about that stuff yet.

I found out yesterday that I have an anterior placenta which explains the lack of movement I'm feeling when in reality the baby likes to tap dance all around. The ultrasound tech kept asking me if I could feel that and acted surprised when I said I couldn't. You just told me I probably wouldn't! Why are you surprised? I don't care. I'm just glad everything looked good. We're up to 12 oz with a heart rate of 150.

We're telling our families the sex today. It's my mom's birthday so I figured it would be a nice present. We discussed it over and over again and decided we could wait a day to tell people. Well imagine my surprise when someone texts me and asks if he can tell one of his friends. I told him absolutely no one was to find out until we talked to our families. This was also our friend who outed the pregnancy in the first place. Wait a second...did he already blab? He had to come clean and give me a list of people whom he already told or might have "overheard" as he was screaming it out. It bothered me because some of these people I don't even know and I had considered talking to him about not telling anyone for just a little while longer. I would have at least like to tell some family and friends before he blabbed to random co-workers. But how can I be mad that my husband is so excited about having a baby that he can't keep his mouth shut. I'm actually surprised now that he was able to keep the pregnancy to himself for 3 months. And in the end, it doesn't matter who found out what first.

Now I have to deal with a dog who's vomiting blood. Poor Denny. Every time he feels sick he'll let me know and try to get outside. Since I don't like to wake up in the middle of the night to let him out, sometimes I ignore him. It's never a good idea. It's also never a good idea to walk around in the dark when there's the possibility that there's vomit on the floor somewhere. Hopefully I can get him to eat in a few hours and all we be good again.

We're halfway there. For now I just have to continue impatiently waiting for both the baby and my Girl Scout cookies to get here.

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas! I'm just chilling by myself right now so I figure I'd break my rule of only blogging once every 3-4 months again. I'm very grateful that my husband is home for Christmas this year. He volunteered for staff duty today since most people either went home or have family visiting and it's just us so we can delay our Christmas festivities. His plan is to pop in and out until his shift is over at 5. He came home for breakfast and we opened gifts. He definitely went overboard this year. I told him to choose something from my amazon wish list that I really just keep for myself and he bought almost everything off it. Someone will have to remind me to trim the list down to 1 or 2 items before he looks at it next year. Although I have a feeling I will be completely overlooked next Christmas which is definitely ok with me.

I tried to get a Christmas picture to post here since he had to wear his blues today but it didn't quite turn out. He looked pretty spiffy but me with no makeup, having not brushed my hair and looking unusual large. It was not quite the look I was going for and there was no time to fix it.

The cat is almost completely out of the bag about our little blessing to come. I find after 3 months of keeping it secret, it's really hard to just let it go. Sometimes I forget that there are people who know. I also realized when my parents asked me who Shiggy was that I probably should have kept the "Shiggy/Tim" in our Christmas card. Now I will have a poor illegitimate child with an identity crisis.

I find the more people who know, the more anxious I get so I almost wish we kept it as our own little secret. I'm not quite at the excited phase yet just because I seem to spend most of my time worrying. Maybe if I give it a couple more weeks. I know I have a bunch of wonderful people who have been praying for us and continue to pray for us.

Now I'm just waiting for our Christmas dinner date at 9PM. I could say we're going out that late because we're young, hip and cool but in reality all the restaurants are booked up for Christmas. I'm just hoping we can both stay awake until then.

As this year starts winding down, I am so grateful for all the blessings that have been bestowed upon us. We have great friends and family. My husband made it home through another deployment and hopefully will not be deploying again anytime soon. We're ready for our next great adventure!

Happy Birthday, Jesus and thank you for making it possible for us to have a Merry Christmas!

A time of reflection...

It's been kind of a rough week for me. My cousin passed away a few days ago and it has me stuck in a tunnel of emotions. She was a distant cousin, who was quite a bit older than me. Honestly, we were never close. She tormented me when I was little with comments about my weight, acne, and just about anything you can make a young girl cry with. She wasn't trying to be mean. It's just the Chinese way.

She was one of those people that I saw almost every time I went home, usually at some kind of family function. I had no idea she had beaten cancer once only for it to come back. She and her husband have 2 daughters. One of the girls is a senior in high school and her older sister is a freshman in college. Not that there's ever a good time, but what an absolutely awful time to lose your mom.

It brings back a flood of memories for me. That's about the age that I found out my mom had cancer. I was away at college and my family was able to hide it from me for a few months. They finally decided to tell me because they figured I'd notice that mom had no hair when I came home for Christmas break. They even tried to convince me that it wasn't cancer, they were just trying to treat her condition aggressively with chemotherapy. Going back to school after that break was really hard. But God decided that it wasn't her time to go. I can't imagine what those girls are going through.

Then I thought about my uncle. He passed away unexpectedly from a heart attack in his 40's also about this time 10 years ago. I remember I took a break from my finals to go to his funeral. He has 3 beautiful girls and a handsome boy. They adored him and things were difficult without him. I think it's part of the reason my cousin has put off marrying her boyfriend of 12 years.

I don't think my cousin's family believes in God at all but I just hope they can still feel his comfort through their anger and sadness. I don't know how you get through these times without God. I hope those girls remember and cherish every single one of their memories of their mom, even when she was yelling at them to only drink skim milk so they don't get fat. It's funny, when I was younger I took a lot of offense to what she said to me. Now I know it was her way of showing love and concern. Please pray for the Chung family.