Holy Solanum melongena!

Finally! We have a new fruit/vegetable! I'm so excited! Really makes you think about eggplant parmigiana differently, right?


Well, our little miss Stella is now the size of an eggplant, and Derek and I have been married for (drumroll, please...) seven years! I know, I know. We married very young. I wouldn't have done it any other way, though. I love him so much, and I'm so happy :) 


But we didn't start this blog so I could babble on about Derek and me and our marital bliss. Back to the baby. I figure it's time to show the world just how large I am these days:

Maybe I'm crazy, but I think I look a lot bigger than I did two weeks ago. I guess that explains all of my recent discomfort. I haven't weighed myself, but I will soon. I'm kinda nervous about it, but I'm almost at the point of not caring what the scales say. I figure as long as my legs and arms don't look like big tubes of fat, meaty sausage, then I'm fine. Right? :\

Aside from the crampiness, things are going well. Although, I didn't sleep so well last night, and I attribute that to my sinuses. I've been having a hell of a time with my sinuses lately. I mean, I heard of all that rhinitis of pregnancy bullshit, but this is ridiculous. I wake up in the morning and blow my nose. It looks like someone either punched me or squashed a mouse in my tissue (gross visual, I know, but I'm the one that has to look at it every morning). I was starting to get worried because of the bloody noses and constant state of being stuffed up, but I'm going to give it a couple days and see what happens. 

You know you've been married for a while when your anniversary request is to go buy a humidifier for your bedroom, haha. Derek and I went and bought one today, and I think it will really help. I've had it running, and I think it will clear up the sinus discomfort and sinus headaches. If not, I'm calling the doctor. 

I also picked up a few things for our nursery while we were out. Here's how it's looking these days:

Clearly, it's still a work in progress, but it's looking much girlier! I was very happy to find that lamp at Target - it has cute little owls all over it! We still need to get some more artwork on the walls, and we need to get some more gear. The next big purchase will likely be the pack and play, and we have the perfect one picked out. It's brown and pink by Graco. I also would like to get some sort of a glider/rocker very soon. I had wanted the rocker from my mom's house that my grandmother rocked me in, but I'm worried about my mom transporting it here from Ohio. I am also concerned about it being too hard. I know I'll be spending plenty of time in that piece of furniture, so I want to make sure it's comfortable. We'll see.

I also thought I'd take a second to show you what I'm guessing Derek's parenting style will be like...

I thought this offered a telling glimpse of what he'll be like with Stella - literally letting her do whatever she wants. Maggie spends most of her time licking Derek's face and crawling all over him, so I'm guessing that whatever Stella wants to do, he'll let her. He's a total spoiler, so I'm sure she'll have him wrapped around her finger in no time. 

Anyway, I'm so excited that our baby girl is now the size of an eggplant! My other little tracker says a rutabaga, but I don't really know how big those are since I never buy them. An eggplant is a much easier visual for me. I also read that she's got fingerprints now, and I'm certain she gets hiccups pretty darn often. All of sudden, I'll have these weird, rhythmic bounces over and over. It's pretty cute :)

I'll post more as we continue to develop the nursery! :) So much more to do!! 

Crafts Et cetera

Here we are at 24 weeks (otherwise known as six months for you laypeople), and apparently, I look like a beached whale or possibly a hippopotamus. We'll get on to that later...


First, I'd like to start things off all cheery-like, and show what I've been up to this weekend. Since my next class with Ashford doesn't start until Jan. 4, I figured I had some down time to work on something fun. I fancy myself crafty, but I never have the time or patience to do anything. 


I've had my eyes on some cute nursery letters on Etsy, but Derek convinced me that I could make my own. Well, here are the fruits of my labor:

:D 

Derek gets "Most Patient Dad" award for hanging them.

 I was griping the entire time about how crooked they were. 

A closer shot 

I think they're pretty cute, and it let me incorporate the colors I wanted. I wouldn't say we're doing a theme - not fond of those - but I would say that we're at least in a color ballpark, unlike the rest of my house. Usually, I just get all crazy and colorful and go wild. What can I say, I like color. Well, we're sticking to sort of softer pinks - none of those crazy hot pinks - greens, browns, and soft blues. See what I mean? I can't just pin down one or two. I get crazy with it. 


I think that's why I like patterns a lot. It's all crazy and patterned and wild with tons of colors. Makes me happy! I think they turned out really well, and Derek hung them on the wall in her room. I had been thinking about painting something, but I'm going to stop here. I don't want to go overboard, and I know have other decor items that I want to get/still need to hang up. Once the nursery is in a more put together state, I'll take some pictures. 


Speaking of happy, Miss Stella was quite entertaining this morning. We went to the earlier mass - 7:15 - since the 9am mass is usually packed out the door. I was up anyway, so I figured we could go ahead and go. During the homily, she seemed to do what I think was rolling over or shifting, and she ended up morphing my stomach into this weird triangle shape. I could feel her just sitting there in this goofy looking lump in my stomach. I was totally distracted at that point and started kinda smiling and giggling because I felt like I could actually feel her. She was doing it again when Derek was hanging the letters, and he was able to feel her. :) 


Now, on to my complaining... it's unlike me to be too positive for too long, right?


In the past couple days, I've had a lot of people saying things like, "Wow, you're huge." One of my coworkers said, "I wonder why you're so much bigger than Maria (who works in the Registrar's office and we have the exact same due date)." Last night at a cookie swap, I had one person say, "You're enormous! I thought you were maybe due in February or something." There was another pregnant chick there and she is due in March, and I dwarfed her. It was actually embarrassing...


To top it off, the priest who served mass this morning said, "Wow, any day now!" I was like, "heh." I can't even find sanctuary there! :( All things considered, he wasn't Fr. MacNeil - our usual priest at the 9am mass. Oh well... I'm sure he wouldn't have said it if he knew I'd be griping about it on a blog right now. :( 


So WTF is up?! Why am I so damned large? I swear, I don't think I'm doing anything wrong. I eat healthy stuff, and I'm even trying to conform to this stupid nurse's "low carb" mentality (even though I hate meat!). When I go to my doctor's appointments, the doctor says my fundal height is perfect, and I'm exactly where I should be weight-wise. Derek even thinks I don't eat any more than I ever did, except for the occasional snack or 3am cottage cheese run. So what in the hell is going on? Why am I a freaking whale?


Sigh... I know none of you can really answer this. I don't think anyone can. It's some combination of genes, frame-size, weight, and, honestly, bad luck. I had always figured it was because I'm a mere 5'2" but everyone keeps telling me that doesn't matter. I know my mom said she was pretty large when she had me, so maybe I'm to blame her (sorry, Mom). Maybe I was a little too hefty before I got pregnant. Although, I didn't think I was at the time. It's a world of ifs, kids. 


Anyway! Things are going well, aside from the occasional remark about my preposterous size. I feel good, and my heartburn has disappeared for a couple days thanks to the Protonix. I have been making a point to eat protein-heavy dinners, and I haven't been waking up every night needing to eat. I even stayed up until almost 11 last night working on Stella's letters. Overall, things are going well! 


I can't believe it's almost Christmas and our anniversary! I'm looking forward to the long weekend with my awesome husband who listens to me cry over and over and pretty much exhausts himself telling me that he thinks I look great :) 


Oh, and to finish things out - we bought a papaya at the grocery store and had it for breakfast. Kinda weird, I know, but man, it was tasty (and huge - like me!). 

Super Fun Etsy Purchase!

I had to take a second to share this super fun nursery purchase before I log off my computer for the day:

http://www.etsy.com/listing/62937517/true-love-collage-eco-friendly-by-maple

I saw it and I thought it was too cute! I've been so excited to share it! Derek and I are getting ready to go help with a SCAD Men's Swimming meet, so I wanted to get this in since we'll be getting in so late! Oh, I love shopping online over my lunch! I can't wait to get it!!! :) 

Appointment on Monday

Well, we're almost at 19 weeks, and my next appointment is on Monday at 3. 

We'll get to do our half-way ultrasound, and we're really excited :D We haven't seen our baby since our 7 weeks appointment back in August. Back then, Baby Ratcliff was a little gummy bear-looking guy. I'm sure a lot has changed, and I can't wait to see him/her. I hope everything is okay and all the parts check out. I'm very nervous about the baby, and Derek says I'm being too worrisome. It's hard when I worry that everything I do may harm the baby or somehow negatively affect the baby's development. Just please pray for a healthy Baby Ratcliff on Monday :) 

That brings me to my next topic. In some secret way, I keep hoping that the ultrasound will start and Baby Ratcliff will be waiting on us with his/her legs wide open and there won't be any way to hide it. I know, I know... I brought this on myself, but for some reason, I keep wishing I hadn't. My lack of patience is really rearing its ugly head. 

Maybe it's because I've realized how little gender neutral baby gear there really is out there. I've been looking at baby clothes, and everywhere I've looked  - Carter's, Baby Gap, Gymboree, The Children's Place, Macy's - all pretty much have a couple gender neutral outfits. Mostly, gender neutral stuff is covered in these less than fantastic ducks, and it really pisses me off. Who says parents want to cover their babies in ducks for the first three months of their lives? I sure as hell don't.... We may opt for the Wu-Tang onesie since it's technically gender neutral! 

We've also decided to make a final decision and order bedding. We were going to go with the Carter's Forest Friends bedding I found on Diapers.com. Remember that post? Well, we're honestly very worried that it may end up being too boyish. We want something that we can easily add pink to but also easily be able to add darker shades of blue as well. I still plan to get that adorable owl wall hanging and pillow, but I think we may go for something simpler, less matchy-matchy. We found something we like on Overstock.com, and it's much cheaper than the Forest Friends set. It's all light blue and brown, and it's covered in geometric shapes. We thought that might go better with the rest of our house and the whole gender neutral thing. Any ideas?

I've also spent a good bit of time looking for other gender neutral bedding options, and there are so few - wait, so few that aren't a JUNGLE theme, bleck! - that I could scream. My friend Kerry found an awesome one on Diapers.com that she sent me and it had birds on it. The only problem is that it doesn't really go with our paint choice, and I kept worrying that a boy probably doesn't want to have a bunch of birdies all over his bed. Such a hard decision!

We're planning to do a little shopping today but mostly for holiday things. I'm going to look around and see if I find anything. We've decided upon a mattress, and I plan to order that right away. I haven't had a lot of free time lately with TAing for Ashford, the University of Phoenix hiring process, and work at SCAD. I have to go in tomorrow for our finals Midnight Breakfast. I love my job and everything, so don't think that. I just haven't had much time (even for online shopping) in the evenings when I come home and fall asleep at 8pm.

That brings me to my next topic. I've been so stinking tired lately. On Thursday night, I fell asleep at 8, tried to wake up at 8:45 to watch The Office at 9, and I ended up crying and just falling asleep. If you know me, you know I'd never fall asleep during The Office. I'm going to talk to my doctor about it since I'm concerned I may have low iron or something. As you all know (since I'm constantly reminding you), I don't really eat meat, and last week, I started craving roast beef for some reason. After I had it for lunch, I felt a bit better. We had vegetarian chili for dinner last night, and the before that, I made spinach lasagna. I guess the point is: there's my evidence for low iron. If I eat the meat, I feel better, but how do I stomach eating meat every day? We'll see. 

The heartburn has been pretty intense, too. I may ask about taking Prevacid or something like that. One of my coworkers is pregnant and she started taking that recently. I also want to ask about this pregnancy acne. It's so terrible :( I thought it would clear up, and I've been using this all natural, moisturizing soap to clean my face. Nothing I do fixes it. I've heard you can take some medication for it, so I plan to ask the doctor about that as well. I know all of this is for the baby and it's worth it, but, man, it sucks. 

Well, I suppose I should get to cleaning our house and these errands! I'll update on Monday with pictures from our ultrasound! Yay! :)

Nursery

When we moved in to our house, we went ahead and chose our nursery right away. We selected one of the bedrooms in our house near the guest bath, further in the back. The guest bedroom is in the front, and we've turned the bedroom off the great room into an office. It just seemed more appropriate than a bedroom. I mean, eventually it may be a bedroom, but we're just trying to make it to baby #1, not baby #2, at this point. 


Well, our entire house is this beige-type color, and we  plan to paint every room at some point. We wanted to take it one room at a time, and we figured the nursery is the best place to start since it doesn't have any furniture in it yet. 


We had considered a darker beige and green, but we just weren't sure. On Friday night, we just got some balls and went to Home Depot, and we found the perfect color. It's called Nurture (very baby-ish, right?), and it's a grey-blue with a hint of green. I'd call it a super-soft, super-muted seafoam color. We looked at each other and said, "That's it!" So, we ordered up a gallon of it, and went home victorious. 


On Saturday, Derek started painting, and I helped some with the trim. I pooped out pretty easily since we had already spent the day at the Historic Bluffton Arts and Seafood Festival (which was lots of fun). We really loved this photographer from Edisto Island. Her name is Susan Roberts, and I may purchase some of her bird photographs for our nursery in the future. :) 


Back to painting, Derek painted the entire room Saturday evening, and this morning we got up to finish up the trim and clean up. Sounds pretty standard, right?


Hah - It wouldn't be a Ratcliff Family activity without some sort of disaster. As I was working to clean up the white trim, I had moved the plastic drop cloth so I could get to the trim better. Woops! I dropped an entire quart of white semi-gloss paint all over our brand new carpet :( I immediately started crying and screaming that I ruined the entire nursery. Derek quickly jumped and said, "Get me a towel!" I was like, "Ahhh, I don't know where one is!" He said, "Get it together and act like an adult. Get me a towel." I managed to grab one of our brand new (yes, it pissed me off) towels from our linen closet. We sacrificed t-shirts, old boxers, and some stinky pajama pants to the clean up cause. 


I googled what to do - in typical Ratcliff fashion - and discovered that laundry detergent with club soda works perfectly to get it up. We used a lot of hot water as well. About an hour and a half later, the mess was totally cleaned up. At the end, Derek was sopping the leftover water out of the carpet with our Sham-Wow. We were in fact saying "wow" as we used it.

Yeah, this crazy thing.

The mess was cleaned up, and we finished up the trim duty. Derek actually managed to completely save the carpet, and you can't even tell it ever happened. As for finishing painting, we're going to have to buy some flat white ceiling pant to touch up the ceiling for next weekend, so it's not TOTALLY finished yet. 

We took some pictures of the process: 

Here's the mess

Derek doing some touch up

Me looking hideous and half asleep 

(this was just before the quart of paint incident)

Derek stared being goofy during clean up:

He decided to paint the chair he had been standing on

Now, here's the final product:

As you can see, it's a really light color

Oh, and that corner is where the quart of paint incident took place, so I think it's pretty much back to perfect. 

We're super happy with how it turned out, and we think it's going to go really well with everything we've already picked out. We're still trying to decide on a crib, but we've agreed that it will be really dark wood, maybe even black. We're going to look at some more in person before we make a final decision, so next weekend will include a trip to Just for Baby and Babies-R-Us in Savannah. We've found some that we really like on Overstock and Amazon, and we may just go that route. I guess we want to play it safe and see some stuff before we go ordering anything. We all know what happened with the Ikea nursery furniture last weekend.

Aside from painting, things have been going well. I've had a lot more energy, and yesterday morning, I ran for 40 minutes. I was so happy! I had been making it about 20-30, and this was really good. It made me feel like myself. I've suspected that I've felt the baby a couple times, but I'm not entirely sure. On three separate occasions, I've felt like someone poked me with their finger about 2 inches below my belly button. It could've been me being gassy, so I won't jump to conclusions yet.

Baby Ratcliff's heart rate has been around 155, so that's good. I haven't had too many intense cravings lately. Mostly, I've craved shrimp (that's why we ended up at the Festival yesterday). Tonight, I plan to make some shrimp as well. It's like I can't get enough. I've been trying to eat more protein, and I've been trying to avoid carbs if possible. This morning was the exception, and I had some super delicious pumpkin pancakes :) We were total fat kids at the Festival because we split a funnel cake (we call them flannel cakes in honor of Kurt Vonnegut). Hopefully, I didn't do too much damage. 

Overall, things are going well, and I'm so happy to have more energy. And before I forget, I went ahead and registered for our baby classes. One of my coworkers told me they fill up quickly. We're doing Baby Basics in January, Childbirth and Breastfeeding in February. I'll definitely post about them, and I completely expect something hilarious to happen. Derek's going with me, so I'm sure he'll do SOMETHING ridiculous. 

I can't believe our baby is now the size of an avocado! That's just crazy! I feel like time is going really quickly, and I'm really ready to meet our baby :) Derek thinks that's a funny phrase, so I used it deliberately :) 

I'll post more updates as they come!