Time seems to have slowed a bit

I don't know what it is, but the last couple weeks have definitely seemed longer to me.  Ok, that's not entirely true, I do have some idea of why this is, but it sucks.  I'm way more uncomfortable than I ever was before; sleeping is kind of a struggle when it comes to finding a nice position.  And yes, I'm well aware of the fact that it will get worse. 

My urge to "nest" seems to have kicked in a bit.  I've really been wanting to get things organized and put together for when Baby gets here, and today I was all motivated and got most of her room put together.  We still don't have everything that we need yet, but we've got tons of clothes (courtesy of a lady from my mother-in-laws ward and from my sister-in-law Barbi, haven't bought a single piece) and most of the essentials.  Here's a couple pictures of the room in case you didn't notice them on facebook.

Not gonna lie, I'm getting really antsy.  I keep telling Tucker that we need to get everything done soon just in case she comes early and he chuckles at me.  Sure the odds of her coming early aren't super high, but it does happen; maybe I'll get lucky :)  Y'all should keep your fingers crossed for me.

Not much to report

Doctor's appointment this week was kind of just a weigh in.   Nothing they needed to test, just wanted to measure and make sure I didn't have any questions.  Although, on my way out, they asked me if I could speak with someone from UNC really fast, which was fine with me. 

I'm not sure if I've mentioned it in previous posts, but the clinic that I go to is run by the county health department and I'm fairly positive that the only people that go there are people who are on medicaid like me.  So kind of a lot of mexicans and african americans; I'm usually the only white person in the waiting room whenever I have an appointment.  This clinic is also a teaching clinic, connected with the med/PA schools here in Raleigh (basically UNC and Duke (I think)), and the hospital that we will be delivering at is a teaching hospital, so I've seen quite a few students in my appointments, which doesn't bother me in the slightest; gotta learn somewhere.

Anyways, back to my appointment.  I went to talk with the lady from UNC and she just wanted to know if I was willing to take part in a study they were doing on depression connected to hormones (or something like that) for women shortly before birth and shortly after.  This is totally fine with me, mostly because I'll be getting $200 out of it, but also because I don't have to travel anywhere for this study (they'll come to our apartment), and all they want from me is blood and pee--two things I have plenty of right now.  The only slight inconvenience going along with this is that I'll have to collect pee samples (sorry if that's gross for me to be talking about) for a 24 hour period.  They gave me this totally awesome (yeah, right) kit for collecting samples which has to be kept chilled; for this they told me I could keep it either in the fridge (which is really gross) or in a tub of ice I can keep in the bathtub (definitely going this way).  But yeah, $200 is totally worth this.  Also, sorry again if this was gross or TMI.

Let's see, what else...

I attempted to set up a registry at Babies R Us this week as well.  And I say attempted because they seem to have screwed something up on their end after I scanned everything, so, lucky me, I get to go back to the store to do it all over again.  Awesome.

Tucker and I also made it to our first childbirth class on Tuesday night, and it was a lot better than I thought it would be, surprisingly.  As with any class that I've ever taken, people insisted on asking stupid questions or the same question someone else asked five minutes earlier in a different way, but it was still interesting to hear everything.  While we will go to all the classes (unless our car breaks down again), we're mostly looking forward to the class where they'll take us to the hospital and give us a tour of everything so we'll know where to go when the time comes.

D&D again tonight.  Woohoo!  Super excited.

Birthdays and Car Trouble

Things I consider accomplishments right now:
- I pee less than 3 times during the night.
- I eat a meal without ending up with something dribbled on my stomach.
- I don't fall asleep until 9pm.
- I can bend over to pick something up.
- I actually do my hair and/or makeup (though this one has always been something I struggled with).

That's all that I can think of right now.  I'm sure as these last 8 weeks tick down I'll come up with more to add to the list, but for now (seeing as I just woke up) it's good enough.

This past week was our birthdays (mine was the 25th and Tucker's was the 30th).  They were alright I guess... or well, mine was pretty good.  We had some pizza and wings for dinner, and both my parents and Jenna got "presents" for me.  My parents got me one of those edible arrangements, which was absolutely delicious.  And Jenna decided that I needed more food and ordered me some fancy cupcakes from a little shop near campus.  And here, I'll even post pictures (look at me feeling slightly motivated).

Tucker's birthday was...... not quite normal.  The day before his birthday was packed full.  We both had to be at campus at 8am; me for work, Tucker to get ready for his committee meeting later that day.  Tucker mentioned that he was starting to feel a little sick when we got to school.  There wasn't much of anything that we could do for him then though, because I had to work until noon and he would be busy until 5.  On top of working for both of us that day, we had our first 'childbirth' class that night from 6-8.  So super packed full day.

When I got off at noon, I went and did a little bit of shopping for the lab because the next day (Tucker's birthday) they would be having paninis for lab lunch.  It was about 1:30 when I was finally heading home.  When I turned on the car, the heat gauge thingy automatically went all the way up to the top like the car was over heating.  It kind of confused me, so I turned of the car and let it sit for a second, then turned it back on and it was normal.  So I drove home.  I didn't want to tell Tucker about this yet because I knew it would stress him out and he wouldn't be able to focus on his committee meeting (which is a fairly big deal).  So I stayed home for a few hours, then on my way to pick him up, the temperature gauge shot up to the top again.  Luckily I was only about a minute from the school, so I turned the heater on full blast, rolled down the windows and drove the rest of the way to school.

I guess I should mention that about a month ago, we had the same problem with the car 'over heating' and had it in to be looked at.  They told us that the problem was a cracked cap on the radiator (or at least I think that's what it was) and it only cost us $20 to fix.  When Tucker came out and got in the car, I finally told him what the car was doing (and he was really appreciative that I hadn't told him before because he would have been worrying all through his meeting; I know him so well), so we decided rather than have the car towed like we did last time this happened, we would just drive it to the shop we had gone to before because it wasn't that far away from campus.  We dropped the car off, and then were trying to get ahold of the rental car agency so that we would have a way to get home and then back down to the shop to get the car the next day when it was fixed, but no one was answering.  So on a whim, we decided to try riding the bus home.  Tucker used to ride the bus all the time when we lived at our old place, but he hadn't yet tried it at our new apartment.  Yay for adventures!  However, he called one of his friends while we were on the first bus back up to campus and asked him for a ride home.  Needless to say, we didn't make it to our first childbirth class.

Tucker's birthday dawned and he was feeling more sick than the previous day, and it was rainy outside, and he was going to have to ride the bus to school if he wanted to go, so he decided to just take the day off and stay home (yay!).  I made him breakfast in bed and we kind of just took the rest of the day easy.  Around mid-day the car place called and told us the news.  Basically they were needing to replace some stuff to do with the cooling system and also a couple things dealing with the oil were leaking and needed to be replaced (obviously I don't remember exactly what the stuff was, I don't pay much attention to car stuff).  It was going to be a grand total of about $550 to fix everything.  Um... ouch.  But we told them to go ahead and fix everything, they said the car would be ready by the end of the day.

Now normally, it wouldn't be a super big deal to get to this place in a short amount of time... but we didn't have access to a car and Tucker didn't want to impose on his friend again for a ride.  So we decided that when the time came for us to pick up the car, we would just take a taxi (wahoo!  never ridden in a taxi before).  This was more stressful than I initially thought it would be because they didn't call us to tell us the car was done till about 50 mins before the place was supposed to close.  We called the cab place to ask for a taxi and were told that it would be about 15 minutes till they could get someone to us.  This was still ok; plenty of time to get to the shop.  Wrong.

The cab didn't get to our apartment until 20 minutes before the shop was supposed to close.  It was going to take us about 20 minutes to get there.  And that's if the traffic stays good (we have to take the freeway).  Luckily, we arrived a few minutes before they closed.  I got the special job of paying the taxi guy, which we didn't think was going to be a big deal cause their website said that they took credit cards.  When I asked the guy if this was true, he shook his head no.  Awesome.  Normally we would have been screwed, but I just happened to have about $40 in cash on me, which, really, is amazing that I did, cause neither of us ever carry cash.  I was that day, however, because I had been planning on going to get our registration renewed that week and needed cash to do that.  So, we were able to pay the taxi guy.

We paid for the car stuff and then decided to go to a chinese buffet place for Tucker's birthday dinner.  Normally this would be ok with me, but I was starting to get a headache, and for some reason I was feeling kind of nauseous, but I didn't want to ruin one good thing that Tucker would have on his birthday, so I didn't say anything and we went.  I ended up eating a cup of soup, 2 mini-sugar-covered biscuits, and a couple slices of fruit.  But Tucker enjoyed it, and that was all that mattered that day.  I feel really bad that his day wasn't all that great, but we get to play D&D this week and I also got him a D&D book for his birthday, so hopefully this will make up for the crappy day at least a little bit.

So long as we don't have any more problems with our car overheating, I think we'll be happy.  It's just kind of annoying.

Have a doctor's appointment this coming Monday (32 weeks along!!!) so I'll try and get an update posted here sometime next week. 

28 Week Update

So I had a doctor's appointment on Monday and everything's still looking good.  Had a blood sugar test and (go me) I don't have pregnancy diabetes or whatever it's called.  Yesterday I had a second ultrasound appointment so that they could get a closer look at Baby's heart.  They had told me from the beginning they would want to do this just to make sure that everything was looking ok because my older brother Jeff had a heart defect when he was born that had to be operated on, but it doesn't look like anything that we'll have to worry about (at least with this baby). 

But yeah, short post today because I'm ridiculously tired, just wanted to get an update out there and let you all know that I haven't forgotten about my blog.

Productiveness

Well, I've had a couple of productive days this week (productive for me, at least). I finished our taxes, made a card and necklace for my mother-in-law for her birthday, and kept things in our apartment fairly neat. There's been other minor stuff thrown in there as well, but those are the major things that have happened. Tomorrow should be a full day too, as Lois (my mother-in-law) will be coming to town tomorrow and she's bringing us some baby stuff from a lady in her ward (yay for getting hand-me-downs of sorts).

Last night Tucker started throwing up... a lot. Poor guy barely ever gets sick, and the time that he does it's the stomach flu. There's not much I can really do to take care of him, but I got up with him pretty much every hour last night when he was throwing up. And thinking about it this morning, I decided that the schedule we kept last night will probably be similar to what it will be like once Baby comes, at least for me. I'm surprisingly not tired today, but that might still change. Hopefully I won't catch what Tucker's got.

My parents also told us this week that they'll buy a carseat for us. This is really awesome of them cause now I don't really think we'll have any large purchases to make. Originally we were just going to use the carseat that our nephew Finn has been using (cause he'll be upgrading soon), but as I thought about it more, I realized we would just have to buy a carseat sometime towards the end of this year anyways since we'll probably be moving away from NC and I'm pretty sure Katie would want her carseat back for their next kid, whenever they have their next. So I was just going to buy one, but now I don't have to. Yay! We still might need to buy a crib, but that's still up in the air kind of. Anyways, this is the carseat that me and my mom picked out:
I'm a big fan of "gender neutral" things, at least when it comes to carseats/strollers/etc so that we can reuse stuff for future little Smiths.

But yeah, I think that's it for this post. Can't really think of anything else to add right now. Maybe I'll post some pics of what Lois brings us tomorrow later this week.

Finally...

We finally got a letter from Medicaid yesterday telling us that we are approved for pregnancy coverage!! Best news I've had in a really long time. It's definitely lifted a major weight and so now I can move on to worrying about much more minor things. But yeah, after one rejection, one fairly major breakdown on my part, reapplying, and a lot of nervous waiting, we found out everything will be taken care of and Baby will be (pretty much) paid for... at least until she gets here that is.

24 Weeks

Had a doctor's appointment today, and everything's looking good. Only new development is my back hurting fairly constantly. Showers and baths seem to be helping with that though, so I'm dealing with it I guess.

This is me at 24 weeks. I've decided I have a huge butt.


This is Annabelle, who is the baby doll that I had when I was a baby. Found her the other day, and now she's going to be Baby's baby doll. I'm kind of excited about this.