It's a BOY!

Yep...NO doubt about it that little cookie is a "he." (BTW, the picture above is your standard boring head shot, since I'm not about to post pics of our poor kid's pee pee on my blog.) We are so excited! Honestly, I've known it was a boy since I first saw two lines on the pregnancy test. It was confirmed this weekend when I had a very vivid dream that we had our ultrasound and it was a boy. So it was no surprise to me! And even though I would have been perfectly happy either way, I kinda secretly wanted a boy. So I am absolutely thrilled. And Brad is beside himself! He's already bookmarking webpages of Godzilla toys.

Everything looks nice and healthy. All fingers and toes appear to be attached, as does a brain, a heart and a spine (which looks mega-creepy on the ultrasound). And I'm definitely starting to feel him kick the crap outta me!

On that note, I have so much work to do this week it's insane, so I'd better quit blogging and be productive. Mama out!!

Pregnant pause.

I wouldn't say that I've had a difficult pregnancy so far, at least compared to what some other women go through. My morning sickness never caused me to become violently ill--I'll take 12 hours a day of mild nausea over projectile vomiting, thanks. I haven't had any real complications and my weight gain has been slow and steady (so far...so far!). I've never had to miss a day of work or turn in a school assignment late as a result of anything pregnancy-related.

Still, though, I've never been good at slowing down. I am a go-go-go type of person--my days used to start at 5 a.m. with coffee, schoolwork and a cardio/weightlifting session all before getting into the shower at 7:15 for work. Getting knocked up has put a serious end to that. I'm literally exhausted all the time. I'm lucky if I can stop hitting the snooze button by 7:30. Workouts have been reduced to 3 or 4 days a week of low-impact activity like walking, and that feels like an accomplishment. My fun nights of happy hours, wine tastings and big dinners out are no more. Even without the wine, I still can't bring myself to stay up past 9. Oh, and my cute clothes? No longer fit. I have two pairs of pants that I can still button, but yesterday I happened to look down in a meeting and happened to notice some serious stomach-cleavage going on with one of them. Ugh.

Sometimes it's easy to let myself get really bummed knowing I have a long road ahead of me before I get to go back to "normal" (yeah, like that's gonna happen when the baby's born!). But then yesterday I got to hear our baby's heartbeat again, and all the frustration melted away. It was the third time I've heard it, and I was on a serious high for the rest of the day. I just have to keep telling myself that it's all worth it!

Houston, we have a neurotic pregnant lady.

For about two days after every doctor's appointment, I feel pretty damn good. Cookie and I have never not gotten a clean bill of health, so I have every reason to have a little bounce in my step on my walk back to the car. Hey, why not even email my friends and family pictures of the ultrasound because Cookie is DOING JUST FINE!

Then, about two days go by. The worry sets in. And then a week goes by, and it sets in deeper. The longer I go without hearing the heartbeat, the worse it gets. Even if I have no reason to believe anything is wrong, I just start to assume that something is.

I've had all these weird aches and pains in my left side and stomach for the past few days -- nothing excruciating, just a little uncomfortable. They feel very similar to the description of what's called "round ligament pain," which involves your ligaments stretching to accommodate your cantaloupe of a uterus. If that's what it is, it's a perfectly normal symptom in the second trimester of pregnancy.

But how do I know that's what it is? And on non-doctor weeks (they only schedule appointments about once a month), how am I ever going to be sure that Cookie is OK? (This is a rhetorical question, BTW.)

I do think that if something were ever reallyreally wrong, I'd probably know. I've only been dangerously ill a few times in my life, and in those instances, I knew I had to get to a doctor immediately (and my intuition was absolutely correct). Then, there were the "should I or shouldn't I?" moments where I've gone to the ER against my better judgment. Each time, I spent 15 hours in a waiting room for nothing. Apparently pregnancy consists of a LOT of those "should I or shouldn't I?" moments, and I do NOT have 15 hours each day to spend in an ER waiting room. Not to mention the fact that Blue Cross Blue Shield would be pretty pissed at me.

So, in the absence of a Tom Cruise/Katie Holmes in-home ultrasound machine, I am not quite sure how to deal with all of this. I'm looking for advice here from people who've been through this. How did you deal with the worries without driving yourself crazy?

Out of the closet...

Well, the secret's out. And when I say out, I mean OUT. I guess you have no idea how many people care about your business until you post a status update on Facebook that says "I'm pregnant." Whoa...

So, backing up a little. We found out on Thanksgiving morning, shortly after I wrote this blog post. I'd been feeling not quite like myself for a few weeks but chalked it up to getting over a bad cold. And I actually did try to mountain bike, but I called it a day after one loop of a course I normally ride three times!

Later that morning, I went home and got the shock of my life! Of course, neither Brad nor I believed the first test...or the second...and by the third, we were finally convinced that the test was positive (not that I was pregnant, necessarily - just that the test was positive). The next day we went to my high-school reunion and hit a deer. Talk about an emotional roller-coaster of a weekend! And I couldn't even do shots of tequila with my old classmates. It was rough!

At first I felt perfectly fine, which worried me. Where were all these symptoms I was supposed to get? Oh, they were coming! Weeks 6-10 were miserable. Just thinking about Christmas makes me want to puke a little - the only foods I could stomach during that time were chocolate-chip muffins, oranges and Wendy's cheeseburgers (I can't even think about any of those things now without throwing up in my mouth). I never had the severe nausea and vomiting that some women do, but I basically felt seasick every waking hour of the day.

At about 6 weeks, just when I was starting to actually "feel" pregnant, we had a bit of a scare that involved an emergency trip to the doctor in a massive blizzard. Luckily, it turned out to be nothing, but it still prevented me from getting really excited about the pregnancy just yet. Plus, I was too seasick to get excited anyway.

Over the past two weeks, things have finally gotten exciting. We heard the heartbeat on a doppler machine and we had an ultrasound that showed the baby moving around, kicking its little heart out and doing flips! Unlike my emergency ultrasound at 6 weeks when the baby was a fuzzy blob, it actually looked like a miniature human! And I'm officially out of the first trimester, so my queasy stomach has calmed down quite a bit.

Still, though, the nerves haven't gone away, and I've really struggled with whether or not I should tell people about the pregnancy. I'm now in the "safe zone" for miscarriage, but I will probably continue to worry for the next, oh, 22 years. I hope I'll soon get to the point where I can relax and enjoy this, but for now, my emotions are wavering between tentative joy and sheer terror!

So, there you have it. We're no longer just Brad and Alison; we're now Brad, Alison and Cookie the Fetus. It's going to be an interesting year!

Speaking of scanners...

This blurry picture of my uterus is WAY better than old college pics, isn't it?



We're due in early August. :)