30 Week Update!

Sorry I've been not updating you guys weekly! i'm back though and this one is exciting because it's 30 weeks!

oh my gosh, can you believe it? I'm 30 weeks pregnant!! eeeeep! I'm SO EXCITED about this!


this week the baby is the size of....



...a cabbage. Though the website specifies that his weight is the same as the cabbage, not sure about his length (well, i know he's longer than a cabbage). edit lol oh my god one site just told me he's about the weight and length of Britney Spears' Yorkie hahaha here:


hahaha this is the picture they showed me on the site

Anyway, that means that about now he weighs around 3 pounds! and he's about 15 and 3/4 inches long! whoa!

He's swimming around in about a pint and a half of amniotic fluid (is it bad that i just visualized that by thinking of glasses of beer in the bar?) but that amount of fluid will reduce as the space in there also diminishes.

He's working on his eyesight still buuuut he won't really even be able to see that great even after he's born. Eyesight is one of those things that you have to use in order to have it really work well. His vision when he's born will be about 20/400 (perfect adult vision, as you know, is 20/20 so at first he will only see things that are really super close up to him or high contrast in color (that's why a lot of new baby toys are black and white))

here's the monkey baby who has actually gotten kinda cute in the past few weeks:


that's what he looks like in there! what a difference from what he looked like at 20 weeks:

(20 weeks...i think this is the week we started calling it the monkey baby)

and WHOA an even BIGGER difference than what he looked like at TEN weeks:


10 weeks! alien baby!

pardon me for a moment while i marvel at the absolute amazingness that this baby went through in only 20 weeks. Like, really, wow. He was an alien and now he's like a real little person in there! that's SO freaking amazing, right??

so anyway, more about what he's up to...

his brain is starting to wrinkle and grow and get bigger (because he's so smart!) and his fingernails and toenails are done finally as well. This actually kinda freaks me out lol, can he scratch me from the inside now? is he gonna like claw his way out of there?

He hasn't really gained a lot of weight or grown a lot this week because most of his energy has been devoted to making his brain grow more this week. After this though the weight and things will come on :)


looks kinda cramped in there

When he's awake now he spends all of his time with his eyes open and looking around! this is SO cool to me. He's awake right now so i know his eyes are open! i wish i could see him :)

he's gonna shed the lanugo now (fine hair covering his body) because he is gaining weight and his body is able to regulate temperature on it's own at this point (at least to some degree (lol get it? degree!?)).

here's what it looks like in there:


that's really impressive. He's really big! i'm kinda freaked out lol

so there we go! that's everything! my baby is getting smarter and looking around more and clawing me with his little nails and he's about the size of a very small dog hahaha hooray!

as for me, one site told me i should try to avoid dangerous falls. Obv. lol. I'm apparently doing nothing now but getting bigger and bigger which is also obv and it is suggested that i roll onto my side before trying to get up from a laying down position because i won't be able to. The other day i tried to do this and i couldn't. I said in despair "I'm like a weeble wobble" and Ryan kindly corrected me and said, "actually, you're not because you fell down." hahaha thanks, Ry. xoxo

Okay so yay! Baby! 30 weeks! He'll be here SO SOON!

here are pictures of me now:


the color balance was all kinds of off on my webcam for these, not sure why



and there we go, finally my face exists again lol (it's weird having headless photos)



YAY 30 weeks! only 7 - 11 more weeks until he is here! (i won't be going past 41 weeks according to my doctor's office...which, honestly, i'm fine with)

i can't believe it! i made it to the 30s! yay!

lol weird products

lol look how awesome these are:


Baby's First Boxers!

you just put them on over his diaper hahaha how cute is that? They make 0 - 6 month ones also! And they're only $4.99! haha i totally put them on my wishlist on amazon haha i just think they're hilarious and adorable

oh weird products, how you amuse me.

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where your organs go when you're pregnant...

one thing I am most looking forward to after having the baby (aside from, you know, actually having him and finally getting to see what he looks like and look into his eyes and all of that stuff) is for my internal organs to just go BACK to where they BELONG.

I know this might seem like a really weird thing to look forward to but trust me, it's not.

here's what a woman's body looks like inside during pregnancy:



See where the stomach is? It's all squished at the top there. Yea, that is not the most comfortable experience in the world although I know it must look like it lol

Cause right now, I can only eat reallllly small meals. If i don't, i feel nauseous for a long time afterwards. It's just, not the most pleasant experience to say the least and I'll leave it at that.

So yea, i'm at the point in pregnancy now where i'm just missing the little things. Where I'm saying to myself, "won't it be nice to have a normal stomach and normal digestive system again?" lol truly, you learn to appreciate all kinds of things through a massive change like this.

Just thought i'd share. Ah the beauty of pregnancy.

it's Friday!

Amazon sent me an email letting me know that Kindle covers are on sale. They then proceeded to link me to the ones that are on sale and the first row of them are all designer covers and they are on sale for $85.00.

LOL

sorry but who has/spends $85 on a kindle cover? even if it IS some kind of uber trendy sparkly animal print cover?(which by the way, i kinda think are getting overrated...animal print has seriously lost it's appeal to me)

here, look:



and hahah omg this one is even MORE expensive:


$165.00?? for a kindle cover? That's more than my kindle cost! ahh! hahah

so yea, that was amusing.

another thing that I found funny was this little gem from thebump.com....

so every Friday they send me an email announcing what week I am in my pregnancy. Typically i delete those emails because, as you know, I do my own little weekly thing and find all the information that way and whatever.

this time i clicked the email and it took me to my checklist of stuff that has to be done before the baby gets here. I don't know which of you guys are familiar with thebump but it's just like theknot but for baby stuff. So anyway, they have a whole countdown/checklist for me to go by and typically the stuff is pretty helpful overall i would say.

But then today I was looking through the upcoming things for this checklist and i saw the following item and i just had to LOL



Get an easy to maintain haircut?? like that is SO important that it is one of three things on the checklist for week 32? hahaha and i enjoy the assumption that we can't figure out how we want our hair on our own or that we can't come to the conclusion that we might want to change our hair or something without this list telling us to? it's so funny/bizarre to me!

like who was the editor writing this that thought, "okay, so in week 31 we'll discuss the signs of preterm labor and then in week 32 we MUST remember to remind these moms to get an easy to maintain haircut. Who knows what chaos and mayhem might ensue if we leave that off the list!"

lol so funny and SO WEIRD to me!

also, as a note while we're on the subject, i am not planning to get an easy to maintain haircut. I am super obsessed with my hair being long and it's a big part of how i identify as myself, i think it's important for me to still feel like ME once the baby is here and not completely give myself over to this role that i made up of "mom" that includes a haircut and Lee jeans or whatever. I really want to let the mom thing just organically become a part of me, not something that i try to put upon myself.

And not only that but i LIKE having long me hair. I like how it looks when i actually take the time to do it. I know that the odds are that typically my hair will be a scraggly mess for a while (like how it often is now) but that's fine. I'm sure once a month i will be able to pull out the straightener and still feel like myself. And to me, feeling like myself means having hair at least to my shoulders or longer.

so there annoying checklist, i will not follow you!

okay, i'm gonna go. I want to finish writing a few more thousand words and then i have things to do (including making my 29 week update! Emma has already reminded me haha) aaaaand tonight is super exciting because me and Ryan are going on an ice cream and movie date tonight!!! it doesn't get much better than that, i don't think! YAY! We hardly ever have the time or money to go out together on dates so I'm reallllllly excited and looking forward to it! hooray!

what are you guys doing tonight/this weekend?

we're baaaack!

I enjoy referring to myself in the plural. I think that it's more accurate right now anyway since there really ARE two people in my one body at the moment.

Anyway, like my subject suggests, I'm (we're) back. I've been on quite the hiatus from blogging but I'm back and full of spit and vigor and whatever other weird things there are sayings about that imply that I'm here with enthusiasm.

First i have to point out that I have an AWESOME and amazing and incredible new layout thanks to Becca from Jumping Jax Designs. Seriously, that girl is incredible. I threw a bunch of adjectives and ideas at her and she came up with the absolute most perfect layout of all time. I am swooning with love for my blog and I wish I could hire her to come work her magic on my house and wardrobe as well. She is that good.

I also thought i'd take a moment to explain my new blog title since it's cute and important to me.

Back when my husband and I were getting married, we thought long and hard about disregarding both of our last names and instead making up or finding a new one that would represent us and the life we wanted to lead together from our wedding day forward. We went back and forth a lot and couldn't come up with anything that was the perfect fit.

Finally one afternoon, while sitting in the car outside of our apartment at the time, our discussion really focused in on what mattered: we just really wanted to represent what our new life together truly MEANS to us and we couldn't find one single word that did that to our satisfaction.

So our solution? Instead of changing our name, we would just change the MEANING of our last name.

We decided to go forward and keep with the tradition of me taking my husband's last name as my own. The reason for this was purely logistics...it's much easier for a woman in this culture/society to change her last name than it is for a man. For me, it required one form and about five phone calls and a trip to the DMV. For him it would have required a lot more and a lawyer (which, okay, there are no shortage of in my family but still) and a lot more time and money. It just was a headache. Also, i kind of like the tradition.

We wanted to make sure, though, that this next step was instituted. The priority for us was to create a family that was unique to us, that was our own, that meant something really REAL to us.

And so we invented a new meaning for our last name. And it belongs only to us and it's really very real. because the truth is that things in life truly only have the meaning that we assign to them anyway, so why not give our name it's own meaning? So we did.

And even better, my husband came up with the specific wording of that meaning and that fact alone makes me smile whenever i think of it.

So what was the meaning we gave? Our last name officially (to us) means: Together (for always).

the parentheses are an important part. We clarified that they were there back when we first came up with the name in the car on that autumn afternoon. I don't even really know why they're so important but they are. They truly capture the whole essence of it.

And so when i was trying to come up with a new name for my blog, I wanted it to be something that really captured the essence of what i want this space to represent. i didn't want it to just be a pregnancy blog or just a baby blog or anything like that, i wanted it to be more than that because I wanted it to be about us, and about our lives together...and about our future.

and i realized that these things will always be what i want to blog about and that no matter where life takes us: through highs and lows in life, i will always be me and there will always be this part of my heart that belongs in this life and this family that we have made. and importantly, no matter what happens, i will always be a mommy to the little boy i have in me and Ryan and I will always therefore be united, as a family. No matter what happens, disasters befall us or luck smiles upon us, it will always be and we will always be Together (for always) because of the things that have taken place so far in our lives and in our hearts.


So that is why i named the blog {for always} because it can be that little place in the internet world where i represent that and where i discuss our lives and share the experiences of our hearts and the things we do.

At our wedding my father wished for us a Great Adventure and I know that so far we have been on one. i can't wait to share that adventure here with everyone and I know that there are beautiful and wonderful things to come. There always are in life and there always will be.

So for anyone reading this who still follows me, thank you so much for sticking it out and still being here. I promise not to disappear again and I am truly looking forward to the journey ahead!