the unflattering photo you've all been waiting for...

And it's in the nursery to boot. How about that gut, eh? We're officially full-term this week and also traveling to Dallas for our last baby shower/fun weekend with family.

So this baby might be born a Texan, but let's hope not.

Also, before I forget....happy birthday to my dreamboat husband! It's actually not until tomorrow but I have a feeling I'll be too busy to blog. He has the same birthday as Harry Potter! (The character, not the actor) Love you, Nicholas!

You seem to be getting pregnanter these days.

With the onset of the big, bad THIRD trimester that I am now enjoying...here's a little pregnancy info on yours truly.

How far along? 28 weeks (I'm rounding up)
Weight gain/loss: What? I can't hear you.
Maternity clothes? Yes. Currently looking for more long dresses to wear on the cheap.
Stretch marks? No, but there are hints of them coming.
Sleep? Actually having alot more energy and also sleep is getting more difficult.
Best moment this week? Having Nick talk to my belly all the time. Can't get enough.
Food cravings: Ice. Everyone in earshot hates me.
Gender: Boy!
Belly button in or out? Still in.
Movement? When I lay down at night, he goes nuts. I love it.
What I miss? Beer.
What I'm looking forward to: Getting the nursery done. Or started.
Weekly wisdom: Let's only worry about what we can actually change. That really limits the list doesn't it?
Milestones: My son's testes are migrating into his scrotum. All that's going on inside my uterus. Weird eh?

madison? isn't that a little...gay?

I've been spending alot of time thinking about names. I have decided to give Calvin my maiden name (Owens) as a middle name. I would say WE decided on it, but I'm not sure if Nick is 100% sold on the idea. I never considered the pressure of choosing a name for a child until we started trying to get pregnant. And when we found out it's a boy, the pressure increased because this will be his name FOREVER. I've had girlfriends who were relieved to get maried because they wanted to get rid of their maiden names. I was the opposite. I went through a mini-mourning session when I finally, officially, changed my name from Owens to Fossey. I'm ridiculously close to my family and the idea of separating myself from them made me have a little identity crisis. And the whole idea made me a little indignant. I was just supposed to change the perfectly good name I've had for 26 years just because I was getting married? Not fair. I know I didn't have to change my name, but the women I've known who kept their maiden name get referred to as Mrs. HusbandsLastName anyway, and they're stuck correcting people constantly.

But I digress.

In case my in-laws are reading this, I want to assure them (and anyone else) that in the last SIX years since I have started dating and married and been knocked up by Nick, that I am just as much a Fossey as I am an Owens. I'm not sure when it happened, but it has. Maybe I realized it last weekend when I spent pretty much the whole weekend with my in-laws and without my husband, who was working. Or maybe when I prompted my father-in-law to tell a Fossey family legend and then realized I wasn't even in the family then, but I felt like I was.

I have no idea where all of this is coming from, but I know it is coming from a place of gratitude. Family dynamics are fragile. When my brother married Sandy, I realized how thankful I was that he married someone we all loved and not someone who would take him away from us, so to speak. It's the same way with my mom and Jonathan and Katherine and Todd. I hope that when Calvin gets older, I can find the balance of encouraging him to consider the family before choosing a wife, and keeping my nose out of his business. I'm not too worried about it though, considering he is half Fossey and half Owens. He'll grow up the same as me and Nick - at times taking his family for granted, but eventually realizing how lucky he is to be part of our tribe.

it's probably just a food baby...

It's official: I can feel the baby kicking. There's an actual creature inside of me, moving around and I can FEEL it. It would be really weird if it wasn't so amazing. At first, I blamed it on gas. But just last week it became undeniable. I've only felt one kick from the outside and that was pretty incredible too. Nick's a little frustrated that he hasn't been able to feel anything yet and I suspect he'll be able to in the next few weeks. But, in all honesty, I kind of like having a little secret with my boy. It's just between us for now.

By the way his name is Calvin (we're 99% sure) and we haven't settled on a middle name yet.

I can't wait to see his little* face!

*Or if he's anything like his mama, his BIG, FAT face. Stay tuned for proof.

they call me the cautionary whale

Some BIG things happened yesterday in regards to this baby of mine.

1. We found out the sex of the baby!

2. A stranger noticed I was pregnant.

3. I was judged by the same stranger who noticed I was pregnant.

Let me explain. I was buying a 20 oz Coke for a coworker at Wal-Greens and the lady who checked me out looked me over and said, "Well, you're sure gonna keep that baby awake ALL NIGHT."

I sneered at her, "It's not for ME, it's for a friend."

Her, "Uh-huh." Clearly in disbelief.

But it was true. And even though she sucks for judging me, I was happy that someone other than coworkers and my family noticed I was pregnant.


Now to the other thing...I can't tell you all the sex yet. But I will. After the weekend. I gotta tell the family first. The good news is the baby looks great! Ten inches and eleven ounces. Moving around, sucking its thumb, twitching its feet. I can't get over it.

How can you love something so much that you haven't met yet?!

behold good sir, your future child

(I have decided that every post related to the pregnancy, which let's face it, most of the future posts will be, I will title them with a quote from Juno - one of my favorite pregnancy movies.)

Today, Nick and I went to the midwife for our second appointment. In the last few days, I had been having a lot of anxiety about the baby. In our last appointment, I was only 8 weeks along and LeAnna (the midwife) didn't think we would be able to see the baby that early and she was right, but it still bummed me out.

So for our appointment today, I was worried there wouldn't be a heartbeat. I know, it's morbid. I don't know why I even thought of that, but I just wanted to be prepared for anything. I warned Nick going in that it was a possibility, but he was sure everything was alright.

At the beginning of the appointment, we chatted for a bit with LeAnna and she said, "Well, let's take a look." She gets out the doppler and rubs it around on my belly for awhile and all we hear is static. I start feeling really uncomfortable and nervous. Then she says, "Okay. Let's see if we can get a look at it." She gets the ultrasound machine out and has Nick come over and stand by me so we can look at the screen together. I was too freaked out to look at the screen right away so I looked at Nick until she said, "Okay, there it is!" I whipped my head around and as soon as I made out the baby on the screen, it jumped a mile! It didn't stop moving the whole time we looked at it. We saw the heartbeat fluttering a mile a minute. Nick was so sweet the whole time. I love, love, love seeing him excited about the baby. Last week he brought home a stroller!

I made a comment about being so relieved that we could see the baby and the nurse said, "Yeah, you looked really worried earlier!"

She printed out three pictures of the peanut and we set the date for the BIG ultrasound. March 23rd! How will I be able to wait?!

Here's the little guy/girl with its head down and feet up!
(I never thought I would be one of "those" women who post ultrasound pictures that no one can figure out. I imagine in the next few months I'll be doing alot of things I never thought I would. Isn't that what motherhood is all about?)

for shiz up the spout

Well, it's happened. I'm pregnant, knocked up, prego, with child, expecting. Would you like to hear how it happened? (No, not how IT happened, but how we found out?)

We started "trying" in November (by the way, people asking me how long we had been trying or if anyone knew we were trying makes for uncomfortable conversation in my opinion. No way around it, we're talking about having unprotected sex. So no, we didn't tell our parents or random people that we were trying). Due to my obsessive nature regarding success in the trying-to-conceive game, I researched and read books for months leading up to November. The most helpful was Taking Charge of Your Fertility. Up until I read that, I was sadly ignorant about my own body and what it takes to get pregnant.

I also joined a message board, full of other obsessed women trying to get pregnant. Let me tell you, a message board can be an informative, albeit scary place to visit. There are so many people out there struggling to get pregnant and it's taken them YEARS. It's easy to get discouraged and I was sure it would take us several months to get pregnant, which is why I convinced Nick to start trying earlier than we planned because no one gets pregnant in the first month. (Snicker)

So, November came to an end and then all you can do is wait. The problem with being well-informed is you know that it takes at least 14 days after you ovulate to detect pregnancy with a home pregnancy test. Fourteen days is a long time, y'all. Two full weeks. And all that's running through my head is, "What would be scarier? If the test was negative or positive?" Sure, you want it to be positive, but if it is, then that means, holy shit I'm going to be a mother! If it's not, then you have to go through all of this next month, and maybe the month after that. The waiting is enough to make you go mad.

I could only stand to wait ten out of the fourteen days before I decided to test. Which is dumb, because that early the chances of a positive test are like thirty percent. But I bought a pack of 10 cheapo pregnancy tests online (another trick I learned from the message board). Shelling out for those digital tests is totally against my tight wad nature.

Day ten out of fourteen = negative. Damn.
Day eleven out of fourteen = negative. This time I expected it, but still. Damn.
Day twelve out of fourteen = negative. Expecting my period any day now. Depressed.
Day thirteen out of fourteen = uh. Is that a faint, FAINT line? I'm talking so faint, you might be imagining it out of desperation? I abandoned all cute ways to reveal to Nick I might be pregnant and shoved the test in his face at 6am that morning. He concluded it was a "maybe". Later, he told me he couldn't see anything, but didn't want to disappoint me. That day I bought a digital pregnancy test and an early response test to use the next day.
Day fourteen of fourteen = a big, fat, positive test! It's hard to argue with the word PREGNANT showing up on the stick covered in your urine.

Nick had me wait until he got home from work that morning to test so I peed in a cup and got in the shower. We dipped the early response test first and it was a very clear plus sign. But Nick wanted confirmation from the digital. So we dipped that one too and waited forever. There's a little hourglass on the display screen that's there for about, oh, eight hours. It was infuriating. We couldn't sit there and watch it so we held hands and talked about Nick's day (night) at work. All of a sudden out of the corner of my eye, I see it change and lo and behold...PREGNANT.

Disbelief, tears, joy.

We took dozens of pictures of the thing, included the one above which we framed several copies of and gave to his family for the big reveal on Christmas Eve.

The waiting to tell people was the hardest part. I'm learning that pregnancy in general is a big waiting game and I suppose it's teaching me patience for when I have an infant, then toddler, then school aged, then adolescent - Lord help me.

For right now, I feel mostly fine, but just...different. My body sends me clues that something is changing. It's pretty amazing. I've been sick a few times. I realize I have to eat a little something every few hours or the full-on nausea hits hard. I know pack a lunch AND a dinner for my long days at work. So far, though everything has been manageable.

I think it's a boy.