19 Week Ultrasound

Surprise, it's a girl! Well, I was surprised anyway, I kept thinking it was going to be a boy! I guess my motherly instincts aren't super sharp yet. It is always fun to see the baby's heart beating and limbs moving around. We think she is pretty cute already.

Also I have been feeling her kick for quite a few weeks now. They are pretty hard kicks too, I can feel them on the outside. And I promise I'm showing now. I will have to get Josh to take some pictures. In the words of little 5-year old Aidan, "Whoa, you can really tell you're pregnant now!" Haha.

Climbing Competition

Josh had been wanting to enter this climbing competition for a while, so he finally signed up at the last minute. Even though we haven't gone climbing in a really long time (like, I don't think we've gone once this year) he entered the advanced category. Mostly because they were raffling off a mondo (sp?) bouldering pad, which is like the coolest kind of bouldering pad they make these days I guess.




He started out really strong and it looked like he was gonna do really well. But on the last couple of climbs (he did seven all together) you could tell that his arms didn't have the endurance they used to and his grip was failing. He did complete the Black Diamond climb on his first try though, which got him into the drawing for the bouldering pad. Also he managed to take fourth overall.

Prizes were given out at Costa Vida afterward which was pretty fun except my burrito gave me super bad indigestion which made it really uncomfortable for me the whole time. We got tons of free decals and random stuff, and then Josh won a chalkbag with chalk and a chalk sock which was cool. We didn't get the pad, but we made new friends and both got a free T-shirt so I guess overall it was worth it :)

We will have to climb more when I'm not pregnant anymore.

Our One Year Anniversary

We'd been trying to plan our one year anniversary for a while now and originally had thought of stuff like going to Vegas or St. George, eating at a nice place, staying at a nice place, etc., etc., but lately there have been a ton of big blows to our budget that we couldn't really avoid and as our savings grew smaller and smaller we knew that anything too extravagant was out of the question this year.

So we decided to go camping, and it turned out to be really awesome. We found a nice, secluded spot to set up camp in a place called "The Wash" nearby and roasted brats and made dutch oven apple spice dump cake. It was yummy. Also the weather ended up being perfect and warm and all the layers I wore weren't even necessary. We slept on a bouldering pad out in the open under the stars and the only thing that wasn't perfect were the little patches of cacti all over the place, so we had to be a little careful. My health has been doing a lot better as well.

Here's a picture of the sunrise that Josh took while I was still sleeping.

The lump in the blanket is me sleeping in.

Our awesome little fire pit.

A view of the trail.

Me having an apple for breakfast.

Us!

I could say that this year has gone by really fast but looking back on it I realize how much is packed into that amount of time, and then it doesn't really seem like it was too short. It has been a really eventful year with all my sicknesses, racquetball and climbing, the miscarriage, Josh's schooling, several different jobs, moving, flying to Ohio a couple of times, driving across the country together, driving all over Utah and even to Arizona, playing with all the nieces and nephews over and over, getting pregnant again, and all the little things in between. There isn't anyone in the world I would rather go through it all with than my Joshua.

It's Aliiiiiive!

Medicaid finally came through and I was able to go to my first prenatal check-up today. I was SO nervous because I'm not really showing at all and haven't felt any movement down there yet, and still weigh less than I did before the pregnancy, so I was trying to prepare myself for the worst. But...


Everything's OK! I'm four months along and everything seems to be in order. We got to have a sneak peak ultrasound on an old machine that my CNM had and got to hear and see the baby's heart beating. Also the baby was moving its arms around. You can click on the picture to see it bigger. The top two are a side view with the baby facing downward (head on the left side) and its legs sticking straight up with its feet by its head. The last picture is a view from the top of its head. This is when we could see the arms moving around. Even though it was an old machine we could see the fingers and toes, spine, rib cage, and heart. It was cool.

So now we know that:
1. We are really pregnant.
2. We're not having twins :)
3. There are no extra mutated limbs.

We can't tell the gender yet but are scheduled to find that out in 3 weeks. Happy!

Baptists and Shakespeare

So Josh was randomly going around town practicing his photography one day and stopped at the local Baptist church to take pictures of pretty flowers. Anyway, the pastor (minister? Um, I don't know my terminology very well) who lives there came out to see what he was doing and naturally, being the expert at talking to strangers, they became friends and the pastor's wife invited us over for dinner.

So we went this past Friday and I got to meet their whole family and it was a lot of fun. They just barely moved here from Kentucky so they are newcomers like us. They were some of the kindest and gentlest people I've ever met and the food was simple and delicious. (We had pork chops with apricot sauce, an onion and potato casserole, tomatoes, and angel food cake with whipped cream and blueberry topping. Mmm!) They had three teenage children who were incredibly polite, the oldest girl being really interested in photography, like Josh. We had a lot of fun discussing what we thought of things like homeschooling, midwifery, etc.

Afterwards Josh and I went on a date to go see MacBeth, our first Shakespeare play since moving to the city of the Shakespeare festival! We could actually afford to go to this one because it was produced by students rather than professionals, and Josh could get in free with his student ID. While we were waiting for it to start, Josh took advantage of the light to take some pictures of me. I was not a very willing model and you can tell in a lot of the pictures that I felt really nauseous, but despite all that the pictures turned out pretty good.You can see more at his new photography blog here.

ANYWAY Josh's old guitar teacher, Richard Dixon, was there to see his daughter perform as Witch #3 so we sat next to him. The play itself was pretty good but I imagine it's probably a lot better with a bunch of old, gruff men instead of the skinny youngsters who performed (seriously, all the actors were insanely skinny. Does the theater department ever eat?) but I applaud their effort and enjoyed the show despite the incredibly uncomfortable hard chairs.

I wish I had more pictures of the stuff we did but we haven't really gotten used to whipping out the camera for everything yet. Sorry.