The End

It's the end of my small, non-stretchy shirts. Today started with an email from babycenter.com. "Welcome to your 16th week of pregnancy! Get ready, in the next few weeks your baby will double in size and weight!" (groan from Lauren) Right now I'm doing laundry and sighing as I stack up my small shirts and pants and shorts without elastic. (Yes, because they don't fit, or won't fit by the time I get back from Thanksgiving.) It was a relief to find some towels in my laundry basket. "Aha! These will still fit!" And if I'm going to outgrow my towels, don't tell me now.

I have awesome maternity clothes thanks to some good friends. But I'm still sad about putting away my old clothes. It occurred to me that this is kind of like packing for study abroad. I get to take some clothes with me overseas (through my pregnancy), and the rest I'll see again in a few months (a year or so). Right? Sorry, these reality checks are tough.

There's lots of things to be excited about. ACU is dominating in the playoffs! If you're out of the loop, ACU beat WTAMU on Saturday 93-68! Sheesh! If you want to watch just the touchdowns, you can find the video on D2Football.com or the Abilene Reporter News website. Just the touchdowns - it's 6:00 long! It was a long, crazy, awesome game! We play Northwest Missouri this Saturday. I'll have to watch the game online. Oh man. The Championship game is in Florence, Alabama on Dec. 13th, and I would love to be there! awesome.

I'm also super excited about Thanksgiving! It's one of my favorite holidays. Yum.

Here's the recent picture. We took it last night, 11/23/08.

Lists

I haven't made any lists yet, but I've been thinking about them. Mostly I'm deciding when I need to start working on things. Here's things that I'm not going to worry about until later (definitely after Christmas).
-picking a name
-picking out baby furniture
-picking out a stroller/car seat/etc.
-moving desks out of the office/nursery

Right now I am working on deciding what size I am and what clothes I can wear besides t-shirts and sweat pants. So far I have stacks of maternity clothes from two of my friends. I didn't realize that a woman will go through small, medium, and large maternity clothes in one pregnancy... I also don't understand all the clothes I've unpacked, but that's ok. I like to pretend I know what I'm doing.

Also I think I'm officially in my second trimester. I'm not nauseous and I don't have to use the bathroom in the middle of night. Nice. I know, trips to the bathroom are going to be returning to my schedule as Baby grows.

I have my second doctor's appointment today. I don't know what's going to happen. I'm expecting standard tests (weight, blood pressure, urine test, measure my tummy) and some time to ask questions. If anything exciting happens I'll let you know. My fancy sonogram appt. is scheduled for Dec. 29.

And I'm home sick with a cold. But that's OK. Tommy's snuggly when he knows I'm sick, and I have lots of hot drink and food options here at the house.

Trip to Mexico

Hey, here's some pictures of my trip to Mexico. I don't tend to carry my camera around, so these aren't representative of most of my experiences, just the two times I had my camera: 2 hours on the beach, and 2 hours on the runway in Mexico City. Most of my time I was at a very nice hotel in Merida, Mexico. My favorite part was the Coconut ice cream dessert on Wednesday night - Coco Champola! Sadly, it's only available in Merida.

First the beach with my friend and coworker, Sue Ann. Then the parade of emergency vehicles that checked out and re-fueled our plane when we had some problems with a warning light.

Some Dreams

I've had some pretty wild dreams the last few weeks. Here's my two blog-appropriate favorites so far: In one I was a lead in a Shakespeare play with my friend Amy. I wasn't originally cast as the lead, but the lead got sick, so I got the part. It turns out that I'm a wonderful Shakespeare actress! But after each show the director would pull me aside and tell me to either stop ad-libbing or at least run my ideas by him before the show. I told him that I thought it was important to give the audience more historical information about the play (most of my outbursts were like footnotes). It was pretty awesome.

The dream I had last night was not very fun, but it was crazy. First I was walking around a mall, not knowing which section to shop in. Then someone came up and told me "Happy Birthday!" I asked how old I was, and they said 30. 30?! I quickly added in my head, "born in '83, now it's 2008, yep, that makes me 30!" Then I saw my two good friends Mark and Phil and I asked them if they were 30 too. They said "Of course!" Whoa. So I went home, because my mom was going to bring me a birthday cake. But I knew my house was going to be invaded before my party by a gang, so I waited in my front yard on a wave runner in the pond. (Yes, in my front yard.) The gang came, I got off my wave runner and fought them through the house and backyard. It was pretty cool, but scary. I don't remember all the details, there was something about an airplane engine making fake snow to distract them...(easy, you throw bags of ice through the engine and it comes out all chopped up like snow!) I remember the end - I punched the leader in the face, sent him flying into the fireplace, and I lit him on fire! When I woke up I was terrified! But I slowly realized that I wasn't 30, and I hadn't fought anyone. Thank goodness!

Progress?

For those of you who are out of town and imagining a cute baby bump, here's the truth. Below is a picture of me at 8 weeks and a picture at 12 weeks. There's not much difference except I need a haircut. And these days Curtis can stick out his tummy as far as I can. (I'm working on getting a picture of that!)

Green shirt - October 5
Purple shirt - November 1

Traveling Plans

So Thursday I went to Houston for a fancy ACU recruiting event. Thursday was a bad day. I felt car sick for most of the long ride, but we had to keep going so we could get there on time, so I just tried to sleep. And none of the convenient stores we stopped at had Icees! bummer. For a while I thought I would have to skip the event that night, but once we got to our hotel room, I started feeling better. The event was great, I love talking about ACU. Then Friday we got back in the car and drove back to Abilene. It's a long drive. We left at 9:15, stopped at the Blue Bell factory in Brehnam, it was closed, and then we accidentally ended up in Taylor! That was not on the route, but it was close to Georgetown, and I definitely know my way back to Abilene from there. I felt really good on Friday, and I knew where we were, so I did most of the driving. And my fellow travelers let me pick all the stops. For lunch we stopped in Taylor and ate at this tiny Mexican food place that was painted bright peach and only had trucks in the dirt parking lot. It was great.

So this weekend I'm here in Abilene and on Monday I leave for a NAFSA (some sort of national study abroad association) conference in Merida, Mexico. I'll feel more excited about it after I pack and get all my stuff together. It should be fun though. I'm going with three other people from ACU. I get back late Thursday night.

My baby will have been to Montevideo and Mexico before it's born!

Check out Merida on wikipedia, it's a cool place!