Update!

I am starving ALL the time!

In other news, my husband is concerned and annoyed that I've started to be a full-time snorer.  I would sometimes snore before getting pregnant, but now he says it's out of control and he's been sleeping on his on-call bed in the office.  Womp womp.  I e-mailed my midwife and she got right back to me (she's awesome) and told me to try the Breathe Right strips.  She uses them and said that they don't stop her snoring completely, but they make it much less noisy.  I picked up a pack and was surprised by the cost - $15 for a month's supply - but I suppose it's worth it if it saved my husband's sanity.

The awful acne that I've had is started to let up a bit.  My belly is just huge already!  I've stocked up on some maternity tops and I have a few good skirts, dresses and pants that will likely see me through.  I'm a size 20, so I already have a lot of pants and skirts that are stretchy and comfy.  But my shirts were all too short, so I went out to Motherhood Maternity and stocked up off of the clearance rack.  I got several shirts for $10 and $12, and spent only $20 on the most expensive one.

I can feel the baby fluttering around all the time now.  And tonight is the first night that I've had any sort of heartburn.  It's mild, but I'm really hoping it won't start to be a nightly occurrence.  I HATE heartburn.

I've been trying to ride my bike for exercise, but I'm so terrible about not getting enough physical activity.  We have a membership to The Y and we hardly ever go.  Maybe once in a month, if that.  So I'm going to try to be better at that.  I also need to do some of the exercises that my midwife gave me to help with my lower back pain.  Sweeping the floors and folding laundry put a hurting on me today!

Stocking up

My cubicle neighbor from work sold me a car seat, two bases and a stroller for about half of what I was going to pay to buy almost the exact same system new.  Sweet!  The set is black and gray, which matches the car interior fine, so hopefully people won't be looking at the car seat for gender cues.  We're bound to have some confused people, though, because I don't plan on dressing the baby in anything too gender specific.  Because really, the baby doesn't care if it's in a pink onesie or a blue onesie.

I ordered a bunch of Burt's Bees belly balm online and it finally came.  I like the oil and butter, but the balm is kind of weird.  It's too solid which makes it hard to apply.  But it smells divine!

Tonight, I was leaving straight from work to meet my husband at a meet and greet for the candidates for Congress in our upcoming primary.  I don't wear makeup usually and had put on a sweater this morning that I knew wasn't really big enough to cover my rapidly expanding belly.  I felt so frumpy and awful that I had to stop at Target and buy a shirt to wear just to boost my confidence a little.   I thought I'd scored a good deal when I found an XXL on the sale rack for under $10.  I was in a rush, so I didn't try it on.  It fit, but it won't fit for long.  I mean, really, how idiotic is it to not make maternity wear out of something stretchy?!

Nursery Wall Melt Down

So, I've thought and thought and though about what to do with the nursery.  Right now our second bedroom is a catch all room that is a jumble of tools and remnants of old home improvement projects.  We're working on cleaning it out and I wanted to go buy paint this weekend.  At first, since the room is already bright yellow (I didn't do that, it was that way when we moved in) I was just going to paint some little bees on the wall and go with a bee theme since it's gender neutral and I kind of like that small room having bright paint.  Well, my husband is a SCUBA diver, so he really wanted to do a coral reef theme.  He rarely gets his way when it comes to decorating the house and I thought it was awesome that he'd even put the effort forth to come up with an idea since his approach to starting a family had been avoidance of the subject for the first years of our marriage and he still carries some of that attitude with him (though now I think he avoids the subject because it stresses him out to think about fatherhood.)  So I said, great, coral reef, done.  I'm a graphic designer, so I started doing some visual reference searches and came up with an idea to have a nice blue on blue silhouette mural.  I didn't want to do anything full color because not only is that a lot of effort to hand paint, I just don't like having to much of a jumble of color.  I made a mock up of what I was thinking and e-mailed it over to him for his approval (yeah, that's how we roll).  We get up early and drive to the hardware store and we walk in and I'm going to pick out some blues and he's like "we'll need some red and black and green, or should we just use acrylics?"  I'm like, what?!  Didn't you look at the mock up I sent you?  He was confused because he thought since I said it was a mock up, that I would be filling in the silhouettes of the fish with full color illustration.  I'm like ARE YOU CRAZY?!  Do you have any idea how long that will take???

Let me just say here that I haven't had any real emotional outbursts during my pregnancy.  I get cranky when I'm hungry, but that's easily solved.  I haven't gone on crazy crying jags or just flipped my lid for no reason.  I have gotten unnecessarily livid at work in response to an e-mail from a coworker that was really no big deal, but I realized it was probably hormones and let myself cool down before replying.  So when I say I freaked out in the hardware store, I mean, I really freaked out.  I was like yelling at my husband about how much time and effort I'd put into this, and I'm the designer in the family so that makes me the authority on what looks good and he should just suck it up because his idea was stupid and would look horrible while my idea was informed by hours of research into current trends.  And, really, we're talking probably about 20 hours of searching out source material, compiling some artwork resources and drawing a mockup - the same approach I take with all of my work, so I didn't take wasting that amount of time lightly.  We ended up having to go out into the parking lot and continuing our argument in the car where I pretty much melted down into a crying puddle.  Eventually, we decided that we would ditch the coral reef idea since we were obviously on two completely different pages and go to the bookstore to look through children's books to get another idea.

We considered Pooh bear (my husband is a big fan of Tigger), Peter Rabbit, Dr. Seuss' "One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish" and a few other ideas.  I don't really like over-exposure to branding, so we were about to settle on hot air balloons when we spotted a display that had an Angry Birds game on it.  He was obsessed with that game for a few weeks last year and then his mother and I played it all night one night while the guys worked out in the woodshop at his parents' house.  Anyway, we were like, hmmmm....Angry Birds nursery?

And so that's what it will be.  We went back to the hardware store and got some paint for the background, searched the web for a few images to base the wall mural on and will start painting one of these days when it's warm enough to open the windows.  I'm really glad we were able to come to a compromise and I'm a little embarrassed about how I freaked out about something so silly IN PUBLIC (which we never do.  If we have disagreements, we always work them out in private).