Week 35

Major events:  Easter

Size of baby:  Honeydew melon

Sleep:  Horrible terrible awful

Cravings:  None

Movement:  Getting quite uncomfortable.  Often, I feel like someone has placed a car jack inside of me.  I feel her forcing my diaphragm and rib cage upwards towards my right shoulder, and at the same time pressing downwards in my pelvis towards my left thigh.  Her little feet kick the crap out of my ribs and sometimes it just feels like they are grinding on the bones.  Her butt used to really poke out of my right side and there would be a big hard spot, but she must have rolled over a little bit because now it's her foot/feet that will poke out.  And they will poke out SO far... it's strange feeling them poke out now because they are SO hard.  You can definitely tell that it is a full on baby with actual bones in there now and not just a squishy little alien :)  There is this HUGE thing in there that moves and squirms all over the place.

Belly button in or out?  I guess you would call it "in"... it's very flat and strange looking.

Missing:    Being able to see my own crotch.  Not that I need to or used to all the time or anything... it's just weird not physically being able to.  Also, I really miss dancing around like crazy.  Imagine you just ate a huge meal at a mexican restaurant and then strapped on a 30 pound backback to your front side... dancing would feel terrible right?  Right.  I miss it!

Best part of this week:  I met with my doula this week at a park and she brought her super cute/hilarious 4 year old son with her.  When they pulled up he yelled at me across the park from their car: "I can see your big belly!"  So funny.  I feel like I haven't had enough hilarious little kid reactions to my growing belly yet! Guess I still have a few weeks :)  There was also a very special moment at Easter church service where the pastor had all of the new moms and pregnant women stand up and the congregation prayed over us and new life.  It was truly amazing.

Hardest part of this week:  This baby is definitely starting to take a physical toll on my body.  I am so exhausted, but not because I'm tired... just because my whole body is so achy and worn out.  Each day feels like I just ran a marathon.

Looking forward to:  Baby shower on Sunday!!!!

Emotions:  Feeling great this week!  Went on 2 great runs, 3 miles one day and 4 miles another.  I'm hoping to run a 5K in a week... if I feel good enough I might just stay on the course and run the 10K but I could be totally insane for thinking I could do that.  The day before my 35th week started, I felt like someone had flipped a switch.  I felt miserably uncomfortable, I was a total grouch, I didn't feel like being in a good mood (or putting forth any effort towards being happy whatsoever).  I was really worried that I had turned down a path that there was no turning back on.  LUCKILY that only lasted a few days and now I'm back to feeling like myself again.  Hopefully, if that happens again it will only be for a short period of time and not something that will take over my entire last month of pregnancy.

We would also like to OFFICIALLY announce our baby girls' name - Heidi Rose Kresta!  We had picked out her name on March 15th, which was my grandmother's 80th birthday.  However, we decided to wait until we got a little closer to my due date to announce on social media for a few reasons.  My grandmother's middle name is Rose, which was a middle name we had been discussing.  We thought that she could help us pick out the baby's name at her birthday brunch and she was so thrilled that Rose was one of our top choices!  So that's what we went with.  We hope that was a nice little birthday present to her :)  

Here are a few pictures taken this past Saturday when we went out to the country for Easter at Ryan's grandparents.  

Maternity Pictures

Here are just a few of our favorite maternity pictures!  Shout out to our good (and generous!) friend Mike for taking these for us!  We are so grateful that you took the time to do this. :)  

P.S. These pictures were taken at 33 weeks!  

Week 34

No belly picture this week, but I had already bought the cantaloupe sooo....this will have to do

Major events:  Childbirth prep class, Ryan's birthday and the last time we will go 2 weeks between Dr. visits!

Size of baby:  Cantaloupe

Sleep: Terrible as always

Cravings:  Chocolate donuts!

Movement:  Yes. All. the. time!

Belly button in or out?  In...ish... 

Missing:  Bending and moving.  Can't wait to be flexible again!  Also...I am SO sick of sleeping on my side.  UGH.  I will never sleep on my side again after this.

Best part of this week:  Ordered the crib and bought some curtains for the nursery!  Finally I feel like we are at least starting to prepare for her arrival!

Hardest part of this week:  Childbirth prep class.  The class itself was great, however it was stressful to me to hear all of that information over such a short period of time.  To be honest, there really were only 1 or 2 specific things that was new information for us.  98% of what was discussed was actually stuff that we had already heard/knew/learned about/read somewhere.  But you spend 7-8+ months learning about pregnancy and childbirth, reading books and blogs and getting the daily blurbs from pregnancy apps on your phone... so all of this information is gathered over a long period of time.  Sitting in a room for 7 hours learning about epidurals, medical interventions, drugs, cesarean sections, emergencies... when you cram all that information into one sitting I found it extremely overwhelming - despite the fact that it wasn't something that I hadn't heard before.  I felt a lot more stress and anxiety about labor and delivery for a day or two, but I knew that after a little while I would go back to feeling my normal amount of stress about it.

Looking forward to:  Easter!

Emotions:  Some stress about not having anything set up or ready yet... but I know that we will be able to get going on that very soon! 

Week 33

Major events:  First Baby Shower!!

Size of baby:  Pineapple!

Sleep: Totally different each night.  Some nights are relatively good, while others are bad.  There are some nights where the pressure on my bladder/pelvis is so strong that no position is comfortable, and peeing doesn't help at all.  So I'm constantly waking up thinking I have to go but... sadly that's not the issue.

Cravings:  Krispy. Kreme. Donuts.  Chocolate glazed.  The old school kind - you know the 1,000 calorie each kind.

Movement:  Oh yes.  Although, she has changed positions.  After weeks and weeks with her head down on my bladder, her butt poking out of my right side and her feet kicking my ribs, she has definitely moved.  I'm really hoping she is still head down, but I will find out today for sure!

Belly button in or out?  In... mostly...

Missing:  Beer, bending over, rolling over, being able to bend/scrunch/slouch

Best part of this week:  Baby shower #1!!  Maternity pictures!  Also, ran 5 miles the morning of the shower and I felt awesome!  Definitely could have kept going if I had had time...

Hardest part of this week:  Nothing specific comes to mind... 

Looking forward to:  Childbirth prep class this Saturday!

Emotions:  Very happy and still loving being pregnant!! Although I did have one "down" morning, which I just blame this on the hormones, as these times of feeling depressed are usually very brief.  I also realize that most women will probably think I am insane for saying this... but I am really going to miss being pregnant.  Sure, I'm looking forward to being able to put my own shoes on again, chow down some sushi and shop in normal people stores, but I definitely get sad thinking about NOT being pregnant anymore!  I really am going to miss it :)

Nursery Progress

I feel like we are getting a pretty late start on this whole setting up the nursery thing (at least comparatively).  Nonetheless, between now and January there has been SOME progress... and I know that it will be ready for her when she does arrive.  We have chosen to go with a light mint color for the walls, with light pink and lavender accents.  I don't really like having a big "theme" for the room (matching curtains, matching lampshade, matching bedding, matching everything), but obviously I wanted some sort of idea to tie everything in the room together.  I initially thought we would go with some owl items (Ryan went to Rice and owls are everywhere right now!)  However, I then thought - why just limit it to owls??  Let's include some other baby forest animals!  Well, thanks to Pinterest I realized this was not necessarily an original idea... although not too overdone either.  I was able to find a few inspirational pieces that guided the dream for this room, including a wooden fawn clock and a mobile made of cute little felt animals (which you will hopefully see later!)  SO needless to say we are going for a very subtle "baby woodland creatures" theme, (as long as it's not too cartoon-y though!) 

The room that we chose to use as the baby's room was previously used more as a storage room than anything else... so I thought I would document it's previous, uh...state.  Here are some before pictures...

Yes, there was a mattress in this room, so technically it could have functioned as a guest room, right??

Boxes from wedding gifts.... yes we have been married for over a year...

Paint samples!  I really wanted something light, pastel and between a green and a blue.  We also thought maybe we would go with a light lavender at some point... so that's up there too.

More colors... I HATE picking out paint colors!  From experience, I know that a color can look completely different once it covers an entire wall.  I really liked these two, but I knew the one on the right would look too blue once it was up, and the one of the left would look too green.

We ended up going with Behr's "light mint".  Here is my sweet sweet husband in action!

Before we painted the ceiling and trim white, this color looks super cucumber-y under the artificial light.

One month before our due date - the crib and mattress have arrived!!

Ryan and his helper setting up the crib.

The finished product :)

Now on to the decorating phase!  So much "work" to do ;)

Babymoon!

When we found out that I was pregnant, obviously there were so many emotions.  Mostly happy, some terrified... the only thing that I was (just slightly) sad about was the fact that Ryan and I never really had a chance to do any travelling as husband and wife.  I have become even more grateful for the amazing and perfect honeymoon that we got to take, but other than that we have had no married-people vacations!  I realize that this doesn't mean that we won't get to travel after baby or even with baby...but it will never be the same.  No just taking off when we want to, or travelling without 3500 pounds of junk, no leaving town without constantly thinking about and checking up on another little person that we will be missing so much.  I definitely mourned the loss of this (and only this) particular freedom.  And yes, I do feel slightly guilty for feeling this way... after all, God had just blessed us with the most wonderful gift ever.  That is why it was so important to us that we take some time to get away together.  To take a very long weekend trip and be together, just the 2 of us, before we are under house arrest for 20 something years.  (Just kidding... kind of.)

We truly agonized over where we should go.  We had such a hard time picking a place!  On the one hand, we wanted to go somewhere where we could relax, obviously.  We looked into Astoria, OR and Santa fe, NM initially.  On the other hand, we also LOVE New York, we know it, we know we like visiting there...so that was always an option as well.  However, we hesitated to jump right on New York because we have been there several times before and thought that maybe we would want to try something new.  I would also be 31 weeks pregnant... so there's that.  (Not exactly conducive to walking the streets and public transportation of New York - at least to someone who is not used to living that lifestyle each day.) However, we started running into a lot of issues with each location.  We literally had ONE weekend to take this trip, but it seemed that with every option we ran into some huge obstacle.  We started looking into other locations... Florida, South Carolina, Las Vegas...the list goes on.  I already felt quite uneasy about planning to take at trip at 31 weeks pregnant, but literally the next "free" time we had available was 3 weeks before my due date!  Yikes!  That was simply not an option.  (Like, physically not possible.  Even if I was crazy enough to think I could do it... the airlines [and my doctor] will not even let you on a plane past...36 weeks maybe?  Something like that according to their policy...)  There were some points where I got so frustrated, sad and upset with the situation that I almost told Ryan to just cancel the whole thing.  Thankfully, Ryan talked with one of his sisters who was planning a baby shower for us for the weekend following our trip, explained the situation to her and asked if trading weekends was a possibility.  She said yes!  We were still about 6 weeks out, so as long as we made a decision quick and let her know then we would be able to make it work.  I am so so grateful for her flexibility.  (With this plan, I would be 32 weeks pregnant on the trip, so I was still a little uncertain of how I would feel/where I would be at in the pregnancy and how I would cope with travelling - but I didn't care because now we could at least TAKE the trip!)  Once we switched dates, that opened up New York as an option (and Santa Fe was also still an option as well).  I think we both knew what our choice would be.  New York is a place that we know and love, we could spend some time with my soulmate (aka college roommate) Jenny and her husband Matt who live in the city, and NYC is not exactly an "easy" travel destination with kids in tow, so we knew we wouldn't have a chance to go back for a while.

SO... to make a REALLY long story super short... we decided on New York City for our babymoon, and here is a little photo-tour of our long weekend there!

Good morning New York!  Day 1 - the only day with GOOD weather:  sunny and cool! This is the view from our upper west side hotel room at Hotel Beacon.

Day 1 breakfast at Good Enough to Eat.

The most intense (and amazing) french toast I have ever had!!

Walked all the way around the reservoir in Central Park!  (Took us a little longer than the average person because we had to take multiple breaks to find a bathroom!  My fault - too many liquids at breakfast.  Oops!)

Dinner at of our favorite restaurants - Cleopatra's Needle.  Awesome Mediterranean food with live jazz every night!

We love live jazz!  And window seats :)

Cafe Lalo - (think "You've Got Mail!")  We grabbed some tasty dessert to go!  (So hard to decide - literally hundreds of dessert choices!!)

Day 2 - after a long day of walking through Chelsea and all the way back up to Columbus Circle with Jenny, we stopped for a little coffee break.  Now THIS is my kind of (decaf!) mocha... it came with its own pot of chocolate to pour into it!!!  We ended up walking 6+ miles today!

Baby Kresta's first time in New York :)

Day 3 - You can't go to New York and NOT walk by the Friends building at least once.  It's the law.  We just happened to pass by on our way to dinner in the village in some nasty nasty weather - cold, rainy and windy!  Luckily most of the morning was spent indoors, hanging out with Matt and Jenny :)

Day 4 - Walking around after a tasty breakfast at Irving Farm Coffee Co.

Quick stop at Levain to pick up a little snack for the plane... best. cookies. ever.

Ryan and his lobster roll at Luke's.

Pizza and a coke on a stoop.  

A mocha (and a large belly) at Cafe Lalo.  Sadly, Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks were NOT there.  Can you believe that??

My advice to any couple married, with no kids... travel while you can!  Go on trips together.  Get away for the weekend.  (Go visit Napa BEFORE you get pregnant!) Even if you just drive a few hours away, take advantage of the time you have together and just be married.  Just the two of you.  Because you just never really know when God is going to say "It's time".  (And if that time happens to be 11 months after you get married... well, then... your time is a little more limited :) )

It's scary not knowing what life is going to look like after the baby gets here, but I know that it is going to be better than it is now.  Not easier, but better.  And I do look forward to taking our children on family vacations and showing them the amazing things (and more!) in the world that our parents showed us.  But I am also very grateful to have had this time to spend with my husband, no strings attached.  And I always look forward to the times when I get to be with him.  Kids or no kids. :)

Week 32

This is really getting out of control y'all!! 

Major events:  Second half of our babymoon in New York;  Found a doula for our birth!!

Size of baby:  Jiacama (? Whatever that is??  I couldn't find a large enough one in the store... oh well)

Sleep:  Slept almost 6 hours straight one night!  Insane!!  But then Ryan got really sick on Monday and I haven't really slept since... :(

Cravings:  None

Movement:  Yep!

Belly button in or out?  In... barely...

Missing:  Bending; moving; not feeling SO crammed full!

Best part of this week:  Ryan was able to feel both of her feet kicking around!  It's so cool to be able to feel different body parts... the feet are so much different feeling then when her butt pokes way out of my side!  Also, one of my prenatal yoga teachers (who also happens to have some doula training) has agreed to be our doula!  I really love her and am so excited that she will be helping us through this journey.

Hardest part of this week:  Ryan has been very sick this week, so it has been difficult doing everything on my own and not having him available to support me.  (I keep trying to tell myself that one day it could be me taking care of several sick people all by myself! That helps me get through the day...sometimes)  The other thing that has become quite hard to deal with - all of the aches and pains!  Round ligament pain - this is fairly sporatic, which is good but man sometimes it just feels like someone is twisting a knife in my lower right side.  Worse than round ligament pain though... pain under ribs.  Early in my pregnancy, I experienced pain right under my bra strap line around my chest.  It felt like someone had put a rope around me and was constantly tightening it.  The muscles would also get numb and tingly.  At first, I really thought that I just needed to (yet again) buy larger bras.  But the pain did not go away whether I was wearing a bra or not.  So after looking around online, I found that a lot of other women experience this as well.  Apparently your hips aren't the only things that need to expand to support the baby - your rib cage grows too!  The last few weeks though, the pain has intensified and has moved to just one spot (right under my bustline from the middle to middle right side).  The skin is constantly numb and burning and when I push on it, it is quite painful.  I do hope that this pain is just due to the baby pushing up and forcing my chest cavity to expand and that it's not something more serious, but I definitely plan on bringing this up at our doctors appointment next week. (We are now going to the doctor every 2 weeks - aaah!) 

Looking forward to:  Ryan not being sick anymore!  I hope this is sooner rather than later...

Emotions:  I am currently feeling SUPER stressed about the next 7ish weeks.  When I look at our calendar, I am so overwhelmed with how much we have going on.  I keep trying to tell myself that it's "fun" stuff, but that doesn't really change the fact that we don't have a free moment!  When April started booking up, I made a rule:  Nothing after April 30.  The answer is no.  We need that month for us.  But as May is quickly approaching... we seem to keep bending this rule.  I hate saying "no" just for the sake of saying no... but at this point we don't even have a free day to set up the nursery until 2 weeks before my due date... let alone go and  buy the actual furniture!  I think even for non-planners that must be stressful... I am a BIG time planner and just reading that sentence makes me feel like I'm having a panic attack.  I am trying to focus on the wonderful thing that is coming... but I am so incredibly overwhelmed with crap right now.  (And yes, I realize that your whole life it will always be one thing right after the other.  The junk never ends!  I just wish it could pause.  For just a little bit.  Before this baby gets here...)