General Updates

Hi Everyone!

I've been lurking on your blogs-it looks like most of you are well. I've noticed that the feature on blogger that tells me when you last updated can be a little annoying because I find myself checking it far more often than when I would just do once-or-twice weekly blog rounds. Get blogging people! :D You're too quiet!

I can't believe that I'm almost at the end of my first trimester. And, I went the entire week without calling the doctor. That's not happened during this entire pregnancy. I'm sure they were glad to go a week without hearing from me, and I was sure glad to not have a reason to call them. Was missing getting another glimpse of baby, though. But I prefer this "going dark" period to him/her giving me a reason to worry!

I can't decide how I'm feeling. Some days I go, "Wow, I'm finally starting to feel better" and then other days, I feel as bad as ever. I do notice I get sick within like 30 seconds of the Reg.lan wearing off-it makes me a little uncomfortable to be that dependent on it, but the times it does work for some relief have been welcome. Jury is still ultimately out though. My doctor is getting married in 3 weeks and will be gone for a while with the wedding and honeymoon festivities, so I need to make a decision so that I can go on something else in plenty of time before he leaves, if necessary.

We've had a little fun this week. We've been trying to budget for baby expenses, and so I'm trying to be super militant about watching for sales and stuff so I can buy things a little at a time. It became a mess trying to track items individually, so we went to BRU this week and opened a registry. It's super early for that but we did it so I can have a list of all the items in one place and then just check it regularly for price changes and snatch things up as they go on sale. It doesn't have much on it yet because we want some gender-specific things, and we plan to choose the less expensive things like blankets and feeding accessories at Tar.get and Wal.mart, but it was still fun to wander through the store and make some decisions on what we want. We're trying to be super careful about collecting too much stuff. We're both terrible stuff-collectors and mess-makers, which together is a recipe for disaster any time, much less when you have a reason as cute as a baby to indulge those tendencies. But, man, that was hard, especially when you look at their "must have" list!

DH kept trying to scan my belly :)


The other fun game to play when registering is coming home to check it on the computer to see the goofy things your DH scanned when you weren't looking.

Though we're trying to keep the "stuff" to a minimum, we did choose some toys...well, because they're so cute! Today we went back for one particular toy that we really liked because we found it's not actually supposed to be sold in the store and the online price is almost twice as much, and we had a coupon and a gift card we got just for registering, so we went and had a little fun. So here is baby's first toy. Todd actually was having fun, but this was his "I can't believe you're photographing this" face. Oh, DH, brace yourself. This is only the beginning! :D



Here's the toy itself. Isn't it cute? It rolls around and makes music, and the thing on its back comes off and becomes a rattle and a stacker toy, too. I've discovered I'm a sucker for brightly colored, cute animals.


It was also fun to do something like that with Todd. It's been hard for him because for so much of the pregnancy baby and I are the only ones who feel anything so this was something bonding we could do together.

So, that was our fun week.

On a totally random note, I was thinking about clouds this week. Arizona gets monsoons in the summer. If you're not familiar with them, they're high-intensity, sudden-onset, usually evening-occurring, warm-weather electrical storms. They're almost like a mini-hurricane. They have really high winds, lots of thunder and lighting, and heavy-volume, fast-falling rain. I'd never experienced anything like one before moving to Arizona.

And monsoon rain comes from the most beautiful clouds you've ever seen. They're not like loose-formed cotton-candy clouds like the clouds of a regular day, and they're not heavy gray amoebas like regular rain clouds. They're like piles and piles of individual cotton balls, piled together in all sorts of shapes, with the most wonderful definition in them. And they pile into the sky as high as the eye can see and they just get bigger and bigger as the storm builds.

These are some photos I found on flickr but it's impossible to capture the true majesty of a monsoon cloud in a flat image. But this gives you an idea.







And I thought-how cool of God? I mean, as far as we're concerned, clouds could just be clouds, and we'd never know the difference. They could all do their different jobs but all look relatively the same, and we'd be none the wiser. But God, in His infinite creativity and display of His majesty, gave us these incredible works of arts that are just a pleasure and delight to feast our eyes upon. These ones are different than those ones, which are different than this third kind, and so on. Beauty is such a gift. And we only see through a glass darkly, now. Can you imagine the full, unobscured version?

I love that verse in Romans 1:30 that says,

Since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse.

Wow. I think the same thing about babies, or people in general. This baby has genetic siblings, who all look like each other, and this one will probably look like them too, and yet, they are each very different from each other too. It absolutely baffles me that God decided to make us each unique. There will never be another child who looks like this one, even though there have been billions upon billions of opportunities for repeat. God's creativity and tender-attention to each of us, and to all of His creation, just astounds me. I've been thankful for that reminder, courtesy of His monsoon clouds.

Anyway, I had a migraine earlier, and it did go away (thankfully), but I should go to bed lest I invite trouble back.

Nighty night!

ETA: I noticed a couple of you asked me about Cord Blood Banking. I meant to mention it in this post but forgot so I'll try to put my thoughts on it together in a post soon.