Monday, March 31, 2014

Baby Shower #2







Some of my great friends in the ward here in Phoenix, Brittney, Sierra and Patsy threw me another baby shower. They went above and beyond with it! It turned out so beautiful. The food was so delicious. The Bishop was kind enough to let us have it in his gorgeous home and his wife got the beautiful flowers. I want to cry with how grateful I am to have such great friends who do so much for me.

Baby boy and I were spoiled with more love. All the ladies in the ward that came wrote down advice for me and I will keep those papers forever. It seriously was a huge help . I love that I have so many wonderful mothers to look up to.

First Baby Shower










My Mom and sisters threw me a baby shower when I was visiting Utah. I was only 20 weeks and still not really showing. I felt kind of weird having one so early but it was the only time I would be in Utah before baby boy came. I was also worried that we would later find out we were actually having a girl and then I'd have all this boy stuff haha.

My mom and sisters did such a good job! It turned out so great! The decorations and the delicious food, I loved it! Thanks Mom, Amber and Syd :-) It was so good to see people I hadn't seen in awhile. Baby was showered with so much love.

Oh and my doctor later confirmed that baby boy is in fact a boy :-)

Oculus Rift

Conrad bought the new virtual gaming device, Oculus Rift for his past birthday.Its not consumer ready and is still in the developing stages. Being the big gamer that he is, he had to try it out and bought the developers kit. It was pretty sweet. They had a lot of demo games to try out. Our favorites were the roller coaster rides. It really felt like you were on a roller coaster moving around. When I first tried it I couldn't keep my balance and almost fell over.

There is also a horror haunted maze game that freaked me out! I really felt like I was in the maze and things were chasing me. We had friends over to try it and I actually think watching other peoples reactions to the game is more entertaining than doing it yourself. We of course recorded everyone's reactions. I cant figure out how to get the videos from my phone uploaded to here. I did post one of myself looking like a fool on facebook.

We took the Oculus with us to Utah to have our families try it out. It was hilarious watching everyone try it out.

Conrad posted a video on you tube of one of my cousins playing the horror game. I won't say which cousin :-) It is his real reaction. I will say he is much braver than I am because he went a lot longer in the game than I did. I barely made it a minute before I yanked the headset off.

Christmas 2013

I didn't take very many pictures while we were visiting family this past Christmas. As usual we had a lot of fun. We got to stay 3 weeks and it was so great.










Wednesday, March 26, 2014

Surprise!

I have always thought it would be fun to surprise our family with a pregnancy by just showing up with a baby bump knowing it would be completely possible since we only see our families 2-3 times a year.

When we found out we were pregnant in September it was already a given that we weren't going to tell our family until we saw them in December. It was the perfect Christmas surprise. My mom had been wanting a grand baby for so long. Knowing I wanted to totally surprise her I never let on that we were even thinking of having kids. I think she was getting a little worried that we would never have them haha.

It was really hard not telling them. Especially since I was so sick at first. Even still, being an adult when I'm sick all I want is my mom. When I'd call Conrad at work to tell him I needed things from the store I always ended with, "oh and I need my mom so please bring her too." There were a few times when I was talking to her on the phone I had to hold it away from me because I'd start gagging/dry heaving. I don't know how she didn't notice haha.

Two days before we left for Utah we got an ultra sound to see if we could find out the gender because we wanted to do a gender reveal cake with the family. Luckily we had great technicians that tried very hard to find out as it wasn't easy because baby kept crossing his legs. When they finally saw the gender they sealed it in an envelope for us. We gave the envelope to my friend Sierra and she made us an awesome cake that we took with us up to Utah.

When we got to Utah we stopped by all of Conrad's siblings houses first to tell them the great news. Unfortunately we couldn't tell Conrad's parents that grandchild number 16 was on his way in person because they are in Germany serving a mission.

We told my parents that their first grandchild was coming by making my dad think we were giving him a birthday present since his birthday was a few days prior. When he opened the gift he got a card that said, "We just wanted to tell you that the best parents are promoted to grandparents!" Inside the gift box was a framed picture of our ultra sound. My dad was so confused haha. We got my parents reaction on video and I am so glad we did because it was a great reaction. I posted the video on Facebook.
The awesome gender reveal cake my friend Sierra was kind enough to make for us.

We both happened to be wearing blue when we found out it was a boy.



We're having a BABY!

This news is definitely not a secret anymore as I am due in a little under 2 months! We did keep it a secret for quite some time though, at least from our families because we wanted to tell them the news in person. It was a little harder keeping the secret from our friends in the ward as I was SO sick the first 3 months. I'll get more into that later and I'll start from the beginning, from when we first found out we were pregnant...

Conrad and I had always had an agreement that we wanted him to be done with law school before we tried having kids. Well, before we knew it, he was done with law school and it was time to talk about our little agreement we had when we first got married. We agreed we were both ready- well, as ready as we could be as I have always been terrified of the thought of having a baby.

We decided we weren't going to "try" "try" but we would stop using the precautions to prevent a pregnancy and just let it happen when it happened. Well it happened a lot quicker than we thought.

When I was about a week and half late I didn't think much of it as I thought I would start at any day but Conrad thought other wise, so he actually went to the store and got a pregnancy test. When the result showed up on the stick (which we now realize was a clear positive) we were so in denial we just stared at it, not sure what to think. We were definitely not convinced I was pregnant. Conrad was so unsure that he took a picture of the stick and posted it on a website where other people rate it as a positive result or a negative result. Within minutes we had people rating it positive and commenting "congrats your pregnant" or "that is definitely a positive." You'd think we would be convinced by that point but, nope, we both just sat there staring at each other both thinking it had to be a false positive or something.

The next day I called my Relief Society president who is an OB/GYN and actually my OB/GYN which has seriously been such a blessing to have her as my doctor and not weird or awkward at all as I once thought it would be. I made an appointment with her and sure enough I was pregnant! 6.5 weeks along. She was able to find the heartbeat. It was so crazy hearing our babies heartbeat when he was just a little dot on the monitor. I remember driving home from the appointment with a rush of so many emotions thinking "Holy crap I'm pregnant!"

I thought I was going to be one of the lucky ones who didn't get sick, because up until 7 weeks I was feeling great. As soon as I hit 7 weeks, BAM! I was tossing cookies left and right. I was so nauseous. I don't know why they call it morning sickness because mine was ALL DAY sickness. I was MISERABLE. I'll admit there were days I thought, "Well I guess we're just having one kid cause there is no flipping way I'm going through this again." I pretty much lived on pretzels, saltine crackers, string cheese and yogurt for 2 months. There were several days when I could barely get out of bed or even turn over in bed without a huge wave of nausea rush over me. Conrad was so great taking care of me. Poor guy had to give up his new cologne he had just bought because it was one of my worst trigger smells. Whenever he sprayed that stuff I had to make a mad dash to the toilet. I still can't stand the smell of that stuff so he hasn't worn cologne in awhile. The sickness finally let up around 15 weeks, every once in awhile since then if I have gone too long without eating I get a little gaggy but for the most part it has been smooth sailing since. THANK GOODNESS.
Profile of baby boy at 17 weeks.

October Lovin

It's catch up time again.

October is one of my most favorite months of the year for many reasons: It's fall, our wedding anniversary, Halloween, it's fall... the weather finally drops to the 90's and high 80's.

Happenings in October:

Our ward had the annual Trunk-or-Treat Halloween party which is my excuse to dress up. I love dressing up. This year we went as the insurance commercial people. I was Flo from Progressive, Conrad was the Mayhem guy from Allstate and Chloe was the gecko from Geico.

We went to the Arizona State Fair and I got to ride a Camel. I couldn't stop laughing for the entire one minute ride in a circle. Weeeee!

Conrad and I celebrated our 4th anniversary this year. We went and saw the Lion King Musical, I LOVED it. The costumes were amazing. It's definitely one I'd see again. I was about 10 weeks pregnant at the time and still experiencing my morning/all day sickness and I was afraid I would have to make a mad dash to the bathroom during the show but all was well. I'm so glad I am past all that horrible sickness now.

On Halloween night we watched a scary movie with our friends Sierra and Tyson. It freaked me out! So much so that I have sworn off scary movies forever unless they are black and white and cheesy. I had to have a Mickey Mouse musical show playing when I went to sleep that night. Stupid scary movie.