Pregnancy journal

12 weeks

So its been three or four weeks since the scare. We are back in Arizona, and I had my first appointment with my doctor. First of all, the doctor is Dr. Mike Bryan. He just moved into town. Trav is actually friends with him and has hung out with him a bunch of times.  The first time I met Dr. Bryan, he gave me a big hug! He is one of the nicest and funniest guys. We talked about what happened and what the condition I have is. He basically told me that I needed to be on "couch potato" rest. I can't workout or do anything that would rattle the baby up. I have been bleeding on and off since Utah, but not too bad.


18 Weeks
Things are going well. Hardly any more bleeding.I haven't been too sick from being pregnant. Mostly, foods just sound gross. I can't even look at sugar without wanting to barf. I crave salt! I love eggs and meat mostly. I've lost about 5 pounds, mostly because I don't eat much sugar! I can't stand peppermint gum. Gross! Also, we decided officially that we were going to wait and not find out the sex of the baby. Its mostly Travs idea. Since its  probably our last kid, I decided I would let him have his way. Man its gonna be hard not finding out! We got to see the babe today. They did an ultra sound to check on the clot. Everything looked good. The tech said he couldn't even see the clot, so maybe its going away? What a blessing!

20 weeks

Things are going well. I'm about 20 weeks along (half way, woot woot). This pregnancy is going by fast! Good news, the clot dissolved!!! It is gone and we don't have to worry anymore! What a relief. I can workout and resume normal life again. I started to feel the baby move inside of me a couple of weeks ago. It just feels like a little flutter inside. It is always so exciting when that happens! We got our 20 week ultra sound done. It was extremely hard to not find out what the sex was. I kept looking for private parts, but we told the tech not to scan that area. I have no patience!  That evening, we ran into Dr. Bryan, my O.B. He said that he looked at our ultra sound and he knows what sex the baby is! What a mean man, now he is just gonna mess with my mind making me think it is either a girl or a boy! He has already made a couple of comments and it makes me wonder. So far, I think it is gonna be a boy, but I won't let myself get too excited. Don't get me wrong, if it is a girl, we will be so excited as well, we will know it was meant to be a girl only family. 

For some reason, I always get Braxton Hicks contractions super early in pregnancy. My stomach just gets really hard! Those are happening as well. My appetite is coming back, and I'm starting to enjoy food more. I'm starting to gain weight. I've gained about 5 pounds. We finally told the girls that I am pregnant. They CANNOT wait! Isla doesn't have a clue that her world is going to be rocked! I'm not totally showing yet, but you can see a little tiny bump. I'm mostly just super tired. I'm craving mostly milk products like milk and cereal and chocolate milk. Also, I don't like it when people touch me, also, if you can't tell, I'm super moody! I'm so glad that the baby is growing and developing well. We can't wait to meet her/him!

25 Weeks

Here is my first pregnancy picture. 25 weeks! Baby is moving a lot more. Its fun to feel the little flutters. 

32 weeks

35 weeks

The baby is all up in my grill! I can't breath very well. I sleep with about 18 pillows at night so I can breath! I'm ready to be done! My whole body feels wrecked. 

37 weeks

I picked these out for the baby's wear home outfit. I'm leaning more towards the blue whale outfit? But I just don't know still!!! Travis thinks its a girl. We will see soon!

40 weeks

Absolutely zero percent dilated. Kill me now.  3 out of 4 kids have now stayed longer than 40 weeks in there. I hope this doesn't happen when they turn 18. My uterus is awesome.

The calm before the storm, although it felt stormy to me

I love my OB.But for some crazy reason, he decided to go out of town the weekend before I was due. How rude of him. I wasn't too worried I would deliver, because I didn't have any of my baby's early. But to be safe, he was going to check me to see if I was dilating at all. He checked me on Monday the 13th. There was absolutely no signs of baby coming. So the plan was, to do nothing, and to try not to go into labor. And, absolutely nothing happened! The following Monday, I had another appointment. Dr. Bryan was back in town. He checked me again, and again, not much progress. My due date was in two days, and it wasn't looking like the babe coming anytime soon. At this point, the plan was for my mom and dad to come into town as soon as they found out I was having the baby. Our neighbors and friends were going to fill in when we had to go to the hospital. I was sort of starting to get anxiety about everything, Isla was getting hard, I was just tired of being pregnant, and nothing was happening! I got on the phone with my mom, and she decided that she would just come down on Sunday the 26th, so 6 days. That made me feel a lot better. Wednesday, the due date, came and went, and nothing happened! The baby was nice and happy in there. 

Dr. Bryan checked me again that Friday, the 24th 2 days post due date, and again, not much progress. He told me that he would strip my membranes on the following Monday morning. So this was perfect. My mom would be here Sunday, and in the past, after the membranes get stripped, I have a baby! Monday was the day! When Monday came, I was actually dilated to a 3. The Dr. thinned me out, and on top of that, I went to a chiropractor and got acupuncture. I was ready! TC even came up to hang out to wait for the baby to come. But, yeah, the baby just wasn't ready! I started feeling a little bit of contractions, but not much more. The evening came, and nothing was happening. I made TC, My mom and dad go on a long walk, in the dark and in the rain. I was getting a little ancy. They  even did a crazy rain dance that made me laugh so hard. But still nothing! We went to bed, and we woke up in the morning, and still nothing! I was officially 6 days overdue! I would have little contractions, but not much else. Travis actually took the day off, but got called into work. There was a baby born with some major complications, and he had to go in and make sure everything was ok. He was there for a couple of hours, and I was just starting to freak out because I wanted to be there! I was done! He finally got home, and I sort of had a break down because nothing was happening. We ended up going on a walk around the block, an he calmed me down. We got back, and it was time for Travis to go and pick the girls up from school. While he was gone, I had one super painful contraction, the kind that almost floors you. Whoa! But I wasn't gonna get too excited. Tice and I decided to go into my room and watch Fixer Upper. While I was getting it set up, I had a couple really hard contractions. They were starting to really come and fast! There was a really bad one, and I heard and felt something pop. I thought it was my water breaking, so I went to the bathroom and checked, and it wasn't as wet as I thought, so I chalked it up to peeing my pants a little (but it was indeed my water breaking.) We called Travis, and he got home from getting the girls. It was 3:15 and we headed for the hospital. The baby was born at 4:59, so it was fast!  I will give all the delivery details in the next post. I'm just gonna say that it was a crazy whirl of events the past two days! But looking back, it was actually pretty great. I hung out with my sister and parents and kids and husband, just sitting around waiting for a sweet baby to come. Good memories!

This is how you entertain a 2-year old

Boom! I cleaned out my pantry and let her go to town on all the expired stuff.

I got my nesting on while she got her exploring on. Win-win.

Isla first hair cut

Isla's hair was starting to remind us of the Albino from Princess Bride

It was time for her first hair cut! I'm a sucker and took her to one of those cute kids hair place that charges double what a normal salon would charge! Here is the final result

We will keep her around now that she isn't a threat, that albino will take years off your life you aren't careful!

Old Geezer

100th day of school for Brooklyn today, I hope she doesn't break a hip!

Arboretum

Look at the monkeys in the trees we saw today at the arboretum!

Milli 34th Birthday

I didn't even take pictures! Probably because I'm about ready to pop a baby out! But it was a very good birthday! Travis gave me the weekend off. I went to the valley and stayed in a hotel with Andrea and Mindy. We went to a Hawaiian spa. It was glorious. I got a facial and a massage. But weirdly I have to say that the best part was taking a shower in the shower with like 5 shower heads. I have never felt so clean and warm and tickled in all my life! The massage was ok, the lady talked my ear off about her life, I just wanted to relax! The facial was glorious. It was so nice to not be around my kids for 2 days. I love the crap out of them, but mama needs a break sometimes! I was around my 2 friends, we had great talks, ate amazing food and just relaxed!!! I sort of feel like this needs be be at least an annual thing!

Our maiden voyage

It was time to try out our new camper! We were all a little nervous. Avery was nervous because she didn't want the camper to tip while we were driving, I was nervous because I didn't want to die from carbon monoxide poisoning, and I'm pretty sure Travis was nervous to park the big rig. But we did it... sort of.

We decided to go to the warmest place in Arizona since it was January. Tucson it was. They have cool caves that we have wanted to explore. We also decided to just stay in an RV park since it was our first time. We pulled up about 8pm and everything went smoothly. We parked, hooked everything up, and the kids were ecstatic. We celebrated Brooklyn's birthday and had a great night of sleep. The next day, we went exploring in the caves. It was pretty neat! The only problem is that you couldn't touch anything! Any form of human oil or food or liquid could deteriorate the caverns, and these people really wanted to keep it safe! For a 2 year old, that is almost impossible. So Travis took on the task of keeping Isla. He did break the rule, and he snuck in 3 gummy worms. Those worms were life savers. He used every centimeter of them, ripping them apart to keep Isla sane. After the caves, we hung out in the camper and relaxed. Then Avery and I went on a hike. It was fun! Now to the fun part of the story. The camping errors. Remember, we are first time campers over here!

Camping error #1: Musicgate 2017. Remember, we are camping in Tucson in an RV park (old people central). We were really excited to make our first dinner in our kitchen. We had the music playing, we chose Coldplay because its good chill out music. For some reason, it just wasn't playing very loud inside, it almost sounded muffled. Oh well. After about 30 or so minutes, we got a knock on our door. It was the campsite host. When I opened the door, I realized that I could finally here Coldplay loud and clear. Well, we accidentally had the music on the mode where it plays outside instead of inside. We were blasting Coldplay pretty loud. The old people weren't too excited about it, and about 5 different camps complained to the guy. We were the rowdy ones. Oops! But come on people, its not like we were blasting Eminem. And it was like 8pm. Relax!

Camping Error #2: Propane much? After one good night and day camping, Travis realized that the heater wasn't working along with other things in the camper. He played around with everything, but it wasn't going on. We had to sleep that night without heat. It was freezing! Like 30 degrees! I'm so happy we had warm sleeping bags. Apparently we ran out of propane in one of the tanks, and it didn't switch over to the other tank or we didn't switch it over. We seriously don't know what we are doing! But like I said, we all survived! It was almost like we were tent camping vs luxury trailer camping!

Camping Error #3: Guess the liquid. The next morning, after freezing our butts off, we were packing up, getting ready to go. We got another knock on our door. Dreading the visitor, we opened the door to find our trusty camp host again. He said that he got more complaints from our neighbors saying that our camper was leaking something. We are pretty sure it was just water, but you never know! Travis solved the problem, and everything was good. That was our second offense to those around us. Sorry people, we are rookies! Also, you can just come and tell us, you don't have to tattle!

We learned a lot from our first time. We still have a lot to learn. The RV world is a very different world. I almost feel like we need to read RV's for dummies!

After we left, we went to Old Tucson. This is where lots of old west films were filmed. They also had live old western acts. It was pretty cool!

The train conductor

 their future for sure

 But they will find a way to bust out

Reunited and it feels so good!

It has been 19 months since we saw the Johnson's. That is roughly 570 days since we have seen our best friends. Since then, one child was born, one on the way, an almost dental school grad and lots of growing children have transpired. But we finally made it happen, we snuck a couple of days in St. George together. I'm not going to lie, I was a little nervous that maybe it had been too long, and that things wouldn't be as natural, and that it could be awkward sharing a house for 3 days straight. I was crazy. Things with the Johnson's are just easy. We "get" each other. We have the same "perv" level, and that is very important in a relationship. Chris talks, Travis listens, and Jana and I make fun of them. We can be sarcastic and silly, but we also have a lot of serious talks as well. 

 We had good times being adventurous outside. We went to Pioneer park and Snow Canyon. Avery was in pure Heaven! Travis almost died on a cattle guard, but he made it. The best times were when the kids went to bed and it was just the adults hanging out. We played games, and of course said about a million "thats what she said" jokes. The Dyer's were able to make the trip out and hung out with us as well. It was so much fun catching up and just hanging out. I really miss our Kansas City life. It feels like a lifetime ago! We will always have these bonds with these friends, that is one thing money can't buy! 

The great Globe circus

The smallest circus came to our town. It was called the great Benjamin's circus. I had no idea what to expect because Globe is a tiny town, so anything touring to Globe has got to be interesting. And interesting it was! We walked in, and there were about 15 other people. We did go to the matinee show, so I guess its not weird that it wasn't sold out. The acts were pretty decent as far as talent goes. There was this clown that would come in in-between the acts and do all sorts of cheesy things. I guess the way to describe this circus was old fashioned. Almost like it was 50 years behind the times. My kids really liked it. Avery was actually called down and was apart of an act. The parents were entertained by the pure oddness of it all. It made me think about all of these circus performers lives. How did they get here? They travel to minuscule towns performing for a small crowd. Is this what they thought they would do when they were little? Are they happy? What do they do on their off days? It just got me thinking. And also reminded me to put my kids in college asap!