Rainy days are not good for my bank account-- given too much free time, my obsession with etsy.com rears its ugly head. Today I ordered our Baby Book from edna mae. I'm in love. My mom got me The Belly Book when I told her I was pregnant and it's so cute, but it ends when the baby arrives. I've been looking for something to record all of Liam's firsts... and things like this & this are not my style. edna mae's books are modern but still sweet. She has several different colors and themes to choose from and you get to build your own book by selecting what pages are important to you.
I love that they come in binders so you can add and remove pages. I chose the chocolate brown book:
And the "Whimsy Nature" design, that provides pages for things like birth info, hands and feet, family tree, shower info, birth announcement, etc:
I added the Extended Pack which gives me a page for every month, plus holidays and other major firsts. I also added the Pregnancy Pack to document ultrasound photos and belly pics. (Some of the things from the Belly Book will be duplicated here, but it will be great to have it all in one place!)
edna mae also offers personalization for the window in the front of the book. Here is the one I chose, which will say Liam Blakely:
So, I must admit that the book wasn't cheap. But the memories that will go inside of it?
Week 20 gave me a kick in the butt that there are things this baby will need and that we have to start getting ready. There are plenty of things that we want that are either too expensive or too hard to find to put on our registry. So, we started ordering things and now the boxes just keep showing up on our porch.
First, our crib is on the way! We've been looking for a while, but settled on the Creations Summers Evening Crib in white. My parents were here a few weeks ago and surprised me by ordering it as a gift. What a gift!!! We are so thrilled to have such a nice piece of furniture for Liam to sleep in, once he graduates from his bassinet.
We ordered the Peg Perego PlikoP3 stroller in the Green Bubbles pattern. I already have the matching Skate stroller and car seat (that we bought before the baby was even conceived) but the Skate is a very large and heavy stroller-- it's beautiful & perfect for an all day outing but it's a nightmare for quick errands (jumping in and out of the car) and we could never travel with it. We needed something lightweight so we decided on the PlikoP3 and it arrived yesterday. I love it! (We couldn't register for this because it was discontinued, so we tracked it down online.)
Ahhh, the breast pump-- a necessary evil. I plan on breastfeeding, but certainly want Rob to be able to give the baby a bottle at times & will need to let my parents or sitters feed him while they are watching him. After talking to several moms, I knew that I wanted the Medela Freestyle-- and I knew that with a hefty price tag of almost $400, this would not be going on our registry. Lucky for us, we found a great website that had it for $270. Score.
I think that, as much as it's possible to love a pump, I will love this one. It's a double electric hands-free pump and it's extremely small and lightweight. I love that the motor is the size of my palm and can easily be tossed in a diaper bag, plus it has a rechargeable battery-- no being tethered to a motor inside a bag and a plug.
Which brings us to bottles-- To attempt to minimize nipple confusion, I decided on Adiri Natural Nurser Bottles. They've won all kinds of awards and I think the design is just perfect. While I know that a lot of people love Dr. Browns bottles, I'm really not interested in washing 5 separate pieces after every feeding. These are only two pieces-- the bottle and nipple (one piece) and the bottom cap-- which should make washing easy. The entire top half of the bottle is a soft material that warms with the milk, just like a mother's skin would be warm. Everyone recommends bottles with wide nipples-- well, on the Adiri, the nipple and bottle are as wide as a breast.
Adiri, unfortunately, faced tough economic times last year and went out of business-- so these bottles are not currently available at Babies R Us. However, I'm thrilled to say that Adiri has teamed up with WaterGeeks and the bottles will be back to retailers by July. In the meantime, we got a fantastic deal on ordering these from Amazon, but if there is any improvement in the design, we'll return them and buy the new ones. *This being said, I realize that sometimes babies do not take the bottles you pick! So, while I hope that these are the ones we'll use, Liam will ultimately decide.*
Last, we've started collecting our diapers. We'll be using gDiapers and I'm very excited about them. Some of the reviews have been mixed but it seems like, if we give them a chance to find the right fit, we'll be set. (People who love them, really love them.) If you're not familiar, gDiapers are cloth outer pants with disposable OR cloth inserts. I love that gDiapers are biodegradable and don't contain any plastic-- they're flushable which means no stinky diaper pail in the nursery. I love that they're cute and they're a hybrid-- we can use the flushable inserts but if we want to venture into the world of cloth diapering, we can. We've been using all of our 20% off coupons at Babies R Us to buy little gpants and packages of the flushable inserts, but last night I picked up a package of gCloth so we'll have them on hand.
It feels so good to know that we're well on our way to having the things we need to take care of him! We're going to get started on the nursery in the next few weeks-- post about that soon!
With my job keeping me as busy as it does, I haven't been able to blog as much as I would like to lately-- unfortunately, updates have started to only come weekly when Baby Blakely gets another week older. And while little Liam certainly monopolizes many of our thoughts, there are other things going on in our lives-- things that I should be writing about.
Rob and I finally had a chance to take a short vacation last weekend. I've felt like, for the past 6 weeks, we've just kind of been passing each other coming and going. My biggest event of the year for my job has taken lots of long hours, evenings and weekends to prepare for, and the wrap-up is still going strong. Rob has a full time job, plus grad school in another state to try to balance, on top of his family life-- he was out of town three out of four weekends in April. The first two were spent in Nashville at Vanderbilt and the last was in Massachusetts visiting friends and family.
When we were home, it seemed like a rare occasion where we both were free of responsibilities at the same time-- if I wasn't at the office, I was answering/sending e-mails or working on grant proposals. If Rob was in town, he was Skyping with classmates or working on long papers.
While it's life, and just how things are, it hasn't felt good. No nights spent on our front porch talking, no Saturday morning trips to The Peanut Depot, no listening to baby's heartbeat on the doppler at night before bed. Many meals eaten separately & many quick phone calls to check in, but never enough time to really talk.
We went to one of Rob's work events together on Friday evening, then came home to relax. We decided to head to Atlanta on Saturday and spend the night. With this being the first weekend at home in over a month for Rob, I didn't think he would want to go anywhere, but he was up for it.
Saturday morning, we jumped on Priceline and found an awesome deal on a hotel in Buckhead, then jumped on craigslist and found tickets to the Phoenix concert that night. We ended up having a blast. Here's a clip from the concert:
I have some anxiety issues that make going to concerts a little difficult for me-- I don't like big crowds and I hate being on the floor level of a concert where people are constantly pushing from behind to get closer to the stage. I stopped taking my anxiety meds when we started trying to get pregnant, so I no longer have those to help. Now, with a baby on board, I'm even more nervous about the safety of me and Liam when we're in situations like this-- I'd rather be safe than sorry. Rob and I talked about this before we bought the tickets and agreed that we'd get there early to try to find a seat.
The Tabernacle is really cool-- it's an old church converted into a concert space and even though the entire show was general admission, there are two balconies full of seats. We got there as the doors opened and were able to get a seat on the 4th row of the first balcony-- We even scored an aisle seat for me. Getting there early meant we would see the opening band which is always hit or miss. I'm happy to say that Two Door Cinema Club was really good!
After the concert, we went to Buckhead Pizza Company to grab our favorite post-concert snack, with our ears still buzzing. (Man, we're getting old.) As we ate, we wondered if Liam enjoyed his first concert-- I read last week that at 18-19 weeks babies will cover their ears when sounds are too loud. Hopefully he was kicking to the beat (not that I felt it), liking what he heard.
We slept in on Sunday morning then headed over to Atlantic Station. We walked around and looked at the shops, got some lunch then headed over to the Bodies exhibit. We've been talking about going to see it for over a year. It was supposed to move on to a different city back in Jan, but they extended it until the end of May. When we got there, we noticed that there was another exhibit in the same space called "Dialogue in the Dark" so we bought tickets for both.
Dialogue in the Dark is an experience designed to show sighted people what it's like to be blind. For almost an hour, you are lead by a guide through several environments in complete darkness, equipt with a cane and encouraged to use your remaining senses to determine where you are. As you travel through a park, a grocery store, a busy street, a beach with a dock and a cafe, the surface changes, the sounds change and you may find yourself running into a tree in the park or a car on the street. I thought it was so cool-- the guides are all blind or visually impaired and at the end, you sit in the cafe (in the dark, of course) and ask them questions about what challenges they face. I've been through some team building exercises where I've been blindfolded before, but nothing came close to this experience. I was really glad we did it.
The Bodies exhibit was, of course, awesome.
Really just fascinating... I've wanted to see it for so long & I'm glad we finally made time for it. My favorite part was looking at all of the fetuses at different weeks in development-- I post updates every week, but to see it for real was just amazing.
Before we left Atlanta we took a trip through IKEA-- can't go to ATL without going there, even when we don't need anything. But this time I was on a mission to find something for the nursery, which I'll post about later.
The trip was just what we needed-- a way to reconnect and do something fun together. Planning fun things to do naturally brought us together and made time for us to start talking again. I hope that we plan more of these short trips in the coming months as a way to recharge our relationship before the baby comes. We always think that we don't have time, but when we make time, it's well worth the effort-- it was just what we needed.
I think that I'm finally starting to experience the "glow" of the second trimester. I still stay pretty tired-- but that seems to be related to my job more than the pregnancy itself, and unfortunately, I don't think that's going to change until the day I deliver this baby!
(More to say about my job situation, but that's another post.)
This week, baby is the size of a Red Bull:
And looks like this:
Baking Baby Blakely
"Your baby has established sleep patterns akin to a newborn now. Many babies even have a favorite sleep position already. Some snooze with their chins resting on their chests, while others nap with their head flung back. Many babies at this age fall into noticeable cycles of sleep and activity, so you may know before she arrives whether you have a night owl or an early bird.
If your baby is a boy, the testes have begun descending from the pelvis into the scrotum. If it's a girl, her uterus is completely formed and the rest of her "parts" are in development. (Is that TMI?)
From this point forward, your baby will put most of her energy into gaining weight and, not coincidentally, so will you! Right now your baby weighs approximately 10½ ounces and is about 6½ inches long, about the size of a can of Red Bull (which has way too much caffeine for a pregnant woman to be drinking)."
Additional Updates:
Food Aversions: Not much! Although, after Rob and I saw the Bodies exhibit in Atlanta this weekend, I'm having a little trouble eating chicken this week. Blah.
Cravings: Still Chinese Food, aka anything with soy sauce. Also, still loving any kind of fresh fruit: fruit smoothies (peaches, strawberries, mango, papaya), watermelon & grapes. Oh, and ice cream...always ice cream.
Movement: Not yet-- I've felt a few flutters (I think) but every time I think I feel something, it doesn't happen again, so I'm never able to confirm! When we had our ultrasound two weeks ago, the doctor said that my placenta is in the front of my uterus, so it's acting like a cushion between the baby and my tummy-- this can make it more difficult to feel kicks. Doc said I'd probably start feeling something by 20 weeks, but as of today, nothing.
Nesting: We've registered and purchased a lot of stuff in the past few weeks. Will post soon about our purchases and the plan for the nursery! I'm finally feeling like there are things that we really need to get done!
Weight: Down 6 lbs pre-pregnancy weight again. Hallelujah. Last appointment, my doc said I seem to be fluctuating around the same weight-- up a pound at one appointment, down a pound at the next. I keep bracing myself for the weight gain because I know it's coming but I'm really happy with where I am right now. I am confident that any weight I gain in the second half of my pregnancy will be reasonable. Today, I signed up for a prenatal aquatics class at the hospital where I'll deliver. I love to swim and I really need the exercise. Plus, I'm hopeful that maybe there will be some cool pregnant ladies in my class. It would be great to make friends with someone due around my same time-- maybe we could work on getting in shape together in the fall.
Last night, I decided that it was time to change the blog background to something a little less...pink.
I went to work in Photoshop and created a custom background, but when I try to apply it, the formatting of the blog is a mess. So, it may take a few days to get it right.
If you visit in the next few days and things are a mess, please forgive me!
For those who haven't watched the video (or couldn't make it to the end, it was a little long!) we are happy to announce the name of the little man who will join us in Sept!
While Liam is a name we've always liked, we picked this full name because of it's significance to our families.
Willam was my grandfather's name (he went by Bill) & William is my brother's name (he goes by his middle name, Eric). I also have a cousin named William who goes by Will. Rob had a baby brother who passed away as a baby who was named William (he went by Billy) and Rob's best friend is a William as well (another Billy). While we were on board with William, we didn't want another Bill, Billy or Will. So, we decided on Liam.
We decided to go with Orell as Liam's middle name because it was Rob's mom's maiden name who passed away about 5 years ago and it's important to us to honor his mom with our first baby. Orell is Rob's middle name, too.
We've told our families about the name and they all love it-- My dad has been calling him Liam since before we were sure the baby was a boy!! We're excited to have the name picked out and can now start calling him Liam instead of "The Baby." I couldn't wait to share with everyone!
Ahhh, the breast pump-- a necessary evil. I plan on breastfeeding, but certainly want Rob to be able to give the baby a bottle at times & will need to let my parents or sitters feed him while they are watching him. After talking to several moms, I knew that I wanted the 
