Wednesday, December 24, 2008

We made it!

So just in case anyone was wondering, we did make it to Seattle! Praise God! The second leg of our flight from Atlanta to Seattle was an hour late, but we are here and I am so thankful! The flight was pretty miserable because I am sick with a bad cold and have lots of pressure in my sinuses and head, and both landings were really painful, the pressure in my head was incredible and my ears hurt so bad, I really thought something might explode inside of me. But on the descent in Seattle, where I experienced the most pressure and pain, I was able to be thankful for the thing that I was most concerned about-the snow. As we made our way closer to the ground and looked out the window, the scenery was just gorgeous, as everything was covered in snow. I was able to be somewhat distracted from the pain as I studied the winter wonderland below.

Monday, December 22, 2008

Off to Seattle

Mark and I are going to Seattle for Christmas again this year and I cannot wait, we leave tomorrow!!! I am so thankful for a husband who loves to take trips back home as much as possible, and am so thankful that he enjoys spending time with my family too! This will be our last trip there with it being just the two of us, which I am definitely feeling sentimental about. It is sad yet exciting at the same time...just another "last" in this stage of life we are in right now being married without kids. As much as we so strongly desired to have a baby, I am still definitely feeling sad about seeing this time in our life pass. The time before you have kids and it's just the two of you is definitely a special time and there were so many memories made and fun times had together; things we were able to do and have the freedom to do that we won't necessarily get to do anymore.
Yet although it is sad to see this stage of our life get closer to the end, there is much excitement and anticipation for our next stage of life. I am really looking forward to having a family and being able to do fun family things together with the three of us, and Lord-willing more down the road. I know our lives are about to change tremendously but I also know that once we get to meet and know our little boy we won't want to go back to where we didn't know him and have him. It is definitely bitter-sweet.
Now if only I can get to Seattle without getting sick on the plane :) Actually what I really hope is that we get to Seattle at all...it has been snowing there since last week, and they got a whole bunch of snow yesterday as it snowed basically all day, which is really unusual for it to snow this much in Seattle. Two different sets of my relatives have each had flights cancelled, one going out of Seattle today and one that was supposed to land in Seattle yesterday. Please pray with me that we'll be able to land in Seattle tomorrow, and please especially pray that I will have the right response if we don't. As previously mentioned I am soo excited for this trip to be able to spend time with my family again and for all the fun Christmas traditions that we are going to do, and I'm going to have a baby shower the Sunday after Christmas since this is the last time I'll be there before April which will be soo much fun...so obviously it would be extremely disappointing if our flight was to get cancelled.

Monday, December 15, 2008

Names

So usually one of the first things people ask you when you are pregnant (after the due date of course) is whether you know if it's a boy or a girl. Then after that they usually ask you whether you have a name picked out or not, and if you do are you going to tell people before the baby is born. Well just so everyone knows we are going to tell people the name when we know, and we do have a pretty good idea what it's going to be. When we went in for the u/s to find out what we were having, we both honestly didn't really care which one it was, we just wanted a healthy baby. And I, like most people, want to eventually have both, so with the first one it really didn't matter. However, the whole time I think we both knew that if it was a boy, the name thing would be a lot harder, so it would be nice to have a girl for that reason alone. We have always pretty much liked the same girl names and the top ones on our list we both agree upon, but the boy names were a different story. The only name Mark has ever really liked or talked about for a boy is Wyatt, ever since we got married and started talking about kids names just for fun he has liked that name, and I have not. The one boy name that I came up with since we found out we were pregnant is Cooper. I really like the name and it is a family name, it's my Grandma Gifford's maiden name. At first Mark said he liked Cooper, but as time went by I guess the likeness factor wore off a bit and he didn't like it as much. Of course we aren't going to name our kid a name that Mark doesn't like, and Mark doesn't want to name our kid a name that I don't like, so that basically left us with nothing. Until....
Mark and I went to Pennsylvania with his family for Thanksgiving to visit with his Dad's side of the family. We stayed at his Aunt Robyn's house, and she has a Steenback family tree on her computer that goes way, way back, and I was able to scroll through it and look at all the names while we were there. One name caught my eye, but I didn't say anything at the time. Other than that there weren't a lot of names that I thought "ooo I like that". Our u/s was scheduled for the day after we got back from Pennsylvania, and it wasn't until that day that I said something about that name. We were having "brunch" together and out of the blue I said, "What about the name Emmory?" Immediately Mark said, "I like it", which is pretty amazing because usually when we run boy names by eachother the other person doesn't like it, hence the problem we had been having. What's even stranger though is that Mark began to like that name more than Wyatt, all he has done is talk about that name since I brought it up. We contemplated spelling it Emery, Emory, and Emmory, but are pretty sure we would spell it Emmory because that is the way the family name is spelled, and Mark especially liked that because it got absolutely zero hits on babyname.com...he wants a unique name that not a lot of people have. So, right now we are thinking Emmory William...William is my dad's name, and both Mark and I have grandpa's named Willard. It's definitely not set in stone and when we go to Seattle for Christmas the 23rd I want to look at the Moor family tree just for fun, but I think Mark is pretty sure we are gonna name him Emmory...especially since that is what he calls him now! I told him if we keep calling him Emmory it's going to be really hard to name him anything else if we find something we like better, but he seems to be fine with that.

Friday, December 12, 2008

Catching up

So I've never been much of a blogger, I have never started one because I figure it will be something I'll do at first and then after a while will never update, just like any other share page I've ever had. However, there are two main reasons why I have decided to give it a try now, number one because I am past the halfway point of my pregnancy and haven't recorded a single thing about it; number two since we are having a baby soon and my entire family lives across the country from us, so I want to create a way for them to always be updated on what is going on and be able to see lots of pics and videos of their lil grandson/nephew/etc. So hopefully I will do a good job of keeping this updated, especially once the baby comes.
Well since I'm already 21 weeks pregnant I'll just try and recap some of the "highlights" of what has already happened. Mark and I found out that we were pregnant on August 15 (had to go look at the calendar for that date!) When we found out for me it was a complete mix of emotions, so happy and excited and amazed that it FINALLY happened again, but anxious and fearful about what would happen with this pregnancy, wondering if the same thing was going to happen again. For those who don't know our history, I was actually pregnant almost exactly a year before we found out we were pregnant this time, we found out very end of July 2007, but when we went in for the first ultrasound around 8 weeks they detected a problem, and the next week we found out for sure that it was indeed a miscarraige. It was such a sad and hard trial, but God is Good and His grace was sufficient and we experienced so much growth along the way. We continued to learn and grow for the entire year after that, as we just weren't able to get pregnant again right away like we so deeply desired. I could go into so much detail about this experience, how much we learned from it, and how blessed we were to have our awesome families and our sweet church body supporting and encouraging us through it, but because of space and time I won't. If anyone would like to know more please feel free to contact me about it though. I will just summarize by saying that it wasn't easy, but it was for our good to make us more like Christ, and He is faithful.
So, when we found out we were pregnant this time, we were just so incredibly thankful to God for choosing to bless us with this baby at this time, knowing that this pregnancy is also for our good to make us more like Christ. However as I said before it was a tremendous struggle to not be anxious and fearful about it, especially going in to the first ultrasound. Once again God's grace was sufficient though, enabling me so many times to be able to trust Him and be at peace knowing that this baby is completely in His hands, and if it is His will for this baby to grow and thrive and be born into this world then NOTHING can stop that, and if it isn't His will He will give me to grace to endure, as He did before. Not that I didn't fall short and give in to fear and anxiety and have to repent, because that happened as well, and it is still a temptation now, and I'm confident it will always be a temptation for me to be anxious about the well-being of my child as long as he is on this earth, but I have seen small areas of growth and I have seen that if I discipline myself to do my part and meditate on the Truth, He is absolutely faithful to do His part, it is not something that I have to struggle with. In fact Christ died so that I dont have to struggle with it but can have victory over this sin, along with EVERY other one.
So as far as highlights of the pregnancy go, the first part was definitely filled with that battle against anxiety, and we were definitely very careful and guarded with our emotions not to get ourselves overly excited about it, but to just work on the things that we need to be working on. We had the first u/s at 10 weeks, where we saw the baby and heard the heartbeat, and everything looked great. We were just so overwhelmed with joy and thankfulness to God for this. We had our second u/s last Monday, December 1st, where once again everything looked great and we found out we are having a BOY! Again, our hearts were filled with joy and thanksgiving, and I have thoroughly enjoyed being able to finally buy things b/c I know what to buy for.
As far as the physical part of it, the first trimester was filled with sickness. I was sick everyday, but I am so thankful for the perspective that I had, because had we not lost that first baby I believe I would have grumbled and complained every day and wished that I never got pregnant, because it just isn't easy being sick all the time. But because of what happened last year I was able to be thankful for the sickness, because it meant that there was a precious baby growing in there. Not that I never complained, I am ashamed to admit that there were times that I did, but for the most part I had a completely different perspective on the sickness than I normally would have. The everyday sickness slowed down and pretty much ended at 15 weeks, and that made such a huge difference in my days as far as how I felt and how much energy I had. Not that I haven't been sick at all since then, because one thing I have realized with pregnancy is you can never count on never being sick again, because those horomones are strong!
In the second trimester the main thing that has happened as far as symptoms go (that I am going to mention on here) is round ligament pain. I have realized in pregnancy that there are so many different symptoms and something can happen to you that you never knew was a part of pregnancy, but it turns out to be just another "normal" pregnancy thing. On more than once occasion I have had incredibly sharp, shooting pain usually on my lower right side, to the point where I can barely walk. It ends up going away after a while, sometimes right away sometimes longer.
I have also had heartburn like crazy this entire time. Acid reflux is something that I have had medication for pre-pregnancy, but it has definitely gotten so much more intense since I've been pregnant.
Another "milestone" I want to note is around 18 weeks I first started to really feel the baby move. I had felt a little something here and there before that, but never was sure if it was the baby or something else, but at 18 weeks what I felt was definitely the baby. That is probably one of the coolest things of pregnancy, and Mark has also been able to feel him move twice now, which he was so excited about!
Well this has been a long post, there was lots to catch up on that I wanted to record for myself, and anyone else who was interested. Hopefully I will make this a regular thing!