I'm bringing blogging back...

I give myself an F for blogging. Truth is, I just haven't had it in me for the last several months. There's been a lot going on and sitting down to blog about it just never quite topped the list. Dustin was gone, has come back and is now preparing to go out again in a month. We are also in full swing with the house renovations. That's a whole post on it's own, but literally our entire upstairs is flattened and I am cooking out of my "closet kitchen" just outside our bedroom door (not to self: do NOT cook fish down here again. Very bad idea). I am also preparing for the arrival of our newest little family member! And by preparing, I mean nesting like crazy and getting HUGE!!!! I am the same size at 6 months as I was at 7 months with Lawson. Here's a comparison picture. And may I just point out the difference in maternity jeans. No panel is the way to go! They don't look maternity and they don't fall down every time you bend down to pick something up, which is often with a toddler to clean up after.


I was quite sure I was having a girl when at 14 weeks, I was still gagging constantly and the exhaustion was getting worse instead of better like it had at that point with Lawson. Early on I had a dream it was a boy and was convinced for a week or so it would be a boy, but a dream of twins quickly took away all credibility of my dreams and I was back on the girl bandwagon. Sure enough, at my 17 week scan, after nearly an hour of crossed leg shots, several trips to the bathroom to empty my bladder and jump around a little (in hopes that she'd change position), she finally gave us a peek! I have never in my life had an urge to shop like I did when I saw we were having a little girl! It surprised me a lot! It's all I could do to stay on the table and finish up the ultrasound. I wanted to run to the nearest baby store and stock up on tiny, adorable girl items. Not quite the reaction I'd have anticipated!

Of course, Dustin and I are so happy to be having one of each. I had a fear I'd end up with all boys, which would be fine, I'm sure, if that's what happened, but I just feel so lucky to experience a little boy and a little girl. It took us a few weeks to name her, but one Monday night, as I was watching The Bachelor... yes, I know how ridiculous this sounds already... one of the girls' names kept popping up and I thought to myself, "that's kind of a nice name." Well, Dustin happened to walk by, so I threw the name out to him and the look on his face sealed the deal. He ran upstairs to make sure it didn't have a lame meaning and ran back down declaring that I had found the name! We wrote it on a piece of paper to make sure we liked the way it looked and it was a done deal! It took me a few days to get used to it since it wasn't like the other names I'd been considering, but now I can't imagine her as anything else. She is Naomi May! And, no, I wasn't a big fan of Naomi on the Bachelor. Just the name!

As for the nitty gritty of the pregnancy, there have been a few bumps in the road thus far. At around 12 weeks, the doctor ran a thrombosis evaluation on me. He said it would be incredibly rare to come back with anything, but if it did, we may have some answers for why things went so terribly wrong at the end when I was pregnant with Lawson. Well, I got a call on Friday saying that I needed to come in first thing Monday morning. That was a LONG weekend. I did tons of research about thrombophilia those couple of days so I'd know what the doctor was talking about when we went in. I also realized google can be a bad thing. I scared myself so bad reading over all the possibilities of what we could be told that Monday. Finally, Monday rolled around and we got the news that I have a heterozygous gene mutation called a Prothrombin Gene Defect (or Factor II). Basically, it means that I am prone to blood clots. The elevated progesterone during pregnancy makes this risk much higher than normal so to combat this I "get" to give myself two injections a day of Lovenox, an anticoagulant. Not fun, but honestly, not so bad now that I've gotten used to it. Unfortunately, more blood work came back by the time I had my next appointment and they discovered I had yet another gene mutation called MTHFR. This also is a clotting disorder and makes it so my body doesn't really utilize vitamin B or Folic Acid. This doesn't sound like such a bad deal, but it's the worse of the two. Combined, the doctor said I had NO chance of making it through a pregnancy without serious complications like I'd had with Lawson. Luckily, taking massive quantities of both those vitamins daily, along with the Lovenox, should help things along. I'll be doing ultrasounds once a week to make sure that I'm not experiencing placental abruption, where the placenta separates from the uterus, or IUGR, where the baby isn't growing properly, as both of these are common side effects of the gene mutations during pregnacy. The will also be monitering my blood pressure twice a week the last three months and checking for protein in my urine so we'll now if anything is starting to go wrong. We're planning on a scheduled C-section, which I'm okay with. Delivery can be dangerous either way being on anticoagulants and the risk drops when you can plan around the last shot you've given yourself. You don't want your blood to be all thinned out when going in for surgery or delivering vaginally. Bad things could happen. Of course, the best laid plans or still only plans. We'll see how it actually happens, but hopefully Naomi will hang on in there until around June 15 and give her dad plenty of time to get back. He'll be gone the months of April and May and is set to get back just a week or two before she is supposed to arrive. Sounds familiar... we just hope he makes it to this birth!

SO, that's the short of it. I'll post more later about the house and in the meantime, leave you with a few of the latest ultrasound pictures that leave no question in my mind that I am growing another daddy-look-alike!