10 Weeks Pregnant

So we had an appointment with the midwife yesterday. I am 10 1/2 weeks pregnant. She tried to find the heartbeat with the Doppler but couldn't so she pulled out the ultrasound machine and we got to see the baby. The baby was moving all over the place swinging its arms and legs and spinning in circles. It was really cute. Selena was adorable. She was up on the bed with me and was very interested in the goop that the midwife was putting on my tummy.

Overall I'm not feeling too great. Starting around 8 weeks I've been nauseous all day and this last week I've thrown up almost every day right before dinner. Thankfully I feel better after dinner. With Selena I was a little nauseous, but not too bad, but it ended abruptly at 14 weeks so hopefully the same thing will happen this time, or maybe a little sooner. :)

I am showing a little bit. I think I look like I did at about 18 weeks with Selena at 10 weeks now. I am taking belly pictures again, but my face is all red and my hair is a mess so I'm kinda reluctant to post them. :)

A few days ago I had a very odd feeling. A persistent thumping or tapping coming from inside of my belly just above my belly button and off to the side. It really, really, really felt like a baby kicking. Of course my uterus is about 3 inches lower than my belly button and the baby is only an inch to an inch and a half big so it seems impossible. But Floyd and my mother could feel the tapping from the outside. After seeing the baby move on the ultrasound I think the baby was bouncing off the walls. :) Interestingly enough I found plenty of women on various message boards who have felt a similar thing around 10 weeks. Everyone explains it away as gas, but I have never had gas feel like a baby kicking. The only time I have ever had that feeling was when I was pregnant with Selena and she was kicking. So who knows, but it was very odd.

So I've already mentioned how much I love my midwife. Well a couple more reasons she is great. I don't have to wait at all for my appointments, and she recommended getting Floyd's blood tested to see if he was Rh-, whereas last time they said it didn't matter and they would just give me the shot no matter what. For an explanation of what I am talking about, if your blood is Rh-, like mine is, and the baby's blood is positive your body will produce antibodies that will attack future fetuses, which is not a good thing. So to prevent this they give you a shot of Rhogam in the butt part way through your pregnancy and then again after the baby is born. When I was pregnant with Selena I had to get the shot midway through pregnancy but she ended up having Rh- blood so I didn't have to get the second shot. Since she did have Rh- blood it was likely Floyd did as well, so we tested Floyd's blood and he is indeed Rh- so no shot for me!!! Selena was once again really cute, because I had had my blood taken, and Floyd got his taken, so Selena was pulling up her shirt sleeve all ready to get hers taken. So we gave her a cotton ball with some tape so she could feel like part of the club.

The other thing my midwife recommended was for me to start taking a fish oil supplement. She gave me an article about all the benefits of fish oil which included: higher energy, clearer mind, less incidence of post-partum depression, faster labors, less perineum damage, smarter babies, among many other positive outcomes. So I started taking it and immediately felt a difference in my energy level and in my ability to think straight. With Selena I had pregnancy brain really bad. I honestly felt like I was walking around in a fog, and work was very difficult for me because I couldn't figure out things that normally I would be able to. Anyways I had just started feeling myself descend into the abyss of stupidity and I swear the fish oil rescued me. I'm not sure if it is placebo or what but I am totally sold on it, and recommend it to all pregnant ladies. The specific brand my midwife recommended doesn't have any fishy taste and is actually flavored like strawberries, which is great because I think burping up a fishy taste would be the most awful thing for a pregnant lady.

So even though I feel really crappy, being pregnant is fun. It is really exciting to see my body change. I love preparing for birth. I am once again finding all the birth stories I can online and reading them. This time I am also finding lots of birth videos. I used hypnobabies with Selena and I really loved it, and highly recommend it, and am looking forward to using it again. I think the whole thing will be much easier this time because I have a better idea what to expect.

Abadaba! What does it mean?

Abadaba mama, abadaba dada, abadaba woof. But what does abadaba mean? Well we haven't figured it out yet, but Selena loves to say it.

We are all doing well here. Selena is as busy as ever. She has learned to love playdoh. She likes making Floyd or I make lots of small pieces so she can clump them all back together. And she also insists that we keep her table in the kitchen (which is kind of in the way). We got her a membership for the YMCA and she has taken a toddler gym class, which is a lot of fun. She likes the trampoline and the toys. This week she'll start a swim class with her dad in the evenings.

I made her a monster costume for Halloween. It is blue and purple since those are the only two colors she knows. We decided on monster because ever since she was 6 months old she has been making monster noises. You ask her to say "mama like a monster" and she'll growl "mama". She'll say "dada", "woof", and "apple" like a monster as well.

She was 20lbs 8oz at her last doctor appointment and 31 inches tall. We are continuing to keep her rear facing in the carseat even though legally she could be turned around. After watching the following videos forward facing crash trest and rear facing crash test I figured we might as well keep her rear facing since she doesn't seem to have a problem with it and it looks much safer.

Big News!

So for those of you who are good stalkers you may have seen the following picture already when I post pics of Selena:
If you haven't seen it before, then now you do. I'm due May 14th. So I'm 8 weeks along.

The great thing about this pregnancy is I'm not scared at all. When I got pregnant with Selena I was so nervous about labor. I was nervous about taking care of a baby, but this time I'm like I've been there done that and I'm not worried at all. Well maybe I'm a little nervous about having two little ones running around, and the fatigue and nausea are a little hard to deal with right now. :)

I have had one appointment with my midwife and she is absolutely wonderful. I decided to go with a private practicing midwife this time, and the personal attention I receive is so vastly different than I received with the family doctor or the midwives I saw before. All the appointments are an hour long. I can bring Selena to them and she has toys for her to play with. She gave me tons of reading material and I even learned some new stuff despite the amount of reading I have already done. She does two home visits after the baby is born in addition to two post partum office visits. She does deliveries either at your home or at the birth center in Tacoma (The Birthing Inn). I plan on going to the Birthing Inn again. She accepts our insurance. So basically she is really great and I am super excited.

I think Selena is excited too. She has started saying baby.

Toddlers are strange creatures

Selena is now 18 months, which seems like a big milestone and I'm not sure why but I always get a little nervous at the milestone ages. But she is a really funny kid. She pretty much walks around making funny noises, and funny faces.

Things she likes:

• Playing "set go". "Set go" is great for anything, running, tickles, being tossed in the air, going down the slide, eating


• Going down the slide - We got her a new slide for the back yard and she loves to go down it and make Floyd and I go down it. She calls it "wheee"


• She loves to draw. She is really good too. She holds a pencil correctly and can make precise scribbles and draw circles.


• She likes reading the same books over and over


• Shoes, hats, bracelets, necklaces, trucks, airplanes, cars, balls,

Funny things she does:

• She has become particular about some things. For instance she will start crying if I let Floyd borrow my watch


• When she is watching football she will say "set go" when they are hiking the ball and then "go go go" while they are running and then pout/cry when they get tackled

Her vocabulary is increasing quickly and its funny when she "talks" about stuff. For instance today Floyd took her to the playground at the school and when she got home she kept saying "dada whee, dada whee" which means dada took me on the slide. :)

We have been experimenting with the potty. I think she understands that she is supposed to go poo poo, but doesn't quite get the pee pee.




I have night weaned her, basically because my milk supply has been lower and so she was waking up and instead of immediately falling back to sleep after nursing, she would stay up and suck on nothing, cry when I put her down, until an hour later when more milk came in, and then she would go back to sleep. We had some tears for one night, but that was it. She now sleeps for a longer stretch (7 or 8 hours), but after that long stretch she seems to wake up every hour or two until the morning. Whatever.

Summer Fun

Selena, Floyd and I are all doing great. The summer is getting near to the end so Floyd will be going back to work, which is a bummer. We've been keeping busy. We babysat my cousins for a couple days and went to the zoo with them. Then our friends Breea and Kent stayed with us for a bit with their newborn baby Della. It was a lot of fun to have an itty bitty baby around. Selena was very gentle and interested in Della.

Selena is doing great. She is learning lots of new words (today she said horse for the first time) even though lots of her words sound the same. uuck is the how she says truck, milk, book, sock, and probably some more, basically anything that ends in "k". She likes to organize everyone. She brings both Floyd and I are shoes, directs us outside, tells us to get the soccer ball, and to play with Dyna. Or she gets Dyna's leash and halter and directs me to go running. Which is really a good thing because I've been slacking in that department. If there is a saying, funny face, or action she likes she makes everyone in the room do it.

I pretend that she can read. I always draw apples and write the word apple on the magna doodle so I will write the word apple and ask her what it says and she says "apple". It is so cute and so brilliant. But she'll also say other words say apple so... oh well.

She loves going outside and will stand at the door saying "out, out" if you don't obey quickly she will go and get your shoes and put them in your lap. She can put on and take off her own shoes. She loves accessories--shoes especially, but hats, bracelets, watches, socks, necklaces are all lots of fun as well. The sprinkler is also a lot of fun. She usually helps her Dad water the lawn so she is frequently getting soaking wet. We have a cherry tree and a plum tree in her back yard and she loves to pick the fruit and instruct her dad to pick fruit for her, but she's not the best at getting the seed/pit out of the fruit. She's pretty much amazing and we love her to pieces.

Vacation to Maui

Floyd, Selena, my mother, father, brother, sister and I, all went to Maui for 10 days and it was a lot of fun. We stayed in a cottage in Kaanapali. It was a pretty nice cottage but it didn't have air conditioning so we were sweating a lot. We were a short walk from the beach which had pretty good snorkeling. We rented snorkels for the week so we were able to go often.



We pretty much did all the must see things -- snorkeling, luau, road to Hana, snorkeling at Molokini, sunrise at Haleakala, hiking, shopping, trip to the aquarium, hanging out on the beach, and reading. Floyd and my dad also went golfing and we all played putt putt.



Selena did pretty good desipite getting some teeth while we were there. The soft structured backpack carrier I made was really convenient--we didn't miss the stroller. She slept on a pallet of blankets on the floor for naps and with us at night so we got by without a pack-n-play. We went on a big boat out to Molokini, but poor Selena got sea sick and threw up multiple times. I felt really bad for her, but as soon as we stopped and dropped anchor she was happy. Selena loved the luau and was running around dancing. She also liked the aquarium, the pool, and splashing in the ocean. She didn't really like the sand. I think it was too hot when she first encountered it and then she didn't like how it stuck to her hands or got in her shoes. She really loved the outside showers and I think she could have played in them all day.



My favorite adventure was a hike out to the Nakalele blow hole. The landscape was surreal and the blow hole was really cool. Floyd's favorite was golfing. My brother Chris's favorite part was our adventure hike out on a lava flow to a little cove called the "aquarium" where there was really nice snorkeling. Cynthia's (my sister) favorite was our trip to Hana. The views on the road to Hana were amazing. My mom and dad didn't do the road to Hana since they had done it beore so they stayed home and played with Selena. One funny part on our trip to Hana was when we had stopped to go down a trail to find a waterfall there was a man out in the middle of the rainforest with a table set up selling glass bead jewelry, he asked us if we like his office. Cynthia and Chris did a surfing lesson one day, but the waves weren't really that great for surfing in while we were there. Our snorkeling trip to Molokini was also cool (except for the Selena being sick part) and in addition to all of the fish most of us got to see a turtle or two while snorkeling. Cynthia didn't see a turtle but she did see a shark, but she said it was heading away from us fast.

It was a really fun trip, but it is good to be home. I missed the lack of humidity and the yummy Northwest water.

All of us on the beach


Selena loving the outside shower


Grandma and Selena having fun at the luau


Me, Floyd, Chris and Cynthia in a bamboo forest

Me and Floyd enjoying the view on the way to Hana

Me and Selena hanging out on a lava flow

She's becoming verbose

Well not really, but she is learning a new word every few days. Her first words besides Dada, Dyna, and Mama was "hot", and then "tickle tickle". She pretty much had those around her 15th month birthday. Now she also can say "up", "hat", "woof" and I think she said "out" this evening. She loves to go outside. She also will sign when she needs a diaper change, and once she even said it before she went so those are the first steps to potty training.

She also is obsessed with shoes. Every time she meets someone she points at her shoes, then at theirs, then at mine. Whenever she finds her shoes around the house she needs to put them on. Whenever she finds adult shoes she puts them on and trys to walk around. Then she gets frustrated because it is hard to put on big shoes, and it is hard to walk in big shoes and crys. So then we have to hide them. She really is quite silly about them.

We took her to the diaper dash the other week. She was all ready to go, but then they took a while to start the "race" so she forgot what she was doing and watched all the other kids run. After most of them were done, then she ran to me. It was pretty cute. The picture of her is of her showing us after the race what she meant to do when they said go. :) Dyna (the dog) also ran in the Furry 5k recently. She got second overall for the dogs (Floyd got 3rd).

Well there are probably more cutie pie things she has done that I want to record for posterity, but it is late and I can't remember them right now. We are going to Hawaii in a few weeks. Hopefully she does well on the plane.

Oh and I'm never going to write about sleep again because she read it and decided to push her bedtime back. I think I jinxed myself.

It is time to play

Selena has been a lot of fun the past month. She is starting to have an imagination and a sense of humor and it is fun to see all the new things she can do. It's funny because most of the things really aren't that impressive to most people, but to me it is so fascinating to watch her doing things that she couldn't a month or two ago.

Some of these amazing feats include: playing cook in the kitchen by taking a spoon and mixing stuff up, wanting to help us sweep, vacuum and pick weeds. Reaching up for me to hold her hand when she is walking over a challenging surface or changing surface. Turning around and waving bye bye to me when I ask her where she is going. Reading a book in the car. Giving me zerberts. Refusing to give me or dad kisses, but always giving Dyna kisses. Playing ring-around-the-rosie. Dancing to the songs on American Idol - Seyesha is her favorite. Pointing and getting excited at animals and pictures of animals wherever we go.


She still isn't talking much. She pretty much uses 'da' for every thing. Dada - dada, Dyda - Dyna, Da - dog. She says Da da Dy da all the time. She has added bye bye and diaper change to her signing vocabulary but only uses the latter if I say it first.

She has also finally settled on a consistent bed and nap time. That doesn't mean she still doesn't wake up every 2 to 4 hours during the night but I don't have to guess when to start getting her ready for bed or a nap. All the sleep experts recommend getting your child to sleep at consistent times but this was really hard for me because I didn't know if I was supposed to wake her up in the morning if she slept "too late", and what was I supposed to do if she woke up too early? At night if I tried to force her (ie. rock or nurse her till she was comatose) to sleep when she didn't want to she would wake up every half-hour for the rest of the night--and that was just exhausting for me. And I really did not feel comfortable with letting herself cry herself to sleep.

So we usually would have a schedule for about 4 days and then something would mess it up, be it activities, her needing to fill her diaper, Dyna barking at invisible things, etc. So being a pretty go-with-the-flow parent I just decided that four day schedules are fine and we can create a new one whenever we needed to. But now (for the last two months) she has settled into a schedule all on her own and even if she does end up napping at a different time she still goes to bed around the same time. I also don't have to rock her or hold her while she falls asleep and she did that all on her own as well. I am hoping that since she has progressed in this respect, sleeping longer stretches will also happen soon.


I also figured a while back that rather than read books about how to get my baby to sleep I preferred reading about other babies that didn't sleep. I found this blog -- http://sleepisfortheweak.wordpress.com/ . I especially like their list of excuses for why your baby doesn't sleep and Sleep training - a baby's view.

What's for dinner?

So Floyd and I traditionally go back and forth with each other. "What do you want for dinner?", "What do YOU want for dinner?" et cetera, et cetera until we cave in and make frozen pizza or noodle-roni or something else that is quick, tastes okay, but is not exciting, and doesn't include many vegetables. This happened almost every day and maybe once a week I might get ambitious and plan something that actually involved cooking.

Well now that I am home during the day, and have a young toddler to feed, I felt like I should be making more nutritiously diverse meals. So I thought to myself, "Wouldn't it be cool if there was a website that just told you what to make every day and gave you a grocery list?" Then I figured there probably was, so off I went and started googling menu planning services. There are plenty. So being a frugally minded person, my idea was to try each websites sample menu, and since there were about 8-10 sites that would last me two months, and rotating menus every two months would work pretty well, and it wouldn't cost me anything.

Well after perusing the menus (on a side note look up the word peruse, I was very shocked at it's definition) some of the menus really didn't sound too good. So I did another search for whole food meal planning and found dinnerselect.com. Their sample menu looked really good and their philosophy behind diet seemed similar to mine--eat a wide variety of fresh foods. They aren't providing a weight loss service so they don't provide calorie counts or fat content and they don't sacrifice taste by trying to make a meal "light" (one of my pet peeves), they provide recipes made with fresh ingredients that taste good. So I decided to try their site first. It was very tasty. Their current sample menu is a little different now then it was when we tried it, but my favorites, the chicken strips, steak sandwhich, and the tomato salad are still there. The chicken strips have a side dish of zucchini and potatoes that is really yummy. I am not a fan of salads but the tomato salad was really good and I got to make my own croutons. So overall I was pretty happy, but I figured I should give another site a try.

So I tried relishrelish.com. Their sample menu seemed pretty good when you looked at it, unfortunately it seemed like noone actually tried the recipes out before providing them. A couple had really weird contrasting flavors that didn't seem to go together, and a meatball recipe's proportions were all wrong--it was supposed to be a recipe for four, but it said to put an entire bag of meatballs in and the meatball package served 14. So after that disappointment I decided to sign up for dinnerselect.com's service after all. It is only $15 for 3 months so it is a pretty good deal.

We have been using it for about 2 months and have been overall happy with it. Like I said before I am not a salad person, but their salad recipe's are really good. I am also not a very good cook, but I have only had screw ups with a few of the recipe's so overall most of the recipe's are pretty easy to make. Not every recipe has been a roaring success, but each week there is usually one that is really good, that you really would like to have again. I usually only use about 5 of the 7 recipe's a week and then do leftovers, go out, or do something easy the other days.

The one big thing that is annoying and I find inconvenient is when you print out the recipe's and the grocery list your recipe and grocery list often get split between pages , so that you are constantly flipping between two pages. However I know that technically this is easier said then done. As a web developer you have virtually no control over how html is printed so you are pretty much stuck with what you get-- however it seems like their should be a library out there somewhere that allows you to dynamically create pdf files... But I haven't seen it and that is totally off topic.

But I really recommend this service to anyone who has a hard time deciding what to make for dinner. I really think the chef in this family owned business is talented and I feel really good about recommending their site.

Life as a toddler

Selena is now 13 months and is an expert (well sort of) at walking and thinks life as a toddler is pretty cool. Now when we go shopping it is no longer fun to just sit in the shopping cart and smile at people, she needs to walk around, explore, and play peekaboo behind the fabric shelves at Joanns.

She now enjoys reading Jane Yolen's How Do Dinosaur's... Say Good Night, Eat Their Food, Go to School etc. Other books she gets about half way through and decides that they are over, but the Dinosaur books are pretty interesting.

So the "in" thing is to teach your baby sign language so that they can communicate before they can talk. But I haven't been too consistent about trying to teach her, but despite my inconsistencies Selena can sign, "all done", "eat", and "ice cream". She learned the ice cream sign the first time I showed it to her. She is her mother's daughter.


She also has started to torment poor Dyna by pulling her tail and stealing her dog food pebbles. I'm not sure why she thinks Dyna's food is so yummy, or why she would prefer it over garbanzo beans, but she does.

She also got her first fever. It was very sad, but luckily it only lasted a day. She also had a few molars pop through and that made her very upset for 2 days. Previous teeth might have caused her to be a little cranky, but it might also have been coincidence, but these teeth definitely affected her and it was no fun for anyone.