Sixty eight days to go.

{a pregnant lady's best friends}

Greetings all! Hopefully everyone had a restful, enjoyable Memorial Day weekend. By way of a short update, everything is going well on this end and we are excited to be just a little over two months away (sixty eight days until the due date of August 7th, to be more exact) from welcoming our little girl. A few weeks ago, my obstetrician said I was measuring a little large (fundal height-wise) and so we had an ultrasound just to confirm the baby has continued to develop healthily. Everything looked great, and although she is measuring in the 70th percentile for size, my doctor said measuring large is not really a concern until the baby measures in the 95th or above percentile so she is still right on track and it looks likely that she will just be tall, like her dad. In other good news, I had the routine gestational diabetes screen and that came back negative. I also came up slightly anemic, but that's nothing an iron supplement can't fix so we are good to go there.

I have been feeling pretty good; a bit achy, a bit swollen, and a bit gassy (TMI? Deal with it), but my energy level is still high. Hopefully I can maintain that until I finish up at work on June 14th. Lots of people have told me with gloom and doom in their eyes how miserable it will be to be hugely pregnant and have a baby in the summer, but I'm optimistic. Watermelon is in season, and our apartment complex has a pool. I think it's going to be great!

Nerd alert, nerd alert.

This photo requires a little explanation (no, I can't explain why Spenser is making that face, but if someone else can, I'd love to hear it). As anyone who attended our wedding luncheon knows, Spenser's dad REALLY likes to make fun of us because we had honeymoon plans to visit the Seattle Public Library. This is, of course, a hopelessly nerdy thing to do - but hey, in our defense - Seattle isn't Cancun! It's not like we were going to lounge around in beach chairs drinking mocktails or something, and the library happens to be a freaky cool attraction in Seattle! Anyway, on my last visit there I spotted these souvenir t-shirts and couldn't resist picking a few up to wear for Spenser's parents when they came into town last weekend. I figure: If we can't live it down, we'd better live it up.

Psst - would anyone like to get together and/or contribute a little mulah to make some birth kits for Bloggers for Birth Kits in honor of Mother's' Day?

Emerald city-licious.

Greetings from Seattle! Spens and I buzzed up here for a quick trip so he could take an exam at the federal building for a position with the government and except for about 25 extremely panicked minutes earlier this morning (explanation forthcoming), it's been a lovely trip. I've been to Seattle many times and Spens and I hit most of the touristy spots just last fall on our honeymoon, so I'm not sure what I'll do during his test but for now I'm hanging out in the Seattle Public Library. It's pretty much the coolest/freakiest/trip-on-shroomiest public library you'll ever visit.

Spens and I stayed at the University Inn near the University of Washington because a) we found a good discount rate online, b) it offered free parking (hard to come by in Seattle) and c) it offered a free shuttle into downtown Seattle, meaning more free parking. Budget luxuries baby, that's how we roll.

As life often goes, circumstances conspired against us and Spenser ALMOST missed his test this morning. Yeah, yiiiiiiiiiiiikes. Spenser and I had both independently checked the address and the shuttle drop off locations to make sure we would make it to the vicinity with time to spare...but when the shuttle dropped us off we plugged the address of the test location into our phones and it said we were 15 miles away - 22 minutes by car! I started hyperventilating and yelling 'we need to get a cab!!' like a crazy person, while Spens suggested we walk to the location we had originally identified (before our phones deceived us) and check it out. We had about a half an hour to spare at this point, so in my mind, there was zero time to try both. It was either walk to that place or get a cab to the mysterious place our phones wanted us to be. We decided to walk.

We were scurrying down to 2nd Avenue and it was slow going so finally I just told Spenser to run ahead. He shot off and I continued to waddle down in his general direction until he called and told me he FOUND it - his initial instincts were totally on and he was there just in the nick of time. Scary! It would have been a huge bummer to miss the test just because of a logistical snafu like this when we had saved and put up the monies for gas/accommodations. I'm sort of conflicted as to whether or not I now hate or worship the Google navigation app on my phone. It wanted us to go in some totally different direction and could have totally wrecked the trip. But on the other hand, without the panic it instilled in us I don't think Spenser would have made it to the right building on time. The DeLongs are fasting for him today so that must be what pulled us through the confusion!

Have a lovely day, wherever you are.

Pregnancy, so far.

Hi all, a quick update: Things are going well on the DeLong front. We are just working away (and in Spenser's case, schooling away) and prepping for a fun summer! Today marks 26 weeks of pregnancy. That's just over halfway, for those unfamiliar with gestational timing lingo, but I sort of feel like I have been pregnant forever already. (Pregnant women everywhere who know what is ahead of me in the third trimester are laughing. I surely deserve it.)

The first six months, in a nutshell:

Month 1: Experience strange physical changes. Get suspicious when the monthly visitor fails to arrive, and pee on a stick. Try to convince your husband this is really happening. Throw an epic tantrum in the Bi-Mart space heater aisle when he says he'll believe it after you visit the doctor...in two months.

Month 2: Become a hormonal, raging vomit machine so horrific that even the creators of The Exorcist couldn't dream you up. Become convinced that the baby now has every imaginable birth defect because you can't get a prenatal vitamin down. Settle into comfortable denial by reassuring yourself that a large McDonald's fry has 200% of the daily recommended value of folic acid.

Month 3: Read lots of weekly pregnancy summaries on Babycenter, where the size of the fetus is repeatedly compared to various exotic fruits you've never seen before. Adjust to the idea of impending motherhood. Begin to notice dark bags under the eyes of child-toting women in public.

Month 4: Poke your still squishy abdomen daily and wonder when you'll transition from looking fifteen-or-so pounds heavier to decidedly pregnant. Watch The Business of Being Born and simultaneously feel both intensely empowered by your gestational superpowers and hugely guilty for planning on an epidural.

Month 5: The fun stuff: Learn the sex of the baby, see her recognizably human outline moving around on the ultrasound, feel her first movements and rolls inside of you, settle on a name. Buy your first baby outfit, display it somewhere visible in the apartment.

Month 6: Explode in size. Seriously, become humongous and unmistakeably pregnant practically overnight. Attempt (and fail) to understand how your uterus can now be the size of a soccer ball, but the baby still only weighs about a pound, and wonder - in fear - where the other 7 pounds will go.

Six months down, three to go! :)

An auspicious birth.

Last weekend at a stake closet swap event I attended on behalf of our ward's young women, I met Brother Fei - a mainland Chinese guy in our stake. Of course I had to inflict my ever regressing Mandarin conversation skills upon him in not-so-veiled hopes of securing an invite for hot pot. When he learned I was pregnant, his eyes got big and he exclaimed: "Year of the dragon! This is very lucky!"

Since leaving Taiwan, I've totally lost track of the Chinese zodiac but it would appear that, in fact, our little lady will arrive in the luckiest, most success-producing year (according to Chinese tradition) of the zodiac! Unlike many Chinese parents, Spens and I didn't plan it that way but given that our Chinese surname is Long 龍 - "dragon" - it does seem particularly auspicious. :)

22 weeks old.

A little lady.

{Click here to see more ultrasound pictures}

Spenser and I had so much fun going in last week to take a second (updated) look at our little lady! At eight weeks, she didn't look like much yet (she was affectionately known as "Alien Shrimp"), but now all of the anatomy is in place and from now on she just gets bigger and bigger! The doctor said everything looks typical and healthy...we are stoked!