Congrats to Brad & Steph.

I just got home yesterday from Utah, where we all traveled to participate in my brother's wedding to the lovely Stephanie! The whole day was wonderful and the two of them seemed supremely happy. I lived (and was just about literally attached to the hip) with Stephanie for six ridiculously fun weeks at the end of my mission, and so one of my favorite parts of the trip was meeting her family in person and seeing where she comes from. Missionaries always describe and swap stories about their family members, but it is something different entirely to actually meet them! She has an amazing family and I am not surprised they produced such a quality person.

It was also great to spend time with my grandma and Paul in Salt Lake City. I spent a lot of weekends at their house when I was a student at BYU, but this is the first time in two years that I have had a chance to go visit them. I am excited for them to come up and visit us in August after our little lady arrives!

Aaaaand of course...it was way fun to see some other former mission companions, namely Hanalei and Amy! Hanalei and Austin always let me tag around with them but never make me feel like a third wheel, which I love. And I am currently hatching plans to visit Amy in LA because, well...she's just awesome.

Thanks to my family for massaging my swollen feet and putting up with my pregnant self in general. I missed Spenser a lot (he wasn't able to come due to work), but there are a lot of people in Utah who are very special to me so it was totally worth the trip. :)

Dad's nose.

At our 28-week ultrasound, the sonogram tech was able to snap some cool shots of the baby's face and I think she looks like her dad!

Am I crazy, or does there appear to be some similarity between those two noses? ;)

Does baby's nose look like dad's?

Happy birthday, sister.

Happy birthday (yesterday), Whit! :)

Childbirth class.

Last night, Spenser and I attended what is to be the first of four childbirth classes hosted by our pregnancy care provider, Women's Healthcare Associates. Quite honestly, I signed us up mostly for Spenser's benefit because I wasn't sure he really had much of a vision for how all of this birth thing is going to go down. I've been plowing my way through the ever beloved pregnancy tome What to Expect When You're Expecting, but I learned a bunch of new stuff at last night's class so I think it is already shaping up to be a great investment! Spenser said he was worried that it was going to be some lame thing where we all sit on yoga mats and practice breathing exercises, but that he was pleasantly surprised and enjoyed it, too.

Some things we learned:

• The hormone oxytocin, which regulates labor (and does lots of other interesting things in other circumstances), is a stress-dependent hormone. What that means is that when stress enters the equation and causes a release of adrenaline or other stress hormones, the levels of oxytocin actually decrease, reducing the pace and effectiveness of the labor process. That is why it is important to prepare and take steps to help the mother stay calm throughout the process and feel confident in the birth environment.

• In the past half-century or so, there has been a huge increase in posterior births (sunny-side-up babies - I was one!). This could be due to a number of factors...even potentially the fact that we drive cars, so our right legs are slightly stronger and our pelvises become tilted over time! Sunny-side-up isn't the greatest way for a baby to come out, because it makes it more difficult for the skull to pass through the pelvis and increases the chance that the doctor will need to intervene with forceps, vacuums, etc. Our instructor said that laboring for as long as possible in early labor on hands and knees will reduce the chance of a posterior birth, because the heaviest part of the baby is the spine, so when a mother is on her hands and knees it gives gravity a chance to pull the spine of the baby up and the baby naturally realigns into an easier anterior position (can you visualize that? It's a little hard to describe in words). All of this is potentially harder to achieve the longer a laboring mama spends flat on her back.

At one point in the class, we did this Jungian exercise where the instructor put up a whiteboard and had everyone write down the first word that came to their mind when she said 'childbirth.' The answers were really varied, some positive ('joy', 'aniticipation', 'miracle') some apprehensive ('pain' got three hits)...but one dude just wrote 'vagina'. Seriously? I would now like to publicly thank my husband for not being that one dude who wrote 'vagina'.

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.