Morning Sickness

If you have never had morning sickness, I am here to tell you that morning sickness is a REAL medical condition. It is NOT all in your head. Not to be mean, but it is seriously frustrating that there are people that think it is all in your head just because they have never had it before. Please believe me, you would understand if you ever had it.

There is a real medical condition sometimes referred to as morning sickness and it happens to 7 out of 10 pregnant women or to 80% of pregnant women, depending on what source you are reading. So yeah, I guess I just got lucky (yeah right).

When I was pregnant with Christina, I had morning sickness for five weeks. (The worst five weeks of my life by the way). It started roughly about the week after I found out I was pregnant. This time, I had two weeks of bliss. I foolishly thought that either I wasn’t going to get morning sickness this time around or that the worst had happened and I wasn’t really pregnant.

On Friday, November 27th when I woke up from a nap, (I hadn’t gotten any sleep the night before) I could barely move because I felt like my insides were eating me alive. I began to realize that I hadn’t escaped the dreaded morning sickness afterall. Morning sickness was back. And oh how those words do not even possibly convey 1% of the miserable hell it actually puts me through.

So yeah, morning sickness.

Morning sickness makes my stomach feel uneasy permanently or like I have butterflies, it makes me feel nauseas and on the verge of throwing up (or actually throwing up), it is like motion sickness. Every step I take it is a struggle to keep whatever is inside my stomach, still in my stomach. And yet even when my stomach is empty, somehow I still have stuff to throw up (yuck).

On top of always feeling like that, morning sickness makes me feel hungry and yet it also causes me to have no appetite WHATSOEVER. Yes, these two things can happen at the same time, surprisingly. Every THOUGHT of food makes me want to throw up. It takes Jedi Mind tricks to keep from upchucking just from saying the word “food”. And forget about smells. Every tiny little scent makes me want to, well you get it by now right? When I finally do manage to eat something, ANYTHING that I can manage to get down, even if it is just an apple, I immediately feel this horrible I’m about to burst full feeling. And that is on top of the nausea and the butterflies.

The throwing up part is not relief either. It isn't like when you are drunk and you throw up. In those cases, you immediately feel better. Not with morning sickness. When you throw up from morning sickness, you feel worse. It's just awful on top of awful.

So yeah, my body is trying to kill me. At least that is what it feels like. It is as if I am being tortured and put through these trials and tribulations to see if I am worthy of having another child. I must make it through to get to the end . . . a beautiful, wonderful newborn baby.

Unfortunately, the evil morning sickness does not allow me to possibly think of the light at the end of the tunnel. Morning sickness keeps me so miserable and all I wish is that there were some way to escape this torture. Please let the morning sickness go away, please oh please, I want my life back! Because yeah, morning sickness makes me so miserable that I can barely move. Everything I do feels awful. Laying on the couch only breathing doesn’t even make the pain go away.

The absolute only way to dilute morning sickness is to sleep. When I am asleep, I am the happiest person alive! Sadly, I have a job and a husband, oh yeah and let’s not forget my little 16 month old that demands all of my attention when she is awake. All I can say is thank goodness she is asleep by 7pm every night. But boy I wish I didn’t have to work during the day. And yes, going in 2 hours late every day still counts as work. At least I make it there (most days anyway). I did have to take a couple of weeks off during the height of the morning sickness though. Bye-bye PTO (paid time off).

I am now going on two months of morning sickness, so life has been very different lately. Every effort I can muster up goes to the basic necessities of taking care of my daughter. Everything else, well, it is just gonna have to wait until this sickness is gone. Please, oh please, let it go away soon. (Did I say that already?)

Luckily, the last couple of weeks have been slightly better for me during the day. My sickness has it's ups and downs during the day, an hour sick, a few minutes not so sick, and so on. Sadly, once 5pm comes around I feel so horribly sick and it just gets worse as the hours pass. I have tried soooo many different things to help with this, but nothing has worked. All I have left is the hope that it will end soon (do I sound like a broken record yet?).

Ok, sorry to bring you all down. The next post will be a happy one, I promise. I still have xmas pics and videos to share of Christina as well as the ultrasound picture of the new baby :-) By the way, I am officially in the 2nd trimester which is cause for celebration as miscarriage rates are much much lower now! Yay!

Guess What??

"I'm going to be a . . . .




More details to come :-)

My Sixteen Month Old

I realized that my post "My 15 month old" got cut off somewhere and I don't remember exactly what was missing. I do know that it originally included something about how the post was extremely late (considering that CC was more than 15 and a half months old when I posted it), and that some of the info. was out of date. So, hopefully this will clear things up a bit.

Oh, and one more thing missing from that post was about how sick Christina has been lately. She had that pesky ear infection which we got antibiotics for immediately, but unfortunately a week later we had to take her back to the doctor because she had a fever of 103.5. Turns out the antibiotics never worked and on top of the ear infection she also ended up with RSV and Pneumonia!

She officially has been diagnosed with Reactive Airways Disease (the kid version of Asthma) and we had to return to the 'ol inhaler again. My poor baby even had to go to the hospital and get tortured. Three attempts at an IV finally landed her with fluids, medicine, and steroids; she also had two chest xrays; had blood taken; and a bunch of other terribly annoying things for a baby to deal with. Thank goodness she is all better now though.

So yeah, like I was saying . . . . My sixteen month old:

- likes to color. She is getting very good at it too. She knows how to make lots of marks on the paper, which I hear is an important milestone. We are still working on keeping the crayons out of her mouth, but I hear that is a battle we will likely be fighting for a long time. It seems that whenever I tell her not to put something in her mouth, she gets very excited and immediately takes whatever she has in her hand and shoves it into her mouth. She thinks it is just the funniest game.

- is starting to prefer eating what I eat over anything else offered to her. She shares my bagel with me every morning and whenever I am eating pasta, she always wants some of that too. She is still crazy about fruit though, whether I eat it or not.

- is extremely affectionate lately. She loves to give hugs, especially to Amstel (one of our dogs). Every time she gives a hug to anyone or anything (even a stuffed animal), everyone in the room says "aaawww" because really it is just so darn cute. I'm sure all of the attention is why she continues to do it. I hope she never stops with that one. I love her warm and sweet hugs.

- is very strong. I don't think I've ever mentioned it here before, but she has always been very strong. I call her my little hulk baby. She likes to pick up heavy things and just carry them around. She does this with a small table we have in our living room, her plastic chairs, her lunch bag, her diaper bag, etc. At the grocery store she will sit in the front of the cart and pull things out of the inside of the cart. She can even lift a gallon of milk. When she was in the hospital and the nurses had to hold her down to take her blood and give her the IV, it took four of us to hold her down! I was on one side with my Dad and Nik, while the two nurses were on the other side (one of which was taking the blood or putting in the IV -not holding CC down). Even the nurse was surprised at her strength and commented on it.

- doesn't really let anyone read to her, but loves to flip through her books. She is very independent that way and in many other ways as well.

- prefers to feed herself. It is still a little messy, but she is getting really good at it. In fact she must understand the process extremely well considering she feeds her baby doll now.

- squeals with joy whenever she sees someone she loves, like when Daddy comes home from work or Grandma comes for a visit. It is the most adorable thing. She starts squealing and bouncing around all over the place. She just gets so happy and really knows how to show it.

- got three toy phones for Christmas and absolutely loves each of them.

- continues to go to sleep every night without any crying or fighting whatsoever. I am so lucky. All I have to do is tell her night-night and let her say good night to whomever is home (including the dogs), I hug and kiss her and tell her I love her, then I put her in her crib and cover her with a blanket. She goes right to sleep after that, every night. Plus, she sleeps for 12 hours at least. Her naps are not always as easy, but I will take what I can get.

- still only has six teeth (four on top, two on the bottom). I feel like she is going to be in kindergarten before she has a mouth full of teeth. But that is ok with me.

- has eyes that change colors each day. It is very weird and I'm curious to see if this will continue. One day her eyes are blue, the next they are hazel and still the next day they could be brown. Some days she has a ring of blue around the outside, but the inside is either hazel or brown. It is anybody's guess what color her eyes will be on a given day. Nik thinks it is her genes fighting with each other to see who will win, lol. I don't know, but it would be pretty interesting if her eyes continue to change day in and day out.

- is going to be moving to the pre-toddler room at daycare soon, since she is walking now. I think this is going to be a good move for her. She loves that room and loves the teachers. There is more space and instead of baby toys she has big kid toys she can play with. She usually spends part of her days there anyway, so for her it will be an easy transition. For me it will be a little harder because I LOVE a couple of the teachers in the infant room. I know I will get comfortable with the pre-toddler teachers too though, it will just take some time.

Well, I think that is all I have for now. Happy Sixteen Month Old Birthday Christina!! I can't believe how big you are getting! Muah!

Merry Christmas

I know I'm a little late with this one, but I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas. Things have been pretty hectic with my family, but overall Christmas went well. Christina got totally spoiled and now she has enough toys to fill up every inch of our condo. Just another reason we have to move!

Everyone was very generous this year and Christina is really loving all of her new gifts. She is also walking all over the place like crazy now. She basically doesn't even crawl anymore. It has been so awesome watching her over the last few days. Among many other gifts, she got a baby doll and a baby stroller. Christina loves to push the baby all over the house in the stroller. She also got two more baby dolls and tons of baby accessories. One accessory is a high chair. Christina loves to feed her baby in the high chair. It is just amazing to see how she knows exactly what to do. And her favorite word now is "baby". She just loves all of her baby doll's and all of the fun things she can do with them.

I have lots of pictures and videos (of course), but forgot my camera and video camera at my Mom's. I will post them when I can.

Until then, Happy Holiday's everyone!

My 15 month old

-Says "Auntie" when she points to a picture of Auntie Rachel and Auntie Cassie.

-Can point to her nose (most of the time) when asked "Where is your nose?" and can always point to Daddy's nose when asked "Where is Daddy's nose?"

-Wants to get down and walk around when I am walking the dogs. But since she still doesn't walk much on her own, this means I have to hold her hand which can get a little tricky since I am also holding the dog leashes and trying to keep them from knocking her down.

-Sometimes calls the dogs "Bad Dog" because she hears it from me all of the time.

-Says the word "gentle" and totally knows what it means. Yet that doesn't stop her from beating me and Nik up from time to time. She gets very excited and lets her hands go flying.

-Still loves daycare soooo much! When I pick her up, she is happy to see me. She gives me a smile and a squeal, then she continues with her playing. Most of the time she even runs away from me (i.e. crawls very fast) because she doesn't want to go home. I guess daycare, or "school" as we call it, is just way more fun than our boring old house.

-Loves to feed herself using a spoon or fork, but she still can't be trusted to hold the plate/bowl/jar. I usually help her manuver the spoon/fork into the food and she does the rest.

-Says "Mama" like a million times a day.

-Insists on pushing her food off of her tray and onto the floor whenever she doesn't want it. When she was at Grandma's recently and started to do that, Grandma said "No Christina, don't throw your food on the floor". Christina pointed to the food on the floor and said "Dog". (Knowing full well that the dogs always clean up after her lol). Grandma then reminded Christina that the dogs are not at her house and Christina stopped throwing food on the floor! :-) If only it were that easy to get her to listen to me sometimes.

-Found a midway point between crawling and walking. She now spends a lot of time walking across the room on her knees. She wants to keep her hands free, but she doesn't want to deal with her wobbly legs.

-Is finally starting to eat real food. Whenever she sees me eating pasta, she always wants some. She also stole a pop tart from me recently. I was very surprised.

-Absolutely loves fruit (blueberries, banana's, strawberries, honey due, cantalope, etc). It is definitely her favorite food group.

-Loves to say "baby" and points out babies whenever she has the chance.