Update- 27 weeks

Things keep plugging along. I am doing much better & have stopped contracting as much. I have been able to return to work this week & just tried to take it a little bit easy. So far so good. Thanks for all of your prayers & concerns in our behalf. We will just keep praying that this over-active anxious little girl will stay inside & cook for another 10 weeks (which will take me to term).

Pregnancy update-26 weeks

Okay, so no pictures for this entry & it will have to be a quick one. I am now 26 weeks into my pregnancy, which would make one think "WOW, only 14 more weeks to go!" Right? Well that's what I was thinking about 2 days ago too, until yesterday. My retarded body is trying to decide that it wants this pregnancy to be done with sooner than later! I had cramps & contractions in the morning that pretty much went away in the afternoon. I went to work & they started back up about 3 hours into my shift. I had Braxton Hicks contractions with my son, and with this one thus far, but these were different. There was actually a little pain & discomfort involved. My OB just happened to be at the hospital & so he checked my cervix, which is fortunately still closed, but thinning out & softening already. NOT GOOD! So we went ahead & did a full triage evaluation & put me on the monitors. Contractions every 2 MIN! YIKES! I got a LOVELY medication called Terbutaline- it makes you feel like CRAP- and a steroid shot to my buttocks! The Terb (as we labor nurses call it) stopped the contractions almost entirely (1 an hour) but it makes your heart race & pound and you get all jittery! I could barely fill out paperwork. The steroid shot is to help her lungs develop quicker just in case she does really & truly come early. I get to go back to the hospital tonight for another one of those lovely bad burning boys! (seriously, the shot burns pretty darn good! & I HATE SHOTS!!!!!!) Anywho, this morning was pretty scary when I woke up cramping again, but now it seems to be only one an hour again. I will keep you posted on what develops with this lovely unwanted scenario. As a labor nurse I have seen all realms of the spectrum from moms who really do deliver early to moms who go past their due date despite having been treated for preterm labor. So we will see. Keep us in your prayers!

Oh Ya, I forgot...It's a...

What a slacker I have been!!!! We had our ultrasound the first week of October. Everything looks good with the baby, all parts appear to be present & functioning! :) You can kind of see the profile in this one, I thought the hand in the "SHHHH" position was quite cute. The baby wouldn't hold very still so it was hard to get a good snap shot of its profile, but from what we could see, it has a very similar profile to my son.
Here is a good side profile of its leg & bum. The doctor couldn't get a very good "photo copier" shot of its bottom, so he had to look for boy/girl parts from the side view by scanning in & out laterally to see if there were boy parts between the legs or not. It was quite difficult.

From what the doctor determined (& from what I had gathered from an earlier peek with an ultrasound machine @ work) there are no boy parts & it's a GIRL!

You have to use your imagination a bit here, but this picture is looking at the babies bottom and thighs. It looks like the baby doesn't have the lower part of her legs because of the way we had to zoom in & out (she had her feet crossed & knees together the entire time.) The picture looks like a heart turned on its side, right? Well If you look VERY closely to the right side of the heart right where you would draw the "v" shape of the heart, you can see her girl parts. Some people describe girl parts in ultrasounds as looking like a hamburger. So we are expecting a little girl in February. Pretty cool, eh?

October

This year for Halloween we decided to take a note from my parents book. In the past my Mom & Dad have gone all out & decorated their garage for the Halloween Trick-or-Treaters. This year they were gone to Hawaii (poor them) for a week just prior to Halloween & were still playing catch up at work so they didn't have the time to decorate their garage. So my Husband decided that we should decorate ours. We had spooky music, fog machines, glow sticks, black lights & cobwebs. The picture doesn't really do it justice, but my hubby had fun setting it up. We also found a steal on the bracelet kind of glow sticks and so we handed those out along with candy. Our stash (3 Costco sized bags) only lasted about an hour & a half, as apposed to our AZ house where that same stash would have lasted, oh, at least 10 months. :)

Here is a picture of my son & hubby. I had to get a picture with the cute red suspenders!

I dressed up as an 8 ball. You don't really get the idea of my belly size here, but you can tell it is growing. (I guess it is nice to have a picture that makes your belly look smaller than you perceive it actually is instead of the other way around!) My son LOVED his Fire Fighter costume that his Grandma got him. Plus it was reflective-perfect for a 3 yr old!

Another picture of him with his Fire Fighter costume. He picked out his Trick-or-Treat bucket himself. (He says it "Truck-r-Treat").

So these pictures are backwards in order. Oops. A few weeks before Halloween we had some cousins from AZ come and stay at our house & we went to the Scarecrow Festival at Thanksgiving Point. My husband used his persuasive powers to get a ride on a helicopter. All 3 of us rode for the price of 1!

You can't tell in this picture, but my son really was having a BLAST! He still talks about the ride & the cool headphones he got to wear with the Microphone to talk to Mommy & Daddy!

Here are my boys on their way to get on the Helicopter. I wasn't planning on going, but one of the operators grabbed my hand and walked me up to the helicopter, for what I thought was a photo-op of my Hubby & son sitting in the cockpit. He then proceeded to all but shove me into the helicopter. This was my 2nd time in one & it was really fun.

Another picture of my little Fire Fighter.

We had really good success with my Father-in-laws garden. Perhaps our greatest success was the pumpkin patch. We ended up with 9 LARGE pumpkins! They are beautiful in their coloring. Each one a little different than the next. The largest one is the one behind my son to the right (in this picture) and up against the door. It is MASSIVE!

How can you resist a photo-op with such a cute kid and such huge beautiful pumpkins? I couldn't!