Catching up

Two years?  In two years I couldn't post anything?  Honestly I have thought about it many times, including when my friend Rachel said "You are pregnant? You should blog about this!"  I guess in my mind I thought "is my life really that interesting that people want to read about it?"  The simple answer is that it's not! However, sometimes I get the paranoid feeling that my friends on facebook are probably tired of hearing about my pregnancy all the time.  And on the flip side not all of my friends and family are on facebook, and they are unintentionally left out of the loop.

So here we are! Shortly after I last posted I married my best friend Tim, and we have jumped blissfully into married life.  To be honest I don't feel like it is really any different than when we were just living together, aside from the legal part.  We are still boring homebodies that love each other's company and love to make each other laugh.  Occasionally we peer out our front door and enter the social life, only to get tired and dreaming of bed by 10 pm.  Exciting huh?

We were fortunate enough to be able to buy a house last year, and we are slowly making it our home.  Of course our views of making it a "home" were very different!  I think once we moved all our stuff in, Tim felt like things were done.  It has our stuff in it, it's where we live, it's home!  I on the other hand, felt like the bare walls/bare windows/blue EVERYWHERE had to be remedied before I could call it "our" home.  So we frantically painted the week before move in, and that helped a lot.  Over the past year we have slowly been adding furniture, putting pictures on the walls, and hanging curtains.  I feel like we are almost there!  It's not that I feel like you have to have a house full of "stuff" for it to be a home, but the house just needed a dose of "Tim and Kristin".

How could I leave out Vader?

Vader, 7.5 weeks

Two months to the day of closing on our house, we decided it was way too quiet and bought a Doberman Pinscher puppy!  We trekked over to Eastern Iowa to a little place called Bear Creek and picked up our adorable little trouble maker.  He quickly claimed Tim by climbing up on his neck in the car and peeing on his shoulder!  Apparently this is how puppies like to claim their new parents!   The best part was, my lap was outfitted with a puppy pad and towel for just such an accident, but Vader was way too clever for that.  In any case, I am glad he grew out of that phase because look at him now:

Vader on his 1st birthday

He is really turning into a great dog, Tim trains him every day and he is incredibly smart!  Too smart sometimes, which is why he gets into trouble.  Our ultimate goal would be for Vader to be a certified therapy dog.  He loves people and would be a great breed ambassador, to show how great Dobermans can be.

So gee what next, oh yes I mentioned that I was pregnant?  Tim and I aren't getting any younger and we both knew that we wanted kids, so we figured we better get started before too many grays started to show!  I was lucky enough to get pregnant in September, which puts my due date at May 26th, 2011.  Even though we were trying to get pregnant, the little plus sign on the pregnancy test still took me by surprise!  I have longer cycles than normal, so when it came time to take the pregnancy test, it originally showed up negative.  I was pretty bummed, but there's always next month right?  Well two more weeks passed without my period, which didn't strike me as odd at the time.  I was taking a medication to force my period (since my cycles are too long) but it takes a couple of weeks to work.  Well as I was waiting for the medication to "kick in" I started to feel a little dizzy and sick. Nothing I couldn't handle, no vomiting or anything, I just felt like crap.  "Great I'm getting sick" I said, but one of my friends at work said "you sound pregnant to me".  I thought, surely there is no way I'm pregnant, but what the heck tomorrow morning I will take a pregnancy test.  Well the next morning I forgot, and they say that "morning pee" gives the best results so I waited until the following morning.  And what do I see? Thirty seconds into the 2 minute pee-on-a-stick test it comes up positive!  Well I have had false positives before so of course I didn't believe it.  So I ran to Walmart and bought not one but two different brands of pregnancy tests.  I came home and peed some more and bam! Almost as soon as the pee hit the stick they were positive too!  A very exciting morning to say the least.  And since then things have been great.  The worst morning sickness I got was a little nausea if I didn't eat anything.  Not a big deal for me, eating is my favorite thing!  It was a little hard at first to break the "forever dieting" mentality but I've embraced pregnancy with open arms.

Now that I am 8 months pregnant I am entering a whole new world of back pain, sciatic nerve pain, and leg cramps.  I try not to complain too much though, because really I have it pretty great.  I am considered a high-risk pregnancy, but everything has gone perfect so far thanks to the great care from my doctors.  My family has a blood clotting disorder called Factor V Leiden which makes your blood clot too much if you are not careful.  Easily managed in regular life, but make pregnancy risky if you don't know you have it.  Fortunately I knew about this before I got pregnant, so my doctors could take the proper precautions.  Some women are not as fortunate and find about their Factor V after many heartbreaking miscarriages.  So what precautions are involved?  Well for me I have a subcutaneous injection every day called lovenox that keeps my blood from forming unnecessary clots which could harm the baby.  I have been doing these injections since March of 2010, way before we started trying to get pregnant.  I also have frequent ultrasounds to make sure baby is growing the way he is supposed to.  (oh yeah did I mention, it's a BOY!)  So for those of you that are friends with me on facebook, that is why you get the monthly ultrasound pics.  Not only are they fun but they serve a purpose!  Here are a couple of my favorites so far:

28 weeks, what a sweetheart!

28 weeks, loves his thumb!

Well I guess that is as good a place as any to wrap up this post.  Sorry it's so long but hey if I wrote everything that's happened I would be writing a small novel!  More to come!