Week 19 Update

New Years Eve 2010--19 weeks and the belly is in full force--and i'm drinking apple cider

I can't believe that I'm halfway there. This has taken effen forever this time around. Seriously.

The biggest, most exciting news right now is that Noah has a birthday. It's an odd, surreal, almost wrong feeling thing to choose your child's birthday. It was also awesome. So friends and family, he'll arrive on May 27th!! Very exciting. It was a very practical approach we took to choosing the date. Connor's school ends their spring semester on May 27th and summer camp starts up the next monday. we pay for summer seperately and were kinda stressing about having to pay for that at $750/month when i was off for 8 weeks with zero pay :( boo. it works out so great that he'll just be off with me and we won't have to put out that money for a couple months. So, right now we're waiting to hear from the hospital with the exact time of my delivery. We're hoping for a morning appointment so we can just drop connor off at school on the way to the hospital. "Bye Connor, have a great day...we're off to have a baby. Don't forget to tell the teacher when you have to poop." Strange.

In other news, my belly has officially popped. I went from looking like I had a big meal to having an obvious baby belly in about a week. it really is true that you show sooner on the second baby I guess. This time I powered through the nausea and puking and forced myself to eat so I'm sure that helped too!

Everything with Noah and pregnancy is great at this point. Knowing it's a boy and having decided on a name really helps me to deal with the nausea and everything. My weekly update I got on Tuesday said that baby is about 6 inches long from head to butt, so probably around 8 inches total at this point. He's the size of an heirloom tomoto...where do people find these mutant large tomatoes?? I like tomatoes. The update also said that at this point, it's believed that the baby can hear what's going on around him so reading, music, talking, etc are all fun ideas. Still really tired, starting to waddle and have to stand up slowly or I get all dizzy so that's all normal at this point. I'm really feeling him more this week which is still so amazing the second time around.

Jeffrey told me yesterday that he thinks it would be fun to take a picture of Noah every day of his first year. I know we unintentionally came close to doing that with Connor so it shouldn't be too difficult, but I think we'll go for it. I want to try and get out of the second child rut and do things that are new and special for Noah. We are obsessed with Connor, so we took millions of photos of him--as demonstrated by this blog obviously. I also saw many of my friends take a cute pic of their kids on their 'monthly birthday' holding a little sign that says 8 months, 9 months, etc. I think that's cute and I def want to do that.

For second time, or third time parents out there...Did you do anything special with your second child to avoid the whole issue of doing everything in the world for your first and then barely getting pics of your second?? :) If so, comment and tell me. I'd love to hear the ideas.