12 weeks, 6 days

Well, it's official: I am over 3 months pregnant! Tomorrow marks 13 weeks, which means only one more week until I move into the 2nd trimester. I thought time was going by so slowly, but now that I'm starting to grow out of my jeans I'm realizing how quickly the weeks are flying by. Since I haven't posted anything about the pregnancy yet, I'll give a little background story..

Going WAY back, Matt and I started dating fresh out of high school. 2 and half years later he proposed on February 14, 2007. We were married on September 1, 2007. We moved from our little duplex in Visalia during Christmas of 2007 to an apartment in Los Osos. After about 3 months there, a couple from the church told us they were moving out of their tiny beach house in Grover Beach and had to find someone to move in. We gladly accepted! We spent exactly one year there when Matt's cousin Philip and his wife Renee asked if we'd be willing to swap houses. They were looking for a home with a large backyard closer to work and school. Again, we gladly accepted and moved into a nearly new 2 bedroom, 1 bath house in the country of Arroyo Grande. Not too long after Phil and Renee announced their pregnancy, we were announcing ours! And, as these things seem to go, Matt's other cousin Jacob and his wife Shauna announced theirs! So next summer the Shepard & Sarr families will have 3 fat ladies waddling around together.

I had been charting my basal body temperature (in the morning after I first woke up, before even getting out of bed) to determine early if I was actually pregnant. For those who don't know, after you ovulate your temperature should rise slightly. It stays that way for a few days, then drops back down to it's normal temp until after you ovulate again. If you get pregnant, the temperature will stay high throughout the pregnancy. The books I read said if your temperature is high for 18 days in a row, you are without a doubt pregnant. Of course, after 9 days of high temperatures I took a home pregnancy test! It was early in the morning before work, and it looked negative. I was a little bummed, but didn't quite buy it. I took a second test that night and thought it was negative again, but took at picture of the test strip anyway. There was an extremely faint line!



I didn't take any more tests and worried the entire time until my first appointment that I was just making it all up. It wasn't until we saw the little flashing heartbeat on the ultrasound that I really believed it to be true. The doctor measured me to be 7 weeks, 6 days.



Fast forward to our second appointment: thank goodness Renee is going through everything about a month and a half ahead of me! She warned me that the second appointment would be all kinds of health history questions, information overload, and nakedness. Yes, nakedness! Fortunately the midwife chit-chatted through the entire exam and kept me distracted from everything she was poking at. And at the end of it all, she let us sit and listen to the little junebug's heartbeat for the first time. That was incredible. She warned me that since I wasn't very far along, we might not get to hear anything, but as soon as she touched it to my belly it was booming through the speaker! Once again, it was reassuring to know I wasn't making this whole pregnancy up in my head. Call me crazy, but I just wasn't sure.

I have to admit, I've been bragging for weeks about not throwing up at all. It was so nice to hear about the horror stories but not have to experience them. Then at 12 weeks and 3 days, just when I thought I was in the clear, I turned completely pale at work, got the shakes, started sweating, had a ringing in my ears, thought I was going to pass out, ran to the toilet and puked about 4 times. More than anything it caught me off guard. I actually sat back and said "What?" like the toilet was going to explain to me what just happened. After some pretzels and water I was right back to normal. Maybe it was all the bragging that came back and bit me in the butt. So, to those ladies who threw up non-stop the entire first trimester and then some, I feel about 1/100th of your pain.. and I promise, no more bragging.

I was going to try to wait until my 12 week mark to take the first belly shot, but just like I jumped the gun on the pregnancy tests, I snapped away early. Here's the bump at 11 weeks, 4 days. I should have taken a before photo so you could see that it's not just all chubbiness. I swear, there's a baby in there pushing my chub out even further ;) Plus this was taken at night after eating a pretty hefty meal.



So there you have it! A preggo update. I will get better at this, especially now that I'm finding I have enough energy to stay awake past 8:00 pm. I'll get a baby bump picture every week from now on so we can all stare wide-eyed at how fast I grow out of my clothes.

My next appoint will be December 17th and I'll be one day shy of 15 weeks. I probably won't have a whole lot of exciting news until the appointment after that when we find out if this little peach is a boy or a girl! I've had this feeling it's a boy the last few weeks, but I have no idea where that's coming from. Maybe Matt is whispering things in my ear while I sleep.. "Think boy, think boy.."