Random Updates: Christmas, an Embarrasing Moment at an Aquarium, and Some Thoughts on Pregnancy

It's been awhile.  It seems like I always need to say something like that in the few-and-far-between posts on this blog.  Our lives aren't that fascinating, though, so I guess it makes sense.  Maybe all that will change when Baby T joins us in June and everyone will be sick of us.  Anyway, I thought I'd just record some random things we've been up to and thinking about since mid-December since I'm really bad at keeping a journal now.

First is Christmas.  We decorated our apartment and had our own little Christmas morning a week early so Kel and I could exchange presents and give the cat a new bed and a catnip mouse (which she alternates between mauling and taking care of it like it's her kitten).  The coolest thing I got was a new camera for all the upcoming baby pictures I hope to be awesome at taking.  I think Kelly would say his best present from me were binoculars for birding and such.  He also got a 3DS I bought on the cheap from one of his friends, and he's been enjoying that more than he would probably care to admit.  Now, for memory's sake, some pictures of our little Christmas:

Our tree, that we decided was called Sam as we were throwing it away (technically, Kelly was acting like Libby was saying bye to the tree because she LOVED it, and he said "Bye Sam!" in his Libby voice, so it stuck.  For the last few moments of its life.)

We finally bought a nativity this year.  Who knew ebay was the place for it?  Don't mind the generous gap between our bookshelves, the floor is uneven, but they're anchored to the the wall so it's all good.

Our stockings and little Christmas Angel bell thingy.  I'm sure it has a real name, but I sure don't know it.

That's right.  I made Kelly some Star Wars snowflakes.  I got my x-acto on and rocked at it!  This is R2D2 in case you can't tell.

And Boba Fett.  And no, I am not this super awesome on my own.  I got the templates from here.

Our "Christmas" morning mess

Libby enjoying her present.  I promise it's actually big enough for her, she just sucks at getting in there all the way.

We went home for real Christmas.  I told about three people I would let them know if we were headed home for the break and we would do something, and I'm the worst person ever and didn't even call them.  Sorry to the few friends I have left.  I really do love you guys.  I'm just a very lazy person.  I was so tired from growing a human inside me and dealing with the last vestiges of morning sickness I just hung out with my family, and then I got sick at the end of our trip and only ended up seeing Kelly's family ONCE!  How terrible is that?  Hopefully we move back soon (this summer, maybe?) and I can right that wrong, and hopefully my old friends will re-friend me despite my lazy ways.  It was really nice to be with family, though.  I got to meet my new nephew, who goes by Tiger on the web.  There's a picture on Facebook you can see if you're friends with me.  I don't want to break my sister-in-law's trust and post it on a public blog, since she's really really careful and smart about internet safety.  He's super adorable and I just wanted to cuddle him, but usually he wanted to stand up on his cutie little legs when I was holding him, which was cool too.  Kel and I were feeling a little jealous, realizing we could have had a 7 month old if we hadn't miscarried last year.  It wasn't bad, though, since I am pregnant so at least we know that it's coming.  It was really fun and sweet seeing my brother and sister-in-law as parents, too.  We also got to spend more time with my sister Cami and her new husband Robbie, which was really fun, especially since we hadn't had the opportunity to get to know Robbie very well before that.  One of the many problems of living thousands of miles away!  They are a really awesome couple and we love how Robbie hands Cami's sass right back to her, and we had a lot of fun with them both.  My younger brother Bryan also took a lot of his Christmas break to spend time with us, and as always he is one of the funnest (I know it's not a word) people I know.  Other than that, I mostly probably bothered my parents by always following them around, but I really enjoyed just being with them and talking to them.  We spent Christmas morning at Kelly's parents' house and had a really nice time chatting with his parents and brothers and sisters-in-law, and seeing our cute nephews on that side.  We gave Liam a Buzz Lightyear shirt and wings and it was really fun watching him run around and jump off the couch with them.  I'm excited our baby will have such awesome grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins on both sides.  He or she will be in the same grade as my brother's baby, and almost exactly two years younger than Emery on Kelly's side, which is pretty awesome.

One of the Christmas dinners we enjoyed

The other thing I wanted to write about was visiting the National Aquarium.  They have a deal on Fridays after 5PM during the non-touristy season, and Kel and I have been a few times already since we've lived here, so we went couple weeks ago and just wandered for about two hours and had a really fun time together.  I was a little bummed this time that they changed part of the exhibit and almost all the stingrays were gone.  They used to have a huge shallow pool with some smaller sharks and a bunch of stingrays.  I love watching stingrays swim around.  They're so cool.  And if you're lucky enough to see their tummies they have cute little smiles.

Not the best picture, but see its little smile?

But the new exhibit was cool too, just not AS cool.  And it was our first real outing since I got pregnant, because I spent a couple months basically sleeping and feeling sick.  Kelly even managed to have a "Kelly Moment" by staring at something and nudging a person he thought was me standing next to him about seven times before finally looking over to see why I wasn't responding, only to realize it was a guy.  With blue hair.  And a nose ring.  Now that I think of it, I maybe should be offended he thought that was me.  Right after that the actual me came up to him as he was explaining his mistake to blue-hair-guy, and then as he was blushing and telling me what happened we heard "Kelly!" and turned around and there was a couple from church sitting there, probably witnessed the whole thing, so we had an awkward conversation with Kelly blushing and stammering and me trying not to laugh.  But we did manage to invite them to our house for dinner that Sunday.  When we were chatting with them at our house it turned out they didn't notice anything, but got a good laugh from the story.

Jellyfishing! Jellyfishing! Jellyfishing!

Some stingrays and a shark takin' a nap

Oh, I was tempted.

Sea urchin and some fishies

The rather large eel who looked rather like the Grinch.  He totally smiled for this picture, though.

Aquarium selfie!

Other than that, basically the only thing going on is I'm pregnant!  This one feels so different than the last one.  I feel guilty about that.  The first time I found out I was pregnant I immediately was so excited and in love with our baby and started planning our future.  This time around I feel like something inside of me won't quite accept that it's real.  I remember having the exact same detached feeling the day Kelly got home from his mission, and the day we got married.  Both times I thought I would be jumping-around-crazy-excited because the best thing ever was about to happen, but what actually happened was I just calmly got ready and couldn't quite believe it was actually happening.  Okay, on my wedding day I did having a screaming freak-out at my hair, so "calm" isn't the right word there, but I wasn't feeling like I was about to get married, either.  With this pregnancy I keep having to remind myself that after trying for a year, it's finally happened.

I also wasn't sick at all with the last one before I lost the baby, but this time I had morning (more like 24-hour) sickness pretty bad since about week 6 and it was barely easing off when we went home for Christmas around 14 weeks along.  I tried to remember to be grateful, since they say that's a good sign.  I think Kelly did too, but he was pretty sad about missing his wife for two months.  He takes very good care of me, though.  I lost a lot of weight the first trimester because of my morning-sickness-induced anorexia/bulimia.  My appetite is starting to come back now and I have a little, yet obvious, baby belly now, but I'm still not up to my pre-pregnancy weight.  It works, though, because most of my normal clothes still fit.  It's awesome, because I decided I really hate shopping for maternity clothes, so I can put that off a little longer.

Li'l baby bump. Kelly and I agree it looks bigger in real life.  As an aside, I really can't figure out what to do with my hands in these pictures.

I am super paranoid about losing this baby still.  I thought once I passed the point where I lost the first one I would start connecting better and feeling safer, then I thought maybe once I got past the first trimester, and now I'm hoping when I find out if it's a boy or girl or feel it moving.  In the last week or so I have been connecting more to Baby T and starting to plan on actually having a real baby come June, so that's been really nice and feeling pretty good.  I still have a ways to go, but at least I know it's starting to feel real.  I think that's why I've been feeling really bad about not documenting anything about being pregnant this time.  Last year when I was pregnant I wrote a bunch of posts that I never published, but at least I have them for the memories. 

Another weird thing about this pregnancy that I wasn't expecting was feeling some strange form of survivor's guilt.  I spent a year grieving for my baby and trying and failing to conceive and feeling jealous of others' pregnancies and babies, and forming a sort of unspoken (and maybe unshared?) camaraderie with other women struggling with infant loss and/or infertility (even though I officially missed the label of infertility by a matter of weeks).  Now that I have exactly what I wanted, I'm hyper-aware of the fact that my own pregnancy could be causing others those same feelings of pain and jealousy that I so recently struggled with.  I haven't announced that I'm pregnant in Relief Society's "good news minute" or posted a ton of Facebook statuses or really talked much about it to people other than family.  And my students.  My students are VERY interested in everything about me being pregnant.  I guess I'll continue that story in a minute.  But really, this is the first public talk-about-being-pregnant thing that I've done.  And I'm doing it more to record the memories, and so my family at home can see a picture of my burgeoning baby bump since they're not here to share it with me.  I really hope that I don't hurt the feelings of my friends who are in the middle of their own struggles with baby loss or trying to conceive, especially those whose fight with this has been way longer than mine.  Please know you're in my thoughts and prayers everyday.

Back to my students to end this on a happier note.  I ended up telling my students pretty early on that I was pregnant.  Like 6 weeks along.  First, I was really paranoid about losing the baby and needed to take it easier than I usually do, so I did a lot less running around and getting pens and paper for every Tyron, Darius, and Hakeem, and a lot more sitting down and telling them to get their own dang pen.  Second, I had a minor freak out when a couple students tried to bring a chicken box into my room (for those of you who aren't from Baltimore, that's fried chicken and french fries, often eaten with sriracha sauce on top, as in this case), so they knew something was up.  Finally, when I was 6 weeks pregnant I was teaching fourth period and suddenly ran to the trashcan and barfed (fortunately I made it).  Obviously my students weren't going to let that slide and I let the cat out of the bag.  It spread like wildfire.  So the whole school knew Ms. A was having a baby pretty darn quick.  I was just glad I told my principal as soon as I knew I was pregnant because of my paranoid need to take it easy, so she heard it from me and not through the grapevine.  My students have been surprisingly sweet to me, and instead of asking me to come help, they tell me to stay in my seat and they come to me.  They are also pretty good at remembering my sense of smell is crazy and eat their chicken boxes, ramen noodles, Doritos, and other vomit-inducing things before coming into my classroom.  Students also tell each other off for being annoying or disruptive because "she's pregnant!"  The weirdest thing is so many of my girls have had babies, or are currently pregnant, so they like to chat with me about pregnancy symptoms and living with babies.  Most of my students also debate about if it's a boy or girl, citing very official sources like how I'm carrying, the severity of my morning sickness, and trying to put their hand on my tummy and feel the vibes or something.  I try to avoid the last one as much as I can, but people can be pretty handsy when it comes to a baby bump, and many of my students have a seriously lacking sense of personal space as it is.  I think they are almost as excited as me, Kelly and our moms are to find out the gender ON THURSDAY!!!!!  (After we get the news to everyone in our families, I'll post it here, I promise.)  Anyway, the sweetest thing my students do is just check in everyday.  Some of them aren't even in any of my classes currently.  They just stick their heads in during passing periods and ask "How's the baby?"  It's been really nice so far to be able to answer "Good!"