Navigating Nausea

Before I start on the main subject of my post today, I just wanted to say thank you to those who sent me well wishes after Sunday's "shocking" post. I actually moved up my OB appointment a few days to Monday just so I could get checked out. I got an extra sonogram and everything looks totally fine. Baby's heartbeat was completely normal, so the doctor isn't concerned. I am really relieved, albeit still slightly paranoid. But, I'm trying not to be.

Anyway, many of my friends and family have been asking me how I am doing, and I thought I would give a little update to the whole nausea situation. First of all, yes, I am still nauseous. Apparently, I am not going to get a respite from this until August. And as long as baby is happy and healthy, I'll get through it. It is what it is. I've (mostly) come to terms with it and I am trying my best to not complain too much. That being said, it's way better than it was weeks 5-18, when it was absolutely horrible and completely debilitating. Those weeks were really tough to go through, and I really hope I don't have to repeat that experience if we have another baby in the future.

But I thought I would write this post to maybe help other people who have to deal with this pregnancy-long morning sickness. First of all, it's frustrating. It's super hard to not get jealous when other people never have morning sickness or the October group of the online pregnancy board I frequent discusses how they are feeling better. Yup, insane jealousy over people feeling good.

And the worst part is, I know other people have it worse. I constantly remind myself of that. Some people get HG (Hyperemesis Gravidarum), which is far worse than what I have. It's characterized by vomiting to the point of dehydration, extreme weight loss, and hospitalization. One woman on my board had HG her entire pregnancy and nearly died. Some women have terrible pregnancies. They struggle to get pregnant, or stay pregnant, or keep the baby in long enough. Not to mention those that have a difficult or life-threatening childbirth. And I acknowledge that we have been extremely fortunate from this perspective (so far). 

So, in my 136 days of nausea (and 3 months of vomiting) and counting, here are some things I have learned along the way. My hope with this post is that I might help or encourage other people who have the non-stop pregnancy sickness. 

1. Feeling sick all the time for weeks on end can cause both loneliness and depression. It took me a while to realize that I wasn't alone and that I could, in fact, get through it. I get sad when I have to miss things because I am just way too sick to do them. Imagine having a stomach virus since December. 

2. The typical "morning sickness cures" did almost nothing for me. It took me a while to realize that no amount of crackers and ginger ale were going to help. In fact, I had aversions to both. 

3. Nausea medication can be a hit or miss. For me, Zofran was a huge miss. Everyone talks about how this is a lifesaver drug. For me, this was a non-starter. If I have this again, I will make sure to work with my doctor to get other medication because there is other medication that can help and I would have tried that earlier. As it turned out, I was doing okay enough by the time I realized this that I didn't bother with it. 

4. Unisom (OTC sleep aid) did actually help me quite a bit with the nausea. I have been taking one pill (the sleep tab kind) every evening. The nights where I don't take it, I have a horrible day the next day and usually throw up. The drug in this is an antihistamine. Others have suggested Benedryl for similar effects. A lot of people suggest Unisom with 25 mg of B6. The B6 never really did anything for me, and I sometimes wonder if it's more of a placebo than anything. 

5. Protein makes everything better. I have had to increase my protein intake quite considerably. For some reason, a high protein diet has kept my nausea in check more than anything else. I was never really into meat before, but I am now. Mmmm... steak! That being said, I have had zero aversion to meat this pregnancy. I hear that's a common food aversion. For me, I have only had an aversion to seafood. Everything else, bring it on!

6. Along with protein, dairy has become one of my nausea go-to foods. A glass of milk has an amazing ability to make everything better. This is only funny to me because plain milk kind of grossed me out pre-pregnancy. Cheese and ice cream have also been great. However, I had a super hard time with cheese while I was still puking all the time. (TMI - but the cheese in the vomit made me start choking, which led to more vomit and crying). Yogurt has been good, too. I am really into Klondikes at the moment. Know the saying, "what would you do for a klondike bar?" Yea, I don't even want to know the answer. 

7. Bananas!! It took me far too long to realize that bananas have nausea-reducing capabilities. I found this game-changer after spending the entire first trimester craving banana cream pie. Except I couldn't find any, and I did not have the energy to make it. So, one day at the grocery store, on a whim, I decided to try plain bananas. Pre-pregnancy, I hated bananas. I would never eat them because they grossed me out. Pregnant me loves bananas. They are like some miracle fruit that can get me through another hour or two of the nausea. Actually, a lot of fruit has been great. 

8. Limiting sugar. For me, anything with a high sugar content (with the exception of ice cream) has the tendency to make me nauseous or in some cases actually vomit. It's rough because I normally am all about the sugar. I will still indulge, but I pay for it soon after. Sugar paired with protein or a higher fat content (like ice cream or unfrosted donuts) seem to be okay, but I try to limit those for other (obvious) reasons. 

9. Frequent meals seem to help, but this is hit or miss. I have felt hungry maybe a handful of times this pregnancy. I am either okay or super nauseous. Super nauseous usually correlated to me needing to eat, which makes things better, mostly. I feel like I have gained more weight than I would like because of this, but the alternative is vomiting, so... whatever. My doctors aren't the least bit concerned with the amount I have gained, so I am trying to be okay with it. 

10. Bad weather makes everything worse. I have no idea the reason behind this, but snow and rain mean a pretty miserable stomach for me. Sunny days tend to be my best. This past Sunday, when we had great weather, I had almost zero nausea the entire day. It was great. Well, the rain started Monday and I was miserable until it ended (I actually didn't know it had started raining on Monday, I just started feeling terrible). If someone can explain this to me, I'd be very interested. Nevertheless, this very snowy winter was really not cool. 

That's all I can think of. Mostly, it's been okay. I work out every day and try to keep myself busy working on things. I am getting more excited about the baby. I wonder what he's going to look like and what type of person he'll grow up to be. I love getting ideas for the nursery and working on them. (I just finished making curtains, but I'll write another post on that). Time is going both fast and slow at the same time, if that makes any sense. 3 and a half more months to go! Happy May everyone!

Nursery Painting

Hello everyone! I'm back with some more nursery updates! J and I dedicated this weekend to getting the baby room a bit more ready. So, we'll start off with those updates. To keep you reading, you can hear about the stupid thing I did this weekend towards the end.

So, here are the before shots with the room all cleared out.

The first thing we did was to remove these bifold doors. I am planning on using curtains over the closet for easier access. The bifold doors in this room have never worked all that well, and I hated them.

We then painted the trim from peach back to a white color as we have been doing in all the rooms we have re-painted. This officially makes the upstairs completely white-trim! Since we have been using Sherwin Williams Snowbound for all of the trim, we used that for this room as well. However, I got it color matched at Home Depot in no VOC semi-gloss, since I'm not supposed to paint with paint containing VOCs (VOC paint is also not recommended for baby rooms anyway). For the record, I like the way Sherwin Williams' paint covers better than the Home Depot brand.

J did the rolling for the door and the window seats, while I focused on the trim and molding.

We then moved onto priming. I used spackle to fill in all the holes and cracks prior to priming. We again used no VOC primer (Kilz). For some reason, the room was painted in a semi-gloss, so using the primer helped with the paint grabbing onto the walls. J did all the rolling, while I did the edging on the floors, ceiling and window frames (which are a huge pain, btw).

It was then truly decision time. I had narrowed the choices down to these 4 options (all Benjamin Moore). We ended up going with Breath of Fresh Air, 806, by BM on the right. I was torn between that one and Heaven on Earth (bottom), but the two colors were actually super similar.

Painted room + me at 24 weeks. I am feeling a bit... large these days.

J looking cool.

Don't worry! There are more pictures of the room. But... first, I decided to switch out all the old and ugly outlets in the room.

I replaced them with new outlets, which are tamper resistant. What this means is that they are automatically baby-proof. Score. They are also white, which matches the rest of the room. Here's when things got interesting. Story time! So, I very carefully made sure all of the circuit breakers were off to the room before starting and double-checked each outlet. I installed all of the outlets without incident. Until I got to the light switch. It was also off when I wired it. I then had J go down to turn on the circuit breaker so I could test the light switch before screwing everything back in.... yea, so I accidentally touched a live wire and gave myself a nice 120VAC shock (yup - touched a black/hot). I immediately screamed and let go. Cue panic by J who wanted to know what happened. It all happened so quickly that I am still not sure of the current path. I know the hot was on my pinky because that's where I felt it and it went up my arm. But that's all I have. My other hand was on ground (yup - maximum stupidity). I still can't believe I went through countless EE labs, have re-wired multiple rooms in this house, never gotten shocked, and, now, 24 weeks pregnant, I manage to do this. Anyway, we got the breaker back off, everything put back where it should (no more shocks). At this point, J is like, "you need to call the OB." I agree and call. Needless to say, they weren't all that concerned. They asked if I was okay, which I am. I didn't even really feel pain, just well... shock. Baby has still been kicking me after the incident, so I am hoping and praying everything is okay. After some extensive googling, I have found lots of other pregnant ladies who have shocked themselves (in some cases to much worse degrees) and everything was fine. I still can't believe how stupid the whole thing was because I am seriously always so careful with wiring. So, that's my story from this weekend.

Anyway, here's the finished product. Keep in mind the light was fading at this point, so the pictures aren't terribly light. Don't worry, there will be lots more pictures once we get furniture in here.

I do like how the color turned out. It's a bit more of a bright blue than I thought it would be, but I think it will tone down some once we get the furniture in here. Keep in mind the lighting is just off in these photos, too. I promise there will be better pictures as we move along with the baby room. Also, the outlets will get covered as soon as the room has a little more time to dry.

Anyway, that's all for now. I can't believe we managed to get so much done this weekend. Yay for productivity and being done painting! I'm less thrilled about shocking myself. Ugh. More soon!

Elephant Mobile

Hello everyone! I hope you all are doing well on this cold morning (at least if you are on the east coast). I forgot to turn my heat on last night and we woke up to a pretty cool house. It was hard getting out from under the covers.

In my last post, I promised to update you on some of the ideas I have been working on for the nursery (now that the world knows the baby is a boy). This first project was started about 3 weeks ago, shortly after we knew the gender. Our theme for the nursery is blue + gray + elephants. My inspiration came mostly from pinterest (shocking).

Some examples:
Blue Elephants

Artwork

Inspiration Board

And there are many more examples out there. In fact, searching for "blue nursery" gives you a lot of elephant inspiration. Since I love elephants and think they are adorable for a baby, I decided to go with the theme. I actually bought the fabric from the first picture (the gray elephant print) to make curtains and a crib skirt (because I am crafty like that and don't want to spend $130 on a crib skirt). 

Back to the project at hand, I really wanted to make a mobile for the crib, since (a) buying a mobile is expense and (b) I am not a huge fan of the ones out there. I picked up some fabric quarters and eighths at JoAnns to make the elephants for the mobile. 

For the pattern, I started with this pattern, which I found online. I ended up lengthening the nose so it curled up more than it does here, but I just did that part by hand. 

 I bought the hoop from JoAnns for about $2. I debated on the hoop size a bit, but I wanted something that could fit a decent amount of elephants and wouldn't look too small next to the crib. I think this was around the right size, but could have been slightly smaller. I bought plain white ribbon and carefully used hot glue to glue the ribbon around the hoop. I used a dot of glue to start and then twisted the ribbon around the hoop. After the start, I would use a small line of glue and then twist about 3 turns of ribbon onto that glue and repeat.

For the elephants, I found the easiest way to cut them was to have the fabric folded during the cut with the elephant pinned to the fabric. I cut about 1/4" from the edge of the pattern to allow room for my seam.

I then sewed right sides together, leaving room for stuffing in the back end.

Flipped around (pre-stuffing). For the stuffing, I used a small rod I had to push the stuffing into the nose area. This process made me feel like I was violating the poor elephants. Once I had the stuffing the way I liked it, I sewed up the rear end (hiding stitches as best I could - not one of my sewing strong suits).

I neglected to take a picture of the process for the ears, but I basically cut out a shape that was about right for the ear size and used that as my pattern. The ears are cut from felt and sewed onto the sides of the heads after I stuffed the elephants. I sewed the ears by hand. 

All my elephants. I tried to use patterns in the blue and gray theme that would be visually stimulating for the baby. 

You can see the completed hoop in this picture. I used ribbon for the structure that goes up to the music box. You can either hot glue the ribbon or tie it to create the structure. I found that hot glue worked better.

I used thread (doubled up) to attach the elephants to the mobile. Attaching them and getting the length right was rather tedious. I also had to find the right center of gravity for the elephants so they didn't tip forward or backward. I think it turned out rather well.

Here is the assembly all together. This is in the closet of the nursery (not the final place for the mobile, but we need to paint the walls first. The white walls give a better background for seeing the whole thing.

The music box was a purchase from ebay. You can search for mobile music box and grab one for about $15. I liked this one because it plays a variety of songs and isn't the wind up kind.

Here is the final product in action! I am pretty excited to see it when we have it set up over the crib and have the walls painted.

Speaking of wall colors, we currently have a plethora of paint samples chilling on our walls. I think once we have the walls primed, I will get a few samples of my favorites and paint them in a bigger area. I am having a tough time deciding between more of a blue-gray wall color or one that leans more towards aqua. I think I'll end up with a blue-gray color, but we shall see. More on that in another post.

Baby Gender Reveal Party!

For those of you who saw our facebook announcement, you now know that J and I announced that we are expecting a baby BOY! We have actually known for 4 weeks now, but were keeping the news until we shared it at our gender reveal party this weekend. We are super excited! The anatomy scan went great and baby is looking nice and healthy (and measuring about a week ahead of schedule).

Back to the gender reveal. I started planning it weeks ago by painting wooden eggs as party favors. I thought with this weekend being a week away from easter, the egg idea would be a fun take home gift.

Party favor bags

I asked guests to pick a side by wearing a clothespin with their guess. I gave some old wives tales to help people out with their guesses.

The spread for the party. We also had guests submit boy and girl name ideas, which ended up being really fun. In the back left, we had cake pops made for the reveal. I am kicking myself for not taking a close up of the cake pops. The inside was blue for the reveal.

The reveal!

Guests

Me and my friends. :)

Baby Boy!

The party was a great success and a lot of fun! I pretty much had felt from day 1 that it was a boy. It explains why I have been feeling so terribly sick (the women of my family tend to be sicker with boys). And it gives me hope that I might not be so sick for the next pregnancy (fingers crossed). I am super happy about having a little boy and so is J. We were both pretty thrilled after the ultrasound. I'm still feeling a little nauseous these days, although nothing like it was even a few weeks ago. I also seemed to have "popped" and have a considerable bump. It makes me feel rather huge and my back has started hurting. As the weather warms up, I am reminded about how not fun this summer is going to be (although I am sure it will all be worth it). The party was truly very exhausting for me though, and I spent most of today resting and recovering from all the excitement. It's amazing how much harder entertaining is now-a-days (although it was definitely worth it - it was a very fun time). I'm working on nursery ideas so stay tuned... :)