My Pregnancy So Far

Everyone asks if I’ve had morning sickness and luckily I haven’t. Not the least bit of puking has happened over here. Just don’t ask what I want to eat. I have no idea. Nothing sounds good except chicken fingers or avocado sushi rolls from our local sushi restaurant. Strange I know.
Even though I’ve managed to bypass the so hated morning sickness, I’ve collected my own set of strange complications.
Ovarian hyper stimulation syndrome: My ovaries basically refused to work (maybe since puberty?) but definitely since we started trying a year and a half ago. When they finally did work they swelled up to the size of melons in a matter of days. Ovaries are normally supposed to be about 4 cm and mine grew to many times bigger than that very quickly. Also my blood was dumping all water into my abdominal cavity and at the worst I had gained about 15 lbs in water. This of course was pretty uncomfortable and I spent several days going to the doctor getting blood work and an IV drip. Unfortunately we had to cancel our cruise that we had scheduled on doctors orders. Very sad but we learned we were pregnant during all of this so that definitely made up for all of it. :) My ovaries are still bigger than normal at 16 weeks but they have continued to go down and all the discomfort associated with them has gone away.
Retinal Occlusion: I woke up one morning a little over 4 weeks ago and realized I couldn't read the computer screen very well. Upon further investigation I realized I had a cloud shaped blob in my right eye. It was completely opaque. When using both eyes it just seemed to make my vision blurry and reading was difficult. My OB sent me to see a Ophthalmologist, who brought in a Retinal specialist, who decided I had this retinal occlusion (blood clot)  in my eye which is apparently super rare for someone under 50 or 60. They recommended full blood work and  my OB scheduled me to see their OB/Hematologist specialist. However many days and hours at the doctors later I am on a blood thinner for preventative reasons since they did not find a direct cause of the occlusion. Luckily, last week we found out that the occlusion has healed and now just waiting to see if the vision loss is permanent or not. And I still have to shoot myself with blood thinner twice a day. But it has gotten tons easier to do!
Gestational Diabetes: Sort-of.  I failed the first test they gave and then I barely passed the second. Only one bad score out of 4 and you have to have 2 bad to be diagnosed. But they are concerned about me being high risk so I had to go to gestational diabetes nutrition counseling and check my blood sugar every so often. Thank you Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome.. and the multiples. :)
So that’s the main stuff and I’ve now bored myself to tears and anyone that is still reading. :) It’s definitely an adventure so far. I’m just so glad nothing has really been untreatable or harmful for the babies. Knock on wood it continues!

Three, Tres, Drie, Trois, Tri…

Three is our new lucky number! We are almost 17 weeks pregnant with TRIPLETS! We’ve known about it since we were about 6 weeks along but I still have a hard time realizing that this is actually happening.  That first ultrasound was a complete shocker. I believe the only thing Glenn said while we were in the ultrasound room was “huh.” :)

The babies at 9 weeks old

The babies at 15 weeks

Since many of the doctors warned us that there was a risk that one or more wouldn't make it through the first trimester, we took a break from the blog, wanting to make sure that all of the babies were thriving before sharing the news. Thankfully they are all growing, thriving, and healthy so far!

We spent many weeks worrying what would happen and just what our future was shaping up to be. Feeling shocked and overwhelmed were a major part of our first few weeks and months.  These days we have the same feelings but they are overshadowed with a lot of joy and excitement! We feel blessed and so happy that these little guys are coming into our life and can’t wait to get to know them.

You will hear lots more from us about this in the coming months!

Expectations

(Posted retroactively, since at the time we found out, we weren't quite ready to tell the world yet...)

First, the big news... *ahem*...

We’re
PREGNANT!

We confirmed it at the doctor’s office today, after a positive home pregnancy test result this morning. We’re excited, overjoyed, and terrified all at the same time — and it hasn’t even entirely sunk in yet! We’ve been trying for more than a year now, so we’re at the same time amazed that it took this long to get here and amazed that it finally happened.

Heather is technically a month pregnant (!) already, which makes our expected due date December 29 — looks like we’ll be having a winter baby, though who can tell at this point if it’ll be 2010 or 2011 when baby arrives! Either way, I think that pretty much decides our Christmas plans for us... :-)

We want to do something big to celebrate, but we haven’t been able to yet because Heather’s pretty well out of commission due to a bad case of ovarian hyperstimulation syndrome. It’s causing her a lot of pain, shortness of breath, and loss of appetite, so even just going out to dinner tonight was out of the question. We’ll celebrate once Heather's feeling better, which hopefully will be really soon.

I really want to do a whole photo series tracking the pregnancy, a la Pacing the Panic Room, but Heather's not feeling well enough to be a photo subject at the moment, and I've still got some more learning to do with my fancy camera before I'm a master photographer (ha!). We've got a decent amount of time for that still — the Panic Room series started at around week 16, and I guess there’s not really much to show before then anyways.

One thing is absolutely certain — there are exciting times ahead for us!!!

Photo Class

Once we got a DSLR camera, it rapidly became clear that while it's possible to treat such a camera as just a fancy point-and-shoot, that really wouldn't be making the most of its potential. Fortunately, we found that Durham Tech offers a series of digital photography classes. Initially we signed up for the “Beyond the Basics” class but after the first session it became very clear that the basics were beyond us rather than vice versa — so we switched to the “Basics of Digital Photography” class and continued with it.

The class just completed this past Monday. I've learned a lot from it, both in terms of how to use the various bells and whistles on this camera, as well as how to take better pictures in general. (The pictures in our Easter post are an early product of that education.) Each week we've had photo assignments to get hands-on experience with various features and techniques — aperture settings to control depth of field, shutter speeds to blur or freeze motion, the effect of wide angle versus telephoto, and so forth. Basic, perhaps, but surprisingly helpful. For example:



Shutter speed: 1/640s versus 1/20s


In addition to weekly classroom sessions and homework assignments, the class included a weekend afternoon photo outing to the Duke Gardens. We were given three hours and about a dozen photo assignments to complete, along the lines of “Take pictures of the same subject at the same distance, but vary from maximum wide-angle to maximum telephoto on your lens” and “Take a picture that has only two colors.” While working to complete these assignments, I came up with a few photos that I'm somewhat proud of:




Even though the class focused primarily on DSLRs and all their various manual settings, it'll definitely help me in taking better pictures with our everyday point-and-shoot camera as well. I'm thinking about taking the “Beyond the Basics” class this fall, time permitting, since (as is often the case) by learning this much, I've become very aware of how much more there still is to learn!

A Happy Easter!

We had a great Easter weekend with my  parents and sister and brother in law, who came up to stay with us.

We spent the weekend visiting, eating, playing games, taking a walk through Duke gardens and just enjoying each other’s company. The only rotten part of the weekend was Saturday morning when we woke up to find Hannah and Bizzy’s car had been broken into – in front of our house! ! They busted the drivers side window and took their GPS and iPod and a pocket knife. Unfortunately no one saw anything and we couldn’t find any shops that would fix the window over the weekend before they had to drive home on Sunday. We gave Pasha a stern talking to regarding to her role as watch dog – next time she promises to be more alert.  Of course we just hope there isn’t a next time!

Thanks family, for coming up to see us and for spending Easter together!

Diaper Cakes and Cake Truffles

I've had fun lately putting together a diaper cake for a friends baby shower. This is the second one I've done and I think its a fun gift and makes for a pretty cool decoration or centerpiece. This one consisted of a bottle of champagne, 200 diapers, 6 pacifiers, numerous washcloths, socks, and miscellaneous other toys and baby supplies from her registry. It comes out looking like this:

Vase of washcloth rosebuds: 

 

Here is the previous one I made:

If anyone likes the look and wants a unique gift for a mom-to-be, let me know. :)

I've also had some fun making these cake truffles I found on this site, Bakerella. Mine look nowhere as good, but they were very yummy.  These were for Valentines day, Red velvet cake truffles.

And these for St. Patrick's Day, Mint Oreo Truffles

 

Still exercising!

We're still continuing to train for Heather's triathlon, and looking at other ones to possibly do together later this year. (The problem with that is, by May it's already almost summer, and the idea of doing a triathlon in the summer heat is somewhat demotivating... but we're looking nonetheless!) I'm pleased and impressed (and surprised) that we're managing to stick with this so well - sure, we've missed a day here and there, but we're averaging 5-6 days a week overall, which I think is darn impressive!

We've hit a few exercise milestones over the last couple of weeks that are worth documenting. Firstly, a week ago we did our first "combination" triathlon training - we rode our bikes 5 miles to the park, swam for 15 minutes, then rode 5 miles back. It was a lot of fun, until less than a mile from home on the way back, I steered my bike into the gutter, hit the curb, and wiped out. I picked up a nice big scrape on my elbow (I'll spare you the pictures!) but otherwise escaped injury. Ever since we got the bikes, I've been waiting for the inevitable first crash, so I'm actually kind of glad to have it over with - and glad it was me instead of Heather!

Secondly, this past weekend we drove over to north Raleigh to try out the actual bike route that Heather's triathlon will follow - 9 miles through a hilly (and rather ritzy) neighborhood. We found that the hills in our neighborhood are nothing compared to the big ones on that route, and that we definitely have some more training to do. On the last big hill we both had to drop to the absolute lowest gear on our bikes just to make it up. But we did finish, and we've still got more than two months of training to go, so it's a good feeling.

Thirdly, swimming. Heather was a swimmer in school, and so it's coming back to her quite naturally as we train in the pool. Me, although I got my swimming merit badge as a boy scout, I've never been much of a swimmer, and my swimming technique has always been more of a way to stay afloat and not sink than a way to move through the water quickly. But with some good tips and suggestions from Heather, I've been rediscovering (or perhaps even learning) how to swim the freestyle, and am now at the point where I can actually swim several laps at a time freestyle without inhaling too much water. It's a good feeling. Today at the pool I covered a total of 1000 yards for what I think may be the first time ever for me - of course, I stopped between laps quite a bit, so it probably doesn't "count", but it's a start!