Week 16

Happy August everyone! The Meyer household has been pretty busy lately which is nice because all in all, we've had a pretty slow summer. Let's see. . . most of you know this but Nathan started back to work 2 weeks ago after his carpal tunnel surgery. He's doing well and the surgeon commented that he really hasn't seen anyone heal that quickly. He continues to get his strength back more and more each day. He's extremely happy to be riding his motorcycle again!

My Aunt Mare (Mary) from FL came to the STL in June and my cousin, Mark, came last week. It was nice to see both of them. We had dinner with Mark on Monday and Tuesday and he actually stayed at our house on Tuesday night. This week, my cousin, Kim, is coming in from Wednesday - Sunday so I'm really looking forward to that as well. We are having a Marino family get together at our house this Sat. Should be fun. Hopefully, I will take some pictures because I've been really bad at that lately.

Friday night, Nathan and I went to the Fairmount Horse Races with some friends. I did not know this but that place is shutting down for good in about 2 weeks so I'm glad we got to go one last time. Nathan and I never made official bets but Nathan won one of the side bets we had going with our group. I wish we could have stayed longer but I wore flat, non-supportive shoes and all the standing was killing my feet. Plus, I could actually feel my stomach stretching or something and it didn't feel too good.

Saturaday I went to prenatal yoga (love it!) and then we went to a diaper shower for our friends, Ann and Tim, who are due with their second (yes, second!) set of twins in a few weeks. We wish them the best. Ann looked great and I'm glad they have a good have a good stockpile of diapers ready!

Sunday I went to the pool with Chrissy for about 4 hours. It was pure bliss! Then, Nathan, my mom and I went to dinner.

I haven't been good about taking pictures lately again. I haven't even taken any of myself as I progress through my pregnancy. I guess I need to start doing that since I now have a small baby bump. Sometimes it's more visable than others - depending on what I'm wearing. Today I have maternity capri pants and a maternity top on. I think it's the first time I've worn maternity on the top and botton at the same time. It's just more comfortable even though I can still wear some of my normal clothes.

Here's what's going on with our baby with my comments in (BOLD AND PARENTHESES).

Week 16 (15 weeks and 3 days)

What changes are occurring with your body?
Your uterus is continuing to grow and weighs approximately 8 ½ ounces. Your placenta is also growing, and your body is producing an increased amount of amniotic fluid that helps protect your baby during your pregnancy. Right now your body has about 7 ½ ounces of amniotic fluid surrounding your baby.
When you are pregnant, your body produces 50% more blood, resulting in more blood circulation through your body. This increase in blood circulation causes your face to be brighter. Your body is also producing hormones that cause your oil glands to work in over-drive, leaving your face shiny. Both of these things can result in a "pregnancy glow". What can you do about it? If your skin becomes too oily, you can use an oil free cleanser to clean your face. Other than that, do nothing but smile!*

How big is your baby?
By the end of week 16, your baby is approximately 5.31 inches (CRL) and weighs 2 ½ ounces. (WOW! I get a ruler out each week and hold it up to me stomach to really get a good idea of how long this baby is inside of me!)

What is happening with your baby?
Your baby is preparing himself/herself for a growth spurt over the next several weeks. (Uh-oh!) Your baby’s head is more erect now than it has been in the previous weeks of pregnancy. His/her ears and eyes are situated in their final positions. These three things are giving your baby a more “normal” appearance than he/she has had up to this point. ("Normal" is good!)
Several of the more complicated body systems are also beginning to function including your child’s urinary and circulatory system. Your baby’s heart pumps around 25 quarts of blood per day. However, by week 40 this amount will increase to 1,900 quarts per day!*

Tips for making your pregnancy better:
You can begin to feel your baby’s first movements between 16 and 20 weeks. If this is your first pregnancy, it may be 20 weeks before you feel your baby move. These first movements are often described as fluttering or gas bubbles. You may have felt these sensations and not even realized it was your baby. (I felt this off and on since Week 14! I knew it was the baby!!!) The amount of movement and when it occurs can vary from one pregnancy to the next, so it is not helpful to evaluate your current pregnancy experience on what you experienced in previous pregnancies.

Sleeping on your side is becoming even more important since many health care providers will tell you that you should not sleep on your back once you reach 16 weeks. This is why it is important to begin using pillows to support your body to help ensure that you do stay on your side during the night. (I have a hard time with this. I prefer my back or my stomach. I guess it's time to get some more pillows!)

I am on vacation from Wed. - Fri. since Kim is in town. I have my next Dr. appt. on Wednesday. I hope everyone has a great week!

-Dawn

What an Entrance!

Some of you may have already seen this but I'm posting a link to a video of a wedding party dancing down the aisle of a church. Now, we've all seen wedding parties dance into the reception but this is in the church! Pretty unique! The link is from KSDK's website so hopefully it will work. Enjoy!

http://www.ksdk.com/news/local/story.aspx?storyid=180830


-Dawn

Generation D (as in Digital everything)

So I've been reading these two blogs lately on a regular basis that I really enjoy. They are both written by mothers. One has 2 boys and the other has 2 girls. I like checking in daily to see how they make normal, ordinary events so entertaining to read about. ( http://www.amalah.com/ and http://www.dooce.com/) I guess it's insipired me to post a little more often about little things that happen or things I find interesting. I saw this story on yahoo.com today and thought it was a must read since Nathan and I are bringing a child into this big, bad, crazy world come January. It's about the things that our kids may never know about. Some of the things on the list are still around but not widely used or practiced and some may not be around anymore but we all still remember what they are. (And to be honest, some of them, I've never heard of!) So it's interesting to me that my kid may not have a clue about most of this stuff. So here it is in case you are interested.

100 Things Your Kids May Never Know About
By Nathan Barry
July 22, 2009
8:00 am

There are some things in this world that will never be forgotten, this week’s 40th anniversary of the moon landing for one. But Moore’s Law and our ever-increasing quest for simpler, smaller, faster and better widgets and thingamabobs will always ensure that some of the technology we grew up with will not be passed down the line to the next generation of geeks.
That is, of course, unless we tell them all about the good old days of modems and typewriters, slide rules and encyclopedias …

Audio-Visual Entertainment
1. Inserting a VHS tape into a VCR to watch a movie or to record something.
2. Super-8 movies and cine film of all kinds.
3. Playing music on an audio tape using a personal stereo. See what happens when you give a Walkman to todays teenager.
4. The number of TV channels being a single digit. I remember it being a massive event when Britain got its fourth channel.
5. Standard-definition, CRT TVs filling up half your living room.
6. Rotary dial televisions with no remote control. You know, the ones where the kids were the remote control.
7. High-speed dubbing.
8. 8-track cartridges.
9. Vinyl records. Even today’s DJs are going laptop or CD.
10. Betamax tapes.
11. MiniDisc.
12. Laserdisc: the LP of DVD.
13. Scanning the radio dial and hearing static between stations. (Digital tuners + HD radio bork this concept.)
14. Shortwave radio.
15. 3-D movies meaning red-and-green glasses.
16. Watching TV when the networks say you should. Tivo and Sky+ are slowing killing this one.
17. That there was a time before ‘reality TV.’

Computers and Videogaming
18. Wires. OK, so they’re not gone yet, but it won’t be long
19. The scream of a modem connecting.
20. The buzz of a dot-matrix printer
21. 5- and 3-inch floppies, Zip Discs and countless other forms of data storage.
22. Using jumpers to set IRQs.
23. DOS.
24. Terminals accessing the mainframe.
25. Screens being just green (or orange) on black.
26. Tweaking the volume setting on your tape deck to get a computer game to load, and waiting ages for it to actually do it.
27. Daisy chaining your SCSI devices and making sure they’ve all got a different ID.
28. Counting in kilobytes.
29. Wondering if you can afford to buy a RAM upgrade.
30. Blowing the dust out of a NES cartridge in the hopes that it’ll load this time.
31. Turning a PlayStation on its end to try and get a game to load.
32. Joysticks.
33. Having to delete something to make room on your hard drive.
34. Booting your computer off of a floppy disk.
35. Recording a song in a studio.

The Internet
36. NCSA Mosaic.
37. Finding out information from an encyclopedia.
38. Using a road atlas to get from A to B.
39. Doing bank business only when the bank is open.
40. Shopping only during the day, Monday to Saturday.
41. Phone books and Yellow Pages.
42. Newspapers and magazines made from dead trees.
43. Actually being able to get a domain name consisting of real words.
44. Filling out an order form by hand, putting it in an envelope and posting it.
45. Not knowing exactly what all of your friends are doing and thinking at every moment.
46. Carrying on a correspondence with real letters, especially the handwritten kind.
47. Archie searches.
48. Gopher searches.
49. Concatenating and UUDecoding binaries from Usenet.
50. Privacy.
51. The fact that words generally don’t have num8er5 in them.
52. Correct spelling of phrases, rather than TLAs.
53. Waiting several minutes (or even hours!) to download something.
54. The time before botnets/security vulnerabilities due to always-on and always-connected PCs 55. The time before PC networks.
56. When Spam was just a meat product — or even a Monty Python sketch.

Gadgets
57. Typewriters.
58. Putting film in your camera: 35mm may have some life still, but what about APS or disk?
59. Sending that film away to be processed.
60. Having physical prints of photographs come back to you.
61. CB radios.
62. Getting lost. With GPS coming to more and more phones, your location is only a click away.
63. Rotary-dial telephones.
64. Answering machines.
65. Using a stick to point at information on a wallchart
66. Pay phones.
67. Phones with actual bells in them.
68. Fax machines.
69. Vacuum cleaners with bags in them.


Everything Else
70. Taking turns picking a radio station, or selecting a tape, for everyone to listen to during a long drive.
71. Remembering someone’s phone number.
72. Not knowing who was calling you on the phone.
73. Actually going down to a Blockbuster store to rent a movie.
74. Toys actually being suitable for the under-3s.
75. LEGO just being square blocks of various sizes, with the odd wheel, window or door.
76. Waiting for the television-network premiere to watch a movie after its run at the theater.
77. Relying on the 5-minute sport segment on the nightly news for baseball highlights.
78. Neat handwriting.
79. The days before the nanny state.
80. Starbuck being a man.
81. Han shoots first.
82. “Obi-Wan never told you what happened to your father.” But they’ve already seen episode III, so it’s no big surprise.
83. Kentucky Fried Chicken, as opposed to KFC.
84. Trig tables and log tables.
85. “Don’t know what a slide rule is for …”
86. Finding books in a card catalog at the library.
87. Swimming pools with diving boards.
88. Hershey bars in silver wrappers.
89. Sliding the paper outer wrapper off a Kit-Kat, placing it on the palm of your hand and clapping to make it bang loudly. Then sliding your finger down the silver foil of break off the first finger
90. A Marathon bar (what a Snickers used to be called in Britain).
91. Having to manually unlock a car door.
92. Writing a check.
93. Looking out the window during a long drive.
94. Roller skates, as opposed to blades.
95. Cash.
96. Libraries as a place to get books rather than a place to use the internet.
97. Spending your entire allowance at the arcade in the mall.
98. Omni Magazine
99. A physical dictionary — either for spelling or definitions.
100. When a ‘geek’ and a ‘nerd’ were one and the same.

Can you think of anything else to add to this list?

-Dawn

Twenty-one!

Is it wrong to play BlackJack with your 10 year old stepson? Is that sending the wrong message to someone who takes a few minutes to add up 7 + 8 + 9 to figure out he busted? Nah, it was his idea. And I blame Santa Clause anyway. He's the one who gave the kid his own set of poker chips and a deck of cards for Christmas 2 years ago! Yeah, it's Santa's bad judgement that we have to blame!

Awwww, Yeah

So yesterday, I parked in the "Expecting & New Mothers" parking spot for the first time at the grocery store because it was crowded and I was too lazy to park farther back. And darn it, I AM an expecting mother even if most people wouldn't know it yet just by looking at me. However, I feel pregnant and fat so I feel like everyone else should realize I'm pregnant too, darn it! As I was walking in though, this hoosier guy looked me up and down (after I parked in that Baby Mama spot) and said, "How you doin', sweetheart?" Part of me was pissed that he said this to me and a couple different phrases popped into my head to respond, such as, "I'm pregnant. Leave me alone A-hole!" or "Knocked up and married!". However, instead, I said, "I'm fine. How are you?". He responded with some mumble-jumble that I could not understand and I just shook my head and proceeded to walk my pregnant butt to the bathroom, like a good pregnant lady who has to use the facilities a lot in her state of being. However, even though part of me was mad that this guy flirted with me, I have to admit, that a part of me thought, "Awwww yeah, this pregnant lady's still got it!" Haha! Then I hid from him the rest of the time I was in the store. :)

The End.

Who's a Slacker Now? (I Still Am Really!)

Here are some of the pictures I've been talking about posting in my last two posts. I finally got around to doing something tonight after work. Funny how I got around to it when Nathan isn't home. . . I even took a walk around the neighborhood!

These are for the Komen Race for the Cure. My work had a team this year for the second year in a row. We had a water station and many of us walked.

Graham, Nathan and me before the race

I ran into my cousins there. Carrie, me and Christa

Anthony and his crazy costume getting the water station ready with Katy

The thousands of people who walked

My two boys!

Over Father's Day weekend, we went camping at Klondike Park in St. Charles. It was ridiculously hot and the most I have sweated in . . . ever maybe! We lasted a full 24 hours before heading home. It was so miserably hot and humid that these are the only two pictures we took:

Graham all sweaty the minute we got there!

Me and Graham all sweaty after our hike

Last week, we went to the zoo with Nathan's parents, his sister, Chantel, his sister, Bethany and her boyfriend, Kendall, and some of the nieces and nephews. It was a nice day and a good time!

L-R
Elaina, Clayton, Lexie, Graham, Kalei, and Adelyn

Adelyn and Kendall

Baby bear

L-R and clockwise
Chantel, Kalei, Elaina, Graham, Clayton and Lexie


Graham

Hope you enjoyed the pictures.

Dawn

Cut This Slacker some Slack, Please

OK, so I never got around to posting pictures from the Komen Race, camping, etc. like I said I would. I still intend to do it sometime but I just have to get my lazy, gestating butt downstairs at some point to do it. Ever since we moved the computer down there, I am so bad about logging on. And most days when I come home from work, I park my pregnant booty on the couch and don't move unless it's dinnertime, I have to urinate or it's time to get ready for bed and move into the bedroom to commence sleepytime. I think this is the laziest I have even been in my life. I try to cut myslef some slack but I still feel guilty. I have been feeling pretty good the past couple of weeks - it's just that I'm tired and lethargic. Then this week hit and I've been even more exhausted. When I wake up, it feels like I never went to bed. And it's screwing with my appetite again because it's hard for me to find stuff that sounds good to eat or to have an appetite at the appropriate times of day.

Anyhow, enough complaining. I do have some updates. Nathan's carpal tunnel surgery went well last week. He's been doing pretty good with the healing. He went to physical therapy on Monday and they said his stitches looked good. It was too soon for them to actual work his hand but I think they may do that at his second appt. on Thursday. I just can't wait until he gets the stitches out next week (the 14th) so he can get it wet and we can go to the pool. Yes, it's all about me still somehow! :) He's been doing things with his left hand though as much as possible.

I had my 3rd Dr. appt. yesterday. It went well. The Dr. was able to find the heartbeat this time with just the listening ultrasound thingy. It took her a while but she did find it. She said my uterus has still not tilted back up but it should in the next couple of weeks and I should have a nice little pooch by my next visit on 8/5. She said since she was able to hear the heartbeat w/o seeing it, my miscarriage risk is greatly decreased. So that's good to hear. Nathan was with me so he got to hear Baby Meyer too. I almost wish Baby would have not cooperated though like last time so we would have had to do a regular ultrasound and Nathan could have seen him or her and not just heard the heartbeat. But regardless, it was cool to hear and I'm glad he was there to experience it with me. Other than that, we went over medical history and they drew some blood. Oh, and I lost 1 1/2 lbs. So I've only gained 2 lbs. so far in 12 weeks but I know it will start piling on! The difficult part is that I've gotten wider though and some of my pants and shirts don't fit well anymore. But since I'm not really showing (unless you really look), I feel silly wearing maternity clothes at this point. So I rotate a lot of the same outfits that still fit right now.

Graham started summer camp and that seems to be going well. He loves going and they do a lot of activities. They go swimming every Monday and last week they went to the zoo. His last baseball game was last week but I think he is playing fall ball and will start practicing for that any minute now. It's a new team for him and it's going to be a select team so it will be interesting to see the level of play compared to his old team. He's a good pitcher so I hope they can develop him in that position even more.

That's it for now I guess. I'm not promising to post any pictures soon but I will promise to think about it and feel guilty that I haven't!

Dawn