It's time for another one...

Another baby that is! Tommy is going to be a big brother in May! We are very excited and look forward to adding another sweet child to our family. I am just at 13 weeks; we had an ultrasound around 8 weeks and everything looked good and I had a belly check last week and the heartbeat was strong. I've been feeling much better than I did when I was pregnant with Tommy, thank the Lord! I do get a lot of headaches when I'm pregnant, but have discovered taking benadryl ASAP helps a lot.  Sometimes the benadryl doesn't quite get it though and my sweet husband rubs my shoulders to help. (Apparently tension headaches are super common for preggo women.)

Tommy has no clue I'm pregnant. He's a very intelligent little guy but that's just beyond his comprehension at this point. We did however use him to announce our pregnancy. We put a fake tattoo on his arm that said "Big Bro" and took a picture of him and sent it out in the mail to our family. Most people were a little suspicious when they saw they had mail from us, b/c we don't usually send out random mail.  It was a fun way to tell them though - on the front of the card it said "Tommy got his first tattoo!" then they opened it to find his picture and a message asking them not to tell anyone but call us when they got it. It was a long day waiting for people to check their mail but also pretty nice not having to make individual phone calls one right after the other. I remember making sooooo many calls when Kyle and I got engaged and when we were pregnant with Tommy - it's a lot of fun but a lot of work. So we took the lazy way out, we let Tommy tell everyone and calls excited calls trickled in through out the day. The first phone call was from my parents b/c Tommy had spent the night with them - the day after we put the tattoo on. Well I tried to get the tattoo off before he went over there but it was a pretty untemporary tatoo - I think he wore it for a good 3 weeks or so. (Side note - we learned rubbing alcohol takes temporary tattoos off nicely) Anyhow, my mom went to give Tommy a bath that morning and found the tatto. At first my parents were confused and then my mom said, "She's pregnant. Call Jill and ask her if she's pregnant!" So my mom and dad called - both on the phone at the same time. And I just laughed it off and said Tommy wanted a tatoo. Then I kept changing the subject - telling them how the dog and cat had both already thrown up that morning - and my mom kept saying, "Are you pregnant?" and my dad would chime in, "You're not answering the question." So finally I told them I was and they were very excited. One of the funniest things is that they thought our friends from church (Christina who I've mentioned in other posts and her husband) did it as a joke for halloween. Anyway it was a lot of fun.  Here's Tommy sporting his tough tattoo:

You would have thought the kid was getting a real tattoo with the fight he put up to hold his arm still for each letter to be blotted on. And once we were finished he pulled his arm back and rubbed the whole thing off, since it was still wet, on his high chair. But it turned out great - he didn't care about it at all once he was able to move his arm freely.

We are so excited and feel so blessed to be adding this new surprise addition to our family.  We weren't planning for this sweet little one but I'm glad that the Lord does things in His timing b/c I had no idea when I'd be ready for another baby. I think it will so much fun for the kids to be close in age and play together and hopefully be close and love each other very much!

I was a little afraid that I wouldn't be as excited this pregnancy, that I would worry that something would be wrong.  Whether it was DS or something else.  And to be honest I was worried in the very beginning, but more about having a miscarriage, not DS.  But I prayed specifically that the Lord would allow me to be excited and joyful and that I wouldn't worry about something being wrong.  And to be completely honest I'm not worried (at least not all right now) about this child having DS.  There is a higher chance once you have one child with DS to have another one, but here's the thing we know what a blessing any child is and that it's something we can handle (not on our own but with the Lord).  We won't be having any special tests done to check for DS, it did change my perspective on them though - I do see where people would choose to have them, not for abortion reasons, but to mentally and medically prepare.  There would definitely have been a perk to having done more research and talked to other moms who had been through it before b/c it's a lot to take in, especially in the hospital when you're having to schedule what seemed like a bajillion doctors appointments and you haven't even taken your child home yet.  But I did some research and Kyle and I talked about it and there's no guarantee with the tests - they can be wrong either way.  The test may say you aren't having a baby with DS and you really are, or that you are and you really aren't.  So I don't see the necessity in putting our emotions through something that may not be accurate. We will have a special ultrasound done on our baby's heart, we had one done with Tommy, b/c heart defects run in our family. They couldn't see any of Tommy's heart defects in utero though, so mainly major ones are apparent. Now if there was a major heart defect connected to DS that shows up in the ultrasound then Kyle and I might reevaluate and have one of the safer tests run, but we'll cross that bridge if we get there.

I do think Tommy will be a great big brother, I don't know if initially he will be but I know he'll grow into one and love this baby so much! My main concern with him right now is learning to be gentle. He likes to hit. We try correcting him, it really has no effect at this point but we're trying to be consistent but at the same time try different things to see if he responds more. But I think he'll be great at sharing his toys and us, he seems to like when we hold other kids as long as we stay close to him too. Oh we won't be finding out if we're having a boy or girl, we didn't with Tommy either. We don't even ask the heart rate at the doctor visits so there are no hints! Kyle thinks we're having a boy! I love that he even made a guess, with Tommy he made no guesses until like a week or two before we had him b/c we did know the heart rate then after being monitored many times b/c of my blood pressure. I'm due at the end of May 2012! We do not have names picked out and Kyle will not talk to me about names. He's not happy with me b/c we did have names picked out from way back when we were pregnant with Tom but those are both very popular names now and I don't like them as much. So he says I'll just change my mind by the end of the pregnancy if we pick out other names (not true...could be true...but probably not). Kyle's never had a love for talking baby names, so I understand his disappointment in me changing my mind, but I have always been a lover of talking about baby names so my fun continues. I have a girl choice picked out but no boy ideas - we want to use all family names if we can. Some day if we talk about and agree on names I'll let you know what they are.

My next doctor's appointment is mid-December and then we have an ultrasound in the beginning of January (where the sex of the baby will NOT be revealed).  And then two or three weeks later we'll have the special heart ultrasound done.

There will be plenty of updates on here. I kind of wish now that I would have blogged while I was pregnant with Tommy so I could go back and read what it was like at this point.

This is my mushy monday post by the way. What's mushier than having a sweet, little, snuggly, hopefully calm and happy and laid back and good sleeping and good eating, baby?!