How big is baby?

Woohoo an onion!

How far along: 17 weeks 0 days

Maternity Clothes: Are wonderful! Finally feeling like I look more pregnant than fat, and loving it.

Stretch Marks: Still lathering on the belly butter, so we're looking good.

Sleep: is my friend, when I can find it...

Best Moment this Week: Making everyone laugh about my obsession with the game "Nerts", and beating everyone by over 100 points even in my "condition".... lol

Movement: No flutters yet!

Food Cravings: Grilled Cheese - I can't get enough of it!

Gender: September 22 is the big day!

Labor Signs: Thankfully, no.

Belly Button: Same as last week.

What I Miss: Crabs and Corn

What I'm Looking Forward to this Week: Having off work from Tuesday to Friday.

Weekly Wisdom: If your hormones get the best of you, the best thing you can do is smile and laugh when your husband says you're turning into "Pregatron"

How Big is Baby?

How far along: 16 weeks 0 days

Maternity Clothes: At a bit of an awkward phase right now where I just feel pudgy instead of baby-belly-ish. I've found that I feel more like it's a baby belly when I wear fitted shirts that aren't maternity, but the maternity jeans are still my best friend.

Stretch Marks: Still lathering on the belly butter, so we're looking good.

Sleep: Was a little better this week. No morning sickness since last Saturday, which has helped my energy levels go up.

Best Moment this Week: Dinner with friends!

Movement: Pretty sure I've been starting to feel hints of those first little "flutters".

Food Cravings: This week it was for Chicken Bryan, even though I haven't been able to eat chicken since before I got pregnant! So that's what I made for dinner when we had our friends over, and it was delish. I just had Bran and Jen clean/grill the chicken breasts for me so I could eat them :)

Gender: Only a few more weeks till we find out!

Labor Signs: Thankfully, no.

Belly Button: Same as last week.

What I Miss: Fall weather! We keep getting hints of it (like today - it's about 70 out and breezy and gorgeous), but then it will go away and get hot again.

What I'm Looking Forward to this Week: Doctor's appointment on Wednesday!

Weekly Wisdom: Keep benedryl in your purse at all times, because you never know when you'll go over to a friends house to play cards and remember when you get there that their cat had a litter of kittens a few weeks ago, filling the house with little kitties and their fur.

We love having people over!

For me, it is an excuse to cook something I've been craving, and for Bran, it's an excuse to hang out with friends! I like the friends part, too :)

So my craving this week was for some yummy Carrabba's-style Chicken Bryan (chicken with goats cheese, and a lemon-butter sun-dried tomato sauce... mmm!!). The funny thing about that is that since becoming pregnant, I haven't been able to eat chicken at all, but last week Jen gave me a bite of some bbq chicken she made, and it tasted sooo good. So I decided to risk not being able to eat it and give it a shot. We invited Joel and Celine over, and also invited Jen, Rach, and Ty to eat with us. It was so much fun! The sauce is tricky to make, and was perfect until I added the sun-dried tomatoes at the end. I think that because there is so much butter in the sauce, combined with the lemon juice and the olive oil the sun-drieds were in, things started to become more oily and less buttery toward the end. But everyone LOVED it! We decided to call it Chicken Ashley, since the sauce was just a bit different than Carrabba's... :) Next time I will definitely look for sun-dried tomatoes that aren't in olive oil, to keep the sauce thick and creamy.

And, since I promised my mom I would, we took some pictures so you could share in our little dining experience:

What?! A post in the middle of the week!

I have been so bad at blogging lately! For some inspiration, I jumped back and started reading some of the things I posted in January of this year - my life was so interesting then! I think that the exhaustion combined with all the changes we've been going through have just made blogging feel like a chore rather than fun. I'm determined to bring back the fun-ness, though.

I've decided that whether we have a boy or a girl, I want to paint the nursery something other than it's current blue. It's not a bad color (you can see it in the pictures to the right - we used it in our bedroom, and the kitchen), I just want something new and different. So my current thoughts are that if we have a boy, I want a really deep navy blue, like what they used here:


And if it's a girl, I have no idea what we'll do. I really don't like the color pink (maybe because I went so overboard with it in my bedroom when I was 16?), so I guess we'll just have to see.

Either way, I love this wall decal:



That's all the inspiration I have so far. I'm pretty set on painting the beautiful crib the Antkowiaks gave us white (it's just wood colored now), and looking for other white furniture for the room. I know it gets dirty, but I think it's so pretty. What do you think?

Something New

From now on, I'm going to include this little survey with all my "How big is baby" posts - Enjoy!

How far along: 15 weeks 0 days

Maternity Clothes: I'm loving them. Since my Tommy Jeans (the ones in the belly picture) don't fit comfortably anymore, I've been living in the ones my mom and mother-in-law bought me!

Stretch Marks: I've been moisturizing like a madwoman, so none yet.

Sleep: Has been difficult. I'm looking forward to having a bathroom upstairs so I won't have to go all the way downstairs in the middle of the night just to pee. Napping, however, is my best friend right now.

Best Moment this Week: Having iced tea with Jen at Sisters' Brew. I missed her a lot.

Movement: Jen laughed at me when I told her that every time I think I'm feeling something, it's just gas.

Food Cravings: DONUTS! but there is nowhere to get good ones within 200 miles of home....

Gender: Ok so this has been strange. Bran really thinks it's a boy, and wants a boy. Until recently, I had a feeling that it's a girl, but then today I realized that when I'm thinking about the baby as it is now, growing in my belly, I think of it as "she". But when I think of it after I have it, I keep thinking "boy!" We'll find out at the end of September!

Labor Signs: Thankfully, no.

Belly Button: A little different... kinda stretched.

What I Miss: My momma! I want to show her how cute I am in all my maternity clothes :)

What I'm Looking Forward to this Week: House dinner with the housemates tonight!

Weekly Wisdom: If your husband is anything like mine, then it is always better to wake him up and tell him that you don't know why, but you can't stop crying. Last night I was having a major hormone meltdown at midnight, and he was snoring away. I contemplated it, and then decided to wake him up. When he did, he tried to hep me figure out what was wrong (which really was nothing!) and then resorted to just tickling me and singing "She's rocking the baby gut" over and over. I couldn't help but laugh and feel better!



I just cleaned my bathroom mirror after seeing how dirty it was in this picture - gross!

In other news,

My sister, mother-in-law, and brother-in-law all get in on Tuesday and I'm so excited!

How Big is Baby?

14 Weeks today, and baby is the size of a...

Lemon!

How big is baby?

Woohoo! The size of a peach!

It is so strange to think that something that big is growing in my belly - and I can't even really tell yet! Bran swears I'm starting to show, and he has finally convinced me that I might be a little. I've been horrible at taking the weekly belly pictures I had planned on, so I'll have to start doing those now.

Pregnancy Milestone: SECOND TRIMESTER!

We made it! I'm finally in the second trimester, which is supposedly the best time in pregnancy. For me, it's been the worst so far, with lots of nausea. Hopefully things will calm down and I'll be feeling better soon.

It is about time I updated those of you who care on what's actually going on with the Antkowiaks, and not just how big baby Antkowiak is.

Of the summer projects we wanted to get done before everyone moves back into the house, we have competed exactly none. We've made progress on the bathroom, though it's at a standstill right now while we wait for some money to keep going. We haven't touched a bucket of paint, haven't hung any new curtains, and haven't really changed up any of our decorations.

We HAVE done quite a bit of things we weren't planning on. The biggest thing is our new patio in the front yard, which will be finished this Thursday. When the concrete is poured, I'll be sure and post some pictures. We also got all the things we need to build a retaining wall along our driveway to keep the dirt from making our driveway an icy, muddy mess this winter.

As far as inside the house goes, we moved our master bedroom into what we call the "green room". In my pictures to the right, it's now in the room where the couch was. Our old bedroom will soon be transformed into a nursery for the bambino/bambina.

Not much else has happened this summer... we've just been keeping busy with work. It will be nice to have our housemates back soon to mix things up a bit!