It's not official until it's on Facebook...

On the verge of 29 weeks of pregnancy and I'm feeling grateful for my health, the health of my family and friends, and for being safe on Christmas morning. There are so many messed up things happening in our country and around the world, and we are privileged to be fairly insulated from or ignorant of many of them. I don't want to spend much time on the computer today, but since Mark and I just went "Facebook public" I figured I should add a new post here just in case. If this is the first post you're reading on my blog, thanks for being interested in our journey. In short, I was diagnosed with cancer in January of 2013 and have been cancer-free since December 2013. We were able to conceive on our own this year, which is a miracle in itself and even more so considering that I've been through chemotherapy. Feel free to read on to see some steps along the way. May you be well!

25 weeks

Tomorrow, I will have been pregnant for 25 weeks. Everything has been going smoothly. I didn't have morning sickness at all. The first trimester I was definitely tired, and felt like I'd wake up in the morning wondering when I could take a nap. I stayed physically active during that time, which helped a lot. I've picked up two different colds at times. The first round lasted about 3 weeks, and the most recent time it went away after about three days. Thanks echinacea tincture!

At 20 weeks, we had our anatomical screening ultrasound, which showed that all the essential parts are present... cerebellum, palette, four-chambered heart, kidneys, etc. We're trying to keep the baby's gender a surprise and the technician was great about telling us when to look away so that we wouldn't accidentally find out. People ask us if we know the gender, and often when we say we're letting it be a surprise they follow up with their own prediction based on any number of wives' tales. Mark enjoys this more than I do. I feel very strongly that I don't want to know the gender or even think I know the gender, partially because of a Gender and Women's Studies class I took a while back. In the class we learned that people talk to and act differently with babies, even unborn ones, when they know (or think they know) the gender.