Updates

Three exciting updates to share:

1. I do not have gestational diabetes. Woohoo. I am, however, anemic. So lots of iron in the diet for the next three months.
2. We decided to go with Kaitlin Sheran for our pictures. She got a vote and was about half the price of the other people which was a win. We're doing the maternity shots the second weekend of August - should be interesting.
3. The boat's in the water! This past weekend Alex and I went out with our good friend Megan, who's now 4 days overdue. Send happy labor thoughts her way please :o)

28 week appt updates

For those of you keeping score at home, no big news from my appointment today. I'm still fine (weight and blood pressure look good), and baby's right on track. She was pretty crazy after all the sugar but when she finally kept still long enough for a heart rate measurement she was at 147 bpm, and fundal height is 28 (right where it should be this week). I'll know by early next week if I flunked glucose test or not...

28 week bump

I found my self with some extra time this morning while I let the glucose solution I had to chug run amok in my system, so I took a picture:

While not the most flattering snapshot, I think it proves without a doubt that I now look pregnant :o)  Think happy non-diabetic thoughts for me this morning - I'm off to my 28 week appointment.

Back to the Wedding

Just got pictures from Jean from the wedding a couple weeks back. Here's what I looked like at 25 weeks (and what some of my favorite Provans happened to look like the first week of June 2011):

27 week bump and outdoor nesting

According to all the books apparently I will eventually be overcome with the need to make our home a safe haven for baby girl Provan. Apparently my internal compass is off by a bit, because I have NO desire to clean the bathrooms, but OMG if I don't pull that weed from the flower bed RIGHT NOW I'm going to be  terrible parent. This started to manifest itself last weekend when Alex was away with an overhaul of the front flower beds.  A little new color combined with liberal use of the clippers resulted in something pretty nice if I do say so myself:

Of course when people come over we never sit in the front, we sit in the back yard (which was still a mess). So yesterday (at 27 wks 3 days) I decided to tackle the other half:

With some help from Alex we got quite a bit done and things are looking remarkably more tamed. However it is pouring rain here today so a picture will have to wait. We think it looks better but max was, as usual, unimpressed.

Overall the body's held up pretty well with all the weeding. The nerve pain that I was having has resolved itself (Thank Goodness!), and other back issues are pretty well at bay. Between the PT that I'm doing at home, lots of walking, yoga and reintroducing swimming into my routine, my body's doing alright. Let's keep our fingers crossed it will last!

P.S. Totally unrelated, but my sister is hilarious. She posts as Mama R on the following blog: http://t.co/D3GJAmY. Check it out

Photos...

Who knew there was such a HUGE difference in prices between photographers when it comes to maternity/newborn photography? Alex and I know that we want to have someone take some pictures and some point, but haven't really figured out how much we'd like to spend. To help us decide, I'm hoping you guys can be our impartial judges....

Here are four different people we're considering:
1) Blue Dandelion: http://site.bluedandelionphotography.com/
2) Kaitlin Sheran: http://www.kaitlinsheranphotography.com/#/maternity-and-newborn/
3) Anya Wait: http://www.anyawait.com/main.php
4) Andrea Paradowski: http://blog.andreaparadowski.com/category/newborn/

Please take a peak (photos only, not at pricing) and let us know what your favorites are using the poll on the side bar. It will be interesting to see if most expensive = most popular.

Thanks for playing!

If only this worked....

Dear baby girl provan,
Please stop headbutting my sciatic nerve.
Love, mom

Heat wave

So it's HOT in Madison this week. As in well over 90 hot. As least it means we can put second hand goods to good use.

Back in the winter I went to a second hand sale for used maternity and kid stuff, and picked up an inflatable baby bath that I thought was really cute for $4. However, when Rachel came to stay she informed me that I had actually purchased a death trap, so all plans for using it for baby went out the window.

Good thing we can still get our money's worth....

A wedding!

So this last weekend we got back in the car and heading to St Joseph Michigan for Alex's cousin Chris's wedding. This was the first time that we've had all the Provan cousins together since Becky's wedding (back in 2008), so it was definitely a treat. The location, day and wedding were all beautiful, and in my humble opinion so were the cousins:

I couldn't really title this one "week 24 bump" since due to my awesome dress you can't really see the bump, but Jean took some other pictures that may be more showing. I'll post them once I get my hands on them.

Hard to imagine that our wedding was the same weekend two years ago - my how things change :o)

Congratulations Chris and Kindra!

24 week bump and Door Co.

Yup - I'm a little behind on here. Buy my yoga instructor keeps telling us to enjoy what we get done and let go of the stuff that we don't, so I'm not going to worry about. Instead, I'll catch up :o)

Two weekends ago we drove up to Door Co to spend some time on the lake and visit with Alex's grandparents over memorial day. It was supposed to be a rainy nasty weekend, but the draw of getting to visit and spending the time relaxing rather then cleaning/nesting was enough to set us off on the 3 1/2 hour car ride up there. The good news that with lots of stops and stretching, the back held up fine and the trip was easy. We ended up having great weather, a wonderful time, and even got a little spiffed up for an early anniversary dinner at our favorite bar up there that happens to have a GREAT fish fry.

Okay so maybe Alex wasn't as excited about the getting spiffed up part...

Regardless, we still had a nice dinner and a great trip!