Dude I felt Roo

Last night, Keira said Roo was acting up so I put my hand on her belly and felt Roo kicking! It was so awesome!

19 weeks

roo is a zucchini! babycenter.com has this to say:

"Your baby weighs about 8 1/2 ounces, and he measures 6 inches, head to bottom — about the length of a small zucchini. His arms and legs are in the right proportions to each other and the rest of his body now. His kidneys continue to make urine, and the hair on his scalp is sprouting. This is a crucial time for sensory development: Your baby's brain is designating specialized areas for smell, taste, hearing, vision, and touch. If your baby is a girl, she has an astonishing six million eggs in her ovaries. They'll dwindle to fewer than two million by the time she's born."

wow! getting bigger!! probably because roo likes ice cream. it really really likes ice cream.

Jeremy Column for 3/30

Basically gonna keep this one short and sweet. Moving sux! Very excited to move, but very painful literally and figuratively. We have an open house on Sunday. If anyone's in the neighborhood stop by and be sure to make a good offer. The baby is very wiggly, kind of like its dad :) I haven't been able to feel it move yet but I still think its pretty cool. When Keira told me Roo was moving, it really made me feel happy. With all the stress in our lives right now, just hearing that the baby was moving made me realize how amazing it is going to be to be a daddy. anywho, enough sappy crap. I'm gonna go drink some beer, get a tatoo, and plan a fishing/hunting weekend b/c I'm a man who shows no emotion :)

whirlwind boston trip

we're going to boston 4/13-4/15 in hopes of finding a new house! it will be a crazy weekend. flights were absurdly expensive so we're taking the train. we'll leave richmond at 6:00 p.m. on friday 4/13 and will arrive at south station in boston at 7:52 a.m. on saturday. hopefully we'll be able to hook up with a realtor saturday morning and afternoon to see some houses. we have tickets to the red sox game at 4 p.m. we hope to look at a ton more house on sunday before we catch our 9:45 p.m. train out of boston. we'll be back in richmond by 10 a.m. on monday and i will get to head straight into work. we'll be in boston in less than 38 hours! crazy!

moving hurts

less than a week until our house goes on the market. we're having an open house on sunday and we still have so much to do. we did get the POD full of boxes and extraneous furniture. the attic is virtually empty. the carpet cleaning company is coming tomorrow to suck the pet essence out of all the carpets in the house. hopefully the power washer will call us back tomorrow so we can schedule an appointment, otherwise jeremy and i will be buying a power washer at home depot and attempting to do it ourselves! oh. and we have to clean and declutter every room in this darn house by sunday. and paint the trim. and mow the lawn. and freshen up the landscaping. the list goes on and on. our current to-do list is 8 pages long (10 point font, single-spaced) and growing! jeremy is in pain because he has carried many large heavy boxes out to the POD. i'm in pain because i am pregnant and simply don't have the energy to do what i am doing right now. plus by the end of the day my feet are so freaking swollen. ouch! roo is definitely complicating this whole moving process, but we still love it anyway!

18 weeks

sweet potato! love it from babycenter.com :

"Head to bottom, your baby is approximately 5 1/2 inches long (about the length of a large sweet potato) and she weighs almost 7 ounces. She's busy flexing her arms and legs — movements that you'll likely start noticing more and more. Her blood vessels are visible through her thin skin and her ears are now in position and stand out from her head. Myelin (a protective covering) is beginning to form around her nerves, a process that will continue for a year after she's born. If you're having a girl, her uterus and Fallopian tubes are formed and in place. If your baby is a boy, his genitals are noticeable, though he may hide them from you during an ultrasound."

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roo is a wiggly little potato and a night owl like its mom. every night, roo is just rocking and rolling in there!

boxes, boxes, everywhere

we're on box overload here! last saturday i went to uhaul.com and ordered an obscene amount of boxes ($300 worth - ouch!) however, i never received a confirmation email from uhaul and when i logged into their site it said they had no record of my order. eek. especially considering the POD is being delivered tomorrow. we need to get stuff packed and into the POD before we have our open house on 4/1, so yesterday after work, i went down to the uhaul store. i bought $200 worth of boxes (which is a lot of boxes - we have a lot of stuff.) after artfully shoving them into the jetta i brought them home and started packing. today - what's on our doorstep? yup. the $300 worth of boxes i ordered last week. nice. fortunately, uhaul buys back any unused boxes. but who knows? maybe we'll need them all. we do have a ton of stuff to move. i fear we may need multiple PODs.

prep for our big move

forget selling the house, or buying a new one. jer and i need to work on our boston vocab :) wicked good guide to boston english i'm further up the learning curve thanks to my masshole upbringing, but i do need to brush up! it's funny to read some of the vocab words - things i thought everyone said (until i got to the south for college!) like "cellar" instead of "basement", or even worse "down cellar" as a noun. or like "grinder" instead of "hoagie" or "sub". "packie" instead of "liquor store"

17 weeks

more produce comparisons this week! roo is now a large onion! from babycenter.com :

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"Your baby weighs about 5 ounces now, and he's around 5 inches long — about the size of a large onion. He can move his joints, and his skeleton — until now rubbery cartilage — is starting to harden to bone. His sense of hearing is also developing. The umbilical cord, his lifeline to the placenta, is growing stronger and thicker."

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getting there! roo can hear! time to start teaching it to love wake forest, and hate duke and carolina! :)

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we had our third appointment this morning. roo's little heart is still beating like crazy. i still haven't gained any weight, but i'm not losing any more either so we seem to be stabilizing. next appointment is in 4 weeks (on friday the 13th!) and we will get our second ultrasound then. if we wanted we could find out if roo is a boy or a girl, but we're still opting to be surprised when roo is born.

i knew it!

first of all, congrats to jeremy!!! very well deserved!!! he's a harvard boy now!

and i totally called it! i had a dream about match day earlier this week and we ended up at mass general. i reaffirmed my bet as we were walking in to match day today. even more ironic, here's a picture taken on the MLK weekend trip to boston last year with john, suzanne, jenny, and nathan:

it's hard to tell, but that's me in front of mass general, crossing my fingers :)

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boston here we come!!

We're Going to Boston!

I matched at Mass General! We're all very excited!

I Matched

I matched! We won't know where until Thursday. I'll update the blog as soon as I can on Thursday!

Jeremy Post for Match Week

Hello. So the week is now upon us where we will find out where Roo will be born. To say I am full of anxiety would be an understatement. When I think about the day, I get almost crippling panic! I am really looking forward to knowing and having it behind us. Between the anticipation of Match Day and the VERY time intensive surgery rotation, I know I've been a little scatter brained. I'm not always cleaning up and forgetting to do little things here and there. I'm looking forward to not having these distractions so I can be a better husband for my pregnant wife! On a more exciting note, Keira thinks she has been feeling to baby move. I still can't believe it all and can't wait until the day I finally get to meet and hold little Roo. I'm sure Keira will be more than happy to let me hold Roo after holding him/her for 9 months! Oh well, got get back to panicking, studying, feeling guilty, working etc etc. Talk to you next week!

16 weeks

roo is 16 weeks. and apparently the size of an avocado (i really like comparing roo to fruits and vegetables!) more from babycenter.com :

"At 4 1/2 inches long (head to bottom) and 3 1/2 ounces, your baby is about the size of an avocado. In the next three weeks, she'll go through a tremendous growth spurt, though, doubling her weight and adding inches to her length. Her lower limbs are much more developed now. Her head is more erect than it has been, and her eyes have moved toward the front of her head. Your baby's ears are close to their final position, too. Some of her more advanced body systems are working, including her circulatory system and urinary tract. Her heart is now pumping about 25 quarts of blood each day, circulating her total blood volume through her body many times. (By the end of your pregnancy, this will increase to about 190 quarts.) The patterning of her scalp has begun, though her hair isn't recognizable yet. Although closed, her eyes are moving (slowly), and she's even started growing toenails."

toenails! how fun!

go deacs!

double OT baby! bring on the hokies!

woo hoo nc state!

yeah! down with duke! roo also likes basketball.

one week to go

we will know where roo will be born one week from now!!!

Jeremy Post for the Week of 3/4

Hello. Trying to keep with my goal of a weekly column. Well we are approaching the fourth month and I've yet to have a panic attack! I can't believe how fast things are going, it seems like last week Kiwi was peeing on a stick and now we can hear the baby's heartbeat! We are down to less than a week until we find out where Roo will be born. Very nervous and excited about that. I think I may be facing an uphill battle in my campaign for husband/father of year as I continue to cook foods that give Keira nausea. This week was Asian noodles from PF Changs. She didn't quite dig the aroma. I really should have known better, but i thought she was starting to feel better. I just can't live off of the tan food group :) My time and the hospital and time spent studying at home are also hurting my campaign. Finally, this week at school was the week of the butt. I had a perform a rectal exam, scrub in on a surgery for the removal of anal skin tags, and remove sutures and a tube from some dude's rectum. Medicine is not really a glamorous field, not really at all. Talk to everyone next week!

it never ends

every time i think the morning sickness is gone, bam! it's back. a couple of weeks ago i was gloating because i thought it was over, but alas i am being punished for that. the anti-nausea meds help with the random vomiting, like from seeing and/or touching tissues. but i still have not gotten my appetite back. i want to eat human food, i really do, but every time i try i pay for it later! spent a good bit of this morning hunched over the kitchen sink (couldn't even make it to the bathroom on time!) because the orange juice i drank just didn't sit well. so i had a sleeve of saltines for breakfast/lunch today. yum. i am trying really hard to get enough protein since the "tan" diet doesn't offer too much. i've had more milk in the past 3 weeks than i have had my entire life. i hate milk. but the pints of chocolate milk they sell in the cafeteria at work have 16 grams of protein each - nearly half of my daily goal. earlier this week, our foster beagle sunshine wasn't feeling good. she woke me up at 5:30 in the morning to take her outside. she's really insistent so i stumbled out of bed and took her outside. the other hounds followed us down a few minutes later so they went out too. it took 15 minutes before i could get them back in the house. sunshine was eating grass the whole time she was out there. thought maybe some water would help so i filled their bowl and flopped back in bed. minutes later, before i could even doze off, i heard the unmistakable sound of a beagle eating something they're not supposed to eat. i figured sunshine was eating tissues out of the trash so i tried to ignore it but a few minutes later i could tell she was eating something fabric. i found her downstairs in the dining room, where she had chewed a substantial hole in our dining room area rug. a very expensive (though i got a great bargain!) rug. grrrr. i yelled at her and tossed her in her crate. she knew i was pissed. then it got worse - i found three vomit puddles in the living room left by my darling sunshine. i have a hard time cleaning up vomit when i'm not preggers so this was a disaster. i had to run to the bathroom during and after each puddle to go throw up myself. lucky jeremy was already at the hospital for the day so he got to miss out on this whole adventure! my goal for this week to find some pants that fit! all the maternity pants i've bought need to go to the tailor to get hemmed so that's on my agenda. krissy also found some cute pants for shorties at gap.com so i need to check those out too! got a bunch of tops from oldnavy.com last week since they were having a big maternity sale - 25% off plus free shipping! i also need to start looking for a dress for this summer since i've got a couple of big events to attend - jeremy's graduation and the chris/katie nuptials! :)

expectant motherhood on... caffeine and alcohol

oh how i wish... darn scientific progress... "Tea and coffee may be drunk as usual provided the former is not found constipating or the latter sleep-disturbing. Small amounts of alcohol, let us say a cocktail now and then or a glass of wine, are harmless, but may prove a nuisance in aggravating frequency of urination." i don't know how i am living without my 8-10 daily servings of diet coke. caffeine-free just isn't cutting it! and damn could i go for a margarita! :)