Our Second Shower!

A few weeks ago, Baby Girl Yasay had her second shower thrown by our family friends. Whoa - was it a festive occasion! There was a ginormous amount of food, tons of fun games, and Baby Girl Y was most definitely showered with lots of adorable baby goodies.

Here are some pictures to enjoy:

Blessing the food with the grandparents-to-be.

Just a sampling of the guests.

Picture with the proud lola-to-be.

A guessing game - exactly how many squares of toilet paper will it take to cover my Baby Belly?

Make a diaper out of toilet paper game.

Draw Baby Yasay without looking!

Taken after the guys had a drinking-out-of-the-bottle contest.

Justin wore the wrong shirt for this game....

Having a good 'ole time by everyone :-)

Newborn Care Classes

Justin and I admit to know very little about children under the age of 5, much less newborns freshly exposed to the world.

Being a person who likes to know exactly what I'm getting myself into, I have been doing nonstop research about pregnancy and babies since July. I've gotten tons of literature on the topics, subscribed to several magazines, and have done countless browsing on legit (and somewhat questionably legit) websites on the 'net.

That's just a sampling of the books I've been reading.

Anyway, in addition to all of this research, Justin and I attended two classes at two different local hospitals to fully ensure that we'll be prepared come March 9th. We attended a "What to Expect from a C-Section Delivery/Bringing Home the Baby" class at Baptist (which included a tour of the hospital where we'll be delivering!) as well as a Newborn Care class at Vanderbilt.

Let me tell you, I think we both left the classes- not feeling better about caring for our own newborn, but feeling even more overwhelmed by our lack of knowledge. I think Justin was especially worried when I tried to put a shirt on a baby doll and did it upside-down and backwards. Poor Justin is also pretty terrified of giving the baby a bath and made sure that we read the poster that was hanging on the wall several times so that it'll be ingrained in his memory. He's also a little more nervous than me (and I'm pretty terrified) about this whole breastfeeding thing - how it works exactly and what his job is supposed to be during the whole thing. Oh, and when he tried on the empathy belly he really was sympathetic to the cause!

Yikes. What in the world did we sign up for come March 9th?!?

C-Section Officially Scheduled!

We got a call from the doctor's office that our scheduled c-section is officially on the books for Wednesday, March 9th at 7:30 am!

The Good Doc is confident that we made the right decision based on my family history, the fact that my pelvis is also small, and my baby is not. She's also pretty confident that Baby Girl Yasay won't come any earlier than March 9th, so we're good to go!

I have to be at the hospital at 5:30am that day to get ready for the surgery. The Good Doc said that visitors (aside from Justin) won't be able to see me or the baby until around 11am or noon, but when I told my mom that she didn't have to come until then she informed me that she and my dad would be there waiting anyway. I suppose the grandparents are just as excited (or arguably more so) as we are about everything!

Being a planner, it's nice to know that everything's all set. I'm especially thrilled with Baby Girl's birthday: March 9, 2011 or 3-9-11...what a perfect tribute to Justin's mom who passed away over four years ago on 9-11.

All right, March 9th...we're waiting in eager anticipation for you!

Single Digits, Baby!

We're now counting the weeks in single digits! Since Baby Girl Y is scheduled to make her appearance via c-section on March 9th, that puts us at just under the 9 week countdown!

Are we ready? That's debatable. We've got the basic supplies (the furniture, the car seat, etc.), but the nursery's not yet decorated and her clothes and cloth diapers are still in need of being laundered. We don't have everything that we need, of course, but we're slowly but surely getting there!

Baby Yasette is definitely making her appearance known, though. My belly seems to have grown enormously over Christmas break, and believe me, it's not from over-holiday-indulging. She's also starting to kick hard enough that not only can I feel it, but anyone who's looking can actually SEE it...and, as Justin likes to say, she gets her suave dance moves from him. The worst, though, is that Baby Girl Y is starting to take her toll on my lower back and heating pads and tylenol or not quite cutting it anymore.

Oh, well....these 9 weeks will fly by, right?

Our Last Christmas....

Okay, it's not our "last" Christmas...but many people have said to us that it was. We've been told that Christmases will never be the same again after this one and that we need to relish in its quietness. And so we did.

We celebrated Christmas with my parents on Christmas Eve at our home. I made a delightful prime rib with tasty sides and a yummy caramel pecan pie for dessert. It turned out to be a snowy Christmas Eve, so we nixed our plans to go to Midnight Mass and my parents stayed the night watching movies and trying out our nursery. We woke up on Christmas morning, and I made the most delicious cinnamon rolls ever before going to Christmas Day Mass.

Justin had to work the holiday, 2pm to 10pm. Luckily the snow had stopped and the roads looked decent for his trek out to Hendersonville. I just relaxed at home, reading and preparing for Baby Girl Y. The weather started to become an issue again, and I (along with my parents, thanks to their countless phone calls to me warning me to warn Justin to be careful of black ice and be ready to just stay at a hotel, if need be) was getting worried hoping that Justin would make it home safe and sound that evening.

Luckily, he did - and even earlier than anticipated, thanks to the next pharmacist on duty being kind enough to relieve him early. And that was our Christmas.

It was only later that we learned that our Christmas very nearly could have turned out to truly be our last.

According to news and police reports (that we became aware of a few days later), an armed (with an AK-47 rifle) man was caught in the parking lot of Justin's pharmacy before he had the chance to go in the store to rob the place and get his methadone pain killers. Justin was the only pharmacist on duty at the time.

Here's a link to the actual story:

http://www.wkrn.com/Global/story.asp?S=13746477&config=H264

After we found out what happened, Justin and I counted our blessings and said our prayers that everything turned out the way that it did. I hate thinking about how differently things could have easily turned out. I thank God that this wasn't truly our last Christmas, and I can't wait for our next one...with a little 9-month old Baby Yasette crawling all over the place and getting into everything :-)

On that note, I'll end this post with a few fun Christmas related pictures, simply because I have nowhere else to put them. Enjoy!

We went to Opryland Hotel to check out the Christmas lights. Apparently I'm more pregnant than Mary was, and I still have 2 months to go!

My 28 week belly shot.

Cloth diapers galore!

After hours of research (thanks, Laura and Matt and Google!), Justin and I have decided that we are going to try our hand at cloth diapering. I'm a little (okay, a lot) nervous about it, but the diapers are so gosh-darn cute, that I'm also pretty excited about the concept of dressing Baby Girl Y in adorable little diapers! It almost makes me a little sad that she's just going to end up pooping in them...I mean, look at these:

Cute, right?

So pretty....

Anyway, I'm kind of proud of my ever-growing cloth diaper stash. We've got ourselves a nice mixture of sizes and types (who knew that there were so many diaper options out there?!?) to get us started, and it'll be interesting when we finally put all of our YouTube training (i.e. "how to put on a prefold" and "how to use a snappi" to name a few) to good use!

The beginnings of our cloth diaper collection, put on display on our new changing table/dresser!

Baby Shower Time!

My two bestest friends from high school were sweet enough to throw me a baby shower over Christmas break! We all had a grand 'ole time playing games that included throwing "poop" into "diapers" and testing out (mostly disgusting) baby food. We ate tasty treats and opened the cutest baby presents. Most importantly, we all enjoyed each other's company and are all anxiously awaiting the arrival of Baby Girl Yasay to enjoy her newly acquired goodies!

Baby food taste test.

As You can see, baby food is not so tasty!

Enjoying each other's company.

Tasty petit fours!

Poop throwing!

Grandma-to-be and me!