Growing Another Little Schulze!

That's right!  It's time for baby #2.  As I write this, I'm 14 weeks along and doing pretty well. You can scroll down to some earlier posts that I just put up to see some things I wrote early on but never put on the blog since we kept the secret til Christmas. 

Due date: July 23rd

Ultrasound:
Here's our ultrasound from 7 weeks.  It was very early so it's not much to look at.  But at least we knew baby was in the right place and developing along just fine to that point.  In the first pic, the baby is the oblong shape on the upper left of the dark spot in the middle.  The round shape next to baby is the yolk sack.

7 week ultrasound

Baby is the oblong shape in the dark spot on the upper left

Telling the family:
We held out until Christmas (10 weeks along) to tell most of our family. But I did have to tell my mom and sister a few weeks earlier to explain why I wasn't drinking or hitting the hot tub on our girls weekend in Gatlinburg. To share the news at Christmas, I inserted an ultrasound picture and a pic of Claire in a big sister shirt into photo calendars I make for our families.

My dad's reaction was awesome! Once he finally got to July he looked it for a second and then grinned big and jumped up and yelled "Holy sh$t! Get out of town! Get the hell out of here! No way!" and then got choked up. He said it was the best Christmas present ever!

Jeff's mom was the one looking through their calendar,  When she came to July, she looked for a minute, and then just gave me this look over the top of the calendar.  Apparently she had some suspicions, so her thoughts were confirmed as she wasn't totally surprised.  I told her to show it to the rest of the family and they were all very excited.

Later in the day I gave my grandfather his calendar. He looked at the picture of Claire and started thinking out loud. "Hmm, what's this? Big sister? Now, who would call her that?..." And then he turns me and says something like "Ok, so let me ask you some questions about what's going on here."

We also Skyped with Jeff's extended family in Chicago and let his grandmother know the big news that way.  I think this is great-grandchild number 8 for them!

How I've Been Feeling:
You can read the first few weeks in the earlier posts I wrote.  Since then I've been doing pretty well.  The morning sickness has been very mild compared to Claire and comes and goes.  No throwing up or even close to it.  Just some food aversions and having to think carefully about what sounds good.  I also have to make sure I'm eating often enough.

The mind-numbing fatigue stayed away until maybe 10 or 11 weeks.  But the past few weeks have been rough in that department.  I have days where I'm fine.  But some days I feel like I'm dragging all day and count the minutes until Claire goes to sleep for her nap so I can nap too.  Not a lot is getting done around the house since it's take a lot of energy and motivation for that.  I figure taking care of Claire and growing another human are pretty good accomplishments for the day.  If the house is an even worse mess than usual, oh well.  When Jeff is around, he's been very helpful.  He's let me sleep in a couple times and handled morning duty with Claire.  One day I just need to lay down for an hour after church.  I didn't nap but I was just tired and uncomfortable and needed to be horizontal for a while.  In that hour he fed Claire lunch, changed her poopy diaper, did the dishes that had been accumulating in the sink, and started a load of laundry.   All small things that really added up to a lot of gratitude from me.

All things considered, this pregnancy has been going very well.  Fingers crossed that it continues that way and things look good when we have our big ultrasound.  That should be some time in early March.  We will find out if we're having a boy or girl at that time.  Can't wait!