17 weeks, 4 days

My mom, sister and I went to the Minnesota State Fair today, and I thought it was only appropriate that I have a pronto pup in my belly pic this week!

In the last week, I definitely feel as if my belly has gotten bigger and is hardening a lot. I notice it more when I'm sleeping, and sadly, I think my full-on tummy sleeping days are over! At the fair today, I was wishing I had this tank top to wear, as I feel a bit conspicuous, although I don't think any stranger would ever come out and ask me if I'm pregnant just yet.

I am still feeling good. I had an appointment with the midwife on Wednesday, and all went well - we heard the heartbeat again, I got weighed (I'm up approximately 8 pounds from pre-pregnancy), and my blood pressure is low. There was actually a young male student observing my appointment, and I could tell he was a newbie. He started out trying to find the heartbeat way over to the side, and the midwife just said "Umm, actually I'd try right in the middle" and low and behold, there it was ;) The student then said "huh, lucky guess!"

I'm not feeling any distinct movement yet, but hopefully it will happen soon. Supposedly any time after 16 weeks is normal, but my midwife said that many first time moms don't feel anything until closer to 20 weeks. Sometimes I think I MIGHT be feeling something, but it also could be gas or digestion :)

Also, as an update, I'm still doing good on not going to any message boards!

Arugula Pesto Pasta with Tomatoes

We haven't been doing a ton of cooking in the past few weeks due to an over-active social calendar. We've actually been out to eat several times in the past week, so our We Got Served blog will finally be back to regular posting (as soon as I can get Ben to write his reviews...)!

I did make this very quick and easy dish last week - arugula pesto with pasta and sungold tomatoes. It was really good, and only took about 20 minutes to make - perfect!

The pesto recipe was loosely based off this recipe on Simply Recipes, except I forgot garlic and used sunflower oil instead of olive. I just tossed this with fettuccine and some halved sungold tomatoes, topped with parmesan, and done! Great for a weeknight meal.

In case anyone is curious as to how we used the rest of our box, the tomatillos and jalapenos went toward making the salsa verde recipe on this newsletter - I didn't try that but Ben reported that it was quite tasty. The eggplant and squash turned into deep dish summer cobbler just a few days ago - if you haven't seen that recipe, go check it out! It's so good. Cucumber and carrots were brought with me to work to munch on as one of my frequent snacks. We still have those damn purple beans (we never seem to want to eat those) and cabbage, but that's pretty good!

16 weeks (and 4 days)

I took a delightful walk around Lake Harriet with Kate yesterday, so I decided to change up the scenery for my belly pic o the week. It kind of looks like the bandstand is a hat in this photo :)

This week again has been uneventful in terms of pregnancy. My pants are starting to fit tighter, but I can still wear most of my jeans. It was when I tried to find some shorts/capris to wear on my walk that it became evident that my abdomen IS in fact getting bigger... in the photo above I am sporting the bella band. I'm still able to sleep on my stomach, which is great. My midwife told me that I can sleep however is comfortable for me, and that it will be uncomfortable long before it would hurt the baby. It's starting to get where there's some pressure I notice, but I'm ususally half on my side, half on my stomach which works just fine so far. I will sleep on my stomach until I absolutely can't anymore, and I might shed a few tears on the day when it becomes impossible.

I had some issues with sleeping and having headaches this week - kind of a vicious cycle where I'd get a worse headache the less I slept, but the worse the headache, the harder it was for me to fall asleep. Annoying. Finally on Thursday night I got a good night of sleep and miraculously the headache was gone :) Other than that, I've felt great! So great that I can forget I'm pregnant. I even had a dream the other night that I totally forgot I was pregnant and started doing tequila shots. When I was good and drunk from all that tequila I freaked out when I remembered that - oh crap! I'm pregnant and not supposed to be doing shots of tequila!!! :) (I don't even do tequila shots when not pregnant, by the way...)

I was discussing with Kate yesterday how stupid I used to think all of the "rules" were when it came to pregnancy - no deli meat? I remember the first time I heard my coworker Leigh say that and thought, no WAY would I ever abide by that stupid rule. Then I got pregnant, and it was like this protective switch was flipped. Good thing, I guess. Now I follow almost all of the rules... I haven't had unheated deli meat, I (mostly) avoid soft cheeses where I'm not sure if they are pasteurized, I limit my caffeine intake (I still have one drink a day though, which some people seem to think is nutty), I haven't had any alcohol... etc. I did read once (on a message board) that softserve ice cream (like from Dairy Queen) also carries a risk of listeria. I decided to just ignore that one :) I figure if it wasn't on the very extensive list my midwife gave me, it's just not true.

Speaking of message boards, I am proud to say that for the past WEEK, I have avoided going to ANY pregnancy message boards. I used to frequent one in particular, the bump, and while 98% of the posts were entertaining and helpful, the 2% that were horror stories just started getting to me. When we were at the cabin last weekend, Ben noticed that I was much more positive about the pregnancy and not as paranoid. When we got back home and to the internet, I logged onto the message board and the first 2 posts I saw were about stillbirths and finding severe abnormalities at the 20 week ultrasound. While I obviously know these things are possibilities, reading about them frequently just doesn't help my state of mind! I decided to quit cold turkey, and I've been feeling better ever since.

Box #5 and Carrot Cake

I have been slacking about posting our CSA boxes lately... we got this one a week and a half ago already!

In this box:
Arugula
Carrots
Cucumbers
Edamame
Eggplant
Garlic
Jalapenos
Purple Beans
Sweet Peppers
Red Cabbage
Red Onion
Sweet Corn
Tomatillos
Tomatoes

I was so excited to finally start getting tomatoes! Right after getting this box, we headed up to my parents' cabin and brought most of our veggies with us. We had the sweet corn with dinner one night, which was quite good. I'm not a huge corn on the cob fan, but oh well.

As I have mentioned before, carrots are not my favorite vegetable. I always struggle with thinking of how to use them up and haven't really come up with anything good, except carrot cake! My mom wanted to try a carrot cake with pineapple and coconut, so I found this recipe, which my mom mostly made while I watched :) I made some cream cheese frosting flavored with a bit of the pineapple juice - it was quite good! I even had to go old school and make the frosting without a mixer. It still seemed to work just fine :)

I loved these tiny little butters

Celebrating Diane's nuptials

My good friend Diane moved to Korea over 3 years ago, and returned just a few weeks ago after getting married! Unfortunately, her husband is still in Korea for a few more months tying up loose ends before meeting her out in Cambridge where she will be working on her Masters in Architecture at Harvard. Before she left, my friends and I wanted to have a little party to celebrate her marriage, since none of us were able to go out to Korea for the wedding.

I teamed up with Erin, one of my other high school friends who fled MN for the east coast, to plan this gathering. When I first suggested a list of appetizers, she kindly pointed out that every single one was dairy heavy, and she has the unfortunate problem of being lactose intolerant. I can't even imagine the horror. We altered the menu slightly to account for that, but most of what I made was still filled with cheese and cream, as usual!

Here are the appetizers/desserts that I prepared (you will notice a theme of which blog almost all of these came from!):

Preparing the strawberries


Oreo Cupcakes from Annie's Eats


Roasted Red Pepper Pesto Crostini (made previously) from Annie's Eats


Blackberry Champagne Cocktails from Annie's Eats (don't worry, I made mine with ginger ale)


Cheesecake Bites from....... Annie's Eats again!


The whole spread!

We also had lactose free black bean roll ups, hummus, pita and veggies, fruit salad, chicken satay with peanut sauce, and I also made spinach artichoke dip (recipe can be found in this post). Way too much food for 9 people, but oh well!

It had been too long since we were all together - it was a great night! Congrats to Diane and I hope you are having fun with the smart people at Harvard ;) (if you ever read this - highly doubtful)

I have taken a picture like this at almost every bachelorette party/bridal shower I've hosted - this might be the last one for awhile!

Ratatouille!

A few Fridays ago, our good friends Alex and Sonja came over for dinner, all the way from Indianapolis :) They often prepare elaborate feasts with their friends out there, as shown here and here, so I was feeling a little intimidated! I decided to make something that LOOKED difficult, but really wasn't :) AND something that is an item off my list - perfect! Ratatouille was a great idea given that Alex and Sonja are not to keen on meat, and it used a lot of seasonal veggies, some from our CSA.

Slightly more squash than needed, oh well.

I really thought this would take longer than it did, but with my mandoline, it was a breeze. Thanks again to my in-laws for that fabulous birthday present last year :) We served it with quinoa, and as Deb from Smitten Kitchen recommended, with some goat cheese (none for me - gross).

This was delicious and I'd highly recommend it, especially while watching the movie :) Also, in case anyone is curious - I made this one ALL by myself :)

15 weeks (and 4 days)

As a warning, I probably will do a post every week about my pregnancy. Feel free to skip these if it isn't your thing :)

Photo credit: my sister.
I am 15 weeks, 3 days in this picture.

Well, let's hope that SOME of that bump is baby, and it's not all due to the fact that I am ravenously hungry pretty much all the time. I usually can't actually consume a lot of food at once, but boy am I ALWAYS hungry! I need to find some new snacks that are marginally healthy and will fill me up. I'm getting kind of sick of granola bars.

This is kind of an uneventful part of pregnancy, which is just fine with me. I'm in the middle of my 4 weeks between doctor appointments, where sometimes I let my anxiety get the best of me, but usually I can almost forget about being pregnant. Except when I had an unfortunate run-in with the barf bag I have stowed in my purse on the way to work earlier this week... other than that, my "morning" sickness is pretty much gone.

I'm not REALLY showing yet in the loose fitting clothing I normally wear, so I don't look pregnant, and can't feel any movement yet either. So yeah.... pretty boring. But hey, I'll take boring over feeling ill all the time or having problems obviously!

We haven't started actually preparing for the reality of having a child yet in any way, other than looking at day cares in our area. We have visited one that we liked a lot that is 4 blocks away from our house and very affordable, so if all goes well when we go again this week to observe with kids there, I think we will go with it! Having attended 8 day cares as a child, I consider myself something of an expert :) It will be nice to have that figured out, but then I guess at some point we should start looking into everything else...

More food (that I didn't cook)

Ok, it's confession time. Pretty much all the food you've seen on this blog since June has been cooked by Ben :) Once and awhile, I was feeling ok enough to help, but that's about it! I usually would do the meal planning, and then when it came down to it, he'd do the cooking... and usually the cleaning too :) What a guy!

I still want to share some great food we've had though, even if I technically didn't prepare the meals :) The first two used something from our CSA box, the last one was to help our baby become real smart with all the omega 3s :)

Broccoli Slaw from Smitten Kitchen


Creamy Rainbow Chard Pasta (again found on the Cheap Healthy Good compilation of greens recipes)


Salmon with Avocado Remoulade from Simply Recipes (with green beans from the CSA!)

On another note, I wore my first maternity shirt today. It's one of the strechy ones, so it really didn't look maternity at all, just very long and a little baggy in the middle. I'm 15 weeks today, so maybe I'll take a photo of myself in it today, and again at 30 weeks to see the difference :) Ben was commenting last night that it is pretty crazy to think that I've barely gotten bigger at all so far, but in the next 15 weeks I'll probably get huge... crazy!

Pregnant!

Well, my blog has been quite boring for a long time now - and the REAL reason for that is that I'm pregnant! Phew, it felt good to get that out :) I'm copying Kristal at Good Food, Good Friends, Good Life on the questions I'm answering in this post, as they are pretty much the same ones I've gotten. So here are all the details (that I am willing to share at least! :)

Warning - this post may be slightly TMI to some, but hey - I'm an open book. So whatever.

Due date?/How far along?
I am due February 3rd, and as of today am 14 weeks and 5 days pregnant.

When did you find out?

May 24 - day before Memorial Day, day after the 1st Pedal Pub :) I planned to take a test that day if my period didn't come... so I went downstairs fairly early to go to the bathroom - nothing yet, so I decided to take a test since my cycles were every 26 days like clockwork. It was a VERY faint line, so I had to get a 2nd opinion ......

How did you tell Ben?

...... so I went upstairs and woke Ben up from his hungover stupor and said "hey, is this a line?" and he was like "no, definitely not" and I said "I think it might be - what else would that be? it says on the box that a line is a line...." and he just said "well, obviously we'll just have to get a digital since neither of us are going to trust this one" So then later in the morning after he got up for real, I had to pee again so I said "hey, I have to pee - maybe you should go to CVS and get me a digital test" and like a good husband, he did - I took it, and we both watched "Pregnant" come up (after what felt like a long wait of watching that stupid hourglass)

The first questionable test (taken later, so a line had shown up that wasn't there initially), and the 2nd definitive test

Was it planned?
Come on now - what in my life isn't? It was a little surprising (to me at least - not to Ben) that it happened so quickly. I feel VERY lucky for that, especially since I have heard many heartbreaking stories of couples dealing with infertility.

When did you tell your family?
At first Ben and I talked about waiting until after our first appointment/ultrasound at 8 weeks - well, that lasted about a day until I first told my sister, and then my parents - I just called them to tell them. I was (am?) really nervous because many people close to me have recently had miscarriages so I didn't want to get too excited just yet. My parents didn't believe me at first, but are both very excited - especially my dad, who has been letting us know that he'd like a grandchild for quite some time :)

We told Ben's family at Pedal Pub Part 2 because they would have asked me immediately if I didn't drink... again we got a few "are you kidding??" responses and then everyone was excited - it will be the first grandchild on that side too!

First ultrasound, 8 weeks - looking like a nice gummi bear

When did you tell friends?
I told a few close friends pretty early - about 6 weeks. I had a breakdown one day because I had no one to talk to about anything, and decided that it would be ok (and wouldn't "jinx" anything) if I told a few people. We ended up telling probably 6 or so of our close friends right around 7 weeks, before our ultrasound. After that I pretty much told people as I saw them, with the last group FINALLY being told just yesterday! :) I found that it was just much more fun telling people in person - there were a few I told on the phone because I couldn't wait to see them :) and then there was ONE (KATE) who found out by finding a post by me on a message board :) and then was scared to tell me she knew for a whole WEEK!

What were some good reactions?
Everyone has been really happy for us - we are among the first of most groups of friends to get pregnant so people are excited. Some were a little shocked, some got a little teary, some screamed :)

Will you find out the sex?
Yes. Ben doesn't want to, I do. As usual, I won that battle. My reasons are really that I honestly don't see the point in waiting. I feel it will help us to bond with the baby more before it is born (and stop us from having to refer to "it" or "the baby" which is just annoying) and I don't think it will be "fun" to find out after however many long and horrifying hours in labor. There are only 2 options here, so it really doesn't even seem like that big of a "surprise". Plus, I hate surprises. I read the end of books, and read all the episode descriptions of TV shows that I'm starting. Ben just thinks it would be cool to wait. As a slightly compromise, we are going to have the ultrasound tech put the sex on a piece of paper in an envelope so that we can then go somewhere and find out alone instead of while I'm on my back at the doctors office.

Do you have a preference for boy or girl?
Not at all - I thought I would prefer a girl, but after these first few months of just being worried about staying pregnant, ALL I care about is finding out this kid has all it's parts in working order.

Do you have names picked out?

We have a boy name chosen, and are still working on a girl name... we have 3 options that we both really like a lot.

How are you feeling?
It's been a rough few months, that's for sure. My morning (all day) sickness started at exactly 6 weeks and has been waning slightly but is still there, 8 weeks later. For me, it is worst when I'm hungry - I get very nauseous. I haven't actually thrown up too much - one night it was hourly, but other than that it's just been randomly here and there after a few meals that didn't agree with me. Feeling like this has been a little depressing, and to the point where I wonder if I'll ever feel normal again. I've also been getting bad headaches (nothing new - I got those pre-pregnancy) and am only allowed to take the completely ineffective tylenol for those. My energy level is at a low I didn't think existed. So yeah - it hasn't been a glowing time for me, but I can only hope it'll eventually get better. My symptoms do reassure me that everything is going ok in the ole uterus, so that's good I guess!

Any weird cravings or aversions?

No real strong cravings - I have been wanting carbs a lot though. Any kind of pasta sits well with the tummy, and I'm loving bagels and cream cheese. One of the most devastating moments of my pregnancy thus far was the day I discovered that I had missed 2 weeks of our "bagel Fridays" at work. We get free Brueggers Bagels and cream cheese every Friday and SOMEHOW I had forgotten about it. I made an outlook reminder now, so all is well with the world :) I realize this means that my pregnancy has been a-ok if this was one of the worst things that happened :)

How are you decorating the nursery/where will it be?
We will be keeping it gender neutral no matter what the sex is, so that we can reuse things with the next kid. I haven't even started thinking about decor yet. We'll probably have the baby upstairs in our bedroom for quite awhile, since the idea of coming down for feedings during the night does not sound appealing to me. As a reminder, we have a 1.5 story, our bedroom is upstairs and the other 2 are downstairs. But since we remodeled, our bedroom is huge and can easily fit some baby stuff, so that will be nice! We haven't decided yet if we'll use the office (the stairs to our room are in the corner of our office) or the guest bedroom for the nursery. On one hand, it'd be nice to have the baby right at the bottom of the stairs, but on the other, if (like me) they are not a sound sleeper, I wouldn't want to wake them up when we went upstairs to go to bed...

Are you showing yet?
Well, you tell me - here are the pics I've taken thus far. There are a few where I thought I was - but I'm pretty sure that was just being bloated combined with the fact that my torso seems to be weirdly curved. I'm not going to pretend I had a perfectly flat stomach pre-pregnancy - not working out for the past year+ will do that to you :) I am still not wearing any maternity clothes yet, but I have had to wear the Bella Band (thanks to Leigh, Jamie and Kelley for that lovely present!) once due to wearing jeans that just came out of the dryer :)

The day I took the test (like 3 weeks pregnant), and then 9 weeks


10 weeks, 11 weeks


12 weeks, 13 weeks


and finally, 14 weeks - I didn't want to show my face due to wearing my glasses and not wearing makeup :) Ben said something like "I definitely think your belly is looking big today"

That pretty much sums it up :) If anyone has any other questions, feel free to leave a comment!

Chicken, Arugula, and Wild Rice Salad with Sauteed Apples

I am having 9 lovely ladies over to my house this evening, and right now I should be cleaning or finishing up making all of the treats for that event, but instead I am procrastinating. My chair on the porch is just too comfortable to get out of right now!

When we get our CSA box, I try to figure out how to use things that will go bad first, and save the stuff that is more hearty and long lasting. Arugula is one thing that will go bad in a few days, so that was the first thing I wanted to make sure to use! If you are ever looking for a recipe that features any kind of greens, look no further than this helpful compilation on Cheap Healthy Good - it contains 246 different recipes for pretty much any kind of green you can think of, and has helped us find recipes many times already!

I found a few arugula recipes that looked intruiging, but finally decided on a Chicken, Arugula, and Wild Rice salad with sauteed apples because it looked different than other things we've had before. As a nice bonus, we also got to use some of the sunflower oil that we got from Driftless Organics in our last box!

Ben and I were both pleasantly surprised by this salad - it was delicious! I always love any salad with fruit and gorganzola, so I wasn't that shocked to enjoy it so much. I do wish we had cut up the apples more into bite size pieces, but oh well.

Box #4 and Pasta with Kale and Chickpeas

At some point last week before getting our box on Thursday, we had some kale we needed to use up. Ben found this easy recipe for pasta with kale and chickpeas. Give me pasta in a cream sauce any day of the week, and I'm happy as can be :) This was surprisingly delicious and quite easy to prepare! I thought it would be really bland, but it had a bit of kick from the red pepper flakes.

On Thursday, we picked up the box from Driftless Organics - again, filled to the brim with goodness.

In this box:
Arugula
Broccoli
Cauliflower
Cippolini Onions
Cucumbers
Garlic
Green Beans
Green Savoy Cabbage
Greentop Carrots
Iceberg Lettuce
Italian Parsley
Rainbow Chard
Yellow Summer Squash

While I was excited about this box, it's pretty close to what we got in our last box. I'm ready for TOMATOES! Soon, hopefully.....

Finishing up Box #3

So that I can catch up, here is how we finished Box #3 from Driftless Organics!

First, we made pickles from the dill, pickling cukes and regular cucumbers with the recipe on our newsletter - I just had a few yesterday and they were awesome! I'm not even a big pickle fan but the times we've made them ourselves have been delicious.

We then again made Disappearing Zucchini Orzo, but this time we used summer squash and also added some kale that we had lying around. This was good, but I think we used too much orzo this time - oops!

To use the cauliflower, we made Garlicky Soba Noodles with Roasted Cauliflower, which was delicious! I really liked this meal, and it seemed pretty easy to prepare.

Finally, to finish off the box (well, almost, we still have the beets), Ben used the cabbage, the rest of the cauliflower and some green beans in a stir fry that I didn't eat. He liked it and it seemed to be one of his favorite ways of using cabbage thus far!

Chicken dinner!

A few weeks ago (I'm behind... ugh) Ben and I decided we wanted to try to make a whole chicken again, this time in the crockpot. I found this great looking recipe for 40 clove chicken (which is on the list, but I still want to try again) in the crockpot that looked perfect!

We had all red potatoes and broccoli from the CSA so we had a nice "normal" meat and 2 veg meal on that Sunday eve.

The only lengthy part of the process was peeling all the garlic cloves - after that it was all fine. We used a lot of the cooked garlic in the potatoes too, which was tasty. The all red potatoes were a BIT freaky, as it basically looked like red slop, but they still tasted exactly the same as "normal" potatoes :)

The chicken was great! It was perfectly done, and the leftovers worked great for this delicious chicken salad :) I unfortunately didn't get a pic of it, but it was pretty much the best part about the chicken!