Skipping ahead

Why is it so hard for me to blog?  Maybe because I feel as though I don’t have anything of importance to say or that this blog is more like a diary and not really going in any sort of direction.  I really wanted to focus on me as a runner and how I fit in healthy eating and running to stay skinny while working full time and having a family.  I feel like my focus has completely gotten away from me because I’m pregnant and could barely walk a mile for quite a few weeks let alone actually run.  So here we are at 19 weeks and some change.  I’m starting to get to that point in pregnancy where I just feel chubby.  I don’t feel cute, I am squeezing myself into my pants, and I am having a tough time with exercise.  I’m trying very very hard to do something everyday.  I was very good over the Thanksgiving break.  Luckily my in-laws have a treadmill so I was able to run the whole time we were in Kansas City.  It felt great to be able to run about 4-5 miles each day.  When I don’t have complete control over what I’m going to eat that day (eh-hem vacation and holidays) I do like to be fairly active.  I was so grateful that I actually got to be active and eat pretty well over the holidays (although I rarely go overboard anyways).  I didn’t get to exercise on Sunday and actually welcomed the break.  Monday I was back out running and was able to get in a good 4 mile run and a 2 mile walk that day.  Yesterday I just wasn’t feeling it at all.  Thank goodness I’m able to eat healthy foods again because on the days I just can’t bare to workout I at least can eat salads.  I met my husband for lunch yesterday at a salad place downtown.  This place serves my kind of salad!  I got what I always do-salad with tons of veggies and tofu and then of course was starving by about 2:45pm.  I grabbed from several handfuls of dry cereal and then proceeded to get horrid heartburn which sort of ruined my dinner for a while.  For dinner I made quinoa and roasted vegetables-beets, brussles sprouts, sweet potato, red onion and cauliflower.  yum yum yum.  I wish it would have been a bit wetter but today I ate it with hummus and that was a winning combo.  I was able to get in a 4 mile walk with the pup last night so that also helped make me feel a little bit better about the exercise thing.  Today I’m sitting here blogging rather than going for a run.  I ate my lunch at 10:45am today so I’m patiently sitting here waiting for digestion to be complete.  My original thought was to run to the gym, get a good weights workout in, and run back.  But now I’m thinking maybe all running today-maybe 5 miles.  We’ll see.  I want to do something though.  I’m forcing myself today.  Tomorrow the snow is supposed to come in so I can do a gym workout tomorrow but while the weather is in the 60s and the roads are clear I might as well get my run on.

I wish I had a picture this week.  I look extremely chubby.  I’ll share one of last week where I look like a complete cow:

Thanks for capturing this one husband!  I think I may need to let up on the water drinking as clearly it’s making me extra bloated.  Here is another photo where I’m in the background.  I felt better about myself after seeing this one:

This was our Thanksgiving table set and ready to roll.  I do like the profile shot of me walking there.  Few.  I thought I had gained about 70lbs over night with that first photo.  Anyways, I’ll ask my husband to take a 19 week shot for the next post.  I like to pretend like there has been progress.  I do feel like I’m getting bigger in the tummy region.  Right now the baby is a 6 inch sub!  Since I’ve been eating a lot of subway sandwiches lately, I know exactly what that looks like.  I’m feeling little tiny kicks now which just make my heart melt every time I feel them.  I love having the reminder that baby is alive in there.  Because I have a tendency to worry, I don’t like that long stretches of not feeling anything.  Some days I feel like baby will never stop!  Others, like yesterday, I was questions if he/she was still in there.

Another revelation we’ve had.  My husband is positive the baby is a girl.  I was thinking it was a girl up until a few days ago.  Now I know it’s a boy.  We are having our 20 week ultrasound next Friday so if we really wanted to, we could find out.  We have agreed not to find out but I will be studying those parts like no one’s business I assure you.  I know what I’m looking for and I know what I’m going to see.  You are going down husband.  Luckily this is a fun game.  We have a bet going right now which is our little secret.

(Chad made this!  As you can tell, we both have written on it with our perspective gender chalk colors.)

17 week update

When did I stop blogging?  Anyways, I have been making my husband take photos of our progress with the little bump and last week was my 17 week photo

I keep asking baby if he/she is growing!  I’m still in my regular clothes.  I just feel fat.  I know I’m not and shouldn’t complain but from where I started I am gathering more girth around my stomach area.  I hate feeling the fat pile up around my waist without much sign of a baby.  I can’t wait to get out of the “fat” stage and into the pregnant stage.  Last Monday I did not feel well at all.  It was a pretty uneventful night.  I came home and was just in a bad mood.  I didn’t feel well and I just wanted to cry.  I think I was in bed around 9pm that night.  The next night was even worse.  While I did feel better, my husband wasn’t in the best of moods.  We did have an excellent veggie rich meal.  We had sweet potatoe chilli with no mean and tons of veggies and beans.  I should make that every week.  I hadn’t exercised since Sunday so I think that contributed a bit to the way I was feeling on Tuesday.  I think Chad was in bed by about 8:30 that night just reading.  Well one thing led to another and I swear, you can say anything to me right now without me just breaking down and crying.  I don’t really know what led to my outburst but I cried uncontrollably for about 30 minutes.  While I was crying I felt, sad, alone, desperate, sick, not myself, gross, fat, ugly, and any other emotion that is negative.  But I’d say I felt mostly alone.  Throughout this pregnancy I have felt alone.  I don’t really know anyone going through this with me right now.  It’s not been easy.  It does help to talk to other women who have been through pregnancy but I do find that people sugar coat a lot of things which I hate.  Please be honest with me.  This is how I feel better.  I like when people vent.  It makes me know they are real and also makes me feel closer to them knowing that I’m not alone and that I’m not the only pregnant person who has ever felt this way.  I can’t stand when women say “I just loved being pregnant!”  It makes me feel really bad about myself and hate myself for not loving this experience.  I am not sure what world these woman are living on!  Maybe feeling nauseous and tired and run down and fat is great for some but for me who is athletic, active, energetic, and feels great about the way I looked pre-pregnancy, this is not a walk in the park or anything even close to wonderful.  So as I was thinking about all of this stuff on Tuesday through tears, I decided something needed to change in order for me to start at least being able to live with this pregnancy.

Wednesday I woke up and decided I was going to attempt to run again.  I gave up running after coming home from Savannah/Charleston because my back just hurt too much and I just didn’t think I could keep up with the pain.  As soon as I stopped running the pain started to subside.  Well, as the pain subsided, I started feeling a bit down.  Running is my drug of choice.  After a run I feel like I can do just about anything.  Not to mention it give me a huge self confidence boost.  So I bit the bullet and ran to the gym.  I joined a gym here in Denver that has about 22 locations around town.  I decided to see if there were any locations close to work.  There is one about 1.5 miles away.  Perfect!  I was able to run to the gym, do a 20 minute lifting session, and run back.  So total was 3 miles with 20 minutes of lifting.  Not too shabby!  I felt amazing afterwards.  I decided the next day I was going to try my hand at waking up in the morning to workout on our elliptical machine downstairs since I had a lunch meeting that day.  I was pretty nervous about feeling alright for a workout that early.  I haven’t attempted to workout that early since August.  So I set my alarm for 5:30am and decided that if I didn’t feel up to it, I wouldn’t do it.  Easy enough.  I was so excited to get up that early that I actually woke up before the alarm went off.  I though for some reason it was 5:30am because I heard the vampires upstairs taking a shower.  I just figured most normal people wake up at 5:30 or later to shower for the day.  I got dressed and started gathering books to read.  I went into the kitchen to grab a glass  of water and low and behold it was 3:30am.  Ok, back to bed I went.  Unfortunately I didn’t sleep that well for the last two hours but I did manage to get up at actual 5:30am to workout that morning.  I did the elliptical for about 45 minutes and it felt wonderful.  I was also able to squeeze in a 20 minute walk with the dog.  I actually felt pretty good that day.  My lunch meeting only had turkey and club sandwiches unfortunately so I could only eat the green salad and pasta salad.  I was starving when I left so I made a pit stop at taco bell and picked up a bean burrito freso style and pinto’s and cheese.  Ok, little secret.  Taco Bell is the most amazing Mexican food I’ve ever eaten.  I’ll take Taco Bell any day over authentic mexican food.  I think they have some of the best nachos I’ve ever tried.  Call me trashy and uncultured but man, sometimes Taco Bell hits the spot where no other place can!  I was ok on Thursday night with minor nausea.  We went out to eat at an Italian restaurant that night where I got stuff shells with sweetpototo, butternut squash and goat cheese, all melted into a pesto/goatcheese sauce.  To die for.  All in all I’d say Thursday was the best day of my week last week (I’ll attribute it to my early morning workout).

Friday was an ok day.  I decided to run to the gym and lift again on Friday.  I did exactly what I had done on Wednesday except I was so sore I couldn’t do my lunges or leg workout so I stuck with all upper body stuff.  It felt great.  I felt great the rest of the day.  I was pretty starving all afternoon though so that set me up for feeling pretty nauseous when I got home that night.  I didn’t prepare very well that day and just didn’t have enough food with me.  We made butternut squash risotto with portebello mushroom, spinach, and goat cheese.  Talk about another win.  We ate like kings last week.

As for other happenings during week 17, I decided to slowly start spreading the news at work.  I put my 12 week sonogram up in my office and figured that if people saw it and asked about it then I’d let them know the news.  As predicted my loudest most nosy co-worker noticed first.  She asked right away who’s it was and I just smiled and pointed to me.  Her face lit up like a firecracker and she literally exploded on me.  It felt wonderful.  She told another co-worker of mine to check out my bulletin board and she cried when she saw the picture.  It was a great day.  This last co-worker just had a baby in May so she shared so much of what she went through.  For the first time in a long time I didn’t feel alone.  It feels good to finally start telling people about our little Gherkin.

Over the weekend we caught up on sleep and layed around a lot.  I didn’t feel 100% over the weekend but Saturday I was able to go to the gym and get in 30 min. on the stationary bike, 20 min. on the stair climber, and a 2.5 mile run which felt incredible.  I felt so great that I had designated Sunday to only running maybe even 5 miles.  Well unfortunately with pregnancy you can’t plan anything ahead of time and I woke up to a horrible headache on Sunday morning.  The headache pretty much put me out of commission for the day.  We had plans to go over to my parents house to clean out and give away a bunch of stuff from my child hood bedroom.  This did not happen.  I fell asleep again for almost an hour during mid morning and when I woke up I was hungry again so new I couldn’t get to the gym at that point.  I needed to eat.   Chad made me an amazing grilled turkey and cheese sandwich and then we sat around some more.  I finally dragged myself to the gym around 1:45pm and did 30 min. on the stationary bike, 15 min. of stair climbing and about 15 min. of lifting.  It all felt good and I’m glad I went but we didn’t get to my folks until about 4:30pm 😦  I guess my bedroom will have to wait to get cleaned out.  We had a fabulous wild rice soup and bread and salad for dinner.   My mom makes the most wonderful food and I just love going over there to eat dinner and catch up.  It was pretty tough for the first 3 months of pregnancy b/c I never knew what I would be able to get down but now I’m pretty safe to eat whatever as long as it’s not cake and ice cream 🙂

So now we are back to Monday.  Only a two and a half day work week for us this week!  It makes it bearable to go to work when you know you only have 2 days of work ahead of you!!

How many weeks!?

According to my last menstrual period we are now 14 weeks and 2 days.  According to the growing baby inside of me, we are 15 weeks 2 days(ish).  My husband likes to say the later.  I go back and forth.  Some updates since the last post on 10/21 are that I’m feeling a little bit better especially in the mornings.  There are some days I wake up and think I don’t need to take my Zofriend but end up taking it anyways as a precautionary measure.  We went to Savannah and Charlestons for the week last week and it was great to get away and just be on no one’s schedule.  Chad and I are perfect travel buddies when I am pregnant.  On our honeymoon I would say 95% of the time we were perfect travel buddies, however, Chad does like his afternoon naps and can sometimes get irritated when I disappear for an hour (or longer) run right before we are ready to leave for breakfast.  I can understand that for sure but non pregnant Lindsey hates taking naps, wants to go go GO all the time, and gets bored extremely easily so I have to take hour long runs just to burn off all my excess energy.  Pregnant Lindsey, on the other hand, can’t run for longer than 35 min., only runs ever OTHER day and has to take 2 hour long nap breaks each day.  Chad and pregnant Lindsey are a match made in Heaven 🙂

We started our trip off by heading to KC first for Chad’s grandma’s 90th birthday party.  She is quite the amazing lady.  She still lives by herself, drives a car, goes to aerobics, shops, and used things like the internet which spill over to facebook and twitter.  It really amazes me since I am constantly wondering how some people get Alzheimers at the age of 60 and die by 70 and some keep their brains and their physical health well into their 90s.  The birthday party was where we revealed to Chad’s family our little secret:

Chad’s family has been tons of fun to surprise because he hasn’t told them much about our pregnancy journey so everything is new and exciting to them.  We had quite a few tears of happiness.  The next several hours were spent eating, catching up and relaxing.  The next day we woke up bright and early to catch our flight to Savannah at 8am.  The week was filled with delicious food, lots of sleeping, tons of relaxing, lots of sight seeing, and plenty of time together (what we do best).  I was doing pretty well all week but I could still tell that my stamina is way off.  I get tired very easily and if I start to get hungry even in the slightest I get extremely uncomfortable and shut down.  By the last night, I was very sick and could barely get down a few bites of soup for dinner.  That night was not easy but at least we stayed in a Marriott where we had a king size bed and lots of room to spread out.  I don’t think I bothered my husband too much!  We got home late Saturday night and just used Sunday to catch our breaths and relax.  I was able to run every other day while on vacation which I hope to continue well into pregnancy but every day is different.

This week has been another rough one.  Monday and Wednesday I felt like I was back in the first trimester all over again with the addition of headaches.  So on top of the all day overwhelming feeling of wanting to vomit all the time, I now have headaches.  All I could manage Monday for dinner was soup.  Luckily with every “bad” day comes a good day and Tuesday I was back and full of energy.  I was able to get a run in and make us dinner!  Wednesday I was back to feeling like garbage.  It snowed Wednesday and all I really wanted to do was cuddle with my Chaddy and my Sadie dog but alas, I went into work.  It snowed throughout the morning so I wasn’t able to get outside for a run or walk.  I think that probably contributed to not feeling well because by the time I got home, I ate some chips and salsa and then lost it.  I first went into our bedroom and laid down.  Chad came in to check on me and I just started crying.  I have just felt so miserable lately.  Pre-pregnancy I was full of energy, never felt sick, loved waking up in the mornings, took the dog for walks, ran 7-12 miles a day and was rarely tired.  Now I just feel like a blob who always has the flu.  It’s been like that for the last 12ish weeks and it’s getting old.  Luckily I am having a great day today so I don’t want to complain too much about all this.  I do have my salads and veggies back and while I do miss sugar, I suppose it’s a great thing that it’s the last thing on the face of this earth that I want to look at.  Hey, hopefully it just lowers my chances for getting gestational diabetes 🙂  Gotta look at the bright side!

With all that being said, every single day of this pregnancy has been a complete and total blessing to us.  I do worry a lot about whether or not the baby is ok but I suppose that is pretty normal.  The constant feelings of sickness are reassuring that there is something still in there growing.  I can’t WAIT to feel it kick.  That is the single most exciting thing I’m looking forward to.  Every day is a miracle and I can’t wait, no am overly ecstatic to meet our little baby in April!  Hurry up and get here already baby!!

I leave you with week 15…

I usually look like this though so not sure if that is after dinner bloat or a tiny bean in there 🙂