Woo! Finally some colour!

I’ve realized that I’m just not very good at snapping these bump pics from the side, I never seem to get quite the right angle to show off the bump, and I’ve been wearing quite a few loose / flowy tops and dresses these days that don’t really do Babe justice.

Rest assured – even if it isn’t overly visible in pictures, I can promise you, the bump is real. 

This week was another roller coaster of ups and downs, highs and lows, and another week of pretty extreme emotion swings for me.

I was feeling 95% better from my 24-week salmon escapade by Wednesday and Thursday of last week, and was back to eating as normally as I could. Unfortunately, I think I over-did it a bit on Thursday, and had another miserable night on Thursday night writhing with twisting stomach pains. I never did end up throwing up, but my stomach was just a mess, and eating was next to impossible again.

GO AWAY FOOD POISONING / STOMACH BUG. GO AWAYYYYYYYYYYYYY.

I was too sick to go in to work on Friday, and felt really guilty all day about work in general, as I really hadn’t been myself all week and my productivity had probably been only about 25% of what it normally is. By the afternoon, I absolutely forced myself to have some dry toast to eat, got about half of a Gatorade down, and made myself go out to do a couple of quick errands with the idea that maybe moving around a little bit would help things somewhat.

For once, I was actually right, and after getting my eyebrows done and picking up our car seat (which had come in at Snuggle Bugz – YAY!), I was starting to feel a little bit better – though still not close to “well”.

My family from Sault Ste. Marie had started to arrive at my mom’s house for our baby shower on Sunday, and Matt was busy recording a podcast for a few hours on Friday night, so his dad Roy and I went over to my parent’s house to visit with my Grandma and my Aunt / Uncle / Cousin for a few hours.

It was nice to see everyone, and plans seemed to be coming together for the baby shower, but it was hard for me to be too excited about the weekend when  my stomach was still feeling so sick. I (once again) said a gigantic thank you to the pregnancy gods for giving me a smooth first trimester, free of morning sickness – I just don’t know how pregnant mamas survive weeks on end of that!

Saturday was Matt’s best friend’s brother’s wedding, and I made the (foolish) mistake of not really thinking about a dress to wear to the wedding until the morning of – thinking that I had a couple of flowy options that would work fine. Turns out that when I tried said flowy options on, they looked more “nightgown” then “wedding”, and I went into panic mode trying to find one of my non-maternity dresses that would still fit.

It took me, Matt, our dresser, some cooking oil and some elbow grease, but we finally shoe-horned me into this (non-maternity) black dress, and off we went.

The wedding was beautiful, and my stomach was feeling a little bit better then the previous day, plus we had a couple of hour break in between the ceremony and the reception to come home and hang out for a bit, which was nice. I just couldn’t bring myself to squeeze myself back into the way-too-tight black dress for the reception, so went with a more flowy floral dress that I’ve been wearing to work (totally not formal enough for a wedding – but at this point, it was the best I could do!).

I had a hard time with the dinner at the reception because I was worried about my stomach, so didn’t really end up eating much of anything the entire night, and much to Matt’s dismay, was feeling like I really needed to go home and lie down by about 11pm. It was baby shower day on Sunday and I desperately wanted to be feeling as close to 100% as possible!

Sunday dawned clear, beautiful and sunny, but I was wary because the weather forecast called for thunderstorms to start right around the time of our photo shoot. I had initially scheduled the photo shoot for our entire family, but it was becoming clear over the course of the week that it just wasn’t going to be feasible to get everyone together in the two hours before the shower, so we decided that Matt and I would do a mini-maternity session instead (before I get too giant and potentially wouldn’t really want pictures of myself anyways).

I got my hair done at a blow-dry bar in Oakville, and it felt nice to get a bit glammed-up after my so un-glamorous week, but as luck would have it, while she was putting the finishing hairspray touches on my curls, the heavens opened up and thunderstorms rolled in like a herd of rampaging bulls.

Sigh.

Sensing my utter dismay, the poor Asian girl who did my hair for me escorted me out to my car with a huge umbrella and got soaking wet herself trying to protect my hair as I got into the car – so sweet!

It was about a 15 minute drive over to the photo shoot location from the blow-dry bar and I summoned all of the positive karma I could during that drive pleading with the weather gods to stop the rain. Miraculously, it worked, and by the time I got to the gardens that we were shooting at, the rain had stopped, and although things were wet, the sun was actually starting to peek back out!

We met our photographer (who was lovely), and spent about 45 minutes taking some maternity photos in the gardens. I’m not totally sure how they will turn out to be honest, I’m really not loving how I’m looking these days, and just not feeling overly comfortable in my own skin, so not sure how that will translate in front of the camera, but regardless, at least we have some nice photos to document the pregnancy along the way (better then my weak attempts at bump selfies!); and some photos of Matt as well!

(this is a cheesy iPhone pic – not a professional pic ;-))

The shower was wonderful, but was a bit of a blur to be honest! I do remember feeling pretty frustrated in the hour beforehand that things weren’t ready, people were frantically running around, and the photos that I had planned to take of our entire families never really came to fruition. I fully acknowledge that I’m a bit anal when it comes to planning and logistics, and I like things done a certain way (you know….my way! ;)). I also know that I’d be a much more chill person if I could adopt Matt’s Golden Retriever mentality and let more stuff go. C’est la vie!

In any case, thank god I was feeling pretty good for the shower, although I did miss out on the best looking taco bar ever because I just didn’t trust my stomach! We got totally spoiled with tons of gifts and lots of love and support from our friends and family, and it really was just an awesome afternoon surrounded by the people that we love the most. Our photographer stuck around to take candid shots for about an hour during the shower, so once I receive those, I’ll come back and update this post with a few pictures!

Although I was finally feeling better physically, Monday and Tuesday were stressful days, and my emotions were way out of whack. Most notably, my patience was at an all-time low, and everything that didn’t go 100% as I expected it to (even stupid things like the light changing from green to red at the wrong time) really irritated me and weighed on me for hours. I was also much more emotionally charged then I usually am, and everything (including loading my dishwasher) just seemed overwhelming and too much to ask of me in any given moment.

I know that hormone fluctuations (once again) are likely to blame, and I’m feeling much more level-headed today thank goodness, so until the next appearance of irrational Sara….here’s hoping that this train stays away from crazy-town!

We have SO much to do at the house this weekend, nesting ninja needs to come back out in full force to start organizing all of our shower gifts, plus we have our nursery room furniture being delivered on Friday!! Now that our house is empty again (Matt’s parents are in Lebanon with my family right now!), we are going to start emptying out Babe’s room of the office furniture to make room for it all to be setup! EXCITING! Once the nursery starts to take shape, I’ll be sure to share some pics!

For now, I’m in countdown mode until the long weekend, I’m off on Friday so only one more day to go! A big happy birthday to Canada – 150 years old and lookin’ damn fine!

Have a great week all!

-Sara & Babe xo

 

 

 

 

 

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