BumpDate: 23 Weeks

This week has been a good week for Little Man and myself. I am still pretty tired in the evenings after work, but I've started allowing myself more caffeine than I had previously been consuming around 2:30 every afternoon, and it seems to be helping. (Don't worry, it's still far, far below the recommended daily amount.) Other than that, Little Man has been very, very active, letting me know he is growing healthy and strong.

Starting about a week and a half ago, I started having some weird pains on (in?) my cervix. It wasn't the normal round-ligament pain that I am very familiar with, it was more of a throbbing, aching type pain. I made the mistake of Googling it Tuesday night and started to get scared that perhaps my cervix was shortening or maybe I was even experiencing pre-term labor. (I know, I know, Google is the devil when it comes to medical problems!) So I called my OB Wednesday morning. The on-call doctor thought it was probably normal cervical growing pains, but had me come in for an ultrasound just to be sure. Sure enough, the ultrasound revealed no problems - everything looked perfect! On the plus side, we got a few more 4D pictures of Little Man and you can already tell he's going to be a heartbreaker! ;)

My belly is definitely growing at a rapid pace. I reached a new milestone this week: balancing food on it. Very exciting to have a portable table for the next four months.

My belly and some delicious peanut butter pretzels from Trader Joe's.

Another milestone this week was hot flashes. When I was on Clomid, I was very familiar with hot flashes, I thought maybe I got lucky and wouldn't experience them during pregnancy. Not so much. I'll take them though as my pregnancy has been pretty easy since the first trimester concluded. 

This week I also registered! Registering for baby was so much different than registering for our wedding two years ago. With the wedding, it took hours and I analyzed every item I put on the registry. This time, I took my experienced-mama friend Cassidy with me and scanned every item she pointed at. I think we were done with Target and Babies R Us within an hour and a half this morning. I will of course probably tweak it in the weeks leading up to my shower and due date, but I definitely got a good start. 

Here's your 23 week belly picture! Still on the crappy cell-phone pictures as I haven't located my nice camera yet. (I suppose it would help if I looked for it?)

The BEST Chocolate Chip Cookies on the Face of the Earth

The title does not lie.

I was at work last Friday and my co-worker said to me "There are cookies in the break room - you should go get one before they're gone." It was 8:30 in the morning, I nodded and went back to my email and decaf coffee. 20 minutes later I went down to the break room to fill my water bottle and saw said cookies sitting on the table and I have to admit they did look good. So I took one... And then another for the baby.

I brought them both back to my office, thinking I'd save them until lunch. However, they proved to be too tempting and I sunk my teeth into one minutes later.

Oh.
My.
God.

They were amazing. I immediately emailed one of our admins to see if she knew who brought them. After asking around, she let me know the wife of another co-worker made them. I immediately emailed said co-worker and begged him to get the recipe from his wife for me. I thought the chances of that happening were slim to none - if a woman asked my husband for a recipe at his place of employment, I would not get the message for weeks, if ever. However, my co-worker proved to be a model co-worker (or maybe scared of the wrath of a hungry pregnant woman?) and minutes later I got an email from his wife with the recipe.

I told Bryan about them over the weekend and Monday night after work, he begged me to make them for him. I did and they are just as amazing out of my over.

I have to admit - one thing that is not so fun about baking when pregnant is not being able to eat the raw dough. Cookie dough is my kryptonite. Seriously. I buy the cookie dough at Papa Murphys and sit in front of my TV and eat it like ice cream. I haven't had raw cookie dough in over five months. Four more to go.

Because I believe in spreading good things in the world, here is the recipe:

The BEST Chocolate Chip Cookies on the Face of the Earth

1 cup butter flavored Crisco

1 cup brown sugar

½ cup white sugar

2 eggs

1 teaspoon of baking soda

1 teaspoon of salt

2 teaspoons vanilla

2 ½ cups flour
Chocolate chips... The person I got the recipe from sprinkled them on the top. For this batch, I mixed in a bag of mini-chocolate chips, but I think it may have been too much. I think next time I will try the sprinkling trick. 

Mix in that order, scoop onto cookie sheets. Bake at 350 degrees for 8 -10 minutes.

BumpDate: 22 Weeks

Holy cow - it's been four weeks since I last updated the blog! It's been a crazy-busy four weeks as well - two weeks ago in particular was quite possibly the busiest and best week of my life. Not only did I reach the half way mark, but we found out the gender of Baby Ripke AND moved into our new house - within two days of each other. This mama was exhausted by the end of it all, but man, what awesome milestones.

First, an updated belly picture for you. I didn't do my fancy photoshopping to this picture like I had been doing - I had to take it on my cellphone as my nice dSLR is MIA since the move. (I also absolutely hate the look of my face in this picture, but by the third take, Bryan was tired of taking my picture.)

I took this picture on Saturday (and today is Monday) and I swear to God, my belly is bigger already - is that even possible?? The last four weeks have been good - Baby Ripke is moving around a ton and I love every minute of it. I still get tired pretty easily, but I can at least get through the work day now without feeling like I am going to pass out. 

On to the news you've been waiting for (if you don't follow me on Facebook) - our gender reveal! We found out the gender of Baby Ripke four days before Easter, so I went to Target and found a couple of cheap Easter baskets and filled them with that fake grass and plastic eggs. In each egg, I put a mini-snickers and after the ultrasound, I put one ultrasound picture in each egg - including the one that revealed the gender. 

We went over to each set of our parents house and told them they would have to open the eggs to figure out the gender. I was counting on two things:

1. I carefully thought out which color of egg to put it in and chose orange. I am fairly stereotypical when it comes to genders and both sets of our parents immediately went for the pink thinking if it was a girl, I'd put it in the pink. When that didn't work, they went straight for the blue. For both sets of parents, orange was one of the last eggs, drawing out the game. 
2. Even when they came across the gender picture, neither sets are experienced with genders and would not even know what they were looking at or for (even though the tech labeled the gender on the picture.) When this happened, our plan was to make them go back through the pictures until they figured it out. 

My plan worked on Bryan's parents, but Bryan blew the surprise on my parents. Well...

That's right - Baby Ripke is a HE! We are both so excited (as we would have been with a girl as well). I already have his nursery all planned out - all I need to do now is shop! 

Well, for nursery stuff anyway, I found some pretty cute hats at Von Maur this weekend I couldn't pass up...

Bryan loves super-heros, Star Wars and video games. He is so excited to pass these interests onto our son, so I got a jump-start for him with these - which is LOVES by the way. 

Hopefully now that I have located my computer cord, I can get back to posting regular updates for you all. Hope your week is off to a great start!