Food and pregnancy

It seems that for most women, food in pregnancy is a love/hate relationship.  For me, it has been far more love than hate. A lot more!  All of the sudden, if it has been 2-3 hours without eating, I go into some crazy "eat or die" mentality.  I cannot hold any other thoughts in my head besides "ME WANT FOOD!"  As you can imagine, this gets a little tricky when I'm tutoring.  With my 3rd grader, all the multiplication problems turn into food problems if we pass a critical point. (If 4 kids gives me 3 cookies each, how many do I eat right now! Nom nom nom.)

As distracting as it can be to suddenly find my brain held hostage until food is handed over to my stomach, I am extremely grateful that I have largely dodged the morning sickness bullet.  There have been a couple of times that I've felt less than stellar, but really, I've had it easy.  One thing that I have learned is that (for now) cumin and this baby do not agree. I like the flavor of cumin! It's good! It makes fajitas taste "right!"  However, last week, when I tried to make fajitas as usual, the smell of that little dash of cumin made me gag.  I left the raw chicken with its cumin on the counter and fled the kitchen in search of fresher, less cumin-y air.  As I sat in the living room eyeing my "foe" in the kitchen, I devised my strategy.  A deep breath of cumin free air and back into the fray.  Holding my breath, I grabbed a strainer, dumped the chicken in, washed off the offending seasonings, and started the seasoning process again.  Sigh. (I also sterilized my sink and strainer multiple times.)

BTW, we are already at 10 and 1/2 weeks!  Roo is already more than twice as long as he/she was at the ultrasound 3 weeks ago and is working on growing fingernails. Time seems to be flying. In just under a week, we go back to the midwife and will get to hear the heartbeat. And the promised land of pregnancy, second trimester, isn't that far away!

quilting

When I thought I would be spending January/February starting Clomid and dealing with the crazy emotions that come with that, I decided I needed a project to remind me that, someday, somehow, I was going to have a baby.  The project I picked was a baby quilt.  As you could imagine, it got a whole lot more exciting when I found out there was a real baby coming (not just someday, but in 9 months)!  It has been so fun working on the quilt and thinking about our Little Kanga-Roo playing on it. Someday, I'll have a kiddo who can pick which of the animals on the quilt is his/her favorite!! How crazy is that?!  At this point, I've just got the top put together.  I still need to do a little work for the backing (it'll mostly be the animal print with a vertical stripe of the blue/brown squares).  I also need to decide how courageous I am. The initial example I saw of this quilt had an adorable giraffe appliqued on top.  I have never done applique and for some reason, I am terrified of it.  What if I mess it up?? At the same time, the applique was a big part of what convinced me to make the quilt in the first place. Sigh.

So, if I really do get myself to do the applique, which animal do you think I should use? I think I'll just copy the silhouette of one of the animals already on the quilt but I can't decide which is cutest.

And lastly, to satisfy your curiosity, I'm not really showing (at least not all the time) but pregnancy seems to make one bloat quite a bit more than my raspberry sized baby accounts for: