An Answer!

Update: It was decided that Patrick's gall bladder test may have been a fluke since he has been laying down in bed so much. They are not doing the surgery. He is feeling better and has been able to keep food down so he is headed home.

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I heard from my mom last night after I got in from work. They ran a test on Patrick yesterday to observe how his gall bladder was operating and discovered that it was not emptying. He should have surgery this morning to remove it. Hopefully, he'll be home by this afternoon or tomorrow morning. We are all so grateful for a simple fix!

25 weeks

Here's what 25 weeks looks like for me:


I am certainly finding that my stamina is diminishing. Tim and I went to Target yesterday and I came home and had to take a nap. Well, she'll be here soon enough and then the real challenge will begin.

In other news, my brother is still in the hospital. They decided to run some more tests on him while he is there. They don't want to release him until he can hold down some food. I realized today that my 6' 3" 20-year-old brother now weighs less than my 5' 3" pregnant self. He is becoming more frustrated with the process and who can blame him? In a week, he has been poked and examined more than some people have twice his age in their entire lives. He is tired of sitting around and not feeling well. I hope for his sake and my parents' sake that this will be over soon.

Update on Patrick

His tests for various diseases and disorders are all coming back negative so that is a good thing. The bad thing is they still don't have conclusive evidence of what has been ailing him. They hope that their treatment for a parasite will work and that is all it is. I talked to Patrick today and he sounded real well and was looking forward to some chicken broth. He has been stable now for a couple of days with a couple of bumps along the way. He has one more test tomorrow and then they may release him. I'll keep y'all posted if anything changes.

Where'd they go?!

Someone asked me the other day if I can still see my feet and I responded yes. Then I realized that I can only see them if I bent forward a little. This was an interesting realization for me. I knew I had gotten big but now I understand how big. Although, people keep telling me that I'm carrying the weight well which makes this pregnant lady feel a lot better.

Tim pointed out last night that we were nearing the third trimester. The third trimester begins with your 27th week which will be a week from Wednesday. Time has surely flown by! We are getting more excited, though, as the weeks go by. It is like waiting for Christmas morning when you were a kid. Except, of course, it is coming upon us a lot faster.

I'm still feeling well and steadily gaining weight, around 17 pounds total. The baby is quite feisty. She moves a lot which is very reassuring to me. Last night, Tim and I were sitting on the couch playing a card game and listening to music and I swear, she would start moving more when a song with a good beat came on the stereo. It was so odd. My little rock-n-roll baby!

Pray for Patrick

My youngest brother Patrick was admitted to the hospital Tuesday afternoon after vomiting for a week and undergoing numerous inconclusive tests during three visits to the emergency room. Patrick hasn't had hardly anything to eat for a week since his body immediately responds with nausea and vomiting. He went through this same thing last August and lost over twenty pounds but it went away so it was determined that it must have been just a bug. Since it has come back, it is now believe that it has to be something else. He underwent an endoscopy Tuesday afternoon that provided some evidence that it could be Celiacs disease which is entirely treatable but the result won't come back until tomorrow. They are also looking at Addison's disease which is also treatable. Ultimately, though, he is being tested for everything imaginable and the doctor's have sworn that he is not leaving the hospital until they have an answer. This has given us all hope. It took a lot of frustrating phone calls for my parents to get the doctors' attention and once they did, the response was swift. I will keep y'all posted.

The White Stuff

No, it isn't snow again! Mother Nature has now brought us Spring blooms. Spring is in full blossom here in Birmingham. We started noticing buds a few weeks ago and then we got lots of rain and now we look out our windows and see this:




I love this time of year!

Now, here is my overdue baby bump picture. I am now at 24 weeks. I am still feeling healthy. My breathing is getting harder and I've woken up the past couple of mornings with numbness in my right thigh which I am guessing is sciatica. Other than that, I'm waddling along just fine.


I took this one myself since Tim is still hard at work on the baby's nursery. He has spent a good portion of the day reversing the door into the bathroom. It seems like he has to go to work to get a break!

Oh! I just found out that I am having a baby shower the first weekend in May on Sunday afternoon. How fortunate is our baby that so many people wish to welcome her into this world!?

Lilac Whisper

Hello all! Tim just finished painting the baby's room and it is more perfect than I could have hoped for. We went to Home Depot last night and picked out the paint color, Lilac Whisper, and we came home and he prepped the room. He got up this morning and started painting and it is already done.



Before, the room was a nice pleasant neutral color which was really nice for a guest bedroom.

Here is Tim working on the trim.


Here is the final result! It is the perfect shade of purple! It is very soft and subtle yet bright and cheerful. I hope she likes it!

On a different yet interesting note, I got curious and looked up what the July birthstone is. It is a ruby. I found this to be quite the coincidence. You see right after my grandmother passed away a couple of years ago, my mother gave me a ring that my grandmother wanted me to have. There is a ruby in the center with an opal on the top and bottom. I've worn it everyday since. It gives me a lot of comfort to look down everyday and have a reminder of her constant presence.

I hope to post a new baby bump picture this weekend so stay tuned...

Blogging from the couch

This will be a short entry, as there isn't much to report, but it is notable because it is the first time I have blogged from the comfort of my own couch. I purchased a wireless network card for my computer many, many months ago, but I never could get it to work right. It's a rainy, lazy day today so I am taking care of some items around the house that I have procrastinated in getting done. Boring stuff like IRA rollovers.

Leia has felt better this weekend than last. She was pretty worn out and miserable after her week at work last week, but this week was better. Our friends Rick and Courtney came over for dinner last night and we had a good time with them. They had to go home early though, because their daughter Hayden didn't want to go to sleep for Courtney's sister who was babysitting for the evening. Hayden has been sick lately with a cold that doesn't want to go away. Rick and Courtney had some prescription medicine that they picked up on their way to see us, so hopefully they were able to give that to Hayden last night and she will feel better soon. If you want to see pics of Hayden and her family, (she is about 16 months old) you can check them out at http://hayden.rickandcourtney.com.

I worked late one night the week before last so my boss told me to take a day off to make up for it. I decided to make this a 3-day weekend so I was off of work on Friday. I spent the day cleaning up the house and spent a great deal of time on the phone with various customer service representatives, clearing up boring financial matters and asking questions about my homeowners and auto insurance policies. Not glamorous, but necessary.

I was also at the house awaiting delivery of a pair of chairs we bought from Costco on-line. They were running a really good deal on these chairs that included shipping, and Leia has wanted to replace these cheapo green recliners that I bought in Charleston just to help stage the house when we were trying to sell it. The chairs showed up around noon and were in perfect shape with no shipping damage. The only assembly required was bolting on the wooden feet, and that only took a few minutes. I think they are very comfortable and look nice, plus the price was right. The only problem is that we now have to get rid of the green recliners.

Picture of the new chair:


To that end, I will be spending the day tomorrow cleaning up the basement living room so we can pile up all of the stuff we want to sell in one place. Having a baby immediately created a "storage crisis" in our house. When it was just Leia and I, we had plenty of closet space so we never had to get rid of stuff that we didn't have an immediate need for. Now we have several pieces of furniture, piles of old electronics and bundles of sheets and blankets that are taking up valuable room in our house that we need to reclaim. We also still have our old washer and dryer in the garage. All of this stuff has to go, and soon. Leia has had good luck with selling items via email listings at Samford University, but I think we are going to have to have a garage sale pretty soon to unload everything.

Once we have the bedroom cleared of the piles of junk we no longer need, I'll be able to start on painting the bedroom and baby furniture. Right now it looks like the walls will be a very light lilac and the furniture will be slightly off-white. Lots of work ahead, but I'm looking forward to it. It will be nice to have the room finished and get that big "to-do" item off the list. I've got to go get busy. See you later.

I knew she was perfect, but this is rediculous...

Leia and I own a Wii, but we haven't played on it together in months. I have played the occasional round of golf by myself, but Leia hadn't played at all since Christmas. Last Saturday night (March 7th) we went out to dinner with our friend Laurel, and when we got back it seemed like a good idea to play some Wii Bowling and work off some calories. So I fired up the Wii and set up a three-person game of bowling.

Leia then proceeded to stomp both Laurel and I into the ground. She threw a strike, and then another, and another, and another, and another... Leia has had very high scores before, upwards of 250-260, but when she got to about 8 or 9 strikes in a row I realized she had a very real possibility of scoring a perfect game. I think the hardest part about bowling a perfect game is throwing 3 strikes in a row in the 10th frame, but Leia had no problem with it at all. We were all so excited that we decided this was definitely worthy of taking a picture as proof. The picture didn't turn out too well (I couldn't get the flash to cooperate on the camera) but it serves the purpose of documenting this incredible achievement.

It may sound a bit silly, but I'm very proud of my wife for bowling a perfect game on the Wii. It isn't at all easy, (I've missed it by one pin on two different occasions and nearly wept in frustration) and I think she deserves extra credit for accomplishing this feat while 22 weeks pregnant. As you can see from the picture, she is really showing now. There is no doubt that a baby is on the way.

We had another good doctor's visit on Monday of this week. There isn't much to report except that all signs are normal at this point. Our daughter's heartbeat was about 150 beats per minute and she was moving around a lot. She has been moving a lot in general lately, and that is very reassuring to both Leia and myself. Leia's next visit will involve a blood glucose test, so hopefully that will go smoothly. She can eat breakfast but then she can't eat anything else until she gets to the doctor's office. They will check Leia's blood sugar level and then give her some sort of glucose drink. Then she will have to wait at the office for an hour and have her blood sugar level checked again. Sounds pretty routine, but it will probably be boring to sit around and wait that long for the test results. Should make for a good time to catch up on some reading. Goodbye for now!

Snow Day

We are getting quite a snow fall here in Alabama! When I opened my eyes this morning and looked out the window, I couldn't believe how much snow was falling! Tim had just gotten out of the shower so we immediately got bundled up and went outside to take pictures.


These pictures were taken between 8:00 and 8:30 this morning and we've gotten a lot more snow since then.

Since I'm a little behind on my postings, I thought I'd tell y'all about our trip to Augusta last weekend. We went over since Tim's Aunt Ellen was down from Pennsylvania for a visit. We don't get to see her very often and it was really nice to visit and get caught up on how everyone is doing in PA. We miss them all very much and wish we could see them more often. We also got to see Tim's cousin, Amber and her husband Mike and their adorable children, Peyton and Nolan. They live in Atlanta and came over on Sunday to have lunch with everyone. Mrs. Thomas' cousin Dwayne was also there with his friend David and his nephews. Unfortunately, I didn't get pictures on Sunday. It was a really fun weekend and we owe a few thank you notes as we received quite a few gifts for the baby. Carrie handed me a bag of t-shirts and onesies for newborns. I didn't realize how much was in that bag until I got home. It was unbelievable! Here are some pictures of the fellows working on Carrie and Dan's kitchen island:

Isaiah and Aunt Ellen are supervising.

After leaving Augusta on Sunday, we stopped in Atlanta to see our good friends Matt and Chris and their new baby. I didn't get pictures of that either but you can go here to see pictures. The baby was just too cute!

As for how I'm doing, I'm still doing well. The visit last weekend wiped me out for a few days. I didn't feel like myself until Thursday. I had no idea that sitting in the car would take so much out of me! As you may have read in the previous post from Tim, the baby kicked on Friday and that was a real special moment for the two of us. I know Tim feels a little left out right now so it was good moment for him to feel more connected with the baby. We were both thrilled that he got to experience that. There hasn't been any other new developments. I've gained a total of 12 pounds so everything seems to be going according to schedule.


I spent this weekend cleaning out the closets in the baby's room so that her stuff will have a place to go. This means of course that everything that was in those closets is now strewn all over the house. One step at a time...

Well, I better get going. We're expecting my cousin Courtney and her family soon. I'm making lunch: skillet chicken pot pie and brownies. Great comfort food for a snowy day!