The New Blog

I've been working on a new website that I wanted to create as a gift for my in-laws. There's not a lot on it yet, but it was ready for delivery on Christmas Eve. It's meant to be maintained by them, so it's written as if my Mother in Law was the writer. The new site can be found here. It was a fun way to make our announcement about our baby that will be coming at the end of July! We found out just after Thanksgiving that I was pregnant, and made the announcement to our families just before Christmas. We are so excited to meet our Nokes baby!

There's a story behind the creation of the website. At Thanksgiving, Ryan's parents were talking to Stu's brother and he was giving the update on his grandkids. When Stu and Tina said they still don't have grandkids, Stu's brother suggested that they create a "grandma blog" and send the link to their married children and saying they need fodder for the site. They told us about it and said they weren't trying to put pressure, but were just telling us because they thought it was funny. We took the idea and ran with it since it was only a few days later that we confirmed that I was pregnant.

My due date is July 27th and so far everything is going well. It was a little hard for me to believe sometimes that I was ACTUALLY pregnant, so at my first doctor's appointment when they did an ultrasound and I saw the tiny body of our forming baby I couldn't help tearing up as it finally felt totally real to me. Since then, there have still been a lot of times that it doesn't feel real, but then I remember seeing that little body moving and seeing the heart beating away strongly and I know it's real. I don't really believe in posting my ultrasound pictures although I think seeing them for myself is incredible. But I don't really care to give the world a look at the inside of my body.

For the first 8 or 9 weeks I was really really tired, all the time. I didn't have too much morning sickness--only occasional mild nausea, so I can't complain too much. But by 9 at night I was fading, and it was a losing battle to try and get out of bed before 9 am. (It was typically only if I was still too tired in the morning when I got up that I felt sick.) It was just constant tiredness but around Christmas (week 9 or so) the tiredness started to go down as did any remaining mild nausea. And as that decreases, our happiness to welcome baby continues to grow!