Pregnancy Weight - The Naked Truth

Maybe it's because I have never really had a problem with my weight and maybe it's because I like to talk too much but for some reason, I have never had a problem sharing my weight with people. I figured writing a blog post about my weight gain while pregnant would be different since most people don't talk about it, pregnant or not.

"Women in a normal weight range should gain 25-35 pounds during their pregnancy." -WebMD

Back in the days before we started thinking about having a baby, there was this thing called a wedding. I lost about 10lbs before my wedding in October 2010. At that point, I weighed 138lbs. I visited my PCP and she told me that I did not need to lose any more weight, so please just maintain and don't try to diet. Well, I'm pretty sure the 10lbs I lost pre-wedding was just wedding stress. I didn't weigh myself between my wedding and my first OB appointment. When I went in for that first OB appointment, I weighed in at 146lbs (exactly one year and 10 days from our wedding day). I was happy with that as my starting weight.

7 weeks pregnant

A quick stat in case you aren't or have never been pregnant. If you have a normal pregnancy, most doctors will see you every 4 weeks until 27 weeks. At that point, you will start going every 2 weeks until you are at 36 weeks. Then, you see your OB once a week until the baby arrives. At every visit, you get weighed and your weight either gets ignored or "tsk-tsk'ed."

During my first trimester, I had some pretty bad food aversions. I didn't want to have anything to do with meat but I could eat other things just fine. There were days when I wouldn't eat much but I always tried to get something down. Once my food aversions went away and the fun part of pregnancy started (cravings!!) I let myself enjoy it. I've never been a really healthy eater and figured that I didn't really want to change things drastically towards a healthier diet while pregnant either.

20 Weeks Pregnant

Does that sound horrible? Oh well. I never ate really badly but I do allow myself treats when I crave one. I haven't changed; I didn't start eating salads and grilled chicken as soon as I found out I was pregnant. For one, they made me gag in the first trimester. I eat like a normal human being would eat. Cereal, sandwiches, meat and potatoes. I eat dessert at least once a day. I drink lots of water but sometimes supplement with Gatorade because, you know what? Water is boring! I love food and I wasn't going to restrict myself during this one time in a woman's life when she can really just enjoy watching her body grow bigger and not worry about it!

31 Weeks Pregnant
(definitely gained some chub in other areas than just the belly) :)

I'm currently 37 weeks and 6 days pregnant. My current weight is 188lbs, after a starting weight of 146lbs. Okay, you know what? I can handle that. I found this on WebMD today when I was double-checking some of my stats:

Where Does the Extra Weight Go During Pregnancy?

Baby	8 pounds
Placenta	2-3 pounds
Amniotic fluid	2-3 pounds
Breast tissue	2-3 pounds
Blood supply	4 pounds
Fat stores for delivery and breastfeeding	5-9 pounds
Uterus increase	2-5 pounds
Total	25 to 35 pounds

Source: WebMD

That's a lot of weight that's not just extra fat you're putting on your body!

Now, you might be wondering about exercise. I'll be honest with you about that, as well. Pre-pregnancy, I did not exercise. Every once in a while, I would get this grand idea in my head that I was going to try something new. It never went past a week. I take that back, pre-wedding, I did couch to 5k and ran my first 5k. I also completed Jillian Michael's 30-Day Shred. When I want to work out, I can. When I have no reason to or just feel bored with it all, I don't care to. During my pregnancy, it's been the same thing. I tried some prenatal yoga videos and realized even pregnant, I'm the most awkward person on the face of the earth. That was out. I walked a bunch some during my first two trimesters but then we hit my third trimester and yeah....walking is out. I try every once in a while to get out and do 3/4 mile to a mile around the neighborhood but it takes me about an hour these days to do that because of the belly and the groin pain. I give up. Come on baby, I'm ready for you to be here already so I can soon at least walk without being in complete misery!!

Finally, here are my stats:

I got "tsk-tsk'ed" at week 27 for gaining 7lbs in 4 weeks. That made me sad but it did kind of knock me upside the head a bit. I knew I was probably being that girl who eats for two (in the dessert category) for a few weeks so, I took it well. I changed one thing. I stopped eating such large bowls of ice cream EVERY NIGHT for dessert. Seriously, people I was having homemade sundaes with like 5 scoops of ice cream, caramel sauce, crushed oreos, sprinkles, whipped cream and cherries. It was bad.

 

Also, things like this from Room Service when I was still traveling for work (and my very first attempt) at using Instagram filters. In case you are wondering, that's two Doubletree cookies stacked with vanilla ice cream and whipped cream. It. Was. Amazing.

I cut back to ice cream once or twice a week and had a different, less fattening dessert every night - like an ice cream bar or some homemade cookies. Everything in moderation, right? Anyways, so I saw the same doctor yesterday who tsk-tsk'ed me about my weight and she congratulated me and said I had done a great job with my weight since she saw me last. I was shocked, considering I'm up at 188 now, but still happy to hear that from her.

So, that's my weight story. Yeah, I probably gained more than the "average" woman gains but I'm totally okay with that. I plan on breastfeeding, which normally helps women lose weight and if I'm unhappy with my body post baby, I'll do something about it. It's as simple as that. For now, I'm going to enjoy being pregnant, eat a donut or two three when I want to and continue to look forward to meeting our little girl.

Baby Shower Time

In late April, my friends Lauren, Bonnie and Christy, along with my Mom, put together such a fun baby shower for BGH and me. We held it at my house so I wouldn't have to go anywhere. It sounded like a GREAT idea at the time until I realized I was going to have to clean my entire house because of course people were going to want to see the nursery.

Enter: Lauren.

This girl is an absolute saint. On top of having to clean up the house, I wasn't feeling great that week, leading into the weekend. I was just tired and when I got home from work, all I wanted to do was sleep! Lauren came in Thursday night and I took Friday off so we could get some stuff done. We started work first thing in the morning by dropping the dogs off at the sitter. Then we headed home and scrubbed. We did everything from chair rails to blinds to floors. Lauren even got down on her hands and knees and scrubbed my kitchen floor. Yeah, you can say she's a good friend. Dan spent Friday cleaning up the outside - mowing, mulching, moving things, etc. By Friday night at 8pm, we were done and I was exhausted. Mom arrived around that time. I spent an hour with them and finally went to bed.

Saturday morning, we got up and I showed Mom and Lauren where everything they might need was. At 9am, I was shooed upstairs and sequestered there until I was given the okay to come down at 11, when the party started. The girls did such an amazing job decorating the house (the whole reason why I wasn't allowed to come downstairs for two hours). Lauren made most of the paper decorations using her Cricut. How CUTE is all of this??






Coffee Table Decorations:




More of those awesome hanging decorations:


The food was fantastic, as well. Check out this cake. They really nailed the colors that they knew I would love to see at the shower. Orange, pink and white. Perfect! The cake was from Whole Foods and I have to say, it was the best store-bought cake I've ever had. No fondant in sight!





See the paper palcemat under the fruit? I re-used 5 of those in the nursery. That blog post on the FINALLY finished nursery is ready to go sometime next week!





After we had our fill of food (or continued eating) we started in on the shower activity. Thankfully, my suggestion of no gross shower games was approved. Instead, the girls and my Mom came up with the idea of doing a shower activity. Mom brought a ton of different fabrics, scissors, iron-on paper and templates. She also bought a stack of bibs, onesies and burp cloths.

Everyone took a template that they wanted to iron onto their item of choice and cut out fabric to match it. Then, we went to the ironing board to iron that image onto the onesie, bib or burp cloth. There were also permanent markers and stencils for drawing if you weren't into the ironing bit.



They came out absolutely great! My sister in law took everything home with her to sew the images on so they would last longer. How freaking awesome is that?





Of course there were presents (boring pictures of me making funny faces as I thank people for stuff) and then we said goodbye. I could not have had a better time at the shower celebrating the birth of our little girl. I feel so lucky to have such a great group of women surrounding me at this really special time.

I Have a Problem

My husband took 3 days off of work this week to do the following:

• Finish our taxes (eh hem, start and finish our taxes)
• Work in the yard
• Paint the nursery
• Possibly paint sections of the dining room. Remember? This dining room that we were supposed to paint the bottom section of back in JULY of 2011? Yeah, we never got back to that...

The good news: The taxes are done. 

Moving on to my problem. Hops can work in the yard all he wants, he has the supplies to do that. He cannot paint the nursery, though, until I give him paint colors to work with. I'm stumped. I've been going back and forth and back and forth and can't seem to make up my mind. We're not artsy types (I can hardly draw a stick figure person in Draw Something) so we're not going to go with stripes or anything like that on the walls. I want just plain simply painted walls. At first I thought we would go with seafoam. Then, I really started liking the look of a bold coral color. The problem with the coral is it is so in-your-face that I don't think we can do all of the walls in that color.

Here's what will be the nursery looked like a few weeks ago (there haven't been enough updates to post new pictures yet). The wall to the right of the window will be our accent (coral) wall and will have the crib up against it. The rest of the walls will be some other color.

Coral wall will be behind where the bookshelf is now.

So, here's my dilemma. We paint the one focus wall coral and paint the rest of the walls.....what? I've been probably bugging everyone who follows my Pinterest boards with color dumps today. Here are some of the color ideas I have been looking at. We're still on the chocolate, seafoam and coral color combo idea. So, now it's just a decision of what to put on those other walls. Yellow? Tan? Or go crazy and do seafoam? I don't know if I'm that crazy...... 

I pulled all of these boards from design-seeds.com. Not all of these corals are what I am going for but they work to show contrast to a shade close enough. The Stork coral color (6 down from top) is what I'm leaning towards.

 Tan or Cream?

 Tan?

Peach? 

 Light seafoam (color on the far left)? It's a bit blue for what I'm looking for but I might be able to find something like it in a shade that is green rather than blue. I like the lightness of it.

 Yellow?

 Again with the tan...although that purpley color isn't bad (far left)

 Tan again.

Peach

As I was putting this together, I came across this picture. Could we actually go crazy and do something like this?

Second color over plus:

Second to last color.

So...what do you think? Go basic and do a tan, cream or white on the walls other than the accent walls or do a seafoam on the other walls? Please my friends, help a girl who isn't very coordinated with colors out. 

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An Amateur Maternity Shoot with a Friend

This weekend, Hops and I went down to one of my favorite towns in the whole world, Southport, NC. My parents live down there and I like to visit them as often as possible because of the beauty of the area. It's just down the road from the beach (Caswell Beach, Oak Island) and it has a beautiful waterfront. Friday afternoon we packed up the car and headed down. I received a couple of texts from my friend Meg who I was meeting up with that afternoon. The weather wasn't looking good. It had been pouring all day and we were supposed to take pictures of one another that afternoon. We decided to play it by ear and by the time Hops and I pulled into my parents neighborhood, the sun was out and the clouds were parting. It turned out to be a lovely late afternoon.

I dropped Hops off with my Dad at the house and picked up my Mom. We drove to the downtown area and met up with Meg and her Mom. Meg and I both have nice cameras and we both love trying to learn new things with them. Even better - Meg is 23 weeks pregnant with a baby girl of her own!! We decided to take some fun pictures of one another downtown. The sun was super bright and I probably made a bunch of rookie mistakes (like taking too many photos in direct sunlight) but we had fun with it!! I must say, after looking at all of the photos online, I had to edit all of the pictures that I took while the ones Meg took were great right out of the camera!

Meg did a great job capturing my large hump and I got the super fun job of shooting her tiny little baby bump.

I think it definitely helps to have such a great model. Isn't she beautiful??

A few of my favorites that Meg took:

 We both looked at this next one and were both thinking - what wood wall did we stand up against? Then we realized it was the bench. :)

Keep an eye out on Meg's Blog for a post of her own about our photo shoot. 

We really did have a lot of fun. I feel so lucky that we were able to meet up and do this. We spent time chatting and taking pictures and our Moms (who are also friends) spent the time carrying our bags for us. I am pretty happy that I took these at 31 weeks. I think I'm big enough and not just a complete fat hog yet. My weight gain has been pretty hefty recently so I'm hoping I can really moderate that in my last two months. 

Can you believe it? Just two months to go!!! Since we're talking about that, I'll give you a quick status update:

How far along?:  31 Weeks

Total weight gain/loss: 32lbs. I don't mind sharing that. I think it's important to know that every woman carries her pregnancy differently. 

The Bump: Large and in charge. The other day, my husband stood behind me, then beside me and laughed at how amazing it is that from behind, I'm still Jill. From the side, I have a huge bump!

What I’m excited about/looking forward to: Feeling the baby move. Every time I feel her move around in there, I get the biggest kick out of it. Sometimes she slides a body part across my abdomen and I can actually see it popping out through my belly. It really is an amazing sight.

Maternity Clothes: Almost all. I have one drawstring skirt I can still wear and I am wearing Hops' shirts around the house when I don't feel like getting dressed. All of my maternity pants have the low panel band. I cannot stand the feeling of the maternity band coming up and over my belly. Some people have told me I'm nuts but to me, it's just itchy.

Symptoms: Feeling great. Have some groin pain and round ligament pain here or there but overall, things are going really well.

Belly Button in or out?:  It's still in! It does not look like it will be making an appearance as an outie, which I am very happy about. I do have a very faint linea nigra line showing up, though.

Food Cravings/Aversions: No aversions (woohoo!) Cravings: carbs and fruit. Probably the reasons for my weight gain. Oh well.

Milestones:  Enormous weight gain? Is that a milestone? :) Also, we're in a bit of a safety zone now. If BGH were born today, she would have a long hospital stay but she would be okay. I love knowing that. That being said, keep cookin' baby!

Nicknames: BGH (Baby Girl Hopkins)....or Bovine Growth Hormone, depends on who you ask and Lady Bird Hopkins.