24 weeks.

yipes - sometimes i forget to update my blog. well, it's not that i forget...it's that i don't have anything exciting to add to the blogging world. well, i never really have anything exciting to add to the blogging world, but i suppose this blog is more to keep my friends and family updated with the happenings of our life since they are spread out throughout the whole world in places like Baltimore, Rochester, Lexington, Massachusetts, California, Vancouver, etc. Anyways...here's some thoughts on the past couple of weeks. if you make it to the end there will even be a bumpdate!

+there have been no more kidney stone episodes...praise the Lord. i never want to go through that again. 

+post kidney stone was an infection. antibiotics seemed to have cleared them up.

+cousin has started the brainwashing of jacob (who she fondly refers to as jsquared). i was beyond excited to receive this gem in the mail...along with THE cutest socks and bib EVER! THANKS COUSIN!!!! jsquared tells us he cannot wait to wear this!!

+ry and i are on a serious mission. the goal: find a baby US soccer jersey for jacob. oh dear this is near impossible. there's just about every other country in the world except the US. doesn't anyone know that the olympics are coming and we need to have jacob outfitted appropriately?

+clearly sports teams have been picked out for jacob. we're allowed to do this until he's wise enough to choose syracuse, the patriots, the red sox and US soccer as his own favorite teams ;)

+we got two feet of snow on saturday. two feet. that's a lot of feet of snow. it's so tall that beans won't go in it because his whole body sinks down in. poor little guy. we had to shovel paths for the dogs. here's a picture of them running through the paths...i love the little guy in the back:

+i love my beanies

+ this, my friends, is what 24 weeks of jacob looks like. sorry for the black sweater making it a little hard to see ... i had to take advantage of being dressed in more than sweats and a gordon soccer t shirt, so i took a picture in my church clothes yesterday!

worse pain than labor?!

aren't my new bracelets pretty?!

you see, around 9 pm on Wednesday night I got this throbbing pain in the right side of my back. it came out of nowhere. bizarre, right? my back had been sore, so i figured it was just a muscle thing. i tried to relax and deal with it, but around 11 it had just gotten worse. we called the midwife and she suggested tylenol and thought it could be back spasms the way i was describing the pain. lovely, no tylenol in the house and not a single store open. so i decided to be stubborn and deal with it. bad idea - i only lasted about two and a half more hours before i had to call back the midwife since the pain kept making me throw up (goodbye every ounce of fluid, hello dehydration). she told me the best thing to do was to come in...so at 2:30 my father in law drove us the hour to the hospital (bad roads = better drive with snow tires...we don't have snow tires). what a good father-in-law because not only did he bring us at 2:30 in the morning, he then went and worked a 12 hour shift at 7 am.

anyways, i stumbled into the ER doubled over because the pain was so bad and they quickly brought me up to the labor & delivery floor. i laid down and in walks the midwife, an ob doc, my nurse and a student (UVM is a teaching hospital - students everywhere!). they took one look at me and all had the same thought: kidney stone. it took about a half an hour to get paperwork through (it felt like an eternity), but they finally gave me pain meds. oooooh the joy of pain meds. it made me just sleepy enough to be able to manage the pain. and then they gave me my magic button that i could press every six minutes. every six minutes i pressed it and in came the pain meds. best. invention. ever.

sometime in the morning they took me for an ultrasound to look for the stone. they couldn't find it. strange. they said my kidney was inflamed and there were other signs consistent with a stone, so that's what they're going with. i kept hitting my magic button every six minutes until all of a sudden around 2:30 i stopped needing to use it. it was like someone had hit the off switch on the pain! it was crazy. i finally saw a doctor around five and he determined that the stone probably dissolved and that i could go home.

so i'm home now. the pain has returned, but to a lesser degree. the midwife thinks that it could be part of the stone still in there and that the kidney is still inflamed so she's giving me some narcotics for the pain. victory.  pain management at home and not in a hospital! so as long as i keep up my fluids and take my drugs, i should be all set. though, they'll want to see me if it doesn't get better...hopefully this isn't the case!

and don't worry, baby jacob is just fine in there. we heard his heartbeat a couple times and it's beating at the same rate it has been. and, since i was in the hospital, he received all the fluids he could have ever wanted! the nurses reassured us that this wouldn't affect him at all and that kidney stones are fairly common during pregnancy. the doctor even told us that they are even more common in the right kidney due to all the crazy things going on in the body. go figure!

i must say, that was possibly the worst pain i've ever been in in my entire life. they do say having a kidney stone is worse than having a kid. i guess my body just wanted to practice the whole pain thing for a little while...

pure joy.

yesterday was one of the most exciting days of our lives. i feel like i haven't stopped smiling for 24 hours straight. in fact, i was smiling so much, my cheeks hurt like they did on our wedding day.

yesterday we got to see our little baby for a whole hour while they took measurement after measurement during the ultrasound. i felt like a child in there as i sat with my mouth hanging open watching that little miracle on the screen. what a crazy, crazy feeling. 

frank, the sonographer, was great at explaining every measurement he was taking. he showed us all the little bones growing in there and it was AMAZING. watching and hearing the heart beat at the same time has to be one of the coolest things in the entire world. it's amazing how God is knitting that little one together piece by piece. 

so after an hour or so, frank asked us if we wanted to know what baby was...and we did not hesitate:

it's a boy!!!!!! we are thrilled. i feel like my heart is going to burst just thinking about little jacob jay in there. i can't even imagine what it's going to be like when we welcome him into the world in 4 1/2 months. we love him so much already! (and yes, he's got a name. we've had jacob jay picked out since as long as we both can remember...perhaps even before we were married! and no, we did not have any names if it were a girl, so that saved us a little bit of trouble!)

and you know what is making us feel even more overjoyed? sharing this with all our friends and family. i can't believe the outpouring of excitement, joy and support that people are sharing with us. it's amazing and we are so thankful to share with all of you. our hearts are so, so full. thank you for sharing in our joy with us - you make it all that much more fun!!

(sorry for the blurry picture, it's a picture of a picture as i have yet to scan in the actual pictures. and sorry for the overuse of exclamation points, clearly i'm excited!!)

19 weeks and a present or two.

i was going to save this picture for tomorrow, but i suppose tomorrow's big appointment will deserve it's own post, so i'm treating you all to a bump picture today. i went "shopping" with my mom last week. she lives in baltimore and i'm in vt, so while we enjoy doing our shopping in person, shopping trips usually have to happen as follows (and they're almost as fun!):

+email from mom: let's go shopping at lunch - look at these websites

+call mom at lunch and look at the websites at the same time

+pick out lovely items

and now i have another new shirt for my quickly expanding baby bump! THANKS, MOM!! you're my favorite shopping partner...this was a good pick, you think?:

and not only did i come home to a shirt in the mail from our shopping trip...but also a "happy day you find out if baby is a boy or girl" present from aunt erin!! aunt erin and uncle aaron, baby dumas LOVES it!!! how did you know soccer is already baby's favorite sport?! ;) 

don't worry, baby dumas will be celebrating a US gold medal in the London games...baby is smart, making an appearance just in time for such incredible events. 

coming soon: is baby dumas a boy or a girl??

18 weeks.

well, since people have been asking, i figured i better post a picture of my little baby bump. i finally started really showing last week (as in it looks a little more like baby and not just like some extra winter pounds put on since moving to vt!). i'll try to post these once a week, but since i work at home in my sweatpants every day, i often don't look so great in the bump pictures. i'll see what i can do, though :)

week 18 facts:

+baby is the size of a mango

+baby's legs and arms are proportionate now

+i should start feeling baby moving within the next couple weeks

some extra notes:

+spent the weekend with our pigeon cove chapel family - update coming soon

+a week from today we should know if baby is a boy or girl

a rather random update about nothing.

+ we haven't been doing too much around here these days. i'm still not feeling all that great, so we keep outings short, especially since the roads around here make me quite nauseous, even if i am the one driving. 

+ baby bump pictures will be coming shortly. a couple weeks ago you could actually start to tell i was pregnant, now there's no denying it. there's definitely a baby in there :)

+ january 24th is a big day in the dumas house. it's the day of the big ultrasound...the one where they do a bajillion different measurements to make sure everything is growing as it should. oh it also happens to be the one where they can usually tell if baby is a boy or girl. i used to not so secretly want only boys...but i really just don't care anymore. boy or girl is fine with me!

+ i am seriously missing cooking. i love planning out the meals for the week and grocery shopping. since moving and being pregnant, i've not done that once. part of this is because we are 30 minutes from the closest grocery store, but the other part is that it is rather hard to plan a menu when nothing sounds appealing to me besides eggo waffles with peanut butter and granola bars. 

+ we're about to hit tax season, in fact, next week is the first full week of six day work weeks. i'm already counting down the days until one of my favorite days of the year: april 15.

+ usually tax season starts a week earlier, which is a bummer, because the pigeon cove chapel retreat usually falls on the first weekend of tax season. but not this year! we're off to NH this weekend to spend time with our pcc family. we're excited!

+ i was in massachusetts last week for work. it was nice to be there, especially since two friends got engaged and i was able to hug and congratulate everyone in person...yay :) i also got my fill of hugs that'll last me to this weekend. not having many friends in vt means a serious lack of hugs in my life. not okay.

+ and i'll leave you with this last bullet point (aren't bulleted lists the best??) one of my goals this year is to learn how to use my camera properly before baby comes along. i started playing with shutter speed and i'm working on learning other things. here's a couple shots: 

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sharing our news.

last weekend i had the privilege of going back to massachusetts (i keep wanting to say home instead of massachusetts. it's funny how a place became home after a few short years there...but that's a blog post for another day). there were many reasons for my trip back, most of which revolved around sharing our news with everyone. i needed to tell work and we wanted to share the news in person with our friends. unfortunately, ry was unable to make the trip with me due to not having any vacation time, so i made sure to tape a bunch of reactions for him. 

the first reaction we have is the soccer team. this one is a bit long, but i just couldn't cut out the ending of two of my players looking at the picture. at the end of the season, i had the opportunity to share with the girls how the Lord worked in our lives and moved us to vermont. i asked coach if i could continue my story with a little bit of an update at the banquet on sunday night, to which he gladly said yes (when i told coach i was moving he asked me if i'd be looking for work, or working on my family...he must have known something i didn't know!). so i started by explaining how the Lord had been working all things out and then broke the news by pulling out the gift the girls gave me at the banquet last year: a baby t shirt (again...they must have known something i didn't know!) Here's their reaction:

the next reaction is when our pastor, patrick, shared the news with our pigeon cove chapel family. i stopped over to see patrick and sarah when i got into town on saturday night so i could share the news with them. somehow we decided it'd be fun to display the ultrasound picture up on the screen and tell people that way during announcements. it was so fun being there to share this news!! here's how it went down:

and finally: our friends. this video cracks me up every time. it's perfect. i almost ruined it because i couldn't figure out how to video on my camera, so lauren asked me if i was pregnant before i actually revealed the news. i can't remember how i got out of it, but i made everyone just say hi to ryan. then i convinced dolan that i needed to show her something. Please note the reactions around the room:

so there you have it. i'm so so so glad these videos are recorded. it was so fun sharing our news with everyone and i have never felt so covered with love...again. my goodness we left so many people that we love in massachusetts. the good news is that we know that, because of our shared faith in Christ, we will always have family in massachusetts. i wish i had caught some reactions from work, too, because those were fantastic as well! it's so fun knowing how much baby dumas is loved already. thank you, everyone, for sharing in our joy. we are so thankful for all of you.