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...