34 weeks.

Picture before we left for the baby shower on 12/21. 33 weeks, 2 days there!

How far along? 34 weeks

Total weight gain: 14 pounds

Maternity clothes: yep!

Stretch marks? Yep!

Best moment of the week? A lot of good ones this week. The obvious answer being the baby shower. But the most moving was my grandmother giving me a quilt she made for Hartley. It is truly a priceless gift, and I will love it forever. 

Miss anything? Wine. Bending over with ease. Shaving with ease. Sleeping. 

Movement: yes. She's still not a painful kicker nor does she move the way other women describe but she has hiccups and healthy kicks. 

Food cravings: unfortunately, restaurant food or fast food. My mom's Christmas cookies. Nothing healthy really. 

Anything making you queasy or sick? Not exactly - getting full easily and having the kind of reflux that feels like battery acid in my throat. 

Have you started to show? Um, I'm had someone ask me if I'm due tomorrow so yes. 

Gender: girl. Now complete with a very girlie room and frilly clothes.

Belly button in or out? In but Brian says it looks like it's going to pop out soon.

Wedding rings on or off? Squeezed them on for the shower. They are now retired for a while.

Happy or Moody? More like happy, emotional and confused.

Looking forward to: meeting our angel. Good lord it has been quite the ride, over 3 years since we started our journey to Hartley, and meeting her is going to be amazing.

A lot has happened since I blogged last so I will likely revisit the shower and gifts to share some details on that later. Her room is insanely ready so I will eventually update on that. We celebrated our last Christmas as just a couple with a puppy. 8 Christmases we've seen together, and I'm not entirely sure any of those will hold a candle to next year's. 

Life has been crazy. Things have been emotional. And I can't quite believe we're here.

Brian's work was insane leading up to Christmas. It made for a grouchy, stressed husband. And in turn an unhappy pregnant wife. We jumped in to the shower. Holy overwhelming. You've never seen a haul like this. At 2.5 hours it was the shortest shower I've seen, and at 30 guests, the biggest. So you can imagine what that present opening was like - tied back my hair and sweated like a pig but we got a lot of amazing gifts. It was a wonderful shower but a total blur. 

It took 3 cars to transport the gifts, and an awesome crew of volunteers to get them in to the house. They took up the dining room... And living room. And even working at lightening speed, took about two full days to unpack, not all, but most of it. I won't even tell you how many loads of laundry. 

Then we immediately started holiday celebrations. We were ping pong balls like we are every year - just bouncing from place to place. 

The tough part was that Christmas ended on a very, very tough note. We were supposed to go to my aunts house to see my grandma Frank but she needed to go back to her nursing home because the day was entirely too much for her. We visited her in her home, and I fought back tears the whole time. She has Alzheimer's and was reliving her parents dying. She kept asking us why no one told her - that she just found out. Asking had they died together and who lived in their house. Both of her parents have been dead since before I was even born. Her father has been gone for 38 years and her mom died several years after. My mom told us that next time we'll just pretend her parents never died so she doesn't have to relive that pain.

By the time we left we were all in tears. It's a tough thing to watch. And even harder to watch my mom watch her mom as her mind floats away. And it's tough to see her life in it's last chapters. There is a little solace in the fact that Hartley will soon start hers. A little piece of me wishes Hartley could've entered our lives just a little sooner so she could've really met her great grandmother the way I will always remember her. 

I might cry as I write this but all in all, it's been a good week. Just an emotional roller coaster that hormones don't exactly help.

But I digress, the next few days, we'll work on getting ready. And I'll post more details rom the past chunk of life soon.