Today is my due date

Baby has one hour and fifteen minutes to make her appearance.

Just kidding. She can come whenever 🙂 Guess dates for everyone!

In the meantime, I am eating all the food in sight. What does a pregnant woman eat at 10pm?

1 tuna salad (lots of celery and bell pepper) sandwich on whole wheat

1c cherry tomatoes

1c cherries

1c cottage cheese

Thats a lot of food for a snack. It was delicious. Thanks for asking. I might eat some cauliflower in a little while. I suppose I can’t feel too guilty since most of what I ate is good for me, right? Still feel like a glutton though. Oh well. Baby is hungry 🙂

Food is my friend

Its true. Special K with strawberries is my morning friend. Salt and Vinegar kettle chips are my night time sneaky friend that I only see once in a great while. Grapefruit is my best friend, we visit several times a day.

Lets see…I’m closing in on the 24 week mark! That means a crazy great level of viability outside of the womb should I go into premature labor. WHOOOHOOOO. Honestly, the fact that it is actually feasible to hold my little baby girl if something goes wrong and know there is potential to keep going strong…it means so damn much. I’ve waited so long and we’re just inching closer and closer to her being here.

Also, I’m as big as a house. We had a major major growth spurt and there is no denying I’m preggo at all. In the course of a week, the loose fitting maternity shirts I had became tight around my bump. Yikes! I love it though. As much as its uncomfortable and as much as I waddle, its just a big ole reminder 🙂

Speaking of waddling, the boy called me “Little Mrs. Waddles-a-Lot”. I had nothing witty to say in return because its true.

Oh well!

Tomorrow…

Is the day I can see my baby. It will be our first and probably only ultrasound. I will be 17 weeks (we think) and should also be able to tell the gender as long as the babe doesn’t have his/her legs crossed.

You’d better cooperate, Speck!

Also, the baby has been crazy active all week. Tonight we did an experiment and the boy actually got to feel Speck kick. It was the most precious thing to see his face light up. Yup. Crying again as I type that out. He’s going to be such an awesome brother. Sappy sappy mom moment guys 🙂

Oh, and my husband is awesome because he went to the store around midnight on Tuesday and this totally happened:

Yup. You should probably be jealous. Or disgusted. Probably both. I was. Still am. It was worth it though.

venting frustrations

I haven’t decided what the worst part is.

I had gotten to the point where regular clothes didn’t fit me well and so now I’m stuck wearing maternity clothes for a while longer. I don’t want to wear maternity clothes or look pregnant anymore.

My body hasn’t caught on to the fact that I’m not really pregnant, so every little pain and craving is driving me nuts because its just a lie.

I cry because of the crazy hormones that are still floating around and I cry because of whats going on.

I am terrified to run into people that I know…I don’t think I have it in me to explain what is going on and it is basically going to break me that much more if I have to see smiles and get happy questions about baby because they don’t know. The worst is that we’re supposed to go to a parent/kid play-group tomorrow and last everyone knew the pregnancy was great. I don’t know if I can handle it.

Thank goodness I found my old prescription for anxiety pills. I haven’t needed them in forever, but I’m basically a mess. At least it lets me keep it together enough to get through the day for the little one’s sake. We took him out all day for his birthday since it rained all last weekend (when we originally planned it). I hate feeling like I have to rely on any medication, but…I suppose it is better that I use it now then having a breakdown every 10 minutes. Right? Right…I still have to be a good mommy for my big kid.

Feeling hot hot hot

On my lovely food/craving journey we are currently stopped at “spicy”. I’m not typically one to tolerate really spicy foods in mass quantities, but I can’t get enough right now.

I made steak sandwiches for dinner…I had been wanting them for a while now so I decided to make my own. I piled mine high with hot banana peppers and then the best part…

Franks RedHot Buffalo wing sauce. Its the sauce that makes chicken wings all slippery and hot. Its the reason why wings are served with celery and blue cheese…to cool down the fire in your mouth. Me? I poured it all over my mountain of hot peppers. Oh yes. Only one bite later and I was sad. It wasn’t spicy enough. So I poured on even more. Tasty, but not there yet. The solution? Dip the entire sandwich into a puddle of delicious sauce before each bite. The heavens opened and the angels sang. Husband on the other hand looked on in terror as I took each messy, flaming bite. He knows I can’t eat this stuff without chugging a drink and having horrible heartburn after the first nibbles.

This baby on the other hand? It laughs in the face of fear. Baby is happy with its offering for the evening. I am a content mama.

Baking Adventure

I love love love (did I say love?) baking. However, Germany has made it extremely difficult. First problem is that I don’t have an oven in the apartment. We do have access to the house kitchen that DOES have an oven, but it is a pain in the butt to have to carry down all the ingredients…

Speaking of ingredients, that is the second problem. My first weeks here I wanted to make some chocolate chip cookies. Then I realized…German stores don’t sell chocolate chips. Or brown sugar. Or vanilla extract. Or baking powder/soda. I did make the cookies with some substitutions…a bar of chocolate chopped up instead of chips. I found something very close to American brown sugar at the Asian grocery store (that’s right folks, my brown sugar super exotic and from Thailand), instead of vanilla extract I used a common German item…vanilla sugar. Baking soda equivalent is KaiserNatron. Baking powder’s (not very good) equivalent is Back Pulver. They turned out decent…the texture was only a tiny bit off. And that was with me using not-quite-exact measurements; our measurements don’t always come out so nice when converted to metric.

So, with this experience under my belt, I decided to brave the kitchen once more with my handy metric converter and a mind for substitutions. I was lucky enough to find a brownie recipe that did NOT use cocoa powder (can’t find that in any of my local stores), but I was able to find vanilla aroma. It is kind of like extract…only an oil and MUCH more potent, so you only need a few drops.

Thank you Food Network! I doubled the recipe, skipped the nuts, added some milk chocolate to the batter, and sprinkled in a packet of instant espresso. Absolutely AMAZING. Waiting for them to cool was torture.

I’ve also got some dough in the fridge for Nutella Pinwheels. I found an amazing food blog called The Purple Foodie. What could go wrong? Buttery shortbread and gooey Nutella? Yes please. I’ll post pictures if they come out as pretty as hers!