The Keene Family

This birthday felt odd for two reasons: first, it rarely falls after Easter, and second, it has never snowed on my birthday. Nevertheless, the day was fun and packed with yummy food and good friends. Jim made the most amazing french toast breakfast of his cooking career. We went to dinner and a movie with my friend Jessica, and came home to decorations, presents, and dessert (picture above). I got a few things from our baby registry, which is exciting to start, and a few things for me. My birthday also marked 24 weeks pregnant, so we took new pictures. To compare these two to the 20-week pictures, click here . Twice this week complete strangers have asked me when I'm due, so I guess it's really starting to look like a baby belly. Maybe that's because it grew another inch this week! See for yourself...

Easter Sunday Well, it happened. The bathroom scale now reads a number I've never seen before! All week, people have commented that I looked bigger (in a nice way, of course), and my weekly check-in confirmed it. I gained over an inch in my waist this week, bringing me to 33 1/2 inches, and I weigh 140 pounds. The top of my belly button is now pretty flat, so my innie will probably become an outie in the next month or so. I'm not surprised at all this, considering Monday morning I was awakened around 1:30 AM by some serious tummy-pummeling from within, and by the time it stopped I couldn't go back to sleep. I finally realized that I couldn't sleep because I was so hungry. So I tiptoed downstairs for some cheese, crackers, and yogurt around 2. This week at work, I've had to go get more food twice because I had eaten everything I'd packed in my lunch and was ravenous. JT must be having a growth spurt. Sure enough, our baby book says he will double his weight thi...

On Saturday, we registered for all JT's necessities at Target and Babies R Us (convenient links to the left). While Target is usually less expensive on baby basics, Babies R Us has a lot of things that you can't find in other stores - so we had to do both. I'm going to leave the Amazon registry up too, since there are even more things that you can't get in either of the other two stores. We had already picked out some of the big items (crib, car seat, stroller), so that was good. I don't know how people walk into the store having no idea. There are so many different types to choose from! We didn't register for many clothes, outside of newborn basics, because it's hard to tell what we'll need. What we do need is a lot of gear, since all our friends are still having babies and have to keep theirs! This weekend, JT had two new friends enter the world: Sadie Hollander and Asher Shuck. In another month, Baby Boy Skagen will join the bunch. By the time JT is ...

Today we had our check-up appointment. Here are some updates: JT is 95th percentile in size for his age. Nurse Peggy asked us if large birth weights ran in our families, and my heart stopped for a split second! She said that we would watch his size as we go along. My belly measures 21 cm (top to bottom, clearly not around!), which is exactly average for mid-pregnancy. Peggy said I can expect to gain about 1 cm per week until JT arrives if he's growing healthily. Our next (and quite possibly final) ultrasound will be around 30 weeks - or about two months from now. I got confirmation today that I will got into the Prenatal Water Aerobics class I signed up for at Valley Medical Center. It starts on April 1st and meets twice a week in the evenings. Everyone I know who has taken the class has loved it, so I'm looking forward to it. I think it will be pretty funny to watch all of us pregnant women waddle around in our swimsuits! I still do my workout DVD once a week and try to take S...

What a great day! We are so thankful to announce that our baby is a boy. While any healthy baby is a blessing, that is what we had hoped. Today we had an hour-long ultrasound. I had no idea the 20-week one was so intense. The technician measured bones, arteries, organs, and everything in between. Everything is functioning well and looks great. He measures a little ahead in size (6 days bigger than expected), but that doesn't change my due date at all. His heart rate continues to sit around 150 bpm. Are we sure it's a boy, you ask? Yep! Since he likes to move around so much (both ultrasounds have confirmed what I have suspected for the last month, and both technicians have commented several times that we have a "very active baby"), it was hard to get a good shot of his boy anatomy at first. The technician pointed out some things and said she would proclaim with 80% accuracy that it was indeed a boy. A few minutes later, he turned, and she changed her odds to 90%. By th...

20 weeks! The halfway point. The baby is becoming much more active - I now feel something a few times a day. The movement is especially strong when I'm sitting, like in the car, at church, or at my computer at work. One time during a meeting there were definite thumps , as opposed to little taps, and that made me happy. I'm also big enough where people are smiling at my belly in the store, and helping me carry big things without me saying anything... today at Costco I was loading the car and a man walked by and offered to push my cart back to the store for me. I think I'll just take all the help I'm offered (even if I don't really need someone to return my cart for me) since this only happens for a little while! This past week we got to look through my old baby things as well as Jim's. Both of our moms saved clothes, toys, and blankets from our baby days. We have picked out a few things from both sides that we'd like to pass on to our child. Here are this m...