29 week belly

Here I am at 29 weeks. My face, hands and feet are really starting to get swollen! Yuck!

single digits

Beware, it's a long one!

I'm finally in single digit countdown, in weeks! YAY! Only 9 weeks to go. I really can't believe how fast it's gone. I hope the rest of it goes just as fast. Thank goodness I'm busy with work until the beginning on April and then we are going to San Diego with my family, and after that I'll have to get everything ready for the baby, since we have NOTHING ready for it!

In the last couple of weeks I've been able to feel hiccups. It's so cute. Baby doesn't get them that often or for that long, which I'm glad about, I can't imagine they are pleasant for it.

My hips and pelvis are really starting to hurt, I guess it's all adjusting getting ready for birth. My visits to the chiropractor really help!

I haven't been blogging much because I have been SO busy with work! I'm so excited about the growth my company is experiencing and where it's going. In the last 5 months income has quadrupled!! I've been working with a business coach that has been helping me get all my systems in place and she is also helping me with marketing, it has really been paying off! I now have 7 people that help me. By September I'm going to double my business from where it is right now so that Frank can quit his full time job and come work with me to help with Sales and Marketing. Frank and I just came up with that plan last weekend and The Secret has really been at work since then! Everything has really fallen into place for it to happen. I think I might even be able to take some time off when I have the baby. Well, at least time off from seeing clients and just work a little bit from home, for a couple of weeks. I'm meeting with my business coach in April to come up with a plan for that.

I was having dreams about all of this last night and I woke up and couldn't go back to sleep I was so excited. I felt like that little kid in the Disneyland commercial who's dad tells him to go to sleep and he says, "I'm too excited to sleep," while bursting with excitement!!

My Mom is going to come stay with us for the summer to help with the baby. It's such a huge relief! I really don't want to put my baby in day care and the cost of a nanny is ridiculous and I don't want just anyone taking care of my baby. So we asked my Mom to come stay and she very generously said she would. It will be a fun summer! That's the other part of our motivation for Frank quitting his job, when my company is double what it is now, he can stay home on Tuesdays and Thursdays with the baby and I can stay home the other three days a week. We both will be able to work from home (well, as much as you can with a baby around).

Sorry about such a long post, it's been a long time since I updated everyone and as I'm sure you can tell, I'm VERY excited about everything that's going on!

Business of Being Born

The Business of Being Born. If you are having a baby and you haven't seen this I HIGHLY recommend it! I'm sure you have all heard about it. It's the movie that Ricky Lake produced about giving birth in America. Although it talks a lot about home births, it's a great movie about just being informed about our choices as women to give birth the way WE want and to take back the control from the doctors. It also talks about how giving birth is a business to hospitals and a lot of the decisions they make are based on making money and the fear of being sued, not on what's best for the mother and baby. Whatever type of birth you plan on having at least watch this movie before you do.

I swear the more I learn about and research modern medicine vs. alternative medicine, the more I think that alternative medicine has it figured out. If only they could get the money that pharmaceutical companies have to do the research and to promote it the way pharm. companies do.

That being said, I'm very excited and nervous about my upcoming delivery. We are down to a little over 10 weeks. Yikes! I am planning a natural birth and have spent the last nine weeks taking classes and doing research on all my options. My doctor is very supportive about it, in fact, his wife is a midwife and will be with us during the entire labor. She's going to come to our house so that I can labor at home as long as possible, to avoid having all the testing and IVs and everything else they do at the hospital. Frank says we should have saved the last nine weeks of classes and just hired the doula, because he's gonna be a mess regardless. I'm sure he'll be a little excited, but he'll be fine.

What a gorgeous weekend!

I had a great weekend doing nothing productive, oh wait, I did do laundry and I, wait let's see I'm sure I must have done something else, nope, that's it.

On Saturday I went out to lunch with some girlfriends. That was a lot of fun. One of them is 36 weeks pregnant, she's actually due on my birthday! After that I went shopping for some summer clothes. When I bought maternity clothes when I was first pregnant, I forgot that it gets so warm here so early, so I have only 2 shirts and a one pair of capris that I tried to wear on Saturday and they didn't fit. I think that means that I grew in my butt and not just my belly like I thought. So I got some cute capris and other shorts at Motherhood. BTW, if anyone is pregnant or gets pregnant their "secret fit" is SO comfortable!! I LOVE IT!! I'm never buying any other maternity pants again. It's a really thin microfiber panel and comes over the belly. It totally hides under white shirts too!!

Sunday Frank and I went and bought some furniture for our front porch. We've been wanting some for 2 years and we finally found some we liked that was a million dollars. So I spent the day on the front porch with my boys, reading and enjoying the sunshine.

Frank was a little more productive than I was. He got the baseboards up in the nursery and he got some of the chair rail up and all the corner pieces over the wainscoatting. I finally decided to call my aunt that is an interior designer to help us, because it's getting to the point of ridiculous that we can't make a decision what to do with the paint and I can't find any bedding that I like. Everything is either so girly or masculine. So I think we are making progress there!

Organic Baby Food

I don't know how many of you know, but I've been slowly turning into a San Francisco fruit and nut! Everyday I'm becoming more of a tree hugger, alternative-medicine, crazy person. In addition to doing cork floors and a low-flow toilet in my bathroom, I drive a hybrid and am even a tiny bit considering using cloth diapers, or at the very least Seventh Generation chlorine-free diapers. I've also been looking at different baby food products and I found something others might be interested in.

Here's a great company that sales organic baby food:
Maddy's Organic Meals

Check them out!

almost finished

As I've mentioned before, Frank and I have been working on remodeling this house for a VERY long time! He has owned it for 4 years and I've been around for 3 and it's pretty much, been going on since he bought it. We've taken a lot of time because he has done a lot of it himself (nobody else can do as good a job as he does) and he pretty much has taken the whole thing down to the studs both inside and out.

Anyway, we started the master bathroom in September 2006. Last weekend he finally got the floor done. It's cork flooring with a heater underneath. I LOVE it! When I get up to go in the middle of the night it's nice a toasty warm (it's set on a timer). We still have to put in the counter top, but at least we can shower and, my favorite part, take a bath!

Here's the picture of the before of the outside of the house:
And here's the after:
I'll go through the house later and post some more before and afters. I forget what it looked like before, it's quite the change!

I left my heart in San Francisco

Amber and I spent the day in San Francisco. We went to an Orchid Expo. It was an absolutely BEAUTIFUL day and reminded me, yet again, why I love living here!
There were TONS of sail boats out on the Bay. It was 70* in the City today, so it was packed with people.

I've never seen so many incredible flowers! Every where you turned there was another thousand flowers and no two plants were alike. I came home with just two. One that can grow outdoors and one that has to be indoors. It will sit on my office desk. If you wanna see all the flower pictures you can go to : http://picasaweb.google.com/HollyDeVito777/OrchidExpo After the expo Amber and I sat on a bench and were eating our sandwiches and watching all the people and the boats and just enjoying the sun. When a seagull flew over our heads and one of them pooped on Amber! It was the funniest thing I've ever seen. I was crying I was laughing so hard! She was gracious enough to let me take a picture. Since I've known her she's been pooped on probably 10 times, at least. I've never known anybody that actually has gotten pooped on, let alone more than once!