baby love.

yep, it's true. i'm nine weeks pregnant today! i'm due march 26th, and bennett will be almost 21 months old. two under two... ready or not, here we come!

we found out we are expecting just 2 days after we closed on our house. talk about a lot going on at once! we are thrilled to add to our little family, and the timing couldn't be better now that we have the space to actually put another baby. i've been feeling OK- not terrible, not great. pretty nauseous throughout most of the day but no actual throwing up. craaazzzzy tired. pretty emotional. essentially i feel about how i felt when i was pregnant with ben (except maybe more intense- not sure if it's just that i've forgotten what it was like last time or if it's actually worse). i'm looking forward to getting some energy back- hopefully soon! being pregnant with a one year old is way harder than it was being pregnant with the first. turns out ben's not in for staying in bed all day watching chick flicks. weird, i know.

baby: size of a prune (about 1.5" long), bones and cartilage are forming

cravings: it changes by the minute. anything "heavy"/comfort food like pot roast and fettuccine, bread, cottage cheese (i craved this with bennett too!), cherry arctic rushes from DQ, cold milk, orange juice (though it seems to give me a stomach ache afterwards).

aversions: coffee, any food smells, anything i just ate (things will sound good and taste good until i'm getting full and then that food almost instantaneously has me dry-heaving)

aches/pains: just nauseous mostly. some lower abdominal pain (feels like stretching). super tired, but not sleeping great.

body: i've only gained a little over one pound (despite all the comfort food- thank goodness!). but my clothes already feel tight and all i want to wear are loose skirts/dresses. jeans are a thing of the past, which happens to make my wardrobe pretty limited at this point. i pulled out my old belly band and have been wearing that when i'm miraculously able to talk myself out of wearing the same cotton maxi dress 3 days in a row. i've been trying to go on fast-paced walks a few times a week, which has felt good. bennett seems to like getting a chance to rock his shades :) i'm wanting to look into some prenatal yoga classes somewhere. any suggestions of a studio near-ish to shoreview?

as excited as i am about a new baby, and about bennett being a big brother, i could cry thinking about ben not being the "baby" anymore. i know it's semi-irrational, but something about him having to share us and having to soon make some big boy transitions (big boy bed, room downstairs, etc.) in order to prepare for the new baby has me feeling oddly guilty. it's bittersweet, i suppose. he'll still be kind of a "baby" himself when the new babe comes along, so i'm hoping the adjustment will be smoother than i'm anticipating. he's resilient, after all. more so than joe and i give him credit for.

speaking of resilience, we decided to make the weekend after labor day "operation: bye-bye nuk" weekend. we've talked a lot about wanting to do some of the tough transitions for ben us over the next several months so that we don't have to tackle those while also adjusting to being a family of four. the nuk is the first battle we're choosing. i'm already dreading it. but having the date on the calendar is helpful for me, much like when we did the cry it out weekend.

thankfully, despite a terrible night of crying it out on monday night this week (bennett had been waking up in the night fairly consistently for 3+ weeks and we'd gotten into a bad habit of feeding him), ben slept through the night last night. i literally feel like a whole new woman after a full night of rest. i guess it's another reminder for me that joe isn't always wrong (love you babe!). joe had been hesitant to feed ben in the night, thinking he'd start waking up regularly wanting milk. i, on the other hand, insisted he'd stop waking up when he wasn't hungry in the night anymore. what can i say? i'm a sucker for that big belly our little boy has. honestly, it's so hard to know what to do when your babe randomly starts waking up in the night again. you assess all the possibilities: is he hot? is he cold? is he hungry? did his diaper leak? did he lose his nuk or binky? do his teeth hurt? as much as i'd like to say i know bennett so well that i can determine just what he needs at any given time, it's honestly anyone's guess sometimes. regardless, whatever it was, it seems he didn't need it last night. i don't want to count my chickens before they're hatched, but i'm hopeful that we're moving past the middle of the night wake-up calls for now (maybe even until march 26th?!).