let the renovations resume

well, andrew and i had an excitement-filled four days for this labor day break... we laid around, watched gilmore girl marathons, took naps, and pretty much did nothing - UNTIL TODAY! my mom, who is fantastically motivating, came over and got us jump-started back into getting this house in order. i have limited house painting abilities at this point because of the whole not standing on ladders or stools, and not inhaling fumes, due to the inherent danger to the bean, but luckily team-paint did a great job getting the first coats to the entire dining room/hallway/one wall of the kitchen done!

the wainscoting will definitely need another layer, as this was only primer, and we'll see how the taupe part looks on the top part of the wall to judge whether it needs another coat, but i'm SO excited that it's well underway and we're back in action on the renovation front!

i made 7-layer dip!

tonight, andrew said, "hey, i want some more of that yummy 7-layer dip we had!" i'm not sure if he said "yummy" but it was something to that effect. so we called our local grocer, you know, the one that's not more than 15 mins away, and asked if they had any. lo and behold, they did not. i can't say i was surprised. so we decided that spreading 7 layers in a pyrex dish couldn't be too hard to figure out. when i looked online for a recipe, i was pretty surprised at all the different variations for the 7 layers... and all the recipes that had like 20 ingredients.

i chose to play it simple and layered (bottom, up) refried beans, guacamole dip, sour cream seasoned with taco flavoring, cheese, olives (two kinds), tomatoes, and chives.

end result: delish!

aaaand, we ate it with multigrain tortilla chips, so it was "healthy."

2 years!

august 25th was our 2 year wedding anniversary!

andrew got all romantic and planned a nice dinner with a surprise at the end. i was working all day, and i'm still not feeling great, especially when it comes to food, but i did my best to enjoy it! he surprised me by taking me to 518 west, where andrew had the car valeted, then we got a nice table upstairs right on the balcony so that we could see the whole place. we had calamari appetizers, andrew had the baked pasta, and i ended up with a modified chicken parmesan. see, usually the chicken parm comes with penne pasta and no veggies, but i was trying to be healthy, so i got the chicken with whole wheat linguini, and i had them add spinach to the sauce - yay for accommodating restaurants! the only thing i was missing was a nice glass of wine to go with it... oh well.

then, when we were finished and waiting on it to be boxed up, i started to wonder if our waitress was going to bring the dessert menu, but instead, she brought out the second surprise - andrew had a replica of the top of our wedding cake remade and had delivered it to the restaurant! he had it made at the stick boy in fuquay, and he even called the stick boy in boone to make sure the flavors of the cake and filling were right! how sweet!!

we didn't have my camera there, so we took a picture on andrew's phone, but it's really dark.



and to think, next year we'll have to get a babysitter to go out to our anniversary dinner...

first baby pics!

we went for our first ultrasound on thursday, and...
there's something in there!

the picture scanned upside-down, but i think it actually looks more like a baby and less like a blob this way, so i didn't bother flipping it. with the pictures oriented this way, the small blob at the bottom is the "yolk sac" and the baby is the larger blob at the top. in both pictures, the head is at the top, though i think you really have to use your imagination to see a baby. [if you click on the picture, it will enlarge]

so it's official! i'm pregnant, i was about 7 and a half weeks on thursday based on the size of the baby, the heart rate was 149, and everything looks good so far. yay :-)

being pregnant is...

pretty lame so far.

so when i thought i might be pregnant, i stopped drinking alcohol... which isn't a huge deal, but when you've had a long day, it's nice to sit back with a glass of wine, or go to a mexican restaurant and drink a margarita with your vat of cheese sauce (or a vat of margarita with your cheese, either way). but that is all over for the next, oh, year or so.

then i became exhausted all the time, i'm tired, i ache all over, some days i feel like my joints are coming unhinged (and apparently, thanks to one of the hormones, they kind of are! in preparation of baby-havin'). this problem is complicated by the fact that i no longer consume caffeine, if possible, so that morning espresso is no help in shakin' these tired blues.

after confirmation of the pregnancy, came the nausea and food restrictions. many things i LOVE and base my diet on are no-no's for pregnancy. to name a few: soft, unpasteurized cheeses, sushi, steak any pinker than well done, deli meats, and certain types of fish. oh, but what can i eat? pre-natal vitamins, which in and of themselves will make you wanna hurl. even without these magical baby-producing-vomit-inducing pills, most of the foods i eat left me with an unpleasant feeling in my tummy. and don't even get me started on smells! ugh! even things i liked before like my own perfume, or febreeze send me running for the door! (who knew your sense of smell was so heightened during pregnancy.)

now, i am enjoying the world of full-on morning (or afternoon, or evening, or all day) sickness with my first actual hurling episode yesterday morning before work. let's just say that i no longer want to see v8 in any of its forms, and i'm pretty sure that vitamin didn't get "fully absorbed". i'll take some saltines and ginger ale please. andrew brought me some at work, where i still managed to be the first one there, even after my porcelain prayer session.

work is a whole nother list of "don'ts" - don't play in cat poop (kind of hard when it's one of the major aspects of your job), don't take x-rays, don't be around iso, don't touch that drug, or that one, or that one... wash your hands after touching that, oh that cat has toxoplasmosis! dont' pick up that dog, don't stand on that ladder to get that bag of food that's too heavy for you to carry all of a sudden, and on and on ad nauseum (man a lot of pregnancy is about nausea)...

i guess the only good thing is that people tend to feel bad for you when you ask them if they will take your shifts (so you're not in overtime again while feeling like poop), and i did get to take today off thanks to amy deciding to work for me today.

i am sure that some day soon, there will be a more encouraging positive benefit to all this negativity i'm feeling about my current "condition" - for now, this is your non-shiny-happy emily, signing off.

uncertainty

it seems, that since we made public-ish our big announcement, i have been faced with more and more uncertainty. like, am i really pregnant? how will this change my life? how will this change our lives? will i have a miscarriage? will i have a baby with some kind of deformity or illness? will i go into early labor and have a preemie? will i have to have a c-section? will i be able to stay home with this kid after it's born? will it be a boy or girl? am i really pregnant??? are these symptoms i'm experiencing normal or weird? how will this affect the way i work at my job? how will it affect my dogs? will i get really fat and be unable to lose the weight? will we go bankrupt? AM I REALLY PREGNANT?!

so you can see, i am totally normal and there are no hormones raging out of control in me at all. ps, i just sent andrew to the store for chocolate ice cream. on the way out he jokingly asked if i wanted pickles. i realized... I DO. so i am about to consume pickles and ice cream - how cliche!

---sidenote: i am beginning to hate living here - how can it be that we have no goodberry's anywhere near, no coldstone, AND the grocery store's out of haagen-dazs chocolate. i guess that's what you get when the grocery stores aren't allowed to sell beer and the most hoppin' eatery for sunday night dinner is mcdonalds.---

on a totally rambling continuation of this blog (which seems to lack all direction... consistent with my current mental state), i took my first "belly pic" to document where i was last week. since i'm not sure what week number i technically am because i haven't been to the ob yet (and won't go till the 20th), i don't know which week to call it. i mostly wanted to document that at one time, i had a relatively flat stomach.
thank you, target dressing room.

and secondly, we got new bedroom furniture. correction: we got bedroom furniture. we've been sleeping on a mattress on the floor and keeping our clothes mostly in baskets and on shelves because of the lack of dresser and other such fancy modern conveniences for the past two or so years, but now, thanks to the poor economy and someone having to sell off their entire house's worth of stuff, we have a king sized bedframe, two bedside tables, and a dresser.

movin' on up [moooovin' on up]...

ok, so i lied..

it hasn't exactly been so ho hum around here.

we've had something brewing that is pretty exciting...
to answer your first question, yes, it was on purpose.

we were thinking/hoping that i was pregnant, so i took a test (ok, another test, the first ones i took were too soon to tell), and on saturday morning, this was my result:

as you can see, one line means "not pregnant" and two lines means "pregnant" so obviously, we knew i was...??? thank you faint line - andrew said it should be called "faint response" instead of "first response." well the test says that any line, no matter how faint, is positive, so it peaked our interest enough to buy a less confusing digital test, which said:

... and that weekend i took a total of 4 tests, you know, just to be sure hahaha.

i went to the doctor's office on wednesday, and waited, and waited, and on friday (when i'd already set up a visit with the obgyn), it became official (by blood anyway). we're having a baby!

we told my parents this weekend over dinner...
mom screamed
dad shook andrew's hand
dave and monica found out later that night and were very surprised
and everyone else found out by phone or not on camera. we were going to wait to tell people until we're a little farther along, but i had to tell my work people since there are some health precautions i have to take working around certain chemicals/x-rays/etc.

so now you all, dear blogworld friends, are also in the loop!