4D

We went to the doctor again yesterday to do a detailed ultrasound at 20 weeks.  I'm half way there!  It's hard to believe.  It was so great to get to see our little Wheat in such detail.  She was moving around so much while we were looking at her.  It was good because we were able to see many different parts of her, but it didn't bode well for trying to get a good 4D picture of her face.  Oh well, we were so glad to see her moving around.  She is above average in weight, but it's all length not width :)  I told the doctor we were trying to have the longest baby born in this country.  He said we had a good chance but there is a Danish couple who will probably be fighting us for the record.

So, it's not a great picture because she kept moving around, but here is her little head with her hand (with all five fingers) by her mouth.

Boppy

Living overseas tends to make you a little bit more resourceful.  We don't have everything available to us that we did in the States, and even if it is available, it is usually outrageously expensive.  In the States, it seems that a common staple for new moms is a Boppy pillow.  I have seen similar pillows over here, but they are not quite as big and they are quite expensive still.  So, I decided to make my own!  On Pinterest, I found this tutorial for making a slip cover for your Boppy pillow.  I thought to myself, I can just make this cover and take it to the pillow man down the street and get him to fill it up for me.  It might not be exactly the same, but it should be good enough and I won't even know the difference.

So, I purchased my fabric in the souq, costing me roughly $1.25 for a meter.  I decided to make another as a gift, so I ended up buy two matching fabrics to make a double sided Boppy.  I printed out the pattern I found on that website and got to work.

Here are my two cut and sown fabrics

Andrew and I walked down the street to our pillow guy.  He was obviously from a village or something because his Arabic was incredibly difficult to understand, but we left the pillow cases with him and a few hours later Andrew went and picked them up.  It cost us approximately $5.

The finished products

I am pretty pleased with the results.  I am sure it is not the same as a real Boppy pillow, but I won't know the difference and this one only cost us about $6.25 rather than the $40 it would cost for the real deal.  This is the actual pillow, so if it gets dirty you can't really wash it in the washer, but I am thinking maybe I'll make a slipcover for this pillow.  I don't know yet, we'll see.

18 Weeks

Here's my 18 Week belly pic.  Not the best pic of my face, but just focus on the belly :)

Easter in the Middle East

In our part of the world, things tend to move a bit slower.  That was my first thought when we showed up at a local church on Easter morning and they were just celebrating Palm Sunday.  In actuality that is not why they were a week behind our Western churches.  I remember growing up in Catholic School, there were several students in my class who were Greek Orthodox, and they always celebrated Easter a week after the rest of us.  Here in our current country, there are several varieties of Christian.  The King decided that he didn't want the Christians celebrating all their holidays on different days, so he made them all come to an agreement on holidays.  So, we celebrate the Eastern Easter and the Western Christmas.  It was really neat this year to be able to attend an Arab Church and see how believers here celebrate these holy days.  It was also very encouraging that we actually understood most of the Sermon in Arabic!

Happy Easter from the Middle East!

On another note:  We're having a baby girl!  It was very anti-climatic at the doctor's office when they told me she was a girl.  Partly because it's just not very Arab to hype something up and make a big deal about it, and partly because in their eyes, girls just aren't as good as boys.  But we're incredibly excited about our little girl!  Andrew was actually hoping the whole time that she would be a girl.

This past week I've really been able to feel her moving around in there.  I felt her some last week, but this week I am feeling her more and more.  It is exciting and surreal all at the same time :)  We can't wait till she gets here.  We plan on naming her Zoe Phyllis.  Zoe means life in Greek.  I have always loved this name, thinking if I had a little girl I wanted to name her Zoe in hopes that that she would bring life and joy to all those she comes in contact with.  Zoe is the Greek word used in John 14:6 where Jesus says, "I am the way, the truth, and the life.  No one comes to the Father except through me."  Phyllis was my Grandma's name.  She passed away when I was 13 years old, but I was very close to her and she had an incredible impact on my life.  She loved the Lord, and even though she spent years battling cancer and continual pain, she always kept an optimistic view on life.  I can think of no better name than Phyllis for my little daughter.

Belly

I just realized that I have not posted any of my belly pictures on my blog yet.  Sorry to those who don't have facebook and only see my blog.  Here are the belly pictures we have taken so far :)

at 12 Weeks

at 14 Weeks

Taken today at 16 Weeks

Here I am practicing with my newly made carrier.  I got the idea off of pinterest from this site.  She added a panel to the front, which I may do later once we find out what our little Wheat is going to be!

Speaking of finding out genders, I will be going back to the doctor this week and I am hoping that we'll be able to find out then what our little Wheat is.  I know that 16 weeks is early, and usually in the States they don't look until around 20 weeks.  But since we do an ultrasound at every visit, maybe we'll be able to see!  I am really hoping so, but trying not to get my hopes up too much.  A big part of me fears that they won't be able to see clearly yet, but they'll go ahead and tell me it's a boy because in this culture everyone wants a boy.  I will be thrilled with a boy or a girl, but I just don't want to be told a boy and go crazy buying and making things for a boy only to find out a month later that it's really a girl.

That's all for now, but hopefully later this week we may be posting back with it's a boy or a girl! :)

Detailed Ultrasound

Just a quick update on little Wheat.  We went in today, the last day of my first trimester, to do a detailed ultrasound.  They checked his/her spinal fluid, brain development and a few other features.  When we first arrived and went in for the ultrasound, we could barely see him/her at all.  He was hiding behind the placenta and wouldn't move at all.  After a while of trying to get him to move so we could see more clearly, we finally decided to get up, walk around and come back after about 30 minutes to see if he had moved at all.  So we left that little office, went to get some blood work done for Andrew, grabbed a snickers and bag of chips to eat and we spilt a can of coke.  I did several laps around the lobby including a little bit of skipping and jumping (just a little).  Thankfully when we went back he was in a much better position for us to see him.

The doctor said everything looked good.  One of the main things he was looking for was the spinal fluid which would give indication of Downs Syndrome.  Little Wheat's looked good with no indications of Downs, but they gave us some blood tests to run to help confirm even more that he/she doesn't have Downs.  The blood tests were optional, but highly recommended.  What do you guys think?  Should we have this blood work done or not?  It doesn't matter to us if our baby has Downs or not, we are still having him or her regardless.  In this culture, abortion is not prohibited, but if your baby has a defect it is fine to have an abortion.  We are admittedly against abortion no matter how many problems our baby may or may not have.  So, with these blood tests, it doesn't really matter for us what the results are, but I guess it would be good to know beforehand so we could do some research or mentally prepare ourselves.  What does everyone think?

The Little Things

I want to write a quick blog about this picture so I don't forget it one day.  As I mentioned in my previous blog, I was quite emotional around the time that I found out I was pregnant.  For Christmas, Andrew gave me these little red Converse shoes as a gift, and a sort of symbol that we wanted to have a child.  I knew in my mind that whenever we did get pregnant I wanted to take a picture with all of our shoes to announce the little one.  So, we found out on a Friday that I'm pregnant.  My family usually all gets together on Tuesday for dinner together.  I really wanted to tell them all then so I wouldn't have to wait very long.  In order for the picture to be ordered and sent to them by Tuesday, we needed to take the picture asap.  Unfortunately, that was an extremely rainy and overcast weekend.  Andrew didn't even want to go outside to take the picture, but I convinced him that it would be worth it and that even in the rain the picture would still look cool.  I had a couple of places in mind to take the pictures and this one here is at an overlook just near our house.  When we left our apartment it was raining but not quite as hard and just as we walked up to this overlook the rain slowed down to basically nothing and the clouds parted letting through some sun and sky.  We set the shoes up and Andrew started shooting away and after a minute or two we realized there was a rainbow!  It's quite hard to see in this picture, but coming out of the right hightop, there is a faint rainbow.  It was such a blessing to me.  I was such an emotional wreck, I didn't know how on earth we were going to have a baby, but God cleared the sky for us and gave us a rainbow.  His rainbow is a sign to all the earth that He will never destroy it again by flood, but for me that day, it was His way of comforting me and letting me know He designed this pregnancy and give us this little life and He is going to take care of us even when we don't understand or know how.

As soon as Andrew was satisfied with the pictures he had taken, we were about to move to another location and take some more but the skies closed back up and the rain began falling hard once again.  We decided that those pictures were just perfect and God had given us that little window to take them.  Sometimes it is easy to think that God has so much going on and He doesn't have enough time to worry about your little problems, but that's not who God is.  He loves us, each, individually, and believe it or not, He even cares about the little things in our lives.