Playing Wife

Yesterday I got to play my favorite game - wife! Most of you are probably thinking, "um, Brittny, you ARE a wife... what do you mean by playing wife?" You see, most days I go to work and am away from the house for about 11 hours out of the day to be in Salt Lake City. When I come home in the evenings I usually have just enough time to make dinner, pack it up into tupperware and take it over to Omniture where I eat it with Eric. By the time I get home for real it's usually 9pm at the earliest, which doesn't exactly leave me with a plethora of time for doing wife-y things such as dishes, laundry, cleaning etc. As un-glamorous as those things may sound I love the feeling of having put our house in order and making real food - rather than just pasta roni.

However, yesterday I had a doctor's appointment in the morning which meant that I had already asked for permission to work from home, saving myself the 2 hours of commute time. In anticipation of staying home on Monday I had worked a little later a few nights last week so that I wouldn't have to spend as much of the morning working. All these things added together meant that I had a fair amount of extra time yesterday for "playing wife"!

So first of all, we had the doctor's appointment. I had made the appointment for 9am since we didn't know what Eric's school schedule was going to be like when I made the appointment I had decided to err on the side of setting an appointment too early (9am is their very first appointment of the day) since it seemed less likely that Eric would sign up for classes that were that early. Well, I was right on one thing - Eric definitely doesn't have classes that early! Since his classes are all after 2pm and we don't have church until 10:30am there is never a morning where Eric has to be up before 9am and normally he would still get to be asleep instead of at the doctor's at that time of the day. Sorry love! Luckily he was a good sport and came with me anyways :)

When we got in they placed us in the ultrasound room to wait for the doctor which definitely raised our hopes. We knew that they offered the gender ultrasound as early as 16 weeks at my office and I am 17 weeks along currently. Of course, we weren't scheduled for an ultrasound so we didn't really think that we'd get to do it then, but still our hopes were raised a little bit. The appointment went really well. Things have been going really well with the pregnancy lately. All the rumors are true! The second trimester really is a lot easier! We got to hear the baby's heartbeat again, which is always exciting. Plus, we got to schedule the ultrasound! We should get to find out the baby's gender on October 7th - two weeks from today. Wahoo!! So if you haven't voted on the flavor of baby we're having in our poll, you have two weeks left to make your voice heard! We'll post on here as soon as we know for sure and probably some pictures from the ultrasound too so you can see our baby! We're definitely excited to find out what kind of baby we're going to have!!

After the appointment I took Eric to a meeting at Omniture while he had the 500 mile maintenance done on his bike, and I went to the grocery store. I'd decided that since I had some extra time I was going to make garlic sirloin for dinner, so I needed some ingredients. I started putting it all together when we got home in hopes that I'd be able to have it all ready for dinner (it's cooked in a slow cooker for at least 6 hours so I had to get it ready earlier rather than later). Well, at 4pm I finally finished putting the final touches on it. It probably would have helped if I had known earlier that a clove of garlic is one of the little pods within a bulb... not the full bulb. Since we didn't want to be eating dinner at 10pm I put the roast in the fridge so we could cook it today, and we had Taiwanese breakfast burgers instead (one of our favorite simple meals - toasted hamburger buns with sausage, a fried egg, thinly chopped cucumber and ketchup, apparently they're a pretty common thing to have for breakfast in Taiwan - go figure!). We had the roast today and it was SO good. Nothing like what we were aiming for - the garlic sirloin that they have at Tucanos- but it was a really delicious dinner.

The other good thing that happened yesterday is that my BellaBand came! No, a BellaBand has nothing to do with the main character from the Twilight series, it's a piece of maternity clothing. It's basically a band that goes around the waist and helps pregnant women extend their wardrobes. Here's a picture of the band in action:

The BellaBand in action

Basically right now I can wear it with my normal pre-pregnancy pants and it will hold my pants up if I want to wear them unbuttoned and even unzipped a little bit, without it looking like I'm a moron that forgot to zip up their pants. SUCH a blessing! My pants have been feeling really tight as this baby is growing, but I'm definitely not pregnant enough yet to really be ready for maternity pants. As you can see in the picture, the band has uses for all different stages of pregnancy. As I get more pregnant and my pre-pregnancy pants don't fit anymore, I can use it with maternity pants that will inevitably be too big at first to help hold them up. Later on it's really good for supporting that great big tummy. And after the baby is born it helps as I slowly lose the extra weight and can transition back to normal clothes again. I'm definitely very excited about this purchase :)

I guess that's about it from me for now. My family is coming up next weekend for conference and I'm way excited to see them. Other than that I'm mostly just counting down the days until we find out our baby's gender!!