Mother's Day

It is a beautiful Mother's Day here in Logan, Ohio. As I write this I am sitting on the porch at my parents' house and it's wonderfully sunny and 68 degrees outside. Everything is green, the dogwoods and irises are blooming (up here on their warm, sunny hill anyway), the skies are baby blue with fluffy, decorative white clouds, and the sun is just starting to think about descending towards bed for the evening. There is a humming bird war going on about 6 feet in front of my face as the 4 earliest ruby-throats of the season try to keep one another away from the feeder, an endlessly entertaining battle to watch as they occasionally even smack into each other and the little ones let out out nervous chirps as the big ones chase them away. My dogs are laying like 3 lazy sentinels on the warm bricks of the porch around me, immune to the buzz of the humming birds but snapping at any stray bees who fly too close. As I look at everything that's green around me, the new buds on the trees and flowers, the fresh leaves on the trees, and the fine layer of yellow pollen covering anything that holds still for two long, there are two thoughts that run through my mind. One: it seems appropriate that Mother's Day is this time of year - the spring time, the time of new life for everything green, and the time of birth for most of nature's animals. And Two: I am so blessed to be counted as one among the many mothers to be celebrated this day, so fortunate to have had my beautiful Haley-Bug and so thrilled to feel all the fabulous kicks of Baby-Roo #2 growing inside me as I sit here right now.

Our weekend started out on Friday with a trip to OSU Maternal Fetal Medicine for our Level II ultrasound, where we received fabulous news all the way around and were introduced to the wonderful Dr. Samuels. Our ultrasound lasted about 1.5 hours and we got to see every inch of Dylan, from the lenses of her eyes, the normal shape of her cerebellum, the four fabulously proportioned and functioning chambers of her heart, her tiny stomach that was filled with fluid so they know that means she also has a normal esophagus and mouth, her lovely bladder filled with urine which means she has kidneys and they're doing what they're supposed to, her 10 fingers, 10 toes, adorable mouth and nose, many, many things in between, and all the way down to her other end where she was still proud to show us that she is a girl. ;)

After our appointment we headed out to Easton, where I must tell the world about the most delicious discovery ever: Godiva dark chocolate and raspberry shakes. Never in my life have I tasted anything so delicious, and I keep thinking of ways I can get back to Columbus to get my hands on another one. (If you have a Godiva store near you, I highly recommend you check it out.) That night we joined our friends Tom & Jess Steinbrink at North Star Cafe for a delicious dinner and lots of good conversation - Jess introduced me to yet another delicious discovery: home made Ginger Ale at North Star which was so, so good!

Saturday was a busy day - we went to my cousin's fiancee's bridal shower in the early afternoon, and later in the afternoon we went to the Klingelhafer-Gallenstein's 2nd annual Kentucky Derby Party where my horse WON the 137th Derby despite 20-1 odds! Go Animal Kingdom! (My winnings included beautiful red roses, a glass 137th Kentucky Derby commemorative cup, and $70 dollars - quite exciting for a non-gambler!) I've decided that if I'm going to get into sports, I'll have to start gambling because that makes it ever so much more exciting.

This morning I woke up to yet more deliciousness: Haley & Dylan had smuggled dark chocolate covered strawberries and white chocolate bug covered pretzels down from a Worthington candy shop (with some help from Chadmo I suspect ;)), along with a very nice card. Katy K had given me a gorgeous bouquet of flowers and a sweet card, and Mom & Dad gave me a book on Motherhood which I'm excited to read. I've made out like a bandit and am feeling quite spoiled, and this is all before the lasagna dinner Chadmo has been busily preparing for my Mom & myself - and who would've guessed, I'm hungry again?!? I guess I'd better go eat. ;)

Happy Mother's Day to all the wonderful Mother's, Grandmother's, & Mother's-to-be in our lives! :)

(P.S. I'll post new ultrasound pictures soon!)

Happy Easter!

This Easter we are thrilled to introduce our second little GIRL!!! Dylan Stevelt-Mitchell!

Look how long her legs are! The technician claims they will get nice and chubby and then they won't appear so long, but still - they go clear up to her butt!
We got to peek in on our sweet Baby-Roo again this Friday, and while she didn't want to look at the ultrasonographer and kept hiding her face in my back, she did pose for lots of nice butt shots to tell us that she is indeed a little girl! Grandma McMillan (Mimi) and my Mom (Grandma) went to this ultrasound with me, and it was lots of fun to have them along, especially since Mimi had never seen an ultrasound before. Our tech, Gwenna, was extra nice and spent lots of time pointing out cute little feet, cute little arms which she had curled up by her head, all FOUR chambers of her heart, and watching her roll & move. Her heart rate was 146 bpm this time, and she is still measuring big (which is quite different from her big sister who was always a little peanut.) We have decided to name her Dylan, though I imagine she will mostly be called Dyl-pickle or Pickle, as Daddy has already dubbed her. :) I've now felt her kick 4 times, each time getting closer and closer together, so I'm hoping that soon it will be a daily and then many-times-daily event!

We are hosting Easter dinner at our house tomorrow for my family, it will be our first big Holiday dinner we've done, so wish us luck! I've never made a ham before, so though it's going against my rule of 'never make something you haven't made before for company', I'm hoping for the best!

Happy Easter to all of you, from all of us! ~Kristy, Chadmo, Haley-Bug, Dylan, Ruby, Bianca, Tucker-momo, Farrah, & Forrest <3

The last week of our first trimester!

Here are some new Baby-Roo pictures from today, at 13 weeks & 1 day pregnant. The picture on the last post was from OSU High Risk Maternal Fetal Medicine, and these two are from my regular OB/GYN, Dr. Copeland's, office. They don't have as fancy of ultrasound machines as the high risk place, so these are a little fuzzier & smaller, but it was so much fun to get to peek in at Baby-Roo again today and watch her (?) acrobatics! She/he was kicking, wiggling, and rolling around - much to Mommy & Daddy's delight. :)

The wave form you see underneath Baby-Roo in this picture is her/his heartbeat! 144 bpm today, nice and loud and strong. It's the best sound in the world.

All good news at Dr. C's again today - they're mostly keeping an eye on my pesky polyp which still likes to bleed a little bit on occasion. The polyp has stayed the same size for the last 13 weeks, it's about 4-4.5 cm in diameter. Also, Dr. C is very nice and I think he realizes that I'm a worry-wart, so he keeps doing ultrasounds frequently to check on the baby, though he reassures me that actually after our excellent Ultrascreen results we are no higher risk than anyone else. But he also admits that that's a very difficult idea to grasp after Haley-Bug, so I think he's just as happy to check in on this little Roo more frequently too. We will head back to him for another ultrasound on 4/22 (16 weeks). Our next 2 appointments at OSU are for: our Level 2 ultrasound on 5/6 (18 weeks), and our fetal echocardiogram with Dr. Wheller (Haley's cardiologist) at OSU on 6/14 (22 weeks).

The most exciting development that I can think of is that I would SWEAR I felt the baby kick last night for the first time! I asked Dr. Copeland if that was possible and he says it is, particularly with 2nd pregnancies when you know what you're feeling. I was just reading in bed after Chadmo had fallen asleep, and there was a very distinct *boink* from inside the right side of my uterus (wow, that doesn't sound cozy at all - lets say womb instead.) I was so excited I stayed up later than I meant to, hoping it would happen again. No luck of course, but hopefully in a week or two it'll be happening all the time! I attribute this early kicking to the fact that the ultrasonographer noted today that the baby has long legs - a quality she/he must have gotten from the Mitchell genetics! No one's ever accused a Stevelt or a McMillan of being long-legged, and it's certainly nothing Haley was ever accused of! ;) Maybe if this baby's a girl, she will be tall like her Aunt Melissa?

I couldn't resist asking this ultrasonographer if she would take a guess at the baby's gender too (we didn't tell her what OSU had predicted), and she also said girl - so we'll see! Somehow I feel slightly more convinced having that be the opinion of 2 people at this stage than just 1, but I don't think I'll really trust it till our 18 week ultrasound and getting to see actual 'bits'. ;)

Sweet Baby-Roo #2

Our adorable newest addition at almost 12 weeks, after getting an A+ on her (?) Nuchal Translucency Ultrascreen this past Friday! :)

I know most of you know that we're pregnant, but I've been a bit of slacker and haven't posted our wonderful news on here until today. So at long last - WE'RE PREGNANT!! And we couldn't be happier - especially now that we've made it to the 12 week mark and have had wonderful results on the baby's ultrascreen, we feel like we can breathe a bit of a sigh of relief.

Our very nice ultrasonographer on Friday was kind enough to take a guess at the baby's gender for us on Friday. At 12 weeks they base their gender prediction off the angle of the genital tubercle in relationship to the spine. If it is parallel to the spine, it's a girl, and if it's perpendicular to the spine it's a boy. She told us that, based on this method, they are correct 80% of the time. Soooo, supposedly we are having Sweet Baby-Girl #2! Either way we're thrilled! Though I can't quite get myself convinced off of 80%, we're so ready to stop calling the baby 'it' or 'the baby' that we're going with girl pronouns for now. So I apologize in advance to our baby if it ends up being a boy and he gets referred to as a little girl for the next few months, but I'll hope he'll forgive me if that's the case. ;)

I can't wait for the day when I can feel this little one kick, and I'm even more impatient for it to be October and time for her to arrive so I can hold her in my arms and cover her in smooches. We can't wait to see all the ways she is unique from her big sister, and also all the ways she reminds us of her big sister. Haley would be 2 years and 1 month old when her little sibling is scheduled to arrive, and I like to imagine she would think having a little sibling was fun. (Though I know from several friends that it's more likely she'd be a little bit on the jealous side to start with!)

We're saying lots of prayers for a healthy, uneventful pregnancy and delivery, and most importantly a healthy, happy Baby-Roo! I'll try to be better and update this more often with fun ultrasound pictures and hopefully lots of good news!

Hysteroscopy

*Warning: Lots of attempted-baby-making details in this post, read at your own risk!*

No luck on the baby-making front for us, but perhaps some progress into figuring out why we haven't had any luck these past 11 months. For the last 2 months we have been seeing a reproductive specialist, Dr. Schmidt, in Columbus. We absolutely love working with him! Unfortunately the first month I went to see him I had already taken Clomid, a drug Dr. Schmidt is absolutely not a fan of, but he said we would try to make the best of it so they did an ultrasound to look for mature eggs, found them, and gave me an injection that would make me ovulate 36 hours later. Then 36 hours later we returned to his office where they did IUI (intrauterine insemination) to place Chad's sperm directly into my uterus - in case my cervix was the trouble maker in these past months. I've been ovulating very well on Clomid, but Clomid also destroys your cervical mucus and mimics menopause - lots of negatives that all add up to the likelihood that if you don't get pregnant on Clomid in the first few months, you probably won't.

When they did my ultrasound that first month, Dr. Schmidt noted that the center of my uterus was more echogenic (white) on ultrasound than it should be, but he didn't say too much about it at that time. I did ask what the differentials for that would be, and he said it could be lots of things such as a polyp, fibroid, or even just the lining of my uterus 'fluffing up' because I was getting ready to ovulate.

Well, no luck with the IUI and I decided that I just needed a month off of all crazy drugs - I wasn't 100% convinced that they were the only reason I was ovulating anyway, and I wanted to give my body a chance to do its' own thing. I'm glad I did, because sure enough I ovulated on my own this month! I went up to Dr. Schmidt's for another ultrasound, thinking we would do IUI again if we managed to time it right, but I ovulated a few days before my appointment (I could tell because I have crazy ovulation cramping ever since I finally started ovulating again - exactly one year after Haley was born! And Dr. Schmidt could tell on the ultrasound too.) But since I had already ovulated, this allowed him to more clearly see that echogenicity in my uterus which he now believes is a polyp. There's a small chance it could be a fibroid, but he feels confident that it's a polyp (which would be better & easier to remove.) It's about 1" in diameter which fills up the entire volume of the non-gravid uterus.

A POLYP!! A REASON for why we're not getting pregnant! It basically acts as a giant blocker to keep out any sperm invaders! I mean, I know I shouldn't be happy to have a polyp, but I'm just happy to have a possibility of a reason for our infertility. There's nothing more frustrating to me than 'unexplained infertility', maybe it's the doctor in me that needs a reason? Regardless, now that we have found a trouble maker we are going to take it out! There is a small possibility that we could get pregnant even with this intruder hanging around, so we have to wait for my period to start (& end) before they can remove it. For now the hysteroscopy is tentatively scheduled for February 7th - it will be done up at Riverside hospital in Columbus, and they just take a scope in through your cervix so there will be no incision. They will mask me down with gas anesthesia, but I won't have to be intubated (hopefully), and the procedure should just take about 15 minutes.

Here's hoping we get that bad polyp out of there and then get back to our fertile turtle selves! I'm not too optimistic for next month - I'm sure that's a pretty traumatic procedure for your uterus and I doubt it can recoup in time for ovulation - but we'll keep our fingers crossed for the month after and a December baby! I would dearly love to squeak a cutie-pie baby-roo in in 2011, 2009 to 2012 just seems too long... (Though I know for many people that's a drop in the bucket compared to how long they've tried.) We will be saying lots of prayers that we have finally figured this puzzle out and that we can now fix our problem and experience the wonder of a sweet bundle of joy again soon.

A wintry walk, 2010

Nobody's as cute bundled up against the cold as my Cricket! What I wouldn't give to be back there right now...

A winter walk with the dogs

One lovely, wintry, snowy day this January we had so much snow that all the schools were closed, along with many businesses (unfortunately not OU, so off to Athens trundled Chadmo who luckily has mad Wisconsin driving skillz.) On these types of days the clinic is notoriously slow - people either don't want to drag their kids along or they just don't want to venture out in the wintry weather, so we closed up shop for the day and had a snow day ourselves! The dogs & I decided this would be a fine opportunity to go for a hike in the woods behind our house, through freshly fallen snow that did not yet have a single track through it. It was beautiful and made me think of "The Lion, the Witch, & the Wardrobe" when Lucy goes through the Wardrobe into the snow-covered land of Narnia for the first time.

My wonderful girls, Ruby & Bianca, coming around the gatepost. (Too bad it's not a lamp post, maybe we could make friends with a faun, some beavers, and a lion...) It's hard to believe that Ruby will be 8 this February and Bianca will be 6 in May.

Tucker has a bit of a hard time in the deep, unbroken snow - it likes to clump up on his fur and he turns into one giant snowball who has to be melted in warm water in the bathtub when we get home! But he's a trooper and isn't about to be left behind. Isn't he just the cutest little poodle in the whole entire world??

This is what happens when you try to get three dogs to take a group picture: they all work their hardest to not cooperate!

Are either of these paths 'less traveled'? I'm not sure, but regardless the dogs choose 'to the right!' Some days I wish I was one of my dogs... :)

Me, all bundled up for our snowy hike! Good practice in getting dressed for our Boulder ski trip!