Made it to 12 weeks!

Today we had our long awaited 12 week doctor's appointment. It has been a long anxious month waiting to finish the 1st trimester, but we made it. :) Thankfully the rate of miscarriage after 12 weeks drops significantly so we can relax for a while! I posted an official announcement on Facebook today, and then proceeded to sit on my couch and cry. It was a happy / relieved cry. Also I'm blaming it on having double the hormones. :)

The nice thing about twin pregnancies is that at least at our doctor's office, their dopplar machine thing that they use to listen to the heartbeat with a singleton pregnancy, doesn't work well with a twin pregnancy. I think the babies are too close together early on to tell a difference in each heartbeat, so instead, every 4 weeks I get another ultrasound! This means I get to see the babies every month which is awesome.

Today's ultrasound was especially exciting because they are now big enough that I have graduated to a tummy ultrasound. (for those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, you don't want to know / TMI) :) This was good also because my doctor isn't great at working the ultrasound machine, and he forgot to turn on the printer that prints out the ultrasound pictures, so at the end of the appointment, there were no pictures. :*( Fortunately he is a smart man who probably didn't want to see me cry / scream, so he quickly did another ultrasound and snapped this adorable picture:




In other news, we went to Eagles Mere for Memorial Day Weekend and had a great time with my brother and sister-in-law. Since I am now forbidden from being around paint fumes, they awesomely finished the nursery!! And it looks amazing. Here is a progression of the project:

The wallpaper in the nursery used to be really cute - it was white with stars and had cute little sheep in the border at the top of the wall. Unfortunately, while the wallpaper lasted a really long time, it was about 30 years old and was falling off the wall in several places. It was time for a change!

Before:


After I tore the wallpaper down (it came down in literally 10 minutes - it was put up well!!)


After painting the walls - half blue and half green. (you'll see why soon!)


And after adding the wallpaper border (Thank you Mike & Sara!)




Doesn't it look amazing? I'm so proud of how great it turned out. Thanks to everyone who helped!

Sorry there was no mention of food in this post!! I'll get it together and post something from this week's meals. I think tomorrow we are having lemon chicken. Yum! :)

I still have 10 fingers

So this week's Fresh 20 menu has been exciting! I sometimes have some trouble with some of the Fresh 20 recipes - they are not always worked through ahead of time - sometimes the cooking times are off or the spice / salt is way wrong. However, they always keep our dinners exciting and unusual!

Ok I guess the first item on the menu this week wasn't that unusual - Roast Chicken! However, for anyone who knows me as a cook, I HATE cooking chicken and am pretty terrified of roasting a WHOLE chicken. But, the Fresh 20 menu told me to, so I roasted not one, but two chickens this week. The roasting itself went pretty well, before work I was able to clean and rub the chickens with some olive oil and spices, and put them in 2 gal ziploc bags so they would be ready to put in the oven as soon as I got home. The recipe had us first roasting the chickens at 500 degrees. 500 DEGREES!! I have never set my oven that high to cook anything! Now it was only for like 20 minutes or so... but our house definitely filled with smoke - not from the chickens, probably from whatever else is stuck in the bottom of the oven! Thankfully we turned the oven down for the remainder of the roasting time. The recipe had warned me not to be scared of the 500 degrees, that it would turn the chicken golden brown and seal in the juices - and it did just that! The chicken turned out delicious and was a perfect dinner with a side of greens.


Disclaimer: I did not eat all of that chicken! Even if I am having twins! Matt definitely had to help me finish. :)


We obviously did not eat 2 whole chickens for dinner that night, so this morning I took out the rest of the chicken to cut up for sandwiches and a future meal where we need shredded chicken. And this is where I almost lost my finger! This almost happened to me the last time I was pregnant and cutting up a turkey my mom and I had roasted. I think maybe I should not cut up roasted poultry while pregnant. I think what happens is that I try to get all of the meat off the bones with my knife because I don't want to waste any, but then the chicken / turkey is slippery and so the knife or my hand slips and runs into my left hand. OW. This morning I was so scared that I had seriously cut myself that I immediately rinsed the cut off and grabbed a paper towel to wrap around my finger to stop the bleeding. I held it on my finger for a few minutes and went to find Matt to tell him we might have to go get stitches... but when I removed the paper towel, there were seriously only like 2 drops of blood on it. So thankfully my finger is fine and apparently I am a big baby. (An addition to this story is that at lunch today I was making a chicken sandwich and I wanted the chicken to be thinner to go into the sandwich better... can you guess what happened? Yes I cut the SAME FINGER AGAIN. I now have two bandaids on my left index finger....sigh.)

Another exciting less dangerous meal that we had yesterday was crab-avacado boats. It sounds strange - but they were awesome. You take crab meat (canned is OK) and make almost a tuna salad with them with lemon, yogurt, celery, spices (cumin and cayenne pepper). You cut an avacado in half, making little "boats" and put the crab salad inside. It is an amazingly delicious and light dinner that is still filling due to all of the protein and fat (the good fats!) Plus it was so easy and took almost no time at all. I forgot to take a picture of the cute little boats. Sorry. We ate them too fast! :)

And tonight, I made my own hummus mixed with feta cheese that we ate with warmed tortillas and fresh cut veggies. YUM. See what I mean about unusual this week? The Fresh 20 is bringing their A-game this week.

Here is a picture of my delicious homemade hummus. Ellen even helped by pushing the buttons on the blender.


I am 10 weeks pregnant this week (less than 2 weeks till the 12 week drs appointment, not that I'm counting or anything!) I have definitely grown a little since last week - last week I could button my nice black pants I wear to work, this week not so much. Thank goodness for cute belly bands!

10 weeks!

Philly Cheese Steaks?

So tonight's Fresh 20 dinner was Philly Cheese Steaks! When I first read this I thought - awesome! Cheesesteaks! I LOVE cheesesteaks! Especially being pregnant I have been craving red meat big time. However, I should have looked a little closer at the title of the recipe. Philly Cheese Steaks. With a space between Cheese and Steaks. Meaning that this was not a recipe for anything close to my favorite cheesesteak ever from Renato's. (yummmmm)

It turned out pretty good, but it did in no way resemble a cheesesteak. :)
I should have taken a picture, sorry, I'll try to paint a word picture. First I took potatoes and cut them up to make some nice thick fries. I then tossed the fries with spices, oil, and garlic, and baked them in the oven for about 30 minutes till they were nice and crispy. Meanwhile Matt sliced up some skirt steak pretty thinly, and cooked the steak in a pan with onions and peppers. After the steak was finished cooking, we put the steak/pepper/onion mixture on top of the fries, and shredded some white cheddar cheese on top. (what no cheese whiz?!?) This whole mixture was put back into the oven for the cheese to melt for about 3 minutes. It ended up quite delicious, especially the garlic fries. The steak was a bit chewy for my taste, nothing like the melt in your mouth meat in a cheesesteak. Ah well, I'll just have to make sure I get a real cheesesteak at Renato's the next time I visit my parents!

We are still doing the fresh 20 (www.thefresh20.com) this has got to be at least 2 months now! And while some of the recipes are kind of kooky, I still really love it. I love that someone else is doing the meal planning for me. Especially now that I'm pregnant I've gotten so picky about what I want to eat, its nice to have someone else deciding for me strangely. I think when I was pregnant with Ellen we mostly ate Central Market takeout (A fancy Texas grocery store, like Wegmans) And while that would be nice this time around... we just don't have the money and Wegmans is too far from our house. We have broken down and ordered thai food a few times, and we even found a pizza place here in State College that delivers gluten free pizza! (Corrinado's)

Speaking of the pregnancy, as far as we know I am still pregnant with twins - today marks 9 weeks!! Only 3 more weeks until we are in the 2nd trimester! (and we get to see the babies again at our 12 week appointment!) I swear my belly grew today - my jeans that fit this morning were super tight by the end of the day. Go babies go!!

Here is a picture of me at 9 weeks, my belly is starting to poke out! Hello EARLY!! I know it is ridiculous to start posting pictures so early. But at least I can look back and see how skinny I was when I am enourmous. :)

TWINS!!!!

WE ARE HAVING TWINS!!!! Oh my gosh I'm so excited / shocked!!! We have known we were pregnant for a while (since March 30th) but I haven't been ready to share with many people because of our miscarriage the last time that happened right after we told pretty much everyone. I was planning to wait another month before announcing it to anyone besides immediate family, but then TODAY happened....

So today was our 8 week ultrasound. I didn't have any early ultrasounds for this pregnancy, it was my first doctor appointment plus an informal first ultrasound to get an idea of how far along we were. I already knew how far we were since this pregnancy was uber planned (I bought a 50 pack of ovulation tests and took one or two a day until it finally turned positive) plus I had been taking my temperature every morning so I knew exactly when conception happened. (sorry if that's TMI for anyone reading. :)) I was really anxious about this appointment because this was the exact week and ultrasound that we found out that we had lost the baby last time. Basically I've been counting down the days / hours until our appointment this morning.

I was lying on the table and the doctor starts the ultrasound and I'm thinking / praying: please let there be a heartbeat, please please. And then she says - "You are having twins!" And that is where I don't remember very much. Matt says I didn't believe her, I remember crying and the doctor telling me to breathe... (happy / overwhelmed crying!)

After this she told us about 100 facts about having twins, none of which I remember now. I wish they had some sort of a brochure. The title could be "So you're having Twins!" lol.

She also got the ultrasound techs to squeeze us in for a formal ultrasound to measure everything and get better pictures!! :) We waited a while and then we had our formal ultrasound and it was amazing. Baby A and Baby B as they are now called measured at 8 weeks and 5 days (bigger than they are supposed to be by my calculations, hopefully that is good?) They are fraternal twins, meaning that they have two egg sacs, two placentas, two of everything!! This is much more low risk than identical twins that share a placenta, so this is a very good thing!! The ultrasound tech was even able to see that both eggs came from my right ovary - I guess my right side decided to have a big month. I wonder if this is how fraternal twins usually happen? Are the eggs usually from one ovary? I'll have to do some internet research. :)

Here is a picture of the little babies:


Everyone who sees this picture says: OMG there are TWO of them! And yes. Yes there are!

 Here is Baby A:


And here is Baby B:


We are so excited and also a little scared. Mostly I'm scared now because there are so many more risks with a twin pregnancy. I'm going to try to not focus on these though, and just focus on being healthy and calm, and growing these babies!! :) What a miracle. Hopefully these little miracles will be arriving sometime around Thanksgiving! So we at least have some time to get used to it!!