Here we go...

Considering that most of our family lives miles away, we figured this was a good way to keep everyone in the loop as to what is going on...most of the time this will be Sarah writing, but Jared may be inserting his commentary now and then. Thanks to Michelle for the great idea, we enjoyed following your pregnancy on your blog and looking forward to Eli's many happenings.

First of all, I am 9 weeks pregnant. We found out on April 1st (no joke), 4 weeks ago, and we still are in awe of the situation. That puts our due date on December 3rd. We are planning on finding out the gender of our child because I cannot wait that long and am kind of obsessive about planning things out. We will let you know as soon as we know...sometime in mid to late summer I would think. I just had my first doctor's appointment yesterday, although it wasn't much. I had a nice conversation with the nurse about everything under the moon and then had blood drawn and provided some fluids. Not too bad, I can handle this. Unfortunately I get to have another pap smear next time, but at least I'll get to talk to the doctor. Right now we are going to our family practitioner, but will be switching soon to a doctor down in the St. Louis area. When that is going to happen is still yet to be seen, but it will probably be sooner than later. We would like to start establishing a relationship with the doctor who will be with us when we get to meet our child!

Other than feeling exhausted and having waves of nausea, it is going not too bad. I keep crackers in various locations, including me desk at school, and have a great excuse for taking a nap. :) I also have to rethink dinner prepping - the smell of raw and cooking meat will finish me off for the evening. I think there will be more instances of using the crock-pot over the next few weeks to eliminate my need to be in the kitchen in the late afternoon.

On a different note, I burned out the vacuum Tuesday. I could smell something funny and then all of this white smoke came flooding out of the bottom of the vac. Needless to say, the carpets did not get cleaned and the house smelled like burning wires. Today we took a trip specifically to Edwardsville and picked up a nice one at Target (on sale and we got a twenty dollar gift card with the purchase). It does a great job with the floors and the canister will come out and you can carry it up and down the stairs. It also came with a pet grooming brush that will grab any loose hair off of your animal and suck it away. It works pretty good, although Tigger spent the next hour hiding under our bed, traumatized. We also got boneless, skinless chicken breasts on sale for $1.89 a pound. :)