Johnson Family

The nausea is finally gone (knock on wood) and my appetite is coming back!  My energy levels are almost back to normal!  I feel closer to normal again… the only difference being my regular pants don’t fit anymore.  I’d bought one of the tube tops for your tummy to hold my normal pants up when I couldn’t button them anymore, but when I hit the point that I couldn’t even zip them, I broke down & started wearing the maternity pants I’d been given.

Just so you know, elastic waistbands ARE. COMPLETELY. WONDERFUL.  Completely.  I don’t know how I lived before wearing them and there’s a real posibility I may not stop wearing them after the baby is born.  They’re just so much more comfortable than the regular pants were!

We have our appointment to get the 3D ultrasound done next Tuesday.  I’ll know then whether to use male or female pronouns.  Finally!

Hello Kiddo!

I know this blog is supposed to be a place for your mom to share what’s going on in our little family in the middle of nowhere, but I figured she wouldn’t mind if I stepped in every once in awhile and took some time to let you know how much you’re totally freaking out your Dad.

Some days I find myself extremely excited and trying to rush through these next few months as fast as I can to meet you.  Other days I find myself wanting to slow things down as much as possible in a vain attempt to hold on not necessarily to my youth, but to the norm of life your mother and I have become so accustomed to over the last three years we’ve been married.

We both knew from the beginning that you’d come along one day and were well aware that when that day came things would never be the same.  What I don’t think either of us realized, was just how much you could change us even before you were anywhere near being born.

WHOOSH WHOOSH WHOOSH WHOOSH WHOOSH

It might not sound like much using onomatopoeia, but to your mom and me that tiny little heartbeat of yours was the most beautiful music we’d ever heard.  You were only 6 weeks old then, but your little heart was beating faster and stronger than we could have possibly imagined.  That tiny little sound blew my mind so much, that it wasn’t until the third time we heard it that I actually had enough wits about me to record it on my phone.  I don’t think either of us would admit to you how many times we’ve listened to that recording (or played it for others…sorry guys!)  The point I was trying to make in all of this is to let you know that even if you completely freak me out on a regular basis, I really can’t wait to meet you.

I’ll try not to concentrate on all of the horrible habits I can pass onto you, or the fact that I’m insanely scared that I’ll somehow break you as soon as you get here (even though your mom assures me that you’ll be made of rubber and will bounce just fine), if you promise to concentrate on growing up to be a nice healthy baby boy or girl.

{Editors Note:  I’m sure your mother would also like me to tell you that she’d love it if you could grow to right about 7 pounds and then hold off for awhile.  You won’t understand that now, but one day you will.  At that time it’s completely ok for you to respond with any of the following:  EWW!  GROSS!! or MOOOOM!!!}

Anyway, as much as it kills me to close this first letter to you, rest assured that they’ll be many more to follow.  Just know that above all else I love you and can’t wait until the day I can tell you that in person.

Love,
Dad

Sandy bought me the new Hungry Girl cookbook as part of my birthday present.  I went grocery shopping yesterday to pick up ingredients for a few recipes and made a meal tonight.  The highlight was dessert - Key Lime Pie Shake!  Absolutely delicious and very pretty!

If you haven’t started checking out the Hungry Girl site, I highly recommend it.  All of her recipes are very tasty & super healthy.  This shake had only 124 calories and 1.25g of fat!

We didn’t go anywhere or do anything at all on Sunday to celebrate my birthday after all our driving to Atlanta and back Friday/Saturday.  Nubby decided Sunday should be a day of rest, so I spent the entire day passed out on the sofa.  We watched some tv and I tried to start a new book between naps, but napping took precedent.

To make up for us not leaving the house on Sunday, Sandy took me out for a celebratory dinner at Olive Garden after work.  Never before have soup, salad, and breadsticks tasted so absolutely wonderful.  I wanted to crawl into my steaming bowl of minestrone and swim laps. And the breadsticks!  Warm, soft, chewy deliciousness.  Don’t get me started on the salad with it’s crisp green leaves and crunchy croutons!  Food has never tasted so good.

It must be something about soup.  We went out for lunch today and I had a bowl of egg drop.  I wanted to curl up in the bowl and just stay for a while - just me and the broth and the little green peas floating around.  It was just that tasty!  I’m thinking some potato soup might be on the menu for later in the week.  If only I knew how to make those tasty sourdough rolls to go with it…

For all my enjoyment of soup and it’s accompanying starches, you’d think I’d be eating a lot.  This child, however, is going to be difficult.  I can tell already.  I eat less than half of what I would have eaten before and it takes an extra 45 minutes to complete a meal.  Eat a bite.  Rest.  Eat a bite.  Rest.  Heaven forbid we try two bites between rests - then it’s coming back up.  The OB says I’ve lost 3 pounds since the last checkup, but I’m sure that’ll change once Nubby decides that food isn’t a mortal enemy.

I found the recipe for Olive Garden’s minestrone in preparation for that day…

I find myself beginning to get a bit antsy now that the exhaustion is letting up some.  I want to start doing something to get ready for this kid’s arrival, but I don’t know what.  We’re still working to clean out the office to turn it into the nursery (It’s surprising how much junk you can accumulate in a closet that’s rarely opened!), but we have to move stuff in the spare bedroom around to make room for the stuff coming from the office.  It’s slightly overwhelming at this point, which is why it’s not done yet.  Hey, I still have 27 weeks, right?

The folks at work are excited.  The gender poll has already started - we’re still evenly split between boy and girl.  Although, our friend Lisa seems pretty adamant about a girl.  She may be projecting some of her own ambitions our way.  I’ve been looking at green color scheme options as a way to channel some of my need to plan, but have made no decisions.  It’s still early.

We went back to the OB today for the 3 month check up.  All is progressing well.  Sandy used his phone to record the sound of the heartbeat & has decided it sounds like the baby has a rave going on in my uterus:

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I cried the first time I heard it.  Voices of angels couldn’t sound sweeter.

Most of you who read this blog have known it for a while, but since Sandy & I have friends from work who occasionally surf this way, I’ve waited to post about it until we shared the news locally.

Baby Johnson, fondly referred to as Nubby right now, is due November 25th. Yes, Nubby. One of the very first things we did after the four at home tests read positive was to go buy the What To Expect book. Apparently around week 5, the baby grows arm & leg buds - so s/he had nubby little arms & legs at one point. The name just kind of stuck. Poor kid will have fun trying to explain that nickname in high school.

To answer some of the most common questions:

1) Yes, we’re excited. Of course! Sandy’s boss came by to congratulate me yesterday and said he’d never seen Sandy smile so much.

2) Yes, I’ve been sick. Nausea, but not a whole lot of vomiting. Thank goodness! The fatigue has been the worst part. There have been days I’ve fallen asleep in the car on the way home from work, moved to the couch and fell asleep again.

3) The only craving I’ve had so far was for Oreos and milk over the weekend. Sandy & I hopped in the car, drove to the gas station, and bought both. I ate a few & then I was happy.

Well, I was so happy I cried. That’s twice now I’ve cried over Sandy bringing me milk. I’d like to think those are the only times I’ve been crazy hormonal, but I suspect Sandy would tell you differently if you asked when I wasn’t around.

There have been a lot more food aversions. I will not, under any circumstances, eat Mexican food right now. Sandy is suffering and would be eternally grateful to anyone who wants to meet him for lunch.

4) Yes, we plan to find out the gender as soon as we’re able. I’m sure the kid doesn’t want to go through it’s entire life as Nubby, so we need to pick a real name & start using that to break me of the Nubby habit. Also, the inability to use gender specific pronouns is driving me a little batty.

I go from being incredibly excited to freaking out a little bit. I mean, yes, I have a real job & I’m married & I have a mortgage - all the things that make you an adult - but I’m about to be a parent. That can be a bit mind blowing when you stop to think about it.

Sandy & I went to Nashville for a much needed vacation over the long weekend.  Since I’m such a sweet wife (and Sandy drives us to & from work each day), I drove all the way up.  It was a very pleasant drive with no overly crazy people, traffic accidents, or road construction.   The drive through the mountains was very pretty!

Those icicles were 15+ ft tall and bigger around than my head!

We love to shop (window shop, that is), so we stopped at an Outlet mall near the state line.  It was there I found my first ever Bath and Body Works Outlet!  Body wash was $3 instead of $10.50 and the Wallflowers were $2 a piece.  Great deals!  I only wish we had one closer to home.

We made it to our hotel, Hampton Inn, about 4.  Our room was on the top floor at the end - furthest away from the elevator.

Isn't that a nice view?

The view of downtown Nashville was great!  We were literally right across the street from the Country Music Hall of Fame, the home of the orchestra, and the Musician’s Hall of Fame.  It was only two blocks to Honkey Tonk Row and the rest of the downtown attractions.

We immediately went walking around town.  Boy was it COLD!  We had hats, scarves, jackets, and gloves and still shivered a bit as we traipsed around.  The high temperature on Friday was only in the upper 20s, so by dark it was getting pretty darn chilly.  We decided to hop in the car and go hit the Opry Mills shopping.

Opry Mills must have been built by the same group that did Discovery Mills on the north side of Atlanta.  The layout was just about identical.  We walked through most of the mall before we decided we were hungry.  We stopped for dinner at one of the first not fast food places we stumbled across - the Rainforest Cafe.

Talk about a unique dining experience!

That's a tree... in the restaurant.

Apparently this place is a chain, but this was the first one Sandy & I had ever seen.  The food was just okay and overpriced, but you were paying for the atmosphere, not the quality of the meal.  There were trees & vines & robotic gorillas & elephants & fish tanks & thunderstorms & at least 3 dozen small children running around.  A kid with ADHD eating ice cream on his birthday at Disney Land couldn’t have been more overstimulated!

After dinner & being in the car all day, we were pretty much pooped, so we went back to the hotel to enjoy all those cool channels on the TV we don’t get at home (like TLC and the Weather Channel) before passing out.

We were up pretty early the next day and had a list of places we wanted to hit.  Not being country music fans, we opted to skip the Country Music Hall of Fame and the Ryman Theater tour.  We went to Tubb’s Record Store downtown and The Great Escape records & comic book shop near Vanderbilt.  We wandered around Vandy for a while and then headed to Elliston’s soda shop for lunch.  Easily the world’s best milkshakes - even in the 20 degree weather.

Look at all that ice!

That night we went back downtown.  We admired the frozen fountain and watched the local reporter do a bit in front of it about the cold temperatures.  I’ve never seen a fountain freezing as it ran!

After watching some bad karaoke and peeking in the country music bars, we headed over to B.B. King’s Blues club.  The House band was playing and the music was amazing!  We stayed out pretty late and were happy to crash when we finally made it to bed.

We slept in on Sunday morning, had a lazy breakfast downstairs, then decided to hit up some more shopping.  One of our favorite artists, Andy Gullahorn, lives in the Nashville area and had written a song about the Green Hills Mall.  Of course we had to check it out!  This mall could put Lenox to shame!  It had every name brand designer store you could think of AND a Tiffany & Co.  We didn’t go in (I might have been tempted), but I peeked in the windows as we walked around it.  Didn’t buy a thing except another scarf for the cold weather.  Afterwards we headed to San Antonio Taco Company for lunch.  Great food!  Interesting dining experience…

After lunch it was back over to the Opryland area.  Lora’s sister, Emily, had recommended that we go.  Apparently, though, you have to pay to park.  Not $5.  Not $10.  They wanted $18 just to park the car.  *snort*  Like I mentioned before, we’re not country music fans and I’m too cheap to pay that much money just to park my car.  So, we went back over to Opry Mills so Sandy could look at the Gibson Guitar store again.  While we were there we found a brochure for Cooter’s.

Cooter’s is a memorablia shop owned by the guy that played Cooter on Dukes of Hazzard - Sandy’s most favorite show growing up.  We easily spent 2 1/2 hours here going through the “museum” and gift shop.  Sandy had to pose with the General Lee parked outside.  We took more pictures in this one store than we did of the rest of Nashville combined.  ;)  I think this one stop made the trip for him.

Sandy & the General Lee

Sunday night we went to a local music venue called Eighth and Lindley.  We googled who was playing locally and found two random folks who didn’t seem too country.  The featured acts were Stephanie Chapman and Trent Dabbs and Ashley Monroe.  The music was pretty darn good!  We met one of Sandy’s old friends from high school who’s attending law school at Vanderbuilt.  It was nice to meet her and let them catch up between songs.  Another late night.

Monday morning we were up early and headed back home.  It was snowing as we left (first snow we saw this year!) and we had fun in the parking lot before leaving.  It was a very nice trip & we really had a great time!

Mural across from the hotel

Another restaurant in Opry Mills had a giant fish tank!

Elliston's Soda Shop

Snow!!

I have discovered Twitter (thank you, Sandy!) and I think it’s the coolest thing since sliced bread.  For those not yet in the know, Twitter is a social networking site that lets users tweet, or microblog, text-based messages up to 140 characters in length.  It’s basically a super fast way to tell the world what you’re up to (think status update from Facebook).

One of the neatest tweets I’m following right now is SecretTweet.  It’s like PostSecret for Twitter.  It updates several times a day & I find myself checking my phone regularly just to read the latest secrettweets.    Some are funny, some are creepy, and some are just plain sad.  You never know what secrets somebody will post.

Probate for Dad’s estate is Friday morning, so we’re driving the truck back up to Atlanta so Cole can make arrangements for it.  Since we’ll be heading north, we thought we’d make a vacation of it and head to Nashville.  Monday is MLK Day, which makes it a long weekend!  We’ve talked about making that a vacation spot for as many years as we’ve been together and just haven’t gotten around to it.  So, we’ll be in Nashville Friday through Monday.  If anyone has any ideas or suggestions for things we ought to do or see while we’re up there, let us know!

Opened the mail when we got home tonight to find a benefits enrollment confirmation statement from work.  Sandy & I decided to each get our own health coverage because it’s cheaper that way.  Poor TSYS got confused somehow and signed the two of us up for the coverage we had last year, signed me up for my selection for this year, and gave both of us coverage under a third plan.  I know I’m clutzy, guys, but come on!  Really?!