nerves and not showing.

Some blog news: I added tickers at the bottom so you could follow baby's progress through the produce department and count down the days with us. I think counting weeks of pregnancy is really confusing -- I guess it's like how you might say a baby is in her first year of life before she turns one. Still, every time, I have to double check to make sure my math is right!

Week 14 is wrapping up and week 15 is just around the corner -- baby is graduating from peach to lemon (these sizes seem very arbitrary -- what if you have a large peach or a small lemon?). Regardless of his/her increasing size, I'm not increasing by much at all. I guess it's pretty normal in a first pregnancy to go several months without showing, but it seems like you should, considering how much growth is happening in there! My doctor said she doesn't think I'll show until at least 20 weeks -- so far, she's right, because I'm fitting into all of my clothes just like I always do.

In some ways, that's been advantageous: no one at school has guessed anything. Up until this week, only a few people were on a need-to-know basis, but I decided I should probably talk to human resources about family medical leave, and I also wanted the principal to know before he heard anything "through the grapevine." So now the word is out with administration, and I'm trying to find the right time to break the news to the other people I work with.

And...I'm terrified. I know that there are no signs anything is wrong, and that everything looked great at my last appointment. And I know that the odds are greatly in my favor that everything will be fine from this point forward. But I'm just so, so anxious to tell people beyond, well, you! I'm sure that, besides being nervous about complications, I'm also just nervous to verbalize it and make it real -- at this point, it is still so, well, surreal. Today was a baby shower for two of my work colleagues, and I didn't want to say anything to steal their thunder -- but I'll have to bite the bullet and say something soon, I guess...

Edited 12/3 to add: I sent out an email to my department today. It was a little scary but people were very supportive and nice. I'm still terrified that I'll go to my next appointment, get horrible news, and then have to deal with it...but it's nice to have supportive people around you, too.

thankfulness.

Happy Thanksgiving! Happy second trimester! I officially start my 14th week of pregnancy today. By some calculations, I have been in the second trimester since last Thursday at the start of my thirteenth week...by some, not until Sunday, and by others, not until next Thursday. I like the calculations that choose TODAY and figure it's a good happy medium.

We flew into Salt Lake City VERY late last night, thanks to terrible weather in Chicago that delayed almost every flight going in and out of O'Hare after 7pm. But now that we've gotten a little sleep, we're very glad to be here with Jason's family to celebrate Jason's favorite holiday. What could be better than food, family, football, and Fozzie? Well, I can't take antihistamines, so Fozzie and I are not getting along as well as we'd both like, but I'm dealing with the sniffly nose and itchy chin as best as I can. (Fozzie can be seen in action here and here!)

Last year, we went to Temple Square in downtown SLC to see the "lighting of the Square" to kick off the holiday season. I don't know that we'll venture out this year, as the high temperature is not supposed to be above 20 all weekend, but here's a picture from a local tourism website to give you an idea of how beautiful it is:

We're very thankful this Thanksgiving for so many things. Love to all of you, far and wide, on this wonderful holiday!

morning sickness: not just for mornings.

Growing up, I remember hearing horror stories from my parents about how sick my mom was during both her pregnancies. (Case in point: my dad had to cook up at church because my mom couldn't stand the smell of food in the house -- thank goodness he had an extra kitchen to use!) I had read that pregnancy-related nausea tends to be inherited, so I braced myself for the worst. Now that I'm nearing the end of the 12th week, with all signs pointing towards queasiness being on its way out, I have to say I've been (relatively) lucky. (Knocking on our wood coffee table right now!)

Weeks 6, 7, and 8 were the hardest. First of all, "morning" sickness is such a terrible name -- in my case, it was usually "early and late" sickness, meaning that I felt the worst when I first woke up and then starting at about 6pm until I went to bed I got steadily worse again. I ate a lot of baked potatoes with cottage cheese, fruit, and saltines. I also found that starting the morning with two packets of apple-cinnamon instant oatmeal, milk, and a handful of frozen blueberries thrown in got me through the next several hours in decent shape (this is still what I eat for breakfast every morning -- I'm scared to go off it!). I never actually threw up, but the foods that got me closest (and that I haven't eaten since) were butternut squash ravioli, acorn squash and quiche -- three foods I ordinarily love and now can't stand the thought of. Oh, and sweet foods (chocolate, especially) and coffee were off limits, too, which is pretty much unheard of for me!

In week 9, I suddenly felt great again -- which really, really scared me. This was about the time I found out that I had the subchorionic hematoma, so I was in a tailspin of worry. But never fear -- queasiness came roaring back the morning of parent-teacher conferences, naturally, so I struggled through two days of putting on a smiling face while subsisting on a diet of saltines and peppermint tea. The "morning" sickness continued through weeks 10 and 11, and just as I was about to start week 12...it faded.

I'm still not feeling completely normal -- if I don't eat on a regular schedule, I start to feel ill, certain foods are still off-limits, and at the same time I'm able to eat foods I never was before (I actually used ketchup, which I've always hated, on some Belgian fries at the French market in Chicago last weekend instead of my usual mayo) -- but I'm crossing my fingers that, as is true for 90%+ of women, the end of the first trimester will also be the end of the perpetual queasies! And after 7 months of meat-free living, I'm actually looking forward to turkey on Thursday...

mugging for the camera.

Here are a few ultrasound pictures of how things are progressing so far. (I've never posted pictures in a blog, so apologies about any weird formatting! Also, we don't have a scanner, so further apologies about having to post a picture of a picture...)

This first image is from our 6 week ultrasound -- the blob the arrow is pointing to would have been the size of a pinky fingernail at that point.

And this is our most recent image (12 weeks) -- freaky alien baby doing the dance from "Thriller"! It's about 2.5 inches at this point, half of which is the head (by birth, the head will only be 1/4 of the baby's total size [Jason asked me to edit this to add, "unless it takes after Alan"]). We think it's weird and amazing that we can already see a nose, chin (will it have the famous Hanna/Herszenson chin, we wonder?), and individual fingers.

surprise -- we're expecting!

Hello, friends and family!

As a (very) few of you know already, we're expecting a baby sometime around June 2nd, 2011! Though we're not ready to shout it from the rooftops quite yet -- no Facebook announcements, please -- we wanted to share this exciting news with you.

When we got married in 2005, we both wanted to be married for 5 years before thinking about having a family (Jason would be done with grad school and we both would have the opportunity to enjoy "just being married" for a while). After much discussion and soul-searching once we hit the 5-year benchmark, we decided to give parenthood a whirl -- and were very surprised to get a positive home pregnancy test result on September 20th (Courtney's note: I knew Jason would need some evidence and convincing, so I waited until I had 6 positive tests to break the news!).

It's been a little rocky so far -- with my ovarian cancer history the doctor has been extra careful, and a subchorionic hematoma (bleeding, basically) threw us for a loop a few weeks ago -- but the 12-week appointment today was wonderful, with little future Baby Hanna doing flip-turns and waving like it was the Miss America (or Mr. Universe?) pageant. As of today, baby is about the size of a plum!

We'll be posting here periodically with updates for friends and family near and far. Thanks for checking in on us throughout these next several months!

p.s. We hope you recognize the name of our blog from our "first dance" song at our wedding -- we thought it would be especially appropriate as we get ready for two to become three!