2nd Trimester, Babies Growing Up, and Registries - Oh My!

I have been meaning to write this post for a few days now, but didn't really know what I wanted to say or how to start. I guess I just feel like it's so weird that time seems to go by so incredibly slow, but then so fast at the same time. I mean here I am, already in my second trimester, and I feel like I just peed on a stick the other day. I can literally still FEEL that incredible feeling of pure shock, happiness, and excitement when those 2 lines popped up on the first test. I hope that is a feeling that never leaves me.

But then I think back to the past 9 weeks or so and think about how slow and scary they could be at times. I guess it helps that first tri. actually SEEMS shorter since you don't know your pregnant for an entire month of it, but still... it really did go by faster than I imagined.

On Saturday I had lunch with a few local moms and another mom to be, and the whole thing hit me again. One in particular, I feel like I just remember her being pregnant. She had her daughter last summer and she's already growing up so fast! There was another mom there with a 3 month old and I just couldn't help but think to myself "OMG before you know it that 3 month old is going to be the 6/7 month old there!"

Don't get me wrong, one of the things I am looking forward to the most is watching our baby grow, change, and learn new things, but it just made me so sad at the same time. Bittersweet I guess.

It's hard because part of me just cannot wait for our baby to be here and I think about life with the baby ALL the time, but the other part of me just knows in September I am going to look back and likely miss being pregnant and think it went by too fast. So far, even with being sick a little in my first trimester, I absolutely LOVE everything about being pregnant, so I really want to enjoy it and not rush it away, even though I can't wait to meet our sweet baby.

I'm sure to some of you these thoughts are crazy, but I think any mother or mother to be can relate.

On a different note, I've been thinking about and researching more some of the bigger items we're going to buy. Not that I was super conservative in the 1st trimester since I did buy a few small things, but I feel like now I can actually buy some things without people thinking I am crazy or that it's too early. Even though I've always believed that buying something isn't going to jinx anything, it is totally different now, knowing I am out of the scary 1st trimester (though something could still happen I realize), when I am in a store looking at baby things or ordering online. It's just like it's more real now. I can accept a little more that this is actually going to happen without the voice in my head screaming "no, it actually might not, don't get ahead of yourself!!!" It's kind of a nice feeling to finally be here.

I think our plan, as far as buying larger things since it's not likely we'll get those big ticket items for shower gifts obviously, is to buy 1 bigger item each month or so. So just spend a few hundred dollars at a time and start collecting things. The big things I have so far on "the list" are things like; the crib, shorter dresser for a changing table, taller/skinnier dresser, rocker (this is proving to be harder than I thought b/c all of the upholstered chairs I love are $$$$$$$$$$$), travel system, cosleeper/pack and play, bedding (being made on Etsy), and cloth diapers.

I am registering at MyRegistry.com so that I can put things on our registry from all over, not just one store, and so that I don't have 10 different registries. It's a really cool site in that you can be on any website and click a product to add it to your one, central, registry. Then, friends and family can go to that one site and click on items from a billion different places if I so choose! Then when they click the item it tells them where they can order that particular item (and I am pretty sure if they click further, takes them to that actual website in which to order, so for example, something from BabyGap would take them to that product on the BabyGap site) and they can check a place to say it's been purchased so the registry updates so that it doesn't get purchased multiple times. I thought it was pretty cool, especially since the majority of the things I am registering for are kind of unconventional and not something every Target or WalMart has.

I guess now that I am in my 2nd trimester I can open it up to not be private anymore (I've been using it mostly up until this point just to keep track of things I see that I want). We'll see :)