Names!!

I think we have finally decided on names for the baby. The boys name was so easy for us to come up with. I have a grandfather who passed away about 10 years ago and I really wanted to name our boy after him. My grandfather's first name was Bruce and I really couldn't find a way to use it that I liked, but his middle name was Kay. I think just having Kay is kinda girly but I have always liked the name Caiden. I was going to spell it with a C but recently heard of someone spelling it Kayden. I absolutely loved it and it incorporated Kay. My other grandfather passed away almost 4 years ago and his name was James, along with my dad's middle name being James so we have decided to go with Kayden James if we have a boy.

The girls name really has no significance. I ran through a long list with Nick of different names but he didn't like any of them. He kept saying he wanted something long. I have always liked the name Bella Grace, but I really didn't think he would go for it so I just never said anything. I told him since I picked out the boys name he could pick out the girls name and left it at that. When I brought the subject back up the other night he said he really liked the name Isabella. I then said, how about Isabella Grace, and then we can call her Bella Grace. He said he wanted to call her Isabella (he can't stand when people are called by their middle names too but whatever!!) and I said that's fine but I'm calling her Bella Grace. I think he will eventually end up calling her Bella Grace anyways :)

So there we go, either Kayden James or Isabella (Bella) Grace. We may be finding out the gender sooner than expected as my sister in law offered to pay half for a gender scan at Baby Belly. They do the gender scan as early as 16 weeks, which is only 2 weeks away instead of 6 weeks away if I waited for the 20 week appointment at the doctor's office. The thing I love about this place is that if they are wrong, you bring in the birth certificate once the baby is born and you get a full refund, and if they can't tell if it's a boy or a girl when you go in, then they will schedule you another appointment a week later. I really think I'm going to do it because I'm dying to know and it's not all that expensive. I think I just really want to know because I keep hoping for a girl since all boys run on the Cooper side of the family, however I would be happy with either :)

12 weeks!

This past week we had our 12 week doctors appointment and got to hear the heartbeat for the first time. It was a pretty cool moment since the heartbeat was all I have wanted to hear for the past 12 weeks. At our 9 week visit I got to see the little flutter of a heartbeat on the ultrasound, but there was nothing compared to hearing the heartbeat. I knew our little baby was there and still thriving. We waited until after that appointment to really announce that we were pregnant. We have just had so many friends and family go through miscarriages that we didn't want to tell a lot of people until we were past the 1st trimester and until after we actually heard the heartbeat. It was so much fun to get to post on facebook though after our doctor's appointment and see how many people who were truly excited for us, and surprise a lot of our friends who didn't know. I am so glad now that people know and we don't have to keep it a secret! It was really hard because we have 2 friends due about a month after us that had already said something so it was hard for us to keep ours a secret but we did it! It's actually kinda weird for me to tell people that we are pregnant though. I don't know why but it's just hard to be like hey i'm pregnant! I thought once I was actually pregnant I would like scream it from the roof tops, but I haven't even told the other 5th grade teachers at my school yet that I work with and talk to every day. My cooperating teacher knows just because I wanted to tell her so she knew why I was so tired and stuff, but I still just haven't said anything to the other teachers. I know I will have to eventually but like I said it's still really weird to say anything. I mean obviously, once I start showing it will be easier for me to tell people because I don't want them to just think I'm fat :)

Symptoms

I swear I have every single pregnancy symptom that a pregnant woman could possibly have... even the ones that I didn't even know existed, which means they really aren't that common. I'm not going to go into detail about those though because most people would really rather not hear about that :)
Pretty much the day that I turned 6 weeks pregnant, morning sickness hit. And it continued every morning. I would wake up and immediately start feeling sick. It was very difficult with student teaching, but luckily I never really felt sick during the day. In the evenings I would start feeling bad but very rarely did I get sick. If I did get sick in the evenings it was because I was thinking too much when I took my prenatal vitamin and choked on it (I'm horrible at taking pills!)Finally, this past week the morning sickness has decreased quite a bit. I can't say it is completely gone but I do feel better in the mornings, and I don't dread getting out of bed because I know I'm going to get sick 5 seconds later anymore (even though I do dread getting out of bed just because I'm still so tired!)
Exhaustion has been with me since day 1. I have always been a person who could lay down at any given moment and sleep for 12 hours. I LOVE sleep. However, I noticed that I definitely could not make it through the day without feeling like I was going to fall over dead from exhaustion. I would come home from teaching and immediately lay on the couch the rest of the night, and then go to bed around 9 or 9:30. During the school day, I remember sitting at my desk and just thinking about how I wanted to go to sleep and I couldn't wait for the school day to be over so I could do just that. I'm still pretty exhausted, and I still have to go to bed around 9 or 9 30 but I'm starting to be able to not take the naps during the day. Hopefully I will eventually get all my energy back so I can finish cleaning this house!

We're Having A Baby!!

On January 19th, I was feeling a little off. We had just gotten back from a trip to Gatlinburg with the middle school and high school students. I was absolutely exhausted all weekend, but just thought that I was getting too old for that stuff :) I had also just started student teaching so getting up early was wearing me out also. I really didn't think much of it but decided to have Nick pick up some pregnancy tests from Wal-mart while he was picking up some other things. Neither one of us really thought it would be positive, and I actually wasn't even planning on taking the test that night. Nick begged me to just go ahead and take it, so I did. It says on the box that you are supposed to wait like 2 minutes to read it, but we knew in a matter of 30 seconds that we were pregnant. It was the most surreal moment of my life. I just walked out of the bathroom with this shocked look on my face and just held the test up for Nick to see. It was probably the weirdest feeling ever also. I mean now you know that you have this thing growing inside of you and I just didn't really know what to do. We were super excited though, and decided I would call the doctor the next day to figure out what the next steps were.