Hiking Journal: Abram Falls

On the Saturday after Thanksgiving, we headed up the Cades Cove for a quick hike.  I only needed 5 miles to get my 100 mile pin (!), so we chose Abram Falls.  We had already been once, and last time I thought it was SO HARD.  This time ~15 lbs lighter with a year of consistent weight-lifting and two more LeConte trips under my belt, it was much, much easier!  I will go so far to say that it was EASY – a beginner hike for sure!  If you read the post from the last time, I was griping because I had read on the internet that some one said it was easy and I did not agree.  Ha!  Also, this time there was much less traffic on the trail.

Pictures from the hike:

After the hike, we drove through Cades Cove and back in to Gatlinburg, stopping at the Sugarlands visitor center on the way!  I got it!

  Our next stop was one of our favorites…….

….Best Italian!  We LOVE LOVE LOVE this place!  There is nothing in the WORLD like their garlic knots!

After eating, we did a little bit of shopping before heading back home.  Overall, an awesome hike!

Week 6: Steak & Pickles

Week 6!  For some reason, this felt like a “milestone” – 6 weeks seems so much more legitimate & real than 5 weeks!  Ha ha! Feeling great!  Some days I am bloated, but most of the time I just feel normal.  I have had no nausea to speak of – EXCEPT when I take the prenatal vitamins on an empty stomach.

My major pregnancy symptom this week is CRAVINGS!  In week 5, I mentioned that I had been craving steak patties from the cafeteria.  Well, I began to get embarrassed.  I was getting steak & sausage every single morning & eating it with eggs AND bacon from home!  I share an office & it was embarrassing.  So, I sent Brent on a mission – to find some steak patties so I could eat my massive greasy breakfast at home.  He FINALLY found them at Sam’s – a pack of 10-12 frozen steak patties with 2 packets of sawmill gravy! SCORE!  They are awesome.  There were a few days when I had them for breakfast AND supper.

My other major craving is PICKLES.  I know, so cliché! The past two weeks I think we went through about 2.5 jars. We like the Farmer’s Market pickles from Vlassic, but my favorite are the homemade pickles my coworker brings us.  These have peppers & garlic and are WONDERFUL.  I started eating pickles in the morning, pickles when I come home from work, and pickles in the evening.  Occasionally I will take a sip of the juice straight from the jar.  The only way I can restrain myself is remembering how much sodium is in the pickles and how bloated I am getting…..

Food aversions: none really, but I don’t care for anything sweet at all.  It’s not like it would make me sick, I just don’t want it like I usually do.  Yay!  Also, this is not really a food aversion, but I just don’t feel like cooking.  I am tired.  Not exhausted, but tired when I get off work.

Headed home for Thanksgiving but will be keeping the secret to surprise everyone at Christmas!

The Beauty Queen

It was a big weekend!  We made an extra trip to Tennessee to see our favorite little 5th-grader compete in a beauty pageant!

The pugs got to go!

I took several pictures at home.  Unfortunately not the best weather!

The pageant was held at Rural Vale school – I finally got to see Brent’s old stomping ground!

Despite getting robbed of the crown, she had a great time and looked beautiful.  We were SO proud of her!  She is definitely a beauty queen to us!  And she is just as beautiful on the inside as she is on the outside.

After the pageant, we took her to a Mexican restaurant in Tellico (although it was painful to me since I was abstaining from queso at the time due to pregnancy!  Then we went back to the Freeman’s where I watched Halie perform “surgery” on her Kindle and got seriously nauseated. (Below is the moon over Tellico as we were leaving the school.)

And then it was time to go home!  Quick but fun trip!!

Week 5: Mood Swings

Week 5 was pretty much more of the same! A little bit tired, but not too bad. There were definitely some nights when I was ready to go to bed early, but as long as I get enough sleep at night I am OK.  No nausea!  I’m definitely moodier than usual – in fact, the problem is that I am so, so sensitive! I seem to take offense to everything and I am so irritable! Of course I know that it is just the hormones, and that I am overreacting, but it doesn’t change the feeling…..I don’t want to act on my annoyances, so mostly I just sit around and steam.  It sounds terrible, but since I want to keep my friends, there is no way I’m going to tell anyone how I feel! This week we went home for Halie’s beauty pageant. It’s so fun to have a secret….no one knows! I took so many photos of myself from side, even though I know I won’t be showing for probably 2 more months! This week is also the week that the meat craving really kicked in – in the morning, I began CRAVING sausage & steak patties from the cafeteria.  Pretty funny!  Also, I had a toothache that started acting up when we went home. Otherwise, feeling great!

It Finally Happened!

Most people did not know that Brent & I had been trying to get pregnant for several months.  And that’s all I am going to say about that – no need to rehash or give anyone details that they don’t want.  God is ALWAYS good and His timing is perfect, even if we do not understand.

I got the first positive pregnancy tests on a Sunday.  The lines were very, very faint, but they were there.  Of course I showed Brent first and then I texted Kourtney.  It was early and it was hard to believe.  After researching on the internet, I became less and less convinced that they were legitimate based on other ladies’ experiences with the Target brand.  What a bummer!  Brent seemed excited, but since I didn’t want to get his hopes up, I told him that this was very tentative & that we would have to test again in a few days.

Well, of course I couldn’t just nonchalantly wait “a few days,” so on the way to work in the morning, I stopped and got the pregnancy test that the internet said was the “gold standard” – First Response Early Result.  I was planning on taking it Tuesday, but just couldn’t wait, so I took it Monday morning at work. Based on all of my research, I was just convinced that it would not be positive……

….but it was!!!  You may or may not be able to see the very, very faint line in the picture above.  Of course, I told Brent immediately.  It didn’t even cross my mind to keep it to myself and try to surprise him in a cute way.

For the next several days, there were more tests, all positive.  I just wanted to make sure, because it was so early.

As far as symptoms go, I really didn’t have any.  I would never have guessed that I was pregnant if I hadn’t taken the test.  However, for the first few days I was very, very tired – the Sunday I took the test I had actually taken a 4-hour nap, and had taken a 4-hour nap the day before.  I didn’t take any pictures that week, but here is one that is close as kind of a before.  (The picture that I am holding is a picture of me when Brent & I did Body for Life before the wedding – kind of a “goal” picture.)

In the next week I went to the thrift store & bought two pregnancy books.  I also began researching on the internet.  All of this in-between naps, because I continued to be pretty tired. Otherwise, there were really no symptoms!  So the wait began……