Daycare Search

Parenting is already stressful, and Edison is not born yet.  About a month ago, JR and I went on our daycare search for Edison.  Let's do the math.  About a month ago I was 6 months pregnant.  Which means,  there were 4 months left before Edison would be born and another 2 months before he actually starts daycare.  Why are we looking so early???  This is the norm apparently.  The daycare that we  actually decided on has a wait list and no available spots until February!  So looking 6 months ahead actually wasn't even early enough.  Therefore, the earlier the better :)

Every parent wants the best care for their child, but we also have to remember that every parent has to also pay for that childcare.  So let's amend the earlier sentence to  every parent wants the best affordable care for their child.

JR and I began with setting a parameter on how far we would go for a daycare.  Within the parameter we set, there are about 15 daycares.   So I started to research each one, and narrowed down the list to 8 daycares.  To be honest, the first thing i looked for at each daycare was the price.  Of course, none of the websites have prices!

The next day, we set out to see all 8 daycares.  I had questions and a notebook ready to critique each and every day care.  Of the 8 daycares we drove past 2 and decided to not go in purely based on the look of the building and the play ground.  JR and I didn't even have to discuss it.  We would just look at the building as were driving up, and then look at each other and keep going.

One daycare that we went in to looked decent on the outside, but was extremely sketchy on the inside.  I think we could have turned around and walked right out, if no one had seen us walk in. We took a tour and ended in the infant room.  It was nap time , therefore the lights were off.  One of the teachers was standing between two rooms with a baby in her arms and one in a rocker.  She was feeding the one in her arms and vigorously rocking the one on the floor with her foot.  She actually scared us! As a teacher, I naturally asked about a curriculum.  The response was "We do not have a curriculum for babies.  They just eat and sleep"  This sealed the deal that this was not the right place for Edison...well the deal was sealed with the scary teacher, the lack of lights, the smell of dirty diapers and lots of other things.

After daycare hunting for about 3 hours, we grabbed lunch and headed home to make a decision.  We decided on the same daycare that my niece and nephew attend.  They provide a great curriculum, lots of experienced teachers, diversity, safety, and many other things, including a discount for educators :)

The winner is The Goddard School for Early Childhood Development :)

Thanks for reading,
<3 Jenn

Trimester 2: 17-27 weeks

Hey Friends and Family! It's been a while. There is so much to catch you up on. This entry will be about the BIG ultrasound and other trimester 2 (T2) shenanigans. On the last entry, I spoke about how T2 hadn't been as amazing and enjoyable as everyone said it was going to be. Well, I eventually made it to that honeymoon place. I stopped getting nauseous, rode in cars with ease and stopped wanting to nap every 2 hours. I was back to my old self and moving around with quite a lot of ease. This was great for me, especially with the school year coming to an end. For my non-teacher friends and family, you may think that the end of the school year is a breeze, but it is far from it. I was moving around constantly, packing my room, going on service and field trips, prepping my AP students for their big test, and getting things done around the house. I also finally regained my appetite and then some. This is when I started to eat everything in site. I was always hungry and always snacking. I kept a snack drawer at work and ate constantly during class. I would eat lunch and then leave during my conference periods to get more food. I tried to stay a little bit healthy :) My love was and still is DQ Blizzards. I did learn that I had an aversion to white mushrooms and olives. It was during this trimester that we had our first check everything ultrasound. We had an appointment at 7 in the morning but needed to be there 30 min early. I was told to come with a full bladder and not eat anything past midnight. I woke up and started drinking water. I was so nervous that I didn't drink enough that when we arrived at the hospital, I drank another 2 cups. Well, the joke was on me, because I didn't get in to the ultrasound room until 8 am. By then, my bladder was about to explode. I had to keep my bladder full for the first part of the ultrasound. The ultrasound is more then just checking the gender of the baby. It is to check to see if everything is developing correctly. A tech conducts the ultrasound. She took a lot of pictures and measurements of everything from limbs to organs. The whole time JR and I are just watching the monitor and hoping everything is alright. About an hour later, she leaves the room with the results and comes back in 15 min later to tell us we were done. We were still worried. The tech couldn't really tell us anything. We had to wait for the results to get sent to my OB and then wait for my OB to call us. I can't really describe the feeling. Worry doesn't really describe the knot in my stomach that had formed with the anticipation of knowing whether or not my baby was developing healthily. We were super excited when the tech showed us BR is a boy. He was not shy at all when it came to letting us see his boy parts... After the ultrasound we went to update our registry with boy specific things. We needed to take our minds off of the ultrasound. JR was super excited about the boy factor, and was bouncing off the walls in Target and Babies-R-Us. I had to kind of scold him to get him to focus...may not have been my proudest moment as a wife :/ In the end, everything was fine. The results showed that he was growing nicely and actually ahead of schedule. This did not surprise us at all. JR was almost 10 lbs as a new born....and i have a slight fear that Edison is going to follow in his father's footsteps. Next up: Day Care search <3 Jenn

Trimester 2: Weeks 14-16

JR and I have now entered into trimester 2. This is the trimester I have been looking forward to. Everyone has been telling me that I will be in my pregnant honeymoon stage...but I am not. I have discovered that trimester 2 has brought me motion sickness. I have never had this before. But car rides are a lot more difficult for me. At first I thought it was just other people driving, but last week I had to pull over a few times on the way to work to throw up.

I am also extremely bloated all the time after meals. My doctor told me that it is not going to go away especially for someone my size. Some other things I have discovered about my pregnancy are that fish, tomato juice, and incense make me queasy. I don't really crave anything in particular, but I do have cravings all the time. JR and I also think the dogs may sense something is different, because they have been going potty in the house.

Now let's talk about the doctor visits. No one told me that I have to pee in a cup at every visit. So now I know to drink a large cup of water before I drive to the appointment. I am an expert at peeing in a cup, and have a routine on how to get it done cleanly :) Ladies, you know this is a difficult task for us. Every time JR and I go to an appointment, I get nervous. It's almost as if I hold my breath until the doctor says " Everything looks good" Yesterday we went to the OB for our 16 week check-up and started things off with a sonogram to check BR's heartbeat. The minute it took for the nurse to find BR feels like a lifetime. On my last checkup (4 weeks ago) BR was on the bottom left, this time BR was on the top right. When she found his/her heartbeat, she couldn't keep it for long because BR was constantly moving. So it looks like we are starting off strong and this may be why I feel sick all the time ;) Our next appointment will be the highly anticipated Ultrasound to make sure everything is maturing right. Hopefully BR isn't shy and lets us know if the name will be Ava or Edison (If you read our last entry, you already knew about Ava. Right now we are considering Edison for a boy name :) )

The last thing I want to talk about are baby registries. I thought it was going to be like a wedding registry. I was excited to get a scan gun and scan away at all the cuteness JR and I could find. But baby registries are so much more stressful. I researched everything I came across from cribs to bottles. I also didn't realize how many different types of everything there were. It's not as simple as finding a comfy infant carrier. You need to find one with a five point harness, head support, side impact tested, and energy absorbing foam. I am extremely thorough. So not only did I research what is best right now, I also went on to several sites to read parent reviews and make comparisons. Basically if you want more info and what's out there and what's good for babies, I can share with you! I definitely think a list is helpful to go off of. Babies-R-Us and Target gave us one to use. Feel free to check them out to see what I have spent hours and hours of research on.

Until next time,
<3 Jenn

Please do not judge my spelling or grammar :)

BR Weeks 1-13: 1st trimester

This post is going to be long, I have a lot to cover :)

Alright so a little background first that will answer a lot of questions for all of you. I first noticed something was different about a week after school had started back up in January. I was extremely tired all the time. When I say tired, I mean sleeping whenever I had the chance to. Some of you may be thinking " that doesn't seem different for Jennifer, she sleeps all the time anyways) But let me tell you, I would come home from work and take a nap until JR woke me up for dinner. I would eat dinner then go right back to sleep about an hour later. I was suppose to get my period (we are all adults here)the weekend of Jessica and Daniel's wedding (Jan 14). I had a feeling that it wasn't going to come ,but I didn't want to get my hopes up. That same weekend, JR has a dream that I am pregnant. The following week I took two at home pregnancy test and both came out positive.

At home pregnancy test are not as easy at peeing on a stick. There are very specific instructions on how to hold the stick when you pee on it and how to hold it after you pee and how to lay it down while you wait for the lines to appear. It was actually quite stressful. I immediately make a doctors appointment for the following week. As I am sitting in the doctor's room waiting to hear the results of the test I took there, I had a gazillion things run through my head. I pictured my doctor coming in with a huge smile on her face with balloons and all this crazy fan fare to let me know I was indeed pregnant. Instead, the nurse walks in to tell me that she is dropping off a prenatal care bag for me. and that was it. That was how I found out for sure that I was pregnant. The breaking of the news wasn't exactly how I had imagined it.

I call JR to give him the great news, then go home and ...sleep. And so the first trimester morning sickness begins. I had true early morning nauseousness. I would throw up maybe once or twice a week. Our morning routine became quite tired some. I would wake up around 5 am. JR would wake up let the dogs out and then come ask me what I felt like I could eat. He would fix me breakfast and I would sit in bed eating and get out of bed around 6:15 if I was lucky. After about a week of this, I had to tell my bosses that I was pregnant. Getting to work on time was extremely difficult. I didn't want them to think that I was slacking or anything. So the first people to know I was pregnant weren't my closest family members or friends, but my bosses.

About the second week of February, JR and I go in for our first ultrasound. We were slightly nervous that we could have twins. It runs in JR's family. When flickering kidney bean came on the screen, I was overwhelmed with emotion inside. JR and I didn't cry, but I definitely teared up. The doctor measured BR and calculated that he/she was 7 weeks and 6 days along (1.5 cm in length) She then moved around to make sure there was only one :) and indeed, only one.

As the weeks progressed, I continued to be nauseous and throw up occasionally, I actually lost a few pounds. I snacked all the time, gave up a lot of food I liked, and continued to sleep. At about 9 weeks we began telling our family, and at about 11 weeks we told all of our closest friends. By the last week of my 1st trimester, the tiredness and the nauseousness calmed down. The snacking did not :)

The last downside to being pregnant is how often I have to pee. My record is getting up 3 times in one night to use the restroom.

We also had a sonogram around week 12. We heard the heartbeat after a little scare because the nurse couldn't find BR.

Here are a few questions that weren't answered above:

When are you due? September 23

Were you two trying? We weren't not trying. I had been off birth control for about 3 months.

When and are you going to find out the gender? Any one that is reading this knows me well enough to know that I am a planner. Which means of course we are going to find out the gender. I am not one to be surprised on the day of delivery. We will know at the beginning of May if it is a boy or girl.

Do you care if it is a boy or girl? Like all parents-to-be, we just want a healthy Guatemasian baby, but a boy Guatemasian would be pretty awesome.

Do you have names picked out yet? We have a name picked out for a girl: Ava Mei Reyes. Mei is after my grandmother. As for a boy name, we have nothing! Picking out a name is extremely stressful. BR will also have a Chinese name, but will be given that by my parents after he/she is born.




<3 Jennifer

Reyes News and Updates! Read all about it!

Hey Friends and family! The last entry in this blog was about my grandmother. So I guess I will begin with my grandmother. About a month ago, my grandmother passed away. I am honestly still grieving and think about her often. The last time I saw my grandmother, I was able to tell her that she was going to be blessed with her
13th great grandchild. My last memory of her is filled with love and lots of joy.

So here goes the rest. I received a promotion at work this semester. I am the 10th grade level chair at my school. This essentially translates to an assistant principal type job. The transition has been a bit overwhelming but welcomed with more responsibilities, accountability, and trust. I get to use the school credit card quite often :)JR is still working with USA but no longer works with the shuttle program. He works with the station now and does a lot of planning and programming type stuff. That's about as detailed as I can get with his job description.

Here is the real reason I am blogging again. A lot of friends have asked JR and I to blog about our Baby Reyes (BR) experience. This is the best way for us to keep everyone updated on how things are going. I hope you all enjoy it, and I will try not to forget all the ups and downs about pregnancy. Hopefully JR will get in on this and blog a little about what he is feeling through all of this as well! Please please feel free to call. email and comment. Don't be afraid or embarrassed to ask questions.

<3 Jennifer