30 Weeks! Showered with Love & Debt Free!

Week 30: January 2nd - January 8th, 2014

Thirty weeks in! Seven weeks til Hannah is fully cooked enough that my doctors wouldn't stress if I went into labor and ten-ish weeks until my little girl is "due" to make her grand appearance! Woohoo! Hard not to be excited!

With the exception of feeling exhausted, I am doing quite well. While visiting everyone in SC we are sleeping in a queen (we have a king at home) and something about having less space (when I take up increasingly more space) seems to mean that I'm just really not sleeping very well. I am really hoping it will get better when I get back home, but I am fearing that this is the beginning of the nope, you're-just-too-pregnant-to-sleep-well-phase.

Woohoo! Closing documents to sell our house! This is a very happy envelope!

There have been two big events this week. On Friday the closing documents arrived and we zipped out to have them signed and notarized and quickly overnighted them back to the company. Then, on Wednesday afternoon I checked our bank account and yep - we sold our house in Florida!!! YAY! I can't think about the ways in which it is sad to leave our beautiful beautiful house, (I already did that and cried over it months ago), but as we paid our mortgage and Maryland-level rent ($$$) we were increasingly ready to sell our house - and it needed to happen asap and before Hannah got here (and really, a month or two before she got here so we would have a little more money to buy all the various items you need to contain, soothe, and care for a little one!)

On that note, I still chuckle whenever I think about the observation our friend Arthur made just a few years ago when they were expecting their little one - he said "you know what I've decided? Baby's just need a lot of containers! A container to ride in the car, a container to play in, a container to swing in, a container to sleep in, a container to cary the baby around the house in"... and he was so right! I cannot help but to think about our "to buy" list in terms of all the different baby containers we need. Haha.

Oh! And the other really exciting thing about selling our house?!! We are DEBT FREE! I hadn't even thought of it that way, but Daniel pointed it out the day we got the closing documents and my goodness what an amazing feeling! When we bought the house we had been aggressively whittling down our debt but we still owed some money on my Honda (which we ended up paying off early!) and even though I had full scholarships to Furman when I moved out of SC I violated the Teaching Fellows agreement and had to repay that portion. We have since paid both, and for several years our only debt was our mortgage. (Coincidentally the increase in travel coincided with the lack of debt). But whenever we talked about trying to move overseas or wanting to move somewhere else within the USA the thing that was hanging over our heads was...our mortgage. (It wasn't an unreasonable amount, but not a responsibility we could discount either). So...even though in some ways we are about to be more "settled" or "tied down" than ever before (I mean, we are having a baby), we are simultaneously more free as well! Hard not to be excited (and not to dream of the possibilities just a little bit!) Will we buy a house here? We don't know. Right now I am enjoying the lack of debt and the freedom and we have agreed to table the decision until we can evaluate our lives once Hannah is here! Debt free is a really amazing feeling!!! So so grateful!

We also met up with JR & Maria, friends from Clemson, and finally got to meet their beautiful daughter Alex!  We enjoyed a delicious dinner and really enjoyed catching up with them (it had been way too long!) Another perk of staying in SC for a longer stretch this time! 

The other big and awesome event of week 30 was my baby shower! Daniel's mom, Pam, did an AMAZING job with it - it was so so beautiful and sweet! Pam's sister, Carol, was also sweet enough to come into town a few days ahead to help get everything together. And the day of Emily and Mark were also incredibly helpful too - I feel so indebted and humbled and grateful to everyone! The shower was held at the clubhouse at Emily's apartment complex. And then to top it all off, I was also so touched by the fact that people actually took time out of their busy weekend to attend the shower (it was a mix of neighbors, some of Pam's very thoughtful friends, family who had driven in from out of town, some of our friends who still live in the area, and my two besties from college who drove in all the way from Nashville and Virginia Beach!) It was a really exciting and fun afternoon and I left the shower overwhelmed by how loved I felt and how many people already care about our little Hannah!

Pam made this beautiful wreath!

So sweet! Doesn't everything just look beautiful!?! Pam did such an amazing job dreaming everything up!

Enjoying a few sweets with Aunt Carol

30 weeks!

30 weeks!

Pam and two of her dear friends Sandy and Bernadette

Aunt Carol, Mary, and Merle (two of the lovely ladies who live in the Hals' neighborhood)

Carolyn, Beth, and Natasha! Furman Besties reunite! :) I SO love these girls!

Daniel is steadily working in the pink :)

Emily - bartender/hostess extraordinaire

Me & Kat - the newly engaged one! SUPER excited for her and that she was able to make it! Kat went to high school with Daniel and were all friends at Clemson

Emily & Mark

Three generations of Hals right here!

We got such sweet and thoughtful gifts!

Daniel trying the pink on for size :)

One of two beautiful blankets Aunt Carol made for us (evidently Daniel had one like this when he was little too!)

From the Mannis' and our future tiger! (The Mannis' are the Hals' neighbors that we used to visit at Clemson tailgates - Mr. Mannis is an engineering grad from Clemson - they've always given us the best Clemson gifts!)

It was so amazing to catch up with Carolyn and Natasha and we stayed up til two am talking and sharing stories and catching up - I still can't believe they drove all that way just for Saturday! I really have the best of friends! Daniel and I got up early on Sunday and took a very packed suburban to the airport to pick up a rental minivan for our trip home. Between us, two dogs, the regular travel stuff, Christmas, Daniel's birthday, and a baby shower - we filled the mini van to the brim! It was crazy, but we all had space and drove up to Maryland in a packed out, but comfy Dodge Caravan. The drive was not our best or worst, so we will totally take it!

Snoozing with my puppy on the long drive back to Maryland! I would be mad that Daniel snuck this picture, but I think we're pretty cute too!

Welcome to Maryland! (So many of the roads into Maryland don't have this sign! This was the first time we've actually seen a welcome sign when driving in!) Officially Home!

I spent Monday revisiting my OB for a quick checkup (still thumbs up for me and Hannah!), restocking the fridge (it was a BIG trip to Wegmans, the local grocery store) and getting us set up for the week. I was EXHAUSTED. Between sleeping terribly for two weeks in SC, staying up with my friends after my baby shower, and oh yeah, being 30+ weeks pregnant, I was really and truly wiped out. But the great news? I am back to sleeping a lot better (it's still pregnant sleep, but much better pregnant sleep!) in my own amazing king size bed. Mmmm. Home sweet home!

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29 Weeks! Sneak Peek of Hannah, Daniel's 30th Birthday, Monahan Christmas, and Happy 2014!

Week 29 - December 26 - January 2nd

So...week 29 was another busy one. How am I feeling? Definitely still pregnant and more pregnant than ever, but overall really, I can't complain. Hannah is definitely growing and squirming and kicking and moving around like crazy and I love all the little (and big!) pokes and squirms.

Saturday we drove to Spartanburg and picked up my mom, had lunch with the Grandmothers at Jason's, and were then off to the ultrasound place to take a sneak peek at our Hannah! I was a bit thrown off at first because she definitely looked different than when we had last seen her (which I expected, but she had changed in different ways than I pictured?) and her hands were almost continuously blocking the view and she was pretty pouty (something about people asking her to move her hands and violating her privacy). But the longer we looked the more awesome it was to me. There were a few especially fun things we noticed - oh my goodness her fingers! They were so long and pretty! I was super excited - I've always had long fingers and never knew where I had gotten them until I was sitting at my Grandmother's (Sugarplum - my dad's mom) deathbed. I remember looking down at her hand and thinking oh my God, those are my hands at 87... it was incredibly eery and amazing at the same time. And maybe I'm wrong - but as I was laying there - I thought oh my God - she has our hands! Even during the ultrasound she was wiggly and seemed very interested in grabbing her feet and pulling them towards her mouth. The grandmother's seemed to really enjoy getting to see her and I spent hours over the next few days envisioning how the images would translate to our newborn. Our Hannah was healthy and beautiful!

our beautiful baby girl!

Not entirely sure what hand signal this is, but we were impressed!

Look at those fingers! So long!

Cutie! See her hand tucked under her chin?

This picture doesn't quite capture it but she was totally trying to nom on her foot. After the ultra sound Daniel said - I'm starting to understand why you say she's moving around in there!

 

United again! Enjoying a round or three of darts at one of our favorite haunts - Barley's in downtown Greenville as we celebrated Daniel's birthday!

 

Afterwards we dropped my mom off at dad's work, said hello to some of the Quality Food folks and also enjoyed filling my dad in on not only what Baby Hals' looked like, but also what her name would be! Fun!! From there Daniel and I were off to Greenville to meet Chris for some birthday fun and we spent the night enjoying a scrumptious dinner at the Lazy Goat and hours catching up over darts at our favorite - Barley's. Daniel's parents had also given us a night at the Hyatt downtown as part of his birthday present and we enjoyed our quiet time away from the five dogs, the central location, and the sweet sweet layout of our room (which had been upgraded to a suite when we checked in!)

 

Sunday my parents came over for Christmas time! My parents gave me the bedding I had picked out for Hannah and I was both excited to see it and relieved that it looked the way I thought it would! YAY! My sister had also sent gifts home from India and she gave me a beautiful scarf and a lovely outfit for Hannah - so sweet!

Bedding for Hannah's room! Chocolate brown and pink! LOVE IT!

beautiful gift from my sister, Pam, who is currently living in India. It was a beautiful embroidered cotton top with white pants

 

When we got back to Chapin we had a big birthday dinner for Daniel and they exchanged gifts too - all fun! He handled his turning 30 quite well! And we had a great time in Greenville Saturday night and all stayed up to midnight together to ring it in and celebrate it accordingly. We may not have been in Prague or the FL Keys or Vermont or Florence, Italy or an igloo in the Swiss Alps or diving with hammerheads in the Galapagos (yes, all of those were Daniel's various badass birthdays...I have outdone myself several times over), but we kept returning to this - we have loved our 20's, we have worked hard and played hard and traveled the world and each earned two degrees and furthered our careers and we really have tried to make the most of our lives thus far! We spent the past decade falling more and more in love with each other and we have a beautiful, healthy girl steadily growing and on the way! It's a pretty amazing place to be!

 

Other highlights of the week? I finally swam again (I still need to find my go-to gym in Maryland...since we moved I was busy with the pups and unpacking, prenatal yoga, the elliptical, and lots of trips to the parks...so I haven't been lazy, but haven't been to the pool either). And omg...mmmmm. It felt so good to swim. I was really relieved to still be able to put in a good 30-40 minutes. Am I slower? Yes. I feel like a manatee with the drag I have going on, but when I slipped into the water I felt like myself too! And that was awesome.

and...this sums up the craziness going on at the Hals this Christmas!

 

And last but not least, we rang in the New Year with dear friends! Happy 2014! We are officially in the year of Hannah! :) Yay! New Years always makes me reflective...I always can't help but to think about where I was the previous year...and two New Years ago we were in Innsbruck, Austria. (Which was aweosme!) It was on New Years Day starting 2012 that we had the first truly genuine, serious conversation about starting a family. We were nervous, we were hopeful, but we were also excited! The following year we spent New Years on the liveaboard in the Galapagos ringing in 2013 and the conversation intensified. Baby Hals had not come into existence yet and we were increasingly frustrated with our careers, the Florida climate, and how happy we were (not with each other, but with our jobs and every day lives) and we pledged to each other that 2013 would be a year of change for us.

 

Happy New Year! 2014!

 

And was it?! Yes. In 2013 we did things that in some ways I thought was unthinkable and in other ways were all the things that were part of making the big changes we talked about. I earned my masters, I left my job (which as much as it exhausted and frustrated me, I LOVED), I found out I was pregnant, Daniel left his job, we moved to Maryland, Daniel started a new job, we found somewhere to live and moved into our townhome, we found out Baby Hals was a healthy girl, we added Holly to our family, and we accepted an offer on our home just before Christmas (which has officially gone through and closed at this point!) LOTS of amazing, blessed changes! And my hope? That 2014 is a year full of time with our healthy, growing baby girl!

Innsbruck, January 1st, 2012 - we spent the entire day talking about and dreaming about how a future Baby Hals would change our lives...

Galapagos 2013, Proud to make it to midnight with Little Miss Hals and our dear friends, 2014!

 

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And Little Miss Hals' Name Is....

So at first we really wanted to wait until Little Miss Hals' official arrival to announce her name, but in the end, we decided it would be a lot of fun to enjoy announcing it at Christmas time. We made an ornament for each of the Grandmothers with a sonogram picture and her name and really enjoyed getting to tell them at least one thing in person. Let's be realistic - we told them we were expecting over the phone, the gender over the phone, and guess what - when she's born? 95% chance it's going to be announced over the phone. So why not get to announce something in person and to enjoy sharing that next piece of information? And so we did!

 

When we were trying to choose her name I had an abundance of ideas and Daniel had an abundance of veto power. Except with girls names, he liked far more of them. There were far fewer that got "the axe" right away. Now if you'll remember the story of her gender announcement, we initially thought she was a boy, so when the sonogram lady (who was just awesome and the sweetest) told us she was for sure a she, not a he...you better believe the first thing I did when I got home (after buying a girlie outfit on the way) was to look up the list of girls names we had going. I quickly had a top four and spent the rest of the day trying them out. When Daniel and I went out to dinner that night and chatted in disbelief that our he was a she and how awesome the 19 week ultrasound had been, HE brought up names. (My jaw dropped...he usually avoided this subject). He asked if I had thought about names any further, I said I had and gave him my top four...and he replied "ah, well, cause I was thinking about it and I really like ****" (my jaw dropped even more). Me - "really?! Are you sure?! That's the first time you've actually you said you like a name - why do you like that one?!!" And Daniel just shrugged with a sparkle in his eye and said "it's cute." It was done.

 

Maybe I should be telling you that we fought for months or that we had each always dreamed of that name...but really, it just fit and as we tried it out I loved it more and more and more. I also loved that he had remembered it from our discussions months prior and had loved it enough to take the initiative to bring it up. (And really, it WAS one of the top four on my list...but I had always wanted it to be a name that he bought into and had some ownership in -- it made it that much more perfect).

 

We have chosen to name our daughter:

~Hannah Alexandra Hals~

There are so many things you consider - initials, meanings, how it will sound when a teacher calls her name out on the kindergarten roster, whether it will sound distinguished at graduation...and all kinds of other things, but in the end we were very excited about this name. Hannah means favor or grace and has such wonderfully old Biblical and Hebrew roots. Alexandra has Greek and Russian roots and means "defender of humankind" - which the humanist and justice-seeker in me loves. From the beginning my deepest wish is that our daughter grow up to be a kind person. And as Daniel said, it IS a cute name! But not so cutesie that she would be embarrassed to introduce herself in a job interview as a young woman. And...it fits all the traditional aspects we require (we're big fans of traditional spellings for names, etc). And a totally silly and superficial thing I am excited about? H and A are usually especially beautiful letters to have monogrammed on something. Hannah is also a palindrome and gets bonus points for the fun alliteration - Hannah Hals!

 

At 20 weeks, when Hannah was supposedly the size of a banana, we could not help but take this picture! Hannah you will thank me some day, but it is because of me that Banana is not your middle name. :) Yes, mommy loves you.

 

Telling our parents was a lot of fun. Daniel's family was excited and seemed to like the name - it wasn't one that they expected, but it seemed to be well received. And I got to tell my mom and dad separately (we told my mom on the way to the ultrasound) and each of them did the exact same thing...they read it out loud and it affirmed not only how much I like the name and how distinguished it sounds...but it was really special to hear each of them say it out loud. :) Made my heart very happy and I loved the sound of her name even more!

Daniel's mom has been working tirelessly to pull together some of the cutest decorations you have ever seen for my shower this weekend. Last night when we got home she had more creations laid out on the table and the beautifully monogrammed and decorated diaper wipes container solidified what I have been dreaming of that much more! I really could not be more excited about her name and its cuteness!

Daniel's mom made this for us and the shower and ahhhh! I love it! There was something super exciting about seeing her name in cute letters!

 

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