Baby Boy Shep - The First Trimester

It's time to finally "put pen to paper" and document the first trimester of my pregnancy with our baby boy. I found out that I was pregnant the weekend I went to Austin in October for a work retreat. As you can probably guess from the fact that I was drinking copious amounts of sangria that Friday night at Hannah's birthday dinner, I was completely in shock when I saw that positive test on Sunday morning. 

Since the line was so faint, I didn't tell my parents yet, but I did call Josh on the way home to share the possible news. And as soon as I got home, I busted out the fancy digital test to confirm the results. 

Eek!!! 

I also may or may not taken a test each day for the next week just to make sure. 

We didn't go through quite the production of telling our families as we did with Ava, but we still wanted to make the announcement special. So we ordered a Big Sister t-shirt for Ava and surprised our family via FaceTime and text messages with the picture below. My Mom also happened to be in Dallas for the weekend, so we got to surprise her in person with Ava's "fun new shirt." 

I loved the text message picture responses we got from Hannah and Lily (who were both at the TCU game at the time)...

We finally got to see our little peanut at eight weeks, and there really is nothing better than hearing that little heartbeat for the first time. 

Luckily, the entire first trimester went very smoothly. Just as when I was pregnant with Ava, I managed to avoid morning sickness pretty much all together (feel free to hate me for that one). However, the main difference this time around was that I was starving all…the...time! With Ava, I wasn't sick, but food didn't really sound great during the first few months (and cooking sounded even worse). 

I also had more energy this time around, which is surprising seeing as how being pregnant while chasing around a toddler is no joke. It was because of those differences that Josh was convinced the baby was a boy. And he was right!

I finally took a bump picture at 14-weeks, and it's amazing how fast it popped out this time around. 

Despite the large belly, I had only gained about two pounds by this point (and really until the 17-week mark), which thus far is waaaay different than my 50-pound-weight-gain-pregnancy with Ava. Baby boy must be consuming some serious calories…I foresee him eating us out of house and home when he is a teenager.