Jennifer Groft

1. I suppose that if I am going to talk pregnancy this time around, I owe a belly shot. Here you go: (Excuse the dirty mirror, please.)

This is me, almost 16 weeks with number 10. It is especially fun to see first time mommies who are this big when they are due. But, so far no one has said something like, “Getting close?” because I would have to hit them. I am big enough though that people are comfortable assuming I am pregnant. Which is okay that they don’t think I’m just going overboard on the oreos.

2. Comfort Level: Overall my comfort level is pretty decent right now. The heartburn is controllable, the nausea has ebbed. I’m not big enough to waddle yet or to have my altered posture cause pain in my back. I get out of breath walking from one end of the house to the other. Forget running to answer the phone! Still, one of the non-fun parts of having a lot of babies means that my stomach muscles quit. They rip apart (I feel it when it happens, it’s like buttons popping off a shirt.) and I have to be super careful not to engage those muscles after that or I spend hours in pain. Getting up from laying down is always interesting.

3. Fluffy Mail! What happens when you donate your entire stash of bumGenius diapers to charity? (Hint: See belly shot above.) But I was able to find a nice lady to sell me her stash of various diapers for a very good price. So I’m stocked up again. It’s not that I don’t like disposable diapers, it’s just that when I have to spend $10-25 at a time one future trash I start to think, How many good books could I have bought with this money? I would rather do more laundry and have more books, even if it doesn’t always work out exactly like that.

And they are just so hopelessly cute! See? (This is just a small sample.)

What are your favorite cloth diapers?

4. I guess I should come out and say it then since the diapers made it obvious:

Which means our boys will be outnumbered 6 to 4, and that the bathroom arguments will only increase as time goes on. The two smallest girls are super excited, and 3 year old Gus really couldn’t care less. So it’s all good.

5. Name discussions are in high gear. We have narrowed it down to a list and are experimenting with those names… yelling them out into the house, seeing what rude phrases they might rhyme with or be turned into. You know how it goes. The kids are involved in the process, but not the internet or the extended family. In fact, we have decided to keep the name under wraps until the baby is actually born. It just minimizes the negative comments and the people thinking that they have a say in the matter. We realized this time that we have a pretty specific set of guidelines for our girl names. (We have a completely different set of rules for our boy names.)

• Feminine sound, we generally don’t go for unisex names
• Mostly soft sounds. Our other girls are Paisley, Mariposa (Posy), Therese (Tessa), Lily, and Molly. There aren’t many staccato sounds, except for at the beginnings of the names.
• Either a short name or a name with a nickname that we like. For example, Veronica was ruled out for lack of a nickname that I could live with. Lily was almost Cecilia, except that I couldn’t stand Cece as a nickname.
• Nothing in the top 100, and the lower down on the list of popular names the better. I broke this rule with Lily because we didn’t know any other Lilys at the time. Her name is now #15 or so and we are running into Lilys everywhere.
• A Saint name for either the first or middle name, we are flexible on this. There has to be a first Saint for a name to be a Saint name, right?
• Nothing that ends with /k/, although this was mostly covered with the soft sounds one, it’s worth mentioning. Since our last name starts with a hard /g/, it just makes pronunciation difficult.
• No creative spellings.
• Can’t be the name of my or my husband’s siblings, cousins, aunts, uncles, or our children’s cousins. This eats up an awful lot of names!

I had no idea that we were this defined and picky, but as we have eliminated names, these rules have surfaced. Did you find you had any specific rules with naming your children? What were they?

6. I think I found the perfect stroller. I’m sorry, I just can’t help myself. I’m such a junkie when it comes to strollers. But this one has everything. It is lightweight, can hold a carseat when needed, (although I rarely use that feature), has a seat that can face forward and backward, reclines, has a huge canopy, (Arizona sun, you know…) and a tall seat for tired bigger kids to ride in it. The only thing this one is lacking is a bottom basket big enough for a diaper bag. This is a serious downside, but a stroller with all these features and a big enough basket adds a lot of weight and bulk to the stroller.

I present to you, the Baby Jogger Vue:

Isn’t it awesome? Here’s a video review too, just in case you love baby gear as much as I do:

7. Now I’m bored with pregnancy and baby talk (and you probably were about 5 takes ago) so let’s see, what else is going on around here? We have a nasty cough making its way around the house. It hangs on for weeks and has made me very thankful for our nebulizer and nonstop supply of asthma meds. It hasn’t made anyone really sick, it just keeps them up at night.

They are all glad that I feel well enough to occasionally cook dinner and do the laundry. Even I was starting to get sick of pizza. Nah, just kidding.

Tomorrow is my parent’s 45th wedding anniversary, so Congratulations to them and thank you for being such a great example!

That’s all for this week, go see Kelly @ This Ain’t The Lyceum for more Quick Takes!