Right as I entered my second trimester I took a long weekend trip to Disneyland. My annual pass expired in November last year but I decided to take one more trip to Disneyland to celebrate my pregnancy. I thought this would be my last Disney trip for at least a year or two but there is actually a chance I am going again this summer. More on that later if it happens.
Even though I know I will get her this pin again the first time I take her to Disneyland after she is born I still wanted to get a pin to wear on my belly. The pin lasted about half an hour because it was awkward when I sat down and I was just scared of it coming undone and poking me in the stomach. Cute idea that just didn't work out very well
I knew this trip was going to be a little different because I couldn't ride all the rides and had to account for some extra tiredness. Each stage of pregnancy comes with their own special circumstances but by this point the constant nausea had gone away and I only got nauseous if I let my self get hungry so there was lots of snacking. My food aversions were much better than they were even a couple of weeks before my trip but I still was mostly wanting carbs, fruits and veggies and not too much meat.
I always love tea at the Disneyland Hotel so I booked that for one of the days I was there as a good way to take a break in the middle of the day and rest in the air conditioning. The food was delicious as always and it was a good break in my day.
Another good break in the middle of the day is sitting in the Carthay Circle Lounge. Normally I stop in there for a break and have a snack and a cocktail or two but obviously that later part was out for this trip. One day I tried there non-alcoholic wine soda and it was a fail. It just tasted like grape juice and not even very good grape juice.
After the grape juice incident I learned my lesson and just asked the bar tenders to make me something yummy and non-alcoholic. I took a break there on two different days and had multiple delicious mock-tails. One was sort of like a mojito and one had grapefruit juice. The Food and Wine Festival was going on while I was there and they had this non-alcoholic watermelon drink that was so refreshing and just fantastic. I may have had that one more than once it was so good.
While I couldn't ride anything with the word mountain in it or basically any of the "thrill rides" there were still plenty of rides I could ride. I love Fantasyland so I was perfectly happy taking the time to ride all of the rides there as well as multiple trips on Buzz Lightyear and Midway Mania. I also enjoyed going to the Animation Academy and seeing shows.
I was a little bit concerned about nausea and rides but actually there was only one ride that bothered me. Surprisingly it wasn't the tea cups! Totally fine on the tea cups but nauseas if I rode sideways on the Disneyland Railroad. Some of the railway cars have passengers face sideways and some have them face forward. I quickly learned I needed to only ride on the ones that faced forward.
Even though I couldn't ride most of the "E-Ticket" rides I still decided to get MaxPass to take advantage of not having to walk extra to get Fastpasses to the ones that I could ride. The Fastpass rides that I could ride at 14 weeks pregnant were Buzz Lightyear, Roger Rabbit, Haunted Mansion and Small World in Disneyland and Midway Mania and Soarn' Around the World in California Adventure. There are 17 rides with Fastpass and I could ride 6 of them plus MaxPass includes PhotoPass so it was worth it for me for the convenience factor and because I planned to take full advantage of getting photos taken.
One day while I was there my sister-in-law, who is also pregnant, was able to come so we took full advantage of the photographers to document the first time these cousins met and their first trip to Disneyland!
This bench will always hold a special place in my heart and on this trip to celebrate being in my second trimester of pregnancy it felt appropriate to take a picture of it. After our first round of IVF before we began our second round I took a trip to Disneyland to relax and get away. I was having lunch/cocktails in Carthay Circle Lounge and my phone rang. It was the doctor calling to say they had the PGS test results for the one embryo that had made it to day 5 had been biopsied for testing. We were told it took about 2 weeks for the test results so I wasn't expecting the call for at least another 3 or 4 days but I answered the call and came out to this bench to take it because the reception is in the lounge is notoriously bad. The doctor told me that the embryo passed all the test and was healthy and viable. After I hung up with the doctor I sat there and called my husband crying from happiness that we had an embryo to implant. I was in the happiest place on earth and I was just so happy and hopeful sitting there.
Overall I had a wonderful time in Disneyland and would recommend going in the beginning of the second trimester as long as most of your morning/all day sickness has passed. I came in with realistic expectations of what I could and couldn't do and made sure I planned plenty of time to rest in my day. I could have gone back to take a rest at the hotel but I decided to just rest in the park. I knew I wouldn't make it late into the evening so I had in my head that I would just try to make the fireworks one night and not worry about trying to see any of the nighttime shows. My sister-in-law and I wanted to try and see Fantasmic the day she was there but neither one of us made it that late so we just called it a casualty of pregnancy. As long as someone is willing to have reasonable expectations and listen to their body I think a Disneyland trip is totally doable.
Despite the fact that the little miss will only be about a month old and will likely not be participating in anything Halloween she has 2 costumes whose only purpose is to look cute. It got her a Belle outfit the last time I was in Disneyland and she also has a little Olaf onesie and hat that are just too cute for words.
After she finished law school in May my sister moved back with my parents for a few months to study for and take The Bar. Since she is only an hour away and obviously she can't study all day every day she came up for a Brad Paisley concert in June. Obviously being pregnant I couldn't enjoy a nice cold beer so I settled for a nice cold ice cream taco instead.
At the end of June my husband and I went down to Southern California for my sister-in-laws baby shower and the hotel we stayed at has a pool. I have always been a water baby so I couldn't pass up the opportunity to swim even it it was only for about 45 minutes! I think the baby enjoyed the swim and there will be lots of swimming in her future.
My husband and I have two wedding anniversaries but we tend to celebrate the first one (in November) a little bit more than our Hawaii one but my husband know how much I like celebrating anything for any reason so while I was at breastfeeding class he went out and bought me flowers for our Hawaii anniversary. Another reason I love him!
I don't have a fully explainable theme for the baby's room but my plan is to put up a mix of Impressionist prints that I have collected from my travel over the years along with a few little Disney prints. One weekend I went through and got out all the possibilities so I could see which ones I wanted to use. I didn't make all the final decisions but I did decide that as much as I love Van Gough I needed to limit the crazy I put up on her walls!
Last week my husband's office threw a little shower for us and two other couples in the office that are having babies this summer/fall. It was our first shower and it was so fun! They gave us a few things off our registry and a gift card. They also made this adorable diaper cake! It was too cute to take apart so it is currently sitting in the baby's room but eventually I will take it apart so we can actually use the diapers (and the cute shoes) for the baby.
Right around week 20 I went in for my anatomy scan. Other than the first couple of appointments at this point I had gone to the prenatal appointments by myself but this one my husband came along. We obviously already knew the gender but it was still so fun to get to see lots of different angles of our little girl and try to see if we could tell who she looked like. This was the first ultrasound that she actually looked like a baby!
After I got back from my trip I just kind of laid low for the next few weeks. I did lots of product research and worked on figuring out what to put on our baby registry. I was still sleeping pretty well at this point and only getting up once in the middle of the night to use the bathroom. I was going to the gym 3 or 4 days a week but sometime around the end of May I stopped using the water rower and started using the strider instead. 
I had another doctor appointment at 24 weeks and again took my husband with me. He di dn't really need to be there for any reason other than I wanted him to meet my OBGYN since the appointments he had been to had all been at the IVF clinic instead of with my regular doctor. Everything was looking good and the baby and I were checked out all good. At this appointment the doctor put in the order for me to go and take my glucose test sometime before my 28 week appointment. I went that weekend to just get it over with. It was still orange and nasty but this time it didn't make me feel horrible for the rest of the day so that was an improvement. I got the results a few days later and I passed with flying colors so no gestational diabetes for me.
Somewhere around 25 or 26 weeks my husband and I flew to New York City to attend a wedding in Brooklyn. Due to all of our other travel commitments this summer we didn't really have time to go on a relaxing babymoon so we decided to kind of make this trip our babymoon. Again more on this trip in a separate post. We took a red-eye flight and again I made sure to get up and walk often and while I was definitely not comfortable I was okay on the flight. The flight back was less fun because due to the heat and all the walking my feet were already kind of swollen so flying just made them even more swollen. I wore compression socks but I don't know if they actually did any good.
Somewhere right around the end of the second trimester I started to worry about outgrowing some of my maternity clothes. Not in the belly but in the chest! I was up to either a 36G or 34H and I still had 2 or 3 months to go. I got some hand me down maternity clothes from someone at work and the main reason some of them didn't fit me was because of the chest. 
Even though I know I will get her this pin again the first time I take her to Disneyland after she is born I still wanted to get a pin to wear on my belly. The pin lasted about half an hour because it was awkward when I sat down and I was just scared of it coming undone and poking me in the stomach. Cute idea that just didn't work out very well
I knew this trip was going to be a little different because I couldn't ride all the rides and had to account for some extra tiredness. Each stage of pregnancy comes with their own special circumstances but by this point the constant nausea had gone away and I only got nauseous if I let my self get hungry so there was lots of snacking. My food aversions were much better than they were even a couple of weeks before my trip but I still was mostly wanting carbs, fruits and veggies and not too much meat.
Another good break in the middle of the day is sitting in the Carthay Circle Lounge. Normally I stop in there for a break and have a snack and a cocktail or two but obviously that later part was out for this trip. One day I tried there non-alcoholic wine soda and it was a fail. It just tasted like grape juice and not even very good grape juice.
I was a little bit concerned about nausea and rides but actually there was only one ride that bothered me. Surprisingly it wasn't the tea cups! Totally fine on the tea cups but nauseas if I rode sideways on the Disneyland Railroad. Some of the railway cars have passengers face sideways and some have them face forward. I quickly learned I needed to only ride on the ones that faced forward.
Even though I couldn't ride most of the "E-Ticket" rides I still decided to get MaxPass to take advantage of not having to walk extra to get Fastpasses to the ones that I could ride. The Fastpass rides that I could ride at 14 weeks pregnant were Buzz Lightyear, Roger Rabbit, Haunted Mansion and Small World in Disneyland and Midway Mania and Soarn' Around the World in California Adventure. There are 17 rides with Fastpass and I could ride 6 of them plus MaxPass includes PhotoPass so it was worth it for me for the convenience factor and because I planned to take full advantage of getting photos taken.
This bench will always hold a special place in my heart and on this trip to celebrate being in my second trimester of pregnancy it felt appropriate to take a picture of it. After our first round of IVF before we began our second round I took a trip to Disneyland to relax and get away. I was having lunch/cocktails in Carthay Circle Lounge and my phone rang. It was the doctor calling to say they had the PGS test results for the one embryo that had made it to day 5 had been biopsied for testing. We were told it took about 2 weeks for the test results so I wasn't expecting the call for at least another 3 or 4 days but I answered the call and came out to this bench to take it because the reception is in the lounge is notoriously bad. The doctor told me that the embryo passed all the test and was healthy and viable. After I hung up with the doctor I sat there and called my husband crying from happiness that we had an embryo to implant. I was in the happiest place on earth and I was just so happy and hopeful sitting there. 