All sorts of nostalgic

I was talking with some women who work in our condo office the other day about "how fast time flies." The one woman said she was watching video of her going on walks and having one-on-one time with her two sons, and she said she just keeps watching the videos over and over thinking about how fast they've grown and how much they've changed.

I had to admit that in my six weeks of motherhood, I've looked through the photos from Elle's delivery, hospital stay and our first days at home AT LEAST once a week. I re-read the birth story blog posts every few days. I've even been back to L&D triage to see Suellen, one of the nurses.

And I've found myself looking at the blog posts from throughout our pregnancy a lot lately - even toward the end of the pregnancy, I was glancing back at my first trimester posts and thinking that it seemed SO LONG ago that I wrote them, especially those from early on, like when I thought my baby bump was HUGE at 14 weeks.

Now I'm making the final entries in my pregnancy journal, and I'm filling in pages of Elle's baby book, including the standard background info of when we found out we were expecting, who we told first, etc. And it is making me quite emotional.

But for a funnier side of nostalgia, I thought I should blog about baby's first trip to Ohio. (The baby will be making a return trip toward the end of my maternity leave.) The first trip is something I wanted to blog about long ago and never got around to it ... Tim some might say it is over-sharing, but I've never been one to hold back!

We went to Ohio last November for Tim's cousin Ryan's wedding. We were heading in to our second month or so of trying to conceive, and in casual conversation over the weekend, Tim told EVERYONE (seriously, everyone) that I was pregnant. We met an old friend for lunch - we hadn't seen him in almost four years, and Tim threw it out over pasta. Announced it to his cousins and their wives at the rehearsal dinner. Told his brother at the wedding. Blurted it out less than an hour after meeting my sister and brother-in-law for dinner.

I wasn't really super comfortable with the world knowing that we were trying to conceive. And I really didn't want to put the cart before the horse. But seriously, Tim could not be stopped. I spent a large part of the trip clarifying that we didn't know if I was pregnant, but we were trying and would keep everyone posted.

When we found out we were pregnant, I actually thought we had conceived in mid-October. Since my cycles were irregular, though, I didn't really know for sure. We had our first appointment and an ultrasound to date the pregnancy and were given the Aug. 3 due date. The nurse threw out an estimated conception date, too: November 10.

Uhhhh ...

Without going in to too much detail, we know without a doubt that we conceived on Nov. 6. When the nurse gave us those dates, we looked at each other and said "It's an Ohio baby!"

When we told our families that we were expecting, most of them didn't focus on the timing - in time, we brought it up, saying something along the lines of "And this is an Ohio baby!" But when we told Tim's cousin Jeff and his wife, Allison was quick to do the math.

"Wait a minute. You're how far along? ... That means ... you guys were here then. (pause) Did you conceive your baby in our house?!"

At the wedding, unaware that we were kinda/sorta expecting.

We stayed with Jeff and Allison the weekend of the wedding. When Tim told them we were pregnant (in his blanket announcement to his cousins that we were pregnant when we in fact did not know that we were pregnant), Jeff and Allison had joked that maybe our baby would be conceived in their home, saying they had proof that it was a fertile place (Allison was seven months pregnant at the time). Tim had BEGGED me not to tell Jeff and Allison that their house was, in fact, where we conceived, but Allison guessed it, so I admitted she was right. (My sister later did the math, too - we stayed with her for a night after our weekend at Jeff and Allison's - and she was relieved to find out that she was not the manager of the Hotel de Fertility.)

Since then, though, Tim and I have referenced that weekend as "baby's first trip to Ohio." In that regard, Elle has already been to a Bengals game (even though she was still two separate entities at that point, waiting for fertilization to occur). Baby took her first plane ride during that trip, even though we didn't find out we were pregnant until almost a month later. Baby has experienced her first fall, although it was unseasonably warm.

So now, as our big fall trip to Ohio is on the horizon, I'm nostalgic for the big trip we took last fall. Tim wants to go to another Bengals game on this trip. We're splitting our time between both sides of the state, with an overnight stay at my sister's. We'll see many of the same family members and friends. I'm not taking clothes for a wedding, and my biggest packing challenge is figuring out what we'll need for the baby. This time, we're neither trying to conceive nor pregnant - we're parents.