I had my first baby shower on Saturday, November 15 at my friend Rachel's home. It was hosted by my best friends, Rachel, Jamie and Jennifer. It was an incredible brunch shower with WONDERFUL food (blueberry crepes, hashbrown casserole, quiche, freshly sliced ham, biscuits, and hot apple cider). My girls know how much I LOVE breakfast food! It was so awesome because my closest friends and a few of my "surrogate" moms were there. Everyone brought books for Laurel along with their gifts, which I'm so thankful for. Reading with my little girl is one of the things I look forward to the most as a mother.

Here's almost everyone who attended the shower.

Here's me showing off one of the books I received.

This is a good picture of how much my belly has grown!

And finally, here are my best girlfriends!

Lastly, I just want to thank my lovely hostesses so much for such an incredible shower. It means so much to me that Laurel will come into this world surrounded by so many people who love her so much.

It's amazing what a difference a week can make. I've felt Laurel move for about 10 weeks now (felt LOTS of movement for the past six weeks). However, within the past week, you'd think she's training for a marathon or a gymnastics meet in there! She's especially wiggly in the morning from about 9:30 until noon. I sit at my desk and try to get work done and she's bouncing all over the place! I can feel her move pretty much all day long with no more than an hour or two between movements. I'm really starting to get a little concerned about how much she's going to move when space really starts to get tight in there!

Even though it can be a bit strange at times, I'm so happy that she moves so much. It is so reassuring to me that things are still going alright. I think if she went a day without moving, I'd really freak out! Also, I forgot to post it, but I passed my one-hour glucose tolerance test for gestational diabetes. WooHoo!! I'm so relieved I don't have to go through the three-hour test!

Nothing too exciting going on, but with the election and everything I didn't have much time to post so I thought I'd let everyone know that things are going well. I'm getting bigger by the day. Laurel is moving all the time now, and luckily I'm still feeling really good.

I've got my next doctor's appointment on November 19th, and then I'll start having appointments every two weeks. It's amazing that I'll be in the third trimester in just two weeks. I'm also looking forward to my first Baby Shower Saturday, Nov. 15th. It's being thrown by Jamie, Rachel and Jennifer, and I know it will be tons of fun!

I know this is a long time coming, but I'm finally adding an image of Laurel from our 20 week ultrasound. This is a 3d/4d image, and I know that it's a little hard to pick things out. She is on the right side of the image with her arm curled up next to her head. Her head is quite a bit larger than the rest of her body.

We've started working on the baby's nursery! It's so exciting to imagine us putting Laurel to sleep in here.

You probably noticed that both Tim and I got to put a little bit of our influence into the room. (Look for the pink NY Giants helmet in the top picture, and clearly I had something to say about the Clemson Mobile - which even plays Tiger Rag as the lullaby.)

This is the bedding we've chosen for our nursery. I ordered it a week ago, so hopefully it will be here soon and we can take pictures of our nursery (which is slowly but surely coming together.)

As I now have a definite baby bump, I thought it would be fun to see the tummy progression (especially for those of you whom I don't get to see very often!)