Starting to feel the sun!

After what has seemed like months and months of cold weather, it looks like we may finally be feeling a nice warm change. The weather this weekend was finally absolutely beautiful, and it looks like we are going to be seeing that trend for some time. Hopefully our good ole friend Florida is back!!

So as of Thursday we were now at 7 weeks pregnant (putting us today at 7 weeks 4 days). Currently Baby Rivera is the size of a blueberry. The big news with growth this week is that hands and feet are emerging from developing arms and legs! It is crazy how many things are going on right now with her/him and right now it is unnoticeable to the non-knowing person.

All is well here. Just wanted to check in with everyone!

We hope everyone is doing well.

Love always
Ben and Gabrielle

We have a heartbeat!

Words can not even begin to express what a wonderful site today's doctor visit was. It was by the far the neatest thing we have ever seen and to know that that was our little baby was just amazing. The doctor said the heart is beating at about 100 bpm and we are looking excellent. Based on menstrual cycle measuring we are 6 weeks today. The ultrasound is measuring us at 5 weeks and 5 days, so the doctor was really happy to see our numbers lining up. We are still proceeding at the 6 weeks time frame with an estimated due date of 10.28.10.

Some information about the picture: The POS FHA just shows that we had a positive fetal heart-rate found. Not sure if you can see the little white * s but that is the baby, at the very top. So we have definitely made some progress.

We go back to the doctor in 3 weeks and that will be our first official OB Appointment. We will then go over any of our questions and do a lot of paperwork and getting registered in the hospital among some of the other basic prenatal visit stuff. From that point we will just be going once every four weeks till we get closer to the due date and then we will schedule things more frequently.

Gabrielle has been quite fortunate still (though we are taking it day by day) with no bouts of morning sickness, just fatigue and a couple other small things. The strangest thing has been her lack of desire to have sweets, mainly ice cream..which used to be a nightly ritual has now stopped.

Ben did a great job this past weekend with cleaning up the garage. We can almost get a car in there now :) It looks great!

So that is our news here for now. Will continue to update.

We hope you are all doing well.

Love always,

Ben and Gabrielle

5 weeks today!

According to our current calculations Baby Rivera is at 5 weeks today! Can't believe it's already been over a week since we found out we were expecting a little one. The joy and excitement just continues to grow. Baby Rivera is the size of a sesame seed and is starting to develop the neural tube as well as the heart and circulatory system. We are hoping that we are on a good pace of growth and will be able to see the heartbeat at the next appointment, which is when we are at 6 weeks. Not going to lie, we are still a little nervous but still feel as though we are progressing well.

Fatigue has really kicked in with Gabrielle. As well as a lot of bathroom breaks (though some of that seems to be due to being thirsty more which is causing more drinking, thus the cycle). Overall things for her are going pretty well, especially since her appetite is back :-)

In other Rivera news, we got new gutters installed today. They look great and will really help out with the yard, especially with rainy season coming. This is also going to help out the front of the house and all the water that was puddling up near the house. The plan is to now start working on the landscaping right in front of the house. We still need to post a picture of the front island that is done, however, with all of the cold weather our tree isn't looking too great for now.

We have a lot more house projects to start working on so there will be more updates coming on those as well!

Well that is what we have going on here. Hope all is well with everyone.

Love always,

Ben and Gabrielle

It's Baby Rivera!

We had our first appointment and ultrasound earlier this morning. The doctor says that everything is looking good and we look like we are about 4.5 weeks which is where we figured we would be. He has scheduled us to come back next Thursday for another ultrasound. By then we should be able to see a heartbeat (it was too early today) but he did send us home with two pictures! The black dot is the gestational sac which is where the baby is growing. It is really hard to see at this point because it is so early. The sac is measuring at about 4 mm which puts us at the 4+ weeks mark.

We have also learned that the so-called crazy "morning sickness" that Gabrielle thought she was going through is most likely food poisoning. Ben came down with the same thing this morning, although a little lighter. We are both starting to feel a little better and for the first time in a couple days Gabrielle was able to hold down some food (knock on wood). Hopefully this will be past us and we can proceed as normal.

Well we wanted to share our picture with you all. We will have more to share after our appointment next week.

Love Always,

Ben and Gabrielle

1 + 1 = 3

Last Wednesday (the 17th) we learned that our family is growing and we will have a bundle of joy joining our family this October. We can't even begin to explain our excitement about the news and are so excited to share this journey with our closest family and friends. We are early in the pregnancy (about 4 weeks, 4 days today) and had thought about keeping this a secret until we knew we were 100% in the clear but we just couldn't keep our family and friends in the dark. Not to mention that Gabrielle had to tell her boss today as her bouts of morning sickness have begun and full on!

Tomorrow morning we are going to the doctor's for our first appointment (yes it is a little earlier than most first appointments). They are planning on doing our first ultrasound to make sure that everything looks good and normal and then we will probably schedule our next one in another 4-6 weeks. We aren't expecting to see too much in the ultrasound tomorrow but we are looking forward to it. We will try and update tomorrow if possible on what happened!

Since we are using this site to keep everybody updated on what is happening, we will be keeping our site updated with this journey as well.

We love each of you and hope that this finds you all well. We are so excited to share this great news with you all and hope for only the very best for our Baby Rivera.

Love always,
Ben and Gabrielle

Hello February...

I guess February has kind of been here since it is now the 13th. Yes, we have once again fallen slightly behind. What else is new? We were really hoping to get a little better at this with the new year. There is still time :)

Work has been keeping us both extremely busy. We both are finding ourselves quite tired upon the close of a workday and beyond exhausted by the weekend. The good part of that is that I finally got a promotion at work! We are both very excited and it came as a great surprise. It won't be changing too much of what I do, I basically was doing the work of that level for a while now, but it is so nice to be recognized for the work.

The house is still coming along, just a little slow. The grout is almost completely sealed (yes, we do realize that we had the floors done at the end of December) with the house just about all put back together. Ben has also been working on the front yard. He finished up redoing our island in the front completely and it looks amazing. We just need two more things to fill the "spaces." Today he started to work on the area right in front of the house. That has become a slight mess but I think with the plans we have for it, it is going to look wonderful when it is completed. That date is still TBD :) We need to work on getting some more pictures up of what we have done.

The dogs are being themselves. Rory has continued to adjust and we do the same. She is housebroken (has been for a long time now) and will even go and knock on the door when she wants to go out and when she wants to be let back in. Rigby on the other hand has been recently going to the bathroom in the house while we are at work. He is now joining his sister with his own crate. Today was our first day trying it out with him and I must say compared to how he did when I first bought him he did well.

Weather here is still chilly! We hope that everyone up north is keeping warm!! We have been having a lot of hot chocolate nights ourselves and I think it is just about time for some tonight. We just got back from our Valentine's Day dinner. We decided to go and eat at the place we went to for our first date, Island Pasta. We then went and got some homemade ice cream at Kilwins. Can't beat that :)

Well we hope that everyone is doing well and we promise that we will update more and much sooner.

We love you all and hope to talk to you soon.

Love always,

Ben and Gabrielle

Brrrr!!!

Wow is it cold here! I guess it is about right being January, but seriously for Florida!? Hopefully everyone is staying warm, we know that if we are super cold then those of you that don't live in Florida must be frozen.

Happy New Year to everyone! We hope that you all had a wonderful end of 2009 and are so far having a great 2010. We had a wonderful 2009 and have you each to thank for helping to make it so special and we are hoping to a have a very exciting and even better 2010!!

The house is put back together for the most part. Still don't have everything back together, we need to wait till after this weekend when we seal up the grout. In the process of moving things back though we have had a chance to really make this house look almost brand new and really ours. Once we get things back together we will take more pictures to share.

Well I think that covers it for now. We hope that you are all staying warm!!

Love always,

Ben and Gabrielle