It's a GIRL!

Jake and I are so excited to be expecting our first baby! We have really been looking forward to this new adventure in our life, and we can't describe how much it means to us to have this little girl join us. She's due on Christmas day, so our holiday travel plans consist of a ten minute drive to the hospital. But we think she'll make a great little Christmas present!

We found out just after we moved into our new apartment, and we're glad we moved here because it should work out very well for our new situation. Our place is only a 10-15 minute walk to Jake's office, which means we'll be using less gas, and I'll have the car during the day if I need it. We have a second bedroom, which we were using as a sewing room/office, but we are now in the process of turning it into a nursery for the baby. Our utilities are included in our rent, so we can run our heat as much as we want this winter to keep the baby warm, and we have a washer and dryer for all that extra laundry.

My pregnancy has been going well so far. I haven't had any morning sickness - I'm very grateful to have missed out on those genes. Thanks, mom! I would say the pregnancy symptom I've struggled with most so far is joint pain. My joints hurt when I stay in any position too long (so sleeping is hard) and when I walk for too long. I have some pillows set up in the bed to help with the pain at night, but I definitely walk like an old person sometimes because my hips hurt. Jake makes fun of me.

I started feeling little baby twitches in my tummy a couple of weeks ago. About a week later, Jake was able to feel a kick. She's getting more active every day, especially in the evening. It's been really fun for us to feel her moving around in there. She almost always starts kicking after I eat ice cream, so Jake and I decided that means she likes it. She'll fit right in here.

It was so hard to wait four months to find out the sex of the baby. We wanted to start shopping for baby clothes, which it turns out is still hard even after you find out what the baby is. More importantly though, Jake and I do not have the same taste in girl names at all. We had decided to stop working on names until we knew whether we would have to argue about girl names. So we'll have to get started on that. Our nephew, Will, thinks we should name the baby Tiger, so the list will start there. :) If only she had a cousin named Giant Squid....

Now onto the part you are actually interested in: ultrasound pictures. We think she's pretty cute, but I guess we're a little biased. Enjoy!

You can see her heart in this one.

There's that little knee. 

Foot

Creepy skeleton face

Sleepy little girl

Power fist

We'll keep you all updated on how things are going. Yay for baby!

A Love-ly Holiday and French Macarons

Valentine's Day
So Jake and I have started alternating planning our romantic holidays (Valentine's Day and our anniversary) each year. We got tired of planning them together because there are never any surprises and we always end up doing the things we the things we both like rather than the things each of us like individually. It was getting a little boring. So this year, I took on planning our Valentine's Day and Jake is planning our anniversary. (We decided to celebrate our anniversary at the end of the summer this year since it's so close to my birthday - gotta spread out the celebrating.)

I sneakily asked Jake where he would go if we could go anywhere in the world. His answer was Hawaii, which makes sense considering we were attempting to save money by only rarely running our heater. Our Michigan winter, if I haven't made this clear already, was brutal.

So I planned a "Hawaiian picnic on the beach" for Valentine's Day. I laid a blanket on the "sand" (our carpet) with the "waves" (a blue blanket) nipping at our toes as we overlooked the "Hawaiian sunset" (a pieced together poster of a sunset in Kauai.

I tried to create a little Hawaiian atmosphere. I turned on the heater, set up pictures of Kauai all around the living room, put out a vase of tropical-looking flowers, and played a Hawaiian radio station on Pandora. For our lunch I made marinated shrimp with lime rice and a fruit salad. Jake made date milkshakes to drink. And I made ginger and lime French macarons for dessert (see more about these below).

I think the afternoon was a success! We ate by candlelight and exchanged our traditional home made valentines. I can't wait to find out what Jake is planning for our anniversary!

The Macarons
I recently took up an interest in French macarons. I first had one at Jake's advisor's house on our visit weekend. It was very delicious, and I wanted to make some for myself. French macarons are notoriously difficult to make well, so I knew that it would take a lot of practice to get it right. I think I can handle eating lots of progressively more delicious cookies on the quest for perfection.

My first attempt was in the fall, and although the cookies didn't turn out amazing, I learned a lot, and they were still very tasty.

The cookies didn't have the right texture. They weren't smooth on top, and they didn't develop a foot. However, as I said, they were still delicious to eat. I have witnesses. These were cinnamon cookies with vanilla buttercream.

To fit the Hawaiian theme for Valentine's day, I made both lime cookies and ginger cookies as well as lime curd and ginger buttercream for the fillings. Allie and Steve gave me a macaron cook book for Christmas, so I used those recipes for this batch. This time I also pulsed the almond flour in a food processor before mixing it in to help the cookies be a little more smooth.

Most of the cookies looked like these ones below. They are smoother and rounder, and there is a little foot down there. Definitely an improvement! The ginger cookies were better than the lime. For some reason, the lime cookies tasted like green Fruit Loops even though I flavored them with fresh limes. It's funny because I flavored the ginger cookies with powdered ginger. My buttercream took a step backward in texture, and the lime curd didn't set up enough, but both tasted good.

Ginger cookies in front and lime in back

So a small portion of cookies looked like the ones below. They are very smooth, but also much more flat. The cookies filled with lime curd were kind of a mess because the curd was too runny. I'm pretty sure the top cookies slid right off within seconds after this picture was taken.

We'll see when I get brave enough to try again. Jake and I have been on a baking hiatus during the heat wave, but now that it's cooling down I might be able to run the risk of turning on the oven long enough to bake some cookies. I am excited to make some more progress on my baking adventure!