L'Arche Half Marathon

On March 22nd, Jared and I officially ran our first half marathon! Jared wasn't planning on running it, but a week before, he signed up to run with me so I would have some company and to make sure I was all right.

I'm not going to lie, it wasn't an easy run, but at the same time it wasn't as hard as I thought it was going to be. We had a really good pace for the first 3/4 of the run. About halfway through, however, Jared twisted his ankle in a pothole so his ankle started hurting him at about the 75% mark. My sore knees and hips were definitely starting to affect me too so we took plenty of walk breaks. We kept giving each other encouragement throughout the race which was really helpful I think. It's always nice to have someone cheering you on. When we saw the finish line, we ran as hard as we could which was not very fast but we finished! It was an amazing feeling crossing that finish line after working so hard for over two hours, and really, several months of training. It was awesome having the medals places around our necks as we finished!

When we went back to Eau Claire Market where we had started the race, they had a Stampede breakfast waiting for us which was SO nice. I had double helpings pancakes. When we had settled a bit and my uncontrollable shivering had somewhat stopped, we posted this picture on Facebook to announce Baby Rasmussen!

Overall, such a great and exciting day full of amazing accomplishments and amazing news to share with our friends! So glad I got to run with Jared (and baby)!

Second Ultrasound

Our second ultrasound was March 20th! This time, Baby Rasmussen actually looked like a little person. We could see the baby kicking and moving its legs around. Also, you could tell it is totally getting our stubborn genes because baby just did not want to cooperate with the ultrasound technician at times. According to this ultrasound and my bloodwork, baby has a very low risk of having Down Syndrome and other genetic anomalies. That's always nice to hear. According to this ultrasound, our baby's due date is October 1st! Exciting!

Month of March

Lot of fun things happened in March!

We visited my parents the second weekend of March and had a good time with them. We played games, visited, ate yummy food, and even took a drive out to Waterton. I forgot that the park isn't open during the off-season but it was still interesting to see how much snow they had! It was nuts! They had a TON of it!

After our drive to Waterton, my dad took us for an excursion to a Hutterite colony. It was pretty neat since I've never seen one before. Basically, they have everything they need in a little community. The women make meals all day while the men farm and do the business aspect. They even have their own schools where all the children learn. I must say, it's pretty impressive what they're able to accomplish all on their own.

We had a fun time with my parents but, as we always do, we had to go home and go back to work and real life again. Yuck.

Although March was full of work, I got to have some fun as well. I got a haircut and bought some new dresses and maxi-skirts that I can use all summer to lounge in or wear to church. I was pretty happy with the deals I got.  A dress, two skirts, two t-shirts, two bracelets, two necklaces, two scarves for $75?! Yes please!

St. Patrick's Day

I wasn't originally scheduled to work on St. Patty's Day, but when I got called in for overtime, I had to be festive somehow. I put on the one and only green shirt I own, put some bright green eyeshadow (I do what I want!) and had some Lucky Charms for breakfast. That was about all the St. Patrick's Day spirit I could muster.

$1.50 Slurpee Refill Day

I never realized how much I loved slurpees until, for one day only, it cost only $1.50 to fill up any glass you wanted from home at 7/11. You could literally bring a pitcher and fill it up for $1.50 if you wanted to. I grabbed one of our large theatre cups, I chose Spiderman, and hustled over to 7/11 to get my sugar rush. I'm pretty sure my co-workers were all jealous of my giant slurpee when I showed up to work that evening with a litre of awesomeness.

Arcade Day with Jason

On March 27th, Jared, his brother Jason and I headed out to Cross Iron Mills mall to play at the arcade while on the way to Airdrie for the weekend. Arcades are always fun and bring out the inner child in you. We played a racing game, a basketball shoot-out (which I won!), skeet-ball, Big Buck Hunter, and a bunch of others. We cashed in our tokens afterwards for some candy and some sheriff badges (which literally broke that day). Oh well, it was all in fun! I'm just glad I got a Ring Pop!

March was a fun month! I'll post about our half marathon and second ultrasound next.

First Ultrasound!

On February 28, Jared and I got to go to our first ultrasound of Baby Rasmussen! It was just a little thing, but you could tell it was a baby! It had a healthy heartbeat of 166 beats per minute. So cool! I was about 9 weeks along with this ultrasound.

February Running Update

I'm not going to lie, February was a pretty terrible running month for me, especially because I did so awesome in January. I guess I can blame it on feeling sick for the majority of the month, but my total number of runs for the month was only 5. So much for the hard-core training I planned to do for my half marathon in March!

One run I documented on February 20th. On this run, I stated "I didn't wanna, but I did it." 

Valentine's Day 2014

Valentine's this year was pretty low key but great in so many ways!

Jared went out to run a couple errands first thing and while he was out, I started making breakfast. When he came back, he brought me back a bouquet of flowers! They were seriously beautiful, I had never seen anything like them before. They were blue, purple, pink, all sorts of amazing colours.

We then sat down to breakfast: eggs, pink pancakes and orange juice. I always love delicious homemade breakfasts. My family always used to have pancake breakfasts on special occasions like Christmas morning, Mother's Day, Father's Day, Valentine's, etc. It's a good time to sit down in the morning with your loved ones, not to mention it's just plain delicious.

It's hard to tell, but they are a light pink colour. 

Around breakfast time, my running buddy Laura texted me a wonderful picture! 

Laura captioned this: "I've got a new running buddy. Kind of slowing me down a bit but everyone takes time to be a good runner. ;)"

I proceeded to tell her that I had a running buddy of my own and she couldn't believe it! She thought i was pulling an April Fool's joke on her, but nope. We were so excited!! Laura then reminded me to go running to earn my "Chocolate Heart" badge through nike for running on Valentine's Day.

I made myself a "love" playlist and ran a easy-paced 5km run and earned the chocolate heart!! I'm always a sucker for chocolate.

After my run, Jared and I decided to go see the new "Lego Movie" since we figured the theatre would be pretty quiet on a Friday afternoon between 2-3pm. WE WERE WRONG! The theatre was packed with parents and their young children. I couldn't believe it! I guess the kids had Friday afternoon off school?! Jared and I felt a little out of place as we sat between two groups of kids. As Jared was getting us snacks, a little boy to my left told his mom he had to throw up and then covered his mouth and puffed out his cheeks like he was going to hurl. Luckily, his brother got him to the bathroom before he spilled his cookies, but man, wouldn't that have been the icing on the cake. All in all, we both liked the movie. It had some funny cameos in it and some catchy tunes. We might even buy it when it comes out on DVD and Blu-Ray, we'll see.

For dinner that night, I made some homemade BBQ Chicken pizza. It was yummy, but I made way too much! I ended up making two cookie-sheet sized pizzas for the two of us, so the second pizza went to waste unfortunately. We watched a movie and enjoyed our pizza and that's basically our day!

A fun Valentine's Day for Jared and I even though it wasn't too fancy! 

Big Changes in February

February was a big month for the Rasmussen family!

On February 2nd, I decided to finally take a pregnancy test after a week or two of being late. I've taken a few before in previous months with a negative result so I didn't want to get my hopes up. Jared and I had decided that we wanted to start a family but would let it happen whenever it decided to happen. I took the pregnancy test at work on a saturday night shift, not expecting anything to happen and to my SHOCK, it was positive!

I was definitely not expecting that. It was a crazy feeling and somehow I felt maybe there had been a mistake. In either case, I wanted to let Jared know as soon as I got home so I made him a little card to give him before we left for church in the morning.

When I got home, I told Jared I had made him a special Groundhog Day card and handed him the shoddy card I had made at work (it was a night shift, ok?). He looked at it and then asked, "Really?!" He smiled and gave me a hug. Later, he told me he was still really tired and didn't know how to respond to the news. We are really excited about it, though, and feel so blessed to be able to welcome a baby into the world this year!

Even though it is really exciting and we wouldn't change it for anything, this pregnancy has not exactly been easy as pie so far. Basically, starting the next day, I was over the toilet hurling my guts out. It only took three days of this before I decided to go to a walk-in clinic and get a prescription of Diclectin to calm my raging morning sickness. It definitely helped but there were still mornings that I struggled with nausea and vomiting. My diet basically consisted of chicken noodle soup, soda crackers, and Ichiban for the first couple weeks after the morning sickness started. 

Day shifts and night shifts at work were hard as I felt I had to be sipping on ginger-ale and eating toast to keep my stomach happy. Even then, sometimes it just was not happy. In the following months, it has gotten better, but February was a challenge for sure. 

In either case, Jared and I are very excited for this new chapter in our lives and look forward to the day when we can use our guest bedroom for a nursery instead of a storage room. More to come for February in the next couple entries!