Went in for my 12 week NT scan to check for down syndrome. I have an uncle with DS so I've been more than a little concerned. From what they could see things looked "normal" so far. A fully formed nasal bone and 1-1.5mm measurement at the back of the neck are good signs. I gave bloodwork as well so I'm interested to see how that comes back. The other news is they thought I was closer to 11 weeks pregnant instead of 12 based on the overall size of the baby. That made sense to me since I don't think I conceived on the normal dates. My cycle was always like 34-35 days long instead of the normal 28. But yeah, so this means I'll potentially be pregnant for another week more than I previously thought. Ack! Get this over with! Oh well..

I spoke with HR at my job and I think the reduced work schedule is going to work out after all. For 3 months I'll be off full-time from work. Then I'll start working 3 days a week from 7-12 and continue that for the next 6 months before I have to return to work full-time. This helps the situation with daycare for the time being. My mom works her job from 3-6 so that gives us plenty of time to pick up the baby after work for those 6 months. Then once I go back to work full-time she'll be off on the summer. We'll have to figure things out for that next fall but by that time the baby will be like 11 months old. So I've bought myself some time and my mom's saying that her work situation might be different at that point so things might not be as complicated as I was previously thinking. Woohoo!

On the financial front, taking into account my work schedule as written above, I'll need to set aside 5,500 (which includes 2,000 emergency money) to cover my leave/reduced schedule after the baby is born. This is totally doable for us. In fact, we've already got more than this saved already. So it turns out I can pay off the car after all! Baby will be born to parents who only have 3 debts to their name (mortgage, rental prop mortgage, and my student loan!). To think that only 1.5 years ago we were nearly drowning. We were breaking even every month and never getting ahead on anything. Fast forward to today..T and I have $1000 surplus each month to put on debt and are putting 10% of gross into retirement! I know compared to these other bloggers out there this is chump change, but I'm so proud of our progress. If we hadn't made some crummy car decisions and had some crummy car luck we could've dug out of the hole a little quicker. Oh well, it's all a learning experience. Our ultimate goal is to live totally off of my husbands income. I figure we can comfortably pay off my 20k student loan in 3 years and around that point we're hoping T makes enough money we can live soley off his income. I then plan on taking all my paychecks and putting them towards paying off the rental property mortgage. The sooner that is paid off the sooner we get to use the lake condo as a vacation/weekend home instead of renting it out. Ahh dreams .

I'm so excited for baby!! Why does pregnancy last so long?!?!