A weekend of contractions, turkey, hospitals, and memories

**Note that this is a long post, sorry, but I'm running out of time and want to be sure to capture this last week.

Thanksgiving weekend was eventful. Tate's not here, yet, but I did have to make a quick trip to the hospital on Thanksgiving morning.

For about 2 hours on Wednesday evening, I had pretty strong and painful contractions. Halfway through dinner they stopped, but I didn't feel him move after that at all. In fact, by 7:00 a.m. on Thursday, I was a wreck with worry. After trying all of the usual tricks that will get him to move, nothing was working. So we called, and the L&D staff said to come on in. Of course as soon as I'm hooked up to the monitor, he moves around and his heart rate sounds great.

I was relieved that he was OK, but then embarrassed of my rookie-mom worrying. But, thank goodness for nurse Lynn. She was incredible. I was dreading that I would have some nurse that was bitter she was working on Thanksgiving and would stop short at laughing at me for going to the hospital. But Lynn was so sweet, even through my crying that I couldn't stop (these hormones have seriously got to slow down!). So with discharge papers in hand and a baby that started moving around again, I started my Thanksgiving being very thankful for a very sweet nurse.

The next few days were a combination of several Thanksgiving dinners with family, cleaning and nesting around the house, and lots of resting and sleep. Here is the Strzinek family picture on Thanksgiving, followed by the star of the Enright Thanksgiving, my niece, Mallory:

The turkey headdress is compliments of Aunt Kelly. :)

One of the highlights of the weekend was definitely our quick getaway. We ventured out to downtown Fort Worth for our babymoon. All of the pregnancy books suggest having a weekend away at 6-7 months. We didn't quite plan ahead enough for that, but figured we'd still get away for a night even with just over a week to go. So we headed to a very cool, old, renovated hotel in downtown. The "Christmas Parade of Lights" even went right by the hotel, so we got to watch from the room for a little bit.

At dinner, we reminisced about our 7 1/2 years of marriage pre-baby. I think it's so important to be able to reflect back on the good, the bad, and the ugly of your relationship. We've all had them all. It makes you realize how far you've come in your marriage and that it does take work.

We laughed at some of our newlywed moments, both being thankful for how much we've relaxed...and matured. We remembered back to the vacations, the first one-bedroom apartment, the funny stories, the sicknesses, the fights (which are a little funnier now), the sad stories, and all of the in between that have formed us into "Kelly & Wade."

It sounds so sappy and cheesy I know. But since we're about to start this new chapter of our family and our relationship, it's such a good reminder to see how much better we got at just being married. I'm sure it will be the same for parenthood as well. It will probably take some time (and funny stories to share along the way) for us to get the hang of it. Good thing we can laugh at ourselves. But, it's all part of it. One day soon, we'll have a new set of remember-when memories with our little baby boy.