Can’t believe I’m almost halfway through my pregnancy – how exciting (and nerve-wracking at the same time – holy cow, the baby will be here soon!). I’m so anxious for the 21/22 week mark, as we will likely be able to learn whether we are carrying a baby girl or a baby boy during that time frame. We can’t wait to find out!

Before we conceived a child, Jordan and I had discussed the idea of not planning to find out the gender of the baby. Jordan was a big proponent of this plan especially, since he loves the idea of being surprised. But as we began trying for a baby, I couldn’t help but express my desire to find out the gender for practical/logistical/planning reasons – I’m just too much of a Type-A personality not to find out! Luckily, I have an understanding husband who was willing to go with whatever I decided, so we ultimately chose to find out the gender of our child.

A week or so ago, I had a lot of anxiety associated with finding out the gender of our baby – particularly if we learned that our baby is a boy – because we hadn’t yet finalized our chosen boy’s name. A baby girl’s name came relatively easy – we have had long-time favorites (since maybe March or April of 2011!) that we love and that we’ve kept secret, so choosing a first and middle name for a baby girl was comparatively easy. After many a discussion, Jordan and I had finally selected a first name for a baby boy, but as of a week ago, we still had no middle name and no good ideas. However, the other day, I suggested a name that I’ve loved for awhile as a middle name possibility, and Jordan really liked it, so that’s that – we have our first and middle baby names selected, for both girl and boy! Now I couldn’t be more excited to find out what we’re having, simply because I feel more prepared name-wise. :)

Wondering why we are keeping our baby names secret until the baby arrives? Truthfully, we never thought we would! A few of our friends decided to keep their chosen baby name secret when they were expecting their children, and we appreciated that A) the couple had a fun, exciting secret that they were able to share between the two of them for the entire pregnancy, and B) by keeping the name secret, the couple was able to sidestep hearing any opinions (at least ahead of time) on their chosen baby name. What Jordan and I have found since deciding to keep our baby names secret is that it’s SO fun to keep the baby’s name a secret from our friends and family (literally, no one else knows except for us – well, and Wyatt the dog) because it makes the pregnancy seem so much more personal and private for us. We’ve also discovered that it’s empowering to select a name for our child that we love, that we believe in, and that we feel has significance, and because we’re keeping our chosen names secret, we will be able to present the name that we have chosen for our child in a way that emphasizes our reasoning for choosing the name! We love the idea of making a video to announce the baby’s name and the significance behind our choice (we will make the movie a month or so before the birth and we will wait until shortly after the birth to release the video). Lastly, we also love the fact that no one can offer opinions (positive or negative) on our chosen names; truthfully, we love our names so much that it would suck to hear negative opinions at all, but especially prior to the arrival of our baby. It seems like a good idea to avoid any second-guessing of our choices!

I’ll keep you posted on any new developments as my pregnancy continues – we have another prenatal appointment this week, and we’re excited to be nearing the halfway point!

Hello there! I know that I’ve been absent, but I promise that I have a really exciting reason…

Jordan and I are expecting our first child! I’m about 14.5 weeks along, and we couldn’t be more excited to finally be able to share our happy news with everyone. We are due on June 15, 2012, and we were elated to discover that we were expecting after just three months of trying for our first baby.

Watch our fun holiday announcement video here!

It’s been a long-kept secret that Jordan and I planned to try to conceive a baby – we’ve been talking about our desire to be parents since we were married, but we developed an “action plan” around January of 2011 to get me on “good” insurance, to get a bigger and more winter-ready vehicle, and to start saving for a potential new member of our family. We began trying around our one-year anniversary in July, and we learned that we were expecting in early October.

The reason for my (LONG) absence from the blog is mostly due to the horrendous morning sickness that I had in the first trimester – I don’t mean to complain, because obviously, we feel very blessed to have been able to conceive a baby at all, much less in just three short months of trying, but seriously – I was sick for FIVE STRAIGHT WEEKS and visited the emergency room for IV fluids TWICE! Uffda. But, once early November hit, the nausea passed, and all I was dealing with (mostly) was exhaustion. Now that’s it’s mid-December (how time flies!), I would say that I’m at about 95%. The remaining 5% is mostly due to my lingering lack of appetite – I’m still unable to tolerate the smell of eggs, browning hamburger, hot dogs, buffalo wings from Taco Johns, and soup, and I can’t eat any steak-like meat (just the thought of steak makes me gag!). But, I’m excited to see what the second trimester brings in terms of changes, because it has certainly been a wild ride thus far!

With Christmas just around the corner, I wanted to showcase two of my favorite holiday card designs from Minted.com!

I’m a big fan of Minted – I’ve found a TON of cards for all occasions that I would LOVE to send out in celebration of every single holiday, from New Year’s to Christmas!

I love this design, which is called the “Wishing Script Holiday Photo Card” -

And this one is also a favorite: “Wintry Pine Holiday Photo Card” -

Have you picked out your holiday cards for this year?

NOTE: I haven’t been paid or perk’d to showcase Minted’s designs; I’m just a big fan!

{All photos via Minted}

A humble request today, folks: this Saturday & Sunday, my husband Jordan is participating in a 24-hour video game marathon to benefit Children’s Miracle Network via an organization called Extra-Life. The organization began when a few video-game lovers decided that they could use their love of gaming to raise money for sick children, and Extra-Life was born.

What About Sara has donated $12 towards this cause, and I hope that you will join me in donating just $12 as well. My husband is currently 61 percent of the way towards his fundraising goal, and this tax-deductible donation will go 100% towards helping children via Sioux Falls, SD’s Sanford Hospital’s Children’s Miracle Network.

Click here to donate!

In the fall of 2008, I enrolled in a program called “Writing for Social Change,” which was coordinated by the Higher Education Consortium for Urban Affairs (HECUA). Participating in this program changed my life in a significant and palpable way, and I attribute my desire to create change in the world around me to my time in HECUA.

I recently stumbled upon a short description that I had written shortly after returning from HECUA about the high number of construction sites located near my townhome with Jordan in Sioux Falls. I wanted to share this with you today to encourage all of you to look at the world around you with a critical, poetic eye!

Dirt amasses in my backyard in hills and pools like a dried mudslide. Slender wooden sticks with orange flags perched atop them puncture the mud’s surface, revealing little roots and worms and life. These pennants, carrot in hue in their plastic nature, join together to mark plots of land. Flags appear in plot after plot after plot, never quite ceasing, even once the pink horizon deepens and sinks into the syrupy darkness of the sludge. This is development. What was once fields with switchgrass, dandelions, thistles and sunflowers is now just…mud. It’s happening everywhere this time of year – actions of expansion. It’s apparent, from the sunflowers that still wave their yellowed petals to the tune of the wind, that development nearly always requires destruction. Yet, in this sense, such a thing struggles to mark progress at all when demolition precedes it. The small plot of wild sunflowers, which dance in the muddy openness on the north side of the land, have betrayed the city’s efforts to “improve the quality of life offered in rental properties,” for they function to provide a solitary swatch of evidence as to the damage inflicted on the land’s natural habitat to provide such advancement in apartment living. As I stand staring into the dark, muddy pools of nothingness that abut my deck, I consider the emptiness of the land. Then, as I turn around to head back inside, my eyes catch a small slice of land, just to the east of my overlook. In the midst of the opal-hued muck, fragments of green assemble as if called to fight their way through the sticky trenches of the mud. I think to myself, Maybe there’s evidence of progress here after all.

{Photo by me}

Before Jordan and I were married last year, I had a major conflict of identity that came from a rather unexpected source: a rubber stamp.

For our wedding, Jordan and I had a wishing tree, which was basically a few manzanita branches (from here) arranged in a flower pot. Jordan and I asked guests to write down their wishes for our marriage on cardstock and then hang the wishes on the branches of the tree. It ended up being a creative way for our guests to wish us well. However, when I was conceptualizing how the wishing tree would come together, I never imagined that it would be the source of a name-change-related breakdown for me.

In order to decorate the cardstock, I commissioned a local stamp shop to make a custom rubber stamp for me, which said the following phrase: “Wishes for the Mr. and Mrs.” Cute, right? That’s what I thought, too; I saw the phrase somewhere in the blogosphere, and I promptly ordered the stamp. I then purchased the manzanita branches, the flower pot, the cardstock and the ink for the stamp, and I didn’t think anything of it until the stamp came in a week or two later.

It was around that time that I read this post (and then this post) on A Practical Wedding. And truthfully, these posts (together with a post that I can’t seem to track down on Project Subrosa on name-changing and the Ms. vs. Mrs. debate – this post is similar, though with decidedly less sass – which is a bummer, because I love me some sass)…well, they threw me big time. I had never thought about changing my name before…I had never thought about the fact that I had a choice of whether or not to take my husband’s last name. What’s more is that I had thought much less about which choice was right for me; I always thought that I would take my husband’s name, because that is what women do in my family, and in my state (South Dakota). And now, because I ordered a stupid six-dollar stamp that said “Mrs.” on it, I felt like my choice between Ms. and Mrs., and my birth name, was being made for me.

So I cried. A lot. I cried to my mother, to my guy (now my husband), and I cried even more when re-reading the posts and the comments on APW and Project Subrosa. I felt like I had failed my cultural position as a woman by rejecting the rights available to my beloved-yet-too-often-marginalized womanhood. [Big stuff.] So, I hemmed and hawed over whether or not to use the stamp, because gosh darnit, I paid for it, and I wasn’t about to throw money out the window, but then again, it was only six dollars, and was six dollars worth chucking my oh-my-gosh-I-guess-I-am-a-feminist-wow-this-is-strange-I-didn’t-notice-this-before-now self out the window? Was six dollars worth me compromising my identity as a woman, my identity as me, as Sara?

In the end, it was my mother who helped me the most. She said that my identity as a wife, my identity as a woman, didn’t have to be determined by a stamp. She rationalized that while the majority of our wedding guests would call me “Mrs.” on our wedding day, as a cutesy ode to my newly married status, that after the wedding, I was able to stipulate whatever name I wanted for myself, and that people would either abide by my wishes, or they wouldn’t. She cautioned that in our area of the United States, it isn’t common for women to keep their birth name [which is true], so I had to brace myself for many a mailing/solicitation/family Christmas letter/invitation error. I had to be okay with mistakes.

Fast-forward to a few weeks before our wedding day. The scene: The Clerk of Courts office in our home state of South Dakota. The action: Jordan and I, standing, awkwardly, nervously, in front of a window, applying for our marriage license. As I shuffled my feet back and forth while waiting to fill out the necessary forms, I seriously considered what I wanted for myself when it came to being a woman, being a partner, being a wife. And I thought about the women who came before me in my family, who didn’t seem to know (or, rather, to care in the same way that I did) that even though they were married, they still had the right to keep their birth names.

I thought about my grandmother, my father’s mother, who is one of the best women I know, and one of my most favorite people. She’s a sassy, faithful, family-oriented, inspirational go-getter at 81 years old. But in the 44 years that she was married to my farmer-tractor-driving-grandfather (who sadly passed away before they reached 45 years of marriage), she loved nothing more than to cook and care for him and for their nine children. Yet even so, my grandmother, who took my grandfather’s name, which is my father’s name, and which is my birth name – she never lost herself. She never let go of her role as a woman to take on her role as a wife, and her name certainly had no impact on her wifehood, on her womanhood.

I thought about my grandmother, my mother’s mother, who died when I was in high school. I thought about how she would respond to my internal debate regarding whether to take on Mrs., or to keep my birth name. And then I smiled in knowing that she would support me no matter what choice I made, because that’s the woman she always was. She was a supporter to her core.

And I thought about my mother, who took my father’s name when they married, and who never seemed the slightest bit inhibited by her choice to take on a different moniker.

In thinking back to all of the women that have come before me in my family, I made my choice. I took my husband’s last name, but I remained a Ms. It was a compromise that I was willing, no, that I was overjoyed, to make. My choice was an acknowledgment of my identity as Sara, and my new identity as the partner of Jordan. And for me, I also made another compromise, a symbolic one, to honor myself as I’ve always been, and the new self that I was about to become, as a partner, a wife: I hyphenated my name professionally. To me, my career was (and still is) my own, and by symbolically hyphenating my name professionally, I was able to ensure that I entered into marriage with my feminist womanhood in tact.

In looking back on our first year of marriage, I have no regrets regarding my decision to take my husband’s name. I’m especially proud of my decision to remain a Ms., and I’m reminded of that every single day, when my students call me Ms. XXXX-XXXX. But as I reflect on the choices I’ve made, I think back to that silly little stamp, and I feel blessed to have had compelling blogs to read in that moment and in many more, precisely because blogging continually forces me to make choices with intention. And I know that I did just that.

I’ve been dwelling in possibility for the past few days, feeling grateful for all of the blessings in my life, from career prospects to the support and love of my family and friends to the rigorous intellectual activity that my Master’s degree allows me to the students that I am able to mold into adults each day.

My Grandma lives her life by this motto, and she is one of the most inspirational women I’ve ever known. I try to live my life with these words as my guide.

Enjoy!

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