Update

It has been a very long time since I have blogged, sorry to those who actually read this. :-)

Things here are going good. Kaylin is talking up a storm and learning new things everyday, she is growing up way to fast. I will post some recent pics here shortly. I am almost 38 weeks now and am starting to feel very close to going into labor. At my last appoint I was already starting to dilate so I don't think it will be too much longer. I have a growth u/s scheduled at my 39 week appt, which is next week and they will decide if then if they are going to induce me or not. Of course if I go into labor on my own we won't even have to worry about that.

The nursery is complete, well the painting is finished that is. The furniture won't be here until the end of November, so pretty much most likely after our little girl is here. We will just use that bassinet portion of the pack-n-play like we did with our oldest until the furniture gets here. I will have to post pics of the paint job, I am very pleased with how it turned out.

I have actually been trying to do a little more me time activities the past couple of months. It has been nice to get away and take some time for just me, although I feel kind of guilty every time I do.....I know I shouldn't I just do. Steve and I actually got to go to a hockey game last month, we haven't done that since I was pregnant with Kaylin. It was a great game too.

I can't believe that Thanksgiving is right around the corner, it seems like this year has just flown by. I can only guess that each year is going to move even faster when this little one is here and I am busy chasing two girls around.

Hope everyone is doing wonderfully!

Busy, Busy, Busy

We have been trying to get the house organized so that we have more room when this baby comes. We have managed to set up a storage system in our downstaird utility and closet area and have partially cleaned out Kaylin's closet. The next step is to clean out the nursery closet and get the room prepared for painting. We moved my office downstairs and I am working on transitioning my job to someone else (well once my boss hires someone that is....hopefully that will be in the next couple weeks).

We have purchased (well Grandma and Grandpa have) the bedding for the nursery. We actually got it from Walmart and I am very happy with it. We decided to go with pink and brown for our colors. We are going to paint the top half of the room pink and then transition (with a border) to brown on the lower half. We will be painting brown stripes using the same color but different sheen (hopefully it will turn out great..I will post some pics when we are done).

Softball season is finally over so it will be nice to have the huby back on the weekends, we have really missed him. Speaking of the hubby, he has a new play toy. He got a 2006 Yamaha FZ6 streetbike. It is very nice and he loves to ride it, makes me happy that we were able to get it for him. We sold the dirtbikes in order to do it but it was worth it in the end. We just didn't have the time to go dirtbike riding here lately and I definitely can't go while being pregnant. Not to mention the cost of gas to haul the bikes somewhere to ride is ridiculous.

Sorry, I haven't blogged in a while but am hoping to keep things a little more up to date in the future.

We're having a........

Girl!!!!!!! We are very excited to be having another little girl. It will be nice to be able to use some of the clothes from her big sister (our oldest had so many clothes as a newborn that some of them never got wore). I really think that our big girl will do great as a big sister too, she loves to help me around the house and is so proud of herself when she does. I am going to make sure to include her in helping with her little sister.

What's been happening

Things have been a little crazy around here. We have been going non stop it seems. We took our little girl to the zoo a couple of weekends ago and she had a blast, her favorite animals were the otters. She plastered herself against the glass and just kept laughing at them. She also loved the bears, she kept growling at them... it was the cutest thing. She also got a medal from The Little Gym, all the kids got one at the end of the spring semester, she is soooo proud of that medal too. She puts in on at least 3x per day and walks around wearing it. She now has several words not all are very clear but we know what she is saying. Here are a few of them.....Ball, Dog, Eyes, Yes, No, Momma, Dada, Juice, Socks, Shoes, Bird, Keys (actually that may be all of them). She is also very good at pointing out animals when going through her books. She is also doing forward rolls now (just started this weekend) most of the time she goes sideways instead of forward but every now and then she goes straight. She is so proud of herself she will lay on the floor and smile until you start clapping and cheering for her.

I just had my 30th birthday last month and my hubby had his 32nd the beginning of June, we're getting so old :-) I can't believe that this weekend we will have been married for 12 years, my how time flies.

Barb, Happy Be-lated Birthday to you!!!!!!!

Here are a couple of pics of our little girl:

16 weeks

I am officially 16 weeks pregnant now, this pregnancy seems to be just flying by. Had my dr. appt yesterday and all is well. I got to hear the baby's heartbeat again which was in the 150s. I am doing great too. I still weigh less than I did before I got pregnant with our oldest and my blood pressure was excellent at 110 / 60. Next month is the big ultrasound, I am getting so anxious....after that appt it will be time to clean out the office and start converting it into a nursery and getting the new furniture. Things are going to be getting quite busy around here, not like they aren't already ;-)

Growing Family

We are going to have another little bundle of joy. We are so happy to be adding to our family. We had our 12 week appt yesterday and all is going well. We were able to hear the heartbeat which was in the 170s. My due date is Nov. 26 so Thanksgiving is going to be quite busy this year.

Why is our House Shaking?!?

So as everyone knows the Midwest experienced an earthquake last week and has then experienced some aftershocks since. Here's our little story on the matter.

My hubby and I were sound asleep when he was awakened by a candle holder over our bed shaking and making noise.  He of course sat up in bed then woke me up, enough that I was thinking to myself that we must be having a major wind storm for the wall to be moving enough for the candle holder to be shaking (hey I was half asleep still). I then realize, wait a minute, I don't hear any wind and it feels like I am sleeping on a boat...hmmmm.....I think we are having an earthquake. I looked at him and said this, who then states, I guess so. The shaking stopped after about 30 to 45 seconds so we decided that we would just go back to sleep and turn on the news in the morning to see if we were right. Sure enough we had an earthquake.  Our little girl of course slept through the whole thing.

Needless to say I am very glad I have Earthquake insurance now. I did check our house out and we couldn't find any damage so that's great. It is a little scary to think that we were over a hundred miles away and could feel it that well though.

Detour, Detour, Detour!!!!!

Saturday the little girl and I decided to run a few errands. Really she was just cranky from being in the house for so long (as we were all sick) and needed to get out (okay, enough of my detouring, let's get to the point of this blog :-) ). It was a wonderfully beautiful day so we decided to go to Babies R Us and then to get her first haircut.

I left the house taking Hwy 40E to get to Babies R Us (I needed to pick up some pictures of the little girl from Kiddie Kandids, oops I detoured again). I discovered on my way that 40W was closed at the Missouri River for bridge work, this was just wonderful as I needed to take 40W to go to her hair appt, and there are no good/short ways of detouring around this. Knowing that I would have to take 270N to 70W to get to where I needed to go we didn't stay at Babies R Us all that long. Okay so now I am back in the truck driving to 270, we get to 270 with no problems pass Paige and bam traffic stops completely. I am thinking to myself it's a Saturday what the heck is going on. Luckily my hubby works in the area so I knew how to get back to Paige to detour around the shutdown so I jumped off on Dorsett (as that lane was actually moving a little bit) and headed to Paige. We are now on Paige traveling at a good clip when yep, you guessed it, traffic stops dead. I mean come on, this is ridiculous. Once again luckily I know the area so I figure I will just take the side streets to bypass all the mess. I make it on to the side streets and am just getting to a stop light when once again everything just stops (for some reason the light just didn't want to turn) so I once again turn onto another street (Jungerman, it goes to the same place I am wanting to go anyhow). Once again we are moving great when what happens(can you guess, yup you got it) there's evidently an accident cuz the darn road is shut down! At this point I don't know of any other detours so I just follow the other cars figuring that they hopefully know where they are going. Luckily they did and I ended up on Willott ( a road that I know, thankfully) and was able to hit Mid Rivers Mall Drive to take to Mexico so that I could get to my baby's hair appt. Oh I didn't mention that we left the house at 12:30pm, left Babies R Us at around 1:20pm and didn't get to our final destination until 2:43pm. A trip that should have taken me about 30 minutes ended up taking a little over an hour :-)

At one point I actually laid my head on the steering wheel and just chuckled as I couldn't believe my luck, I mean really how many detours should one person have to tak for one little trip.

Oh my goodness, my baby girl is 1!!!!!

I can't believe how fast this first year of our little girls life has went by. She is growing so fast and becoming quite the little character. She loves to go to her gym class, greet daddy at the door at night, and chase mommy around the house, oh and she loves to torment Mowzer (although he asks for it sometimes).

We had her birthday party the day Sunday before her b-day and I was amazed at how many people showed up. We just had family but there was still about 20 or so people. She absolutely loved it and enjoyed playing with her little cousin Julia, who is about 2 months younger than her. It was so cute to see them playing with all the little toys together. Speaking of toys, she got all kinds of new little toys, one of her favorites is a baby cabbage patch doll that has the same b-day as her. She will carry that doll all over the house. She also got a bounce and spin zebra from her uncle Chris and his girlfriend Shannon and she loves to bounce on it.

She has started to shut doors and then knock on them until someone opens the door, she will then close the door and, of course, start knocking until someone opens the door again and the cycle continues :-) She also loves to go bye-bye, all I have to do is say do you want to go bye-bye and she will smile really big, wave and go running for the door and start knocking on it until we go.

I swear I have heard her say kitty cat and got it, but I can't be positive. Of course at the time I wasn't paying all that much attention when I heard it and she wouldn't repeat it for me. She loves music and dancing (more like bouncing up and down or shaking her bottom if she is bent over...it really is cute). If I stop singing when I am rocking her before bed she will raise up and start clapping until I start singing again and then she will lay her head back down.

It's so amazing to watch how her personality comes out more and more each day. Being a mom is one of the hardest jobs in the world but it is definitely the most rewarding and I wouldn't change it for anything.

Here are some pics:

Either they are trying to figure out how to escape or they are waiting on someone :-)

Eating Birthday cake, she was actually very neat too.

Another birthday cake pic.

Playing with her cousing Julia.

Look I got a purse.

Stuff......

I am finally caught up with work, YAY for me!!!! It has been a long uphill battle to get caught up as my computer has not been cooperating with me and the little one has decided that one one-hour nap is all she needs each day.

On the subject of the little girl, she will soon be 1 (when did that happen!), she is walking now (well when she wants to that is). Her little personality is really starting to show too, she is quite the goof ball.....she takes after her daddy :-) She loves to play with shoes, it's so funny to watch her try to put her shoes on or try to put them on me. I think she takes after me when it comes to reading, she loves to read and will sit with a book for quite awhile acting like she is reading it. We have been going to The Little Gym and she absolutely loves it. She gets to interact with other kids her age and gets to play on all kinds of fun gymnastic equipment (she loves to hang from the bars and swing around them..with mommy's help of course). I just can't believe how fast she is growing up.

Some close friends of ours are getting ready to move to OK, we will miss them greatly and our little girl will miss there two kids as well. She absolutely loves to play with their little ones (5 and 7) and they have a blast playing with her. It's so funny to watch them as they are so protective of her, it's like she's their little sister. We know that their moving is what God wants for them though and we will still visit and keep in touch. We are actually all going to be going on vacation together to Gulf Shores this Spring Break....I can't wait.

Unfortunately not everything has been great this month. We have had some missunderstandings with some friends regarding breastfeeding. They feel as though we are telling them that biblically they should not breastfeed (not the case at all as I breastfeed) and therefore are very upset with us. We were just asking that breastfeeding not take place (in our home) in front of mutual guy friends as they were very uncomfortable with it. We feel that we have to take our friends feelings into consideration (I believe this is biblical) and that when we have the power to make someone uncomfortable or not we should try to not make that person uncomfortable. An analogy (albeit a silly one but I think it will help make my point) would be that I wouldn't wear my sunglasses on my head in front of my friend if the wearing of sunglasses on my head made that friend uncomfortable. We have tried to arrange a meeting with them so that we could discuss what's going on but they don't want to meet with us (I guess they are just to upset at this point). I guess they feel that they have their stance and we have ours and that there can be no compromise. I just hope that something as silly as this can be gotten over. I really hate that our friendship had to be affected by something that is so, in my opinion, silly. I just have to leave it in Gods hands.

The weather here has been absolutely crazy. We have been going from 50 and 60 degree weather one day to 15 degrees and snowing the next for the past month. Everyone is coming down with colds and the flu. I am just praying that the colds and flu don't visit our home.

So that's a little bit of what's been going on here, not really a whole lot as I have been working non stop.

Barb: Hope you aren't as bored now, but ya know, you really haven't been giving me much reading material either :-). And you haven't been joining me for our nightly Yahoo messenger sessions, you are just going to have to tell Tony that Thursday nights are set aside so that you can chat with me, lol. :-)

Christmas and New Year

I hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas and a will have a wonderful New Year.

We had a pretty good time, my mom and dad came and stayed with us for a couple days. It was so nice having them here as it really allowed me to take the time to enjoy everything as well. Of course our little girl was just as happy as could be having Grandma and Grandpa to play with.

She is into everything now and loves to walk (still needs help though). Here are some pics of her.

Playing in the Snow

Here are a couple pics of our little girl playing in the snow. We had about 6 inches total the week before Christmas. Unfortunately it was all melted by Christmas Day.