And 4 days.  I have a hard time taking pictures and writing a post in the same day, and this week there was a big gap between the two because I went to visit family and did absolutely no blog writing for 3 days.  It was kind of nice not to have my laptop while I was away.  I could have read my Google Reader on the iPad, but I didn’t.  I just hung out with some of my favorite people.  It was great to take a break from the computer that I spend too much time with during a normal week.  The bad part is that now I have 450 items in my Reader, so I am scared to open it…

I’m feeling good—exceptionally better than last week when Carson and I suffered through what Ben had the week before.  Whatever is going around is completely and utterly miserable.  One of the downsides to pregnancy is not being able to take the medications you would normally.  I was getting probably 4 hours of sleep a night since my cough kept waking me every hour or so.  Carson fared better in the sleep department, but was still not his happy self.  We are both almost back to normal, which is a very good thing.  Today I feel pretty close to clear-headed.  I’ve been having trouble thinking, remembering things and forming complete sentences.  I think I have been a hard person to live with.  Ben will be happy to know that I remembered to get AA batteries and trail mix at the store today!  I am so very glad to be better.

Baby girl will be here in a little less than 4 months now, and that makes me both very excited and also anxious.  We are still in our rent house without much happening with our house in Amarillo.  I’ve been imagining the perfect scenario in which we sell our house in Amarillo with no hassle or delay, find the perfect house to buy here with a quick closing and move in with plenty of time to spare to prepare for baby girl.  However, I’m starting to think more seriously about how I’m going to fit 2 kids in our current house.  As it is our garage is full of stuff from the other house and we don’t have a whole lot of extra space to work with inside.  Not that God isn’t powerful enough to create my dream scenario this late in the game—He is powerful enough to do anything.  I’m just preparing for the scenario in which God says, “Your plan just isn’t what’s best.  I have other perfect plans that will be much better than what you’ve conjured up.”  I still pray for the house to sell.  It will be a huge weight lifted for our family.

So I’ve been spending a lot of time looking at small space living and thinking more and more about sending another load of our unnecessary stuff to Goodwill.  Maybe it’s time to give away those skinny jeans that aren’t ever going to fit over my thighs again!   We’ll have to change the office/guest room into a nursery and decide what stays and what goes in there. The thought of that makes me a little queasy.  Getting started on a big project is always hard for me.  Everything looks (and is) worse for a while before it gets better, so I procrastinate on the getting started part.  I think there is a part of me that hopes it will magically fix itself…that happens, right?

Literally everyone I know is having babies.  Ok, maybe not literally.  But a lot of special people I know are expecting and it makes me so very happy.  I am thrilled for you all, and can’t wait to meet your little ones!  Between the months of July and December I will get to meet five sweet newborns.  Oh, how I love babies.

Carson is 18 months old today and had his check up this morning.  He was so good while we waited for our appointment.  Just kept himself busy with the toys and danced to some music they had playing.  He’s in the 35% for height and 85% for weight and head size.  No surprise there.  He had to get four vaccines, which was tough for him and for me.  But he bounced back pretty quickly after the doctor gave him a train sticker.  We stuck it on one of his toys and he pointed at it most of the way home saying “choo choo”.

My sweet boy knows 2 letters of the alphabet.  Well, that’s not entirely true.  He calls almost every letter “A”.  But I got him showing off his skills here with A and B.

And here are some random recent pictures of Carson.

Carson giving baby sister a hug.

 Trying on one of Daddy’s ties.

Investigating some cake.

Sampling some cake.

We took a series of belly shots when I was pregnant with Carson, so I figured I would (and should) do it for baby girl.  Comparing belly shots from both pregnancies will be interesting.  I feel (and am) bigger at this point than I was with Carson, and people tell me that’s normal with second babies.  I am predicting that I am going to be a whale by the end of this pregnancy, so I may stop doing updates at some point.  You’ll probably thank me.

20 weeks is the halfway point, and that makes me pretty excited.  I am not excited about being my biggest and most pregnant during the hottest and most uncomfortable months of the year here in Houston.  I’m sure I’ll be complaining about that a lot when the time comes.  For now I will be thankful that Carson and I can enjoy the spring weather and take walks in the afternoon without passing out from heat stroke.

20 Weeks and 3 Days (to be exact)

We found out on Sunday that we will be having a little girl in September!

Here she is.

And here is our growing family after lunch on Sunday.  We were able to get some, but not all, of our family members together for the announcement.  We are incredibly blessed to have such wonderful people in our lives.

Now my eyes are being drawn toward pink ruffles, tutus and huge flowered headbands!  I actually don’t anticipate going all out girly for our little one, but I am sure that she will have a pretty feminine wardrobe before she even arrives.  I am going to have to exercise some serious self control while browsing Zulily, Etsy and Pinterest.  Maybe it is a good thing that we’re in a rental and I don’t have a nursery to decorate.  Oh, but the things I would do in a little girls nursery!  I know that Ben is freaking out right now as he reads this, but don’t worry, Ben.  I promise not to go crazy.  Promise.

Ben came to my ultrasound yesterday, the one where they take all the measurements and make sure everything looks like it should.  Everything looked good.  Here are a few of the better images of baby girl.  Yes, I know it’s just a hand and a foot, but she was moving around a lot during the appointment and these really are the best images we got.  I’m not including the 3D ones because, in all honesty, they are kinda creepy.

I started typing this over a week ago.  I just kept going back and adding little things, but never posting it.  So this post is really just a list of our events of note over the last 10 days or so.

April 10: We were playing the other day with all of Carson’s little toys (farmers, farm animals, some circus Playmobils, airplane pilots, etc) and he gave one a hug so I took this video of him, trying to get him to hug his animals.  I think this is precious.

April 11:  Carson had a playdate with Jack.  They had a good time and he was so tired when we got home that he took an afternoon nap that was close to 2 hours long!  This is unprecedented.  I just don’t have the energy or stamina of a 2 year old, so I can’t duplicate the level of fun he had with Jack.  But boy, if I could get this kind of nap out of him every afternoon, I would be one happy mommy.  I had time to make a pot roast and bread puddings.  I don’t remember the last time I was able to do that.

April 14: The little guy slept 12 hours last night and took 3 naps totaling 6 or so hours today.  He also hasn’t been eating well, but he’s drinking more milk than usual.  Calling the doctor on Monday.

April 17: The pediatrician confirmed my fears that Carson had hand, foot and mouth.  He was so fussy this past weekend, and wasn’t being a very good eater.  Then I saw a blister on his hand and knew there weren’t many explanations for that.  He hasn’t been his usual cheerful self the last few days, but the doctor said he looked to be on the mend by the signs of the sores in his mouth.  Poor little guy.

April 18: As always, being outside works miracles for Carson’s mood.  We played in the sprinkler today for a little while.

April 19: I found these adorable popsicles and couldn’t resist them.  The doctor also said he would probably like cold on his mouth with the sores.  He looks more like a little boy somehow when he’s eating one.

After the popsicle eating Carson dunked my phone into my water glass and so I am without a phone until the bowl of rice it is buried in works its magic.

His current food obsession is grapes.  Together, he and I go through a good sized bag in about 3 days.  He knows where I keep them and he goes to the fridge and tries to open the door.  I ask, “Do you want grapes?” and he nods (which he kind of does with his whole body) and says “Peese!”

Words and sounds I can understand are hi and bye, mama, dada (which sometimes become mommy and daddy) please, moo, choo choo (which is the sound he makes for trains and for car horns), more, and OK (which he kind of uses as self talk as he’s working on a task like getting on or off of something).  He also says papa and baba which I thought he was using to distinguish my dad from Ben’s dad, but he seems to use both when I point at pictures of them.  I feel like I am forgetting some others.

Carson is still taking 2 naps a day and sleeping from 7 to 7 overnight.  I thought we were growing out of that, but we tried one nap the other day and it was a much less successful day for us.

We are going to Austin this weekend to see family and to have a little lunch on Sunday to open the envelope…

This was the first Easter we’d spent with family in a few years.  We drove up to Dallas on Saturday morning and drove back to Houston Sunday afternoon.  So it was a fast trip with a full agenda.  On Easter Sunday we went to church.  Carson was lucky enough to have a friend in nursery.  He and his cousin Lane were in the same class, so I’m sure that made his time in a new place a bit more bearable.

Carson and Daddy after church.

After church we headed to my Aunt Joan and Uncle Wil’s for lunch.  On the way it started to rain and we could see quite a bit of lightning on the horizon in the direction we were driving.  It was pouring when we arrived.  The fate of the egg hunt was undetermined at this stage.

We had a delicious lunch and after Lane and Lydia were done napping we had an indoor Easter egg hunt.  This video is long and uneventful.  I’m including it on this post mainly so that I will have it here for the future.

Carson wasn’t an eager Easter egg hunter this year.  I have a feeling that next year will be different.  But he did manage to get a few eggs on his own, most were placed pretty much right in his hands.  He had a hard time putting them in the basket, too.  He seemed to be content with finding one and inspecting it for a while.  Without any coaxing I’m sure he would have sat with the first one he picked up the entire time.  He did seem to kind of get the hang out it, though.

Grandpa Marvin and Patti were down from Amarillo, so we had to get a picture of Great Grandpa and his great grandkids.  It was a challenge, as it usually it with this many kiddos.

Grandpa Marvin and the Grandbabies.

Carson and one of his eggs.

Our Little Family

I had a doctors appointment today, 17 weeks and 2 days along.  This sealed envelope contains the gender of Baby Z #2!

I need a different name for this baby.  I don’t like the way #2 sounds.  Any suggestions?

We weren’t sure at first whether or not we wanted to find out the sex.  We didn’t find out with Carson and it was really fun not knowing.  I am so glad we did it that way.  But we decided to find out this time.  Now we will have done it both ways.

I toyed around with having a gender reveal party.  We went to one for a friend and it was special and exciting to find out that they were expecting a little girl right there with them.  The more I thought about it, the more I began to realize that planning a party would probably be a little too much work for me.  So then we decided we would just go to Austin and have lunch with our parents and open the envelope with them.  However, I struggled big time after I was given this envelope by the sonographer.  How am I supposed to resist this?  I had a great desire to just rip it open, right then and there.  I resisted, but thought I’d try to get Ben on board with not doing the lunch thing and just finding out tonight.  Unfortunately I am not as persuasive as I thought I was, and he still wants to wait.

So this thing is now going to stare me in the face for the next 10 days (I know, that’s nothing) and taunt me with the knowledge it contains.  On the bright side, this does give me the opportunity to ask all of you what your vote is.  What do you think, boy or girl?  Leave a comment and vote!

With all the rain we’ve had this year it’s not been easy to get outside as much as we’d like to.  Carson is so happy when he’s outside and with the yard we have here it is a pleasure to get out on a nice sunny day and enjoy it.  Unfortunately when it rains the yard becomes a soggy, muddy mess.  So even on a sunny day it’s not a good idea to go frolicking about in the yard if it’s rained the day before.  Thankfully things had dried up enough yesterday for us to get outside and enjoy the beautiful spring day we had.  We brought his tent outside, but it was too windy so I only got one good picture of him in the toppled tent.

You can see in almost every picture I took that he is drooling like crazy.  His shirts don’t stay dry for very long.  He is getting 4 new teeth right now, so I hope this amount of drool is only temporary.  Oh, and yes, he needs a haircut.  I know.  But he told me that he wanted long bangs in front like Justin Bieber, and we want Carson to be able to express himself creatively and he’s chosen his hairstyle to do so.  Really I’m just too nervous to go get it cut again…but it’s going to happen.  Ben is getting sick of how long it is.

Some of the things Carson is up to…

• He says please after being prompted with “What do you say?” from me.  It sounds like “Pweee” but I think it still counts as the beginning of manners.
• When I ask him if he wants to take a bath he heads straight to the bathroom and tries to get in the tub.
• We were reading a book that has one page with a bunch of different animals.  He points to one and I say what it is.  When he points to the chicken I say “chicken” and he says “mmm”.  Well, we do eat chicken and I tell him what it is when he eats it, so I guess it makes sense!  It was pretty funny.
• He’s been tickling for a while.  He kind of just reaches out, rubs his fingers together and laughs as he comes toward you.  When I tell him, “Go get Daddy!” he goes toward him in tickling stance.
• When he’s up on our bed or on the couch he will lay his head down and say “Ni Ni”.  Very sweet.
• He can eat those pouches of food all on his own now.  He squeezes the pack and even folds it up to get the last bit of it out.
• He likes to try to drink out of a straw, but isn’t very good at it.  Whenever I am drinking something from a straw he wants some.
• When he is eating now he likes to have some utensil, even if all he ends up doing is holding it.  He will use it to pick up food and eat, but only occasionally.

We are so excited about baby #2, but mixed in with that excitement is a bit of nervousness thinking about how in the world I am going to function with 2 babies a mere 22 months apart.  I know, I know, people do it all the time.  People have babies less than a year apart.  People have twins, and people have triplets!  And they do it alone with 4 other kids and they home school and don’t have maids, and compared to those women I am going to have it easy.  But it’s the unknown and the inability to plan for it now that makes me anxious.

When I had Carson I wondered and worried before he was born about how it was all going to go.  When would I sleep, how soon would he sleep through the night, what if he didn’t sleep through the night, when would I take a shower, how would I know if and when I needed to call the doctor, and how would I manage to cook dinner and clean the house?  Looking back on it I realize it’s just a matter of dealing with the sleep deprivation, finding ways to get things done when you can and learning how to re-prioritize.  But when people said that to me when I was pregnant I couldn’t help but want to say, “Yeah, ok, but really, what do I do?”  I wanted instructions, but there are none.  You just kind of figure it out, and learn how to take everyone’s advice and find what works for you.  I guess that is what I’ll have to do this time as we make the adjustment from 1 to 2 sweet little ones in our house.

I am 14 weeks pregnant, and after my doctors appointment last week that revealed a good looking baby and a good strong heartbeat we decided to make the news public.

Here is Baby Z #2 at about 13 weeks.  I am due on September 10.

We told our immediate families not long after we found out, at about 6 weeks.  I called my grandparents last week, who are excited to have another great grand baby.  Then I told everyone else the cheater way, a post on Facebook with this picture of Carson.

The shirt is from Zoeys Attic on Etsy.  She has a lot of cute designs for boys and girls.  I thought it was a fun way to announce the new addition, and a way for us to be in public and not have people wonder if I’m pregnant or just a little round about the middle.  I am at that stage in pregnancy where it’s hard to tell.  Any of you women who are either mommies already or pregnant now know exactly what I’m talking about.  I am anxious to have a belly that is obviously a baby bump and not a donuts, pickles and ice cream bump.

I have been feeling pretty rotten so far during this pregnancy.  Nauseated a lot of the day, which is not fun.  I have heartburn a lot, even after just drinking water or eating a cracker.  I hate heartburn.  It makes everything uncomfortable.  I didn’t get heartburn with Carson until the end of my pregnancy.  I am also pretty tired, but that’s nothing new.  On the bright side, everything about baby is looking good and so I’m thankful for that and probably shouldn’t complain about these minor pregnancy nuisances.

We haven’t decided whether or not to find out the sex.  It was really fun not to know with Carson, and I never really had moments during the pregnancy where I felt like I just had to know.  Those gender reveal parties are quite the thing now, and if we do find out, I am having one.  Some of you think this is silly, and that’s ok.  I think it’s kind of silly too, but what fun!  Some friends of ours did it and it was so neat to find out at the same time they did and see how happy and excited they were.  My doctor says we might be able to tell at the next appointment at 17 weeks, which seems early, but I’m no doctor.

I leave you with this video of Carson.  It’s kind of long, so don’t feel obligated to watch it through to the end.  However, if you do watch it all, you get to see him squirt water in his face and then say “no no no” to Ginger, something I know he’s learned from me.  I am setting such a good example…