They really love each other!

Tonight I had to take Aidan to the doctor for his 3 year check up. What? His birthday was 2 months ago? Well. I'm pregnant and forgetful and totally spaced off taking my little guy in for his well-check! Anyways, I asked Reese is she wanted to stay home with daddy or come to the doctor with Aidan and I. Her response, "I want to go with to make sure that Aidan is ok and to make him laugh." Awwww! So we get into the car and Reese is telling Aidan how she is going to make him laugh at the doctor and he decides that he needs to make her laugh too! So Aidan starts blowing spit bubbles and making faces until they are both laughing hysterically in the backseat. The other night as we got into the car to go to dinner, the kids were being very friendly with each other and announced that they were best friends while holding hands. As they are holding hands, they decide that they should also kiss, so they both leaned into the middle seat and tried unsuccessfully to kiss each other! They tried several more times to get a kiss, managing to barely brush lips, all the while still holding hands! It was adorable! As they are getting older, it seems that these moments are becoming more and more frequent and I couldn't be happier!

Truths

I found and bought a box of boy birth announcements for $0.88........We will definitely have a girl! I kind of want another girl...............We will definitely have a boy! Randy swears that the ultrasound tech alluded that she saw a boy............We will definitely have a girl! Randy is supposed to be out of town the weekend of May 20th........I will definitely go into labor that same weekend! I would love to go into labor May 26th(the day after school is out and I am done working for the summer)...I will definitly go until my due date, maybe even after! I have decided that I want the kids to remain in the rooms they are in rather than moving rooms around if we have another boy.....we will have another boy and I will change my mind!

Baby Crap

I recently set up a pack and play in the living room for the baby. Both kids were very curious about it and I explained that it was where the baby would sleep, like a baby crib. They both responded: "Oh, a baby crib" but crib actually sounded more like "crap". Tonight, Aidan was running around the living room and ran into the crib, hitting his knee. He came to me and asked me to kiss his knee because, "I hit it on the baby crap(crib)!" I counldn't help but to laugh!

Hospital bags

While Randy was out of town this week, I ran a few errands and picked up some essentials that we will need before bringing home baby in a few short weeks. Those essentials included baby body/hair wash, diaper cream, a bottle brush and a baby book. With the essentials purchased, I also started putting together some bags for the hospital. I packed up some of the things that I won't be needing until the hospital, such as nursing bras and pads, slippers and pajamas, a baby blanket, the baby book and a few other odds and ends. When Randy came home on Friday and found the bags packed on the floor of our bedroom, he looked at me and asked, "Are you going somewhere?" To which I responded, "Um, yeah! I am planning on going to the hospital sometime very soon to have this baby!"

2011 in pictures

I have been wanting to make a video compilation of all of my favorite pictures from the past year and was so excited when I found out that I had an application for doing just that! I hope you enjoy my first photo video! Be on the lookout for videos from previous years and years to come!

Mommy's Boy

Though Aidan has always been a mommy's boy, he still manages to suprise me sometimes with his affection. For instance, we were taking pictures of all of the grandkids when my family got together recently for Easter. After getting a few shots with all of the kids together, we all piled in to get a large family photo. As soon as I settled into my spot for the picture (right behind where Aidan had been sitting), he stood up and snuggled onto my shoulder.

I love my affectionate little boy so much!

Pregnancy Gripes

I love being pregnant and would continue having children as long as I could. My husband on the other hand, took some convincing for us to try for a third child and absolutely does not want any more children. With this in mind, I have decided to document some of my pregnancy gripes from my current pregnancy to pull out for future reference when I get baby fever!

1. Pregnancy Carpal Tunnel: I experienced pains in my wrists during my last two pregnancies. During my pregnancy with Aidan, I wore wrist braces for several months. This time it wasn't bad enough to get out the braces, but I did have numbness and pain for a few weeks.

2. Back pain: In the past few weeks, my back pain has been so severe that I can barely walk. I expereinced sharp pains in my back as I stood up from sitting or moved in my chair. Once standing, I walked while dragging my left leg. Besides having trouble walking, it was unbearable to get dressed!

3. Swollen feet: Recently my feet have begun to swell incredibly. Though I have been propping my feet up under my desk, my feet have swollen outside my shoes! The last thing I want to do after sitting at work all day, is go home and sit to prop my feet up, but I can't do anything else!

4. Less time with the kids: As my current pregnancy has progressed, I have not been playing, snuggling, or even parenting the kids like I usually do. When a fight breaks out between the kids, I often let them try to work things out themselves, because I do not have the energy to put myself in the middle of their fight. Also, the kids do not fit in my lap for snuggle time like they used to!

5. Sleeping: It is almost impossible to get comfortable. With pillows between my knees and under my belly, I usually start out the night on one side and rotate at least 4 times (the amount of times that I get up to go to the bathroom!) Each time that I get up to go to the bathroom I carefully make my way to a sitting position on the edge of the bed. Then I sit for a minute as my body registers all of my aches and pains. Finally, I stand up and limp, waddle and wince as I make my way to the bathroom. I am always amazed when I crawl back into bed and spend 10 minutes struggling to position all of my pillows, that my husband has managed to sleep through the whole 25 minute ordeal of me going to the bathroom!

6. Cleaning: I prefer to maintain a clean and organized house, not only because it makes it easier to find things and maintain a schedule, but because cleaning is a stress reliever for me. I usually spend Saturday mornings cleaning the entire house and clean as needed throughout the rest of the week. In the past few weeks, my ability to get around and clean like I usually do has severely suffered. It seems like there are piles of stuff everywhere, clothes sit sorted in the basement and are worn again before even making their way to the kids dressers!, I go to bed with the kids toys strewn all over the living room, etc. It drives me crazy, but just the thought of getting the clothes from the basement to the kids rooms on the second story makes me tired and sore!

7.Nesting: Though I despise the thought of having to exert myself to clean, I do have an urge to make room for the baby and to decorate the kids rooms. I have not "decorated" the kids rooms since we moved into our home 2 1/2 years ago because I knew that I wanted more kids and was not sure that the rooms they strarted out in would be the rooms they would stay in. Reese's room is larger and attached to a half finished attic space that could be expanded to make an even larger room. We planned on having the third child share with either Reese or Aidan in this larger room depending on the baby's sex. I did not find out the baby's gender because I wanted to enjoy this pregnancy since it will likely be my last. I spent the 20 weeks after finding out the sex of the previous two buying furniture, decorating rooms, and finding the clothes and blankets and stuff to fill it all in. Since we have everything for a boy or girl, we will simply need to pull the right items out of the closet and set up. But now the wait is killing me!

8. Social Life: Usually after spending the entire week at work and at home, I can't wait to get out of the house to go out to dinner or do some shopping. Lately, if it is not a necessary trip, I am more than happy to just stay home. I even asked Randy to go out and do the grocery shopping by himself this morning because I just did not want to get dressed and go out of the house. We even skipped our ritual of eating out Friday night and Randy picked up pizzas instead! Family members have been trying to plan summer time vacations and keep asking if we will really be ready to go with only weeks after having the baby, and I immediately respond "Yes!" After spending the next 6-7 weeks at home or at work, I am going to be so ready for a change in scenery!

9.Finally, many family members and friends have been very sweet to remark that I make a beautiful pregnant woman, but I feel more like a beached whale than anything human these days! Here are a few pictures from this pregnancy as evidence: January 2012- 22 weeks

March 2012- 29 weeks

There it is, my gripes about being pregnant and a reminder to myself to look back on when baby fever strikes about a year from now!

Things I Love

Reese & Aidan: "Is today a mommy day or a grammy day?" (referring to whether they will get to stay home with me or will be going to their grammy's while I go to work.) Me: "It's a mommy day!" Reese & Aidan: "Yay!"

Spring Break 2012

We spent the last week in our very favorite vacation spot- Pensacola Beach, Florida! The last few years, travelling the 16 + hours to Pensacola from our home in Iowa with 2 children under the age of 3 has been frustrating to say the least! I don't know if we were better prepared and more relaxed or the kids were just older and better able to entertain themselves, but this year's trip was so different. We left late in the afternoon after getting home from work. Randy had picked the kids up from daycare and kept them awake all afternoon, thinking that no nap would make them tired and likely to sleep for some of the trip. We started out and the kids stayed busy enough playing their video games that I started in on "The Hunger Games". Suprisingly I read until we made our first stop. We made it to our hotel with 2 potty stops and a stop for a quick dinner. The kids were kind of wound up at first, but we eventually settled into bed and got a good 6-7 hours of sleep. I got up first and showered and dressed. Then I dressed both kids and we went down to get breakfast while Randy got ready and repacked our overnight bags into the car. We left from our hotel around 7 am. The kids played and watched movies in the car while I picked up my reading. Except for passing out the occassional snack, they kept themselves entertained for the first few hours. They started to get a little restless, but were satisfied when I started playing car games with them. Aidan fell asleep late in the morning and stayed asleep until about the time we stopped for lunch. The afternoon went pretty much the same, with the kids entertaining themselves for the most part with me putting my book away to play occassional car games with them. We finally pulled into our hotel on Pensacola Beach around 4 in the afternoon. We unloaded the car and dropped everything in our hotel room. We found our swimsuits and rushed down to the pool! The kids swam and played for a few hours. When the sun began to go down, we finally returned to our room to get some dinner. Thankfully there was a Subway across the street, so we picked up sandwiches to eat in our room and then put our stuff away. We finally called it a night around 10pm. The next morning after breakfast we went to town to get groceries for the week. When we returned, the kids put on their suits and ran to the pool!

The next few days we bounced back and forth between the pools and the beach.

We also took walks to the park.

After long days in the sun, we cleaned up and went out to dinner.

Randy had to leave us for two days to go to New York for meetings. We took advantage of that time to do something new: mini golf!

Reese even made a hole-in-one!

The next night, we enjoyed some shopping, exploring the boardwalk, feeding the birds and an ice cream snack. We spent the last few days building sandcastles on the beach and playing in the pools.

Unfortunately, I did not get any family pictures this year, but I did get a few shots with my favorite kids on our last night.

On the ride home, we left our hotel just before 7 am and drove straight home. We stopped occassionally for meals and potty breaks and made it home just after 10 pm. Though we were sad that our vacation was over so quickly, we were very glad to finally be home and back to our own confortable beds!

Already acting like siblings

The other night I was sitting with Aidan watching TV. Just after he got comfortable, resting his head on my protruding baby belly, the baby began to kick. Aidan's little head jerked forward two or three times when he turned around and looked at me with a confused look on his face. I immediately explained that the baby was kicking in my belly. He immediately laid his head back down on my belly and exclaimed, "I can hear your baby mommy!" Before I knew it, Reese came racing over and laid her head on my belly as well. She was very disappointed when she didn't feel the kicks, but she also claimed to hear the baby through my belly. Seeing how excited they are about this type of interaction with the baby, I can't wait to see their reactions once the baby is actually here!

Wiggle, wiggle, pull!

Aidan has become very independent in using the bathroom by himself. Though he can get himself undressed and onto the toilet, he has difficulty getting himself redressed when he is finished. After using the bathroom this afternoon, he waddled up to me with pants around his ankles and asked me to help him pull them up. I asked him to try it himself first, which he did half-heartedly. Reese saw him struggling and said, "Just wiggle, wiggle, pull. That's what I do!"

How to throw a firetruck themed birthday party!

In the weeks leading up to Christmas, all Aidan could talk about was garbage trucks. He was fascinated with watching the garbage truck come to our house and pick up the garbage, he always pointed out garbage trucks on the road and pretended everything was garbage. Being the attentive parents we are, we of course bought him a garbage truck for Christmas. Immediately after Christmas, he was suddenly obsessed with all things firetrucks and the garbage truck that we so deliberately sought out, sat untouched!
Well, when I began thinking of ideas for his birthday party, I immediately thought of firetrucks. In researching a firetruck theme, I came across this tutorial for making a firetruck cake (originally from Family Fun magazine)and it was decided.
My first objective was to find invitations. Though I have made the invitations for the kids recent parties, I wanted to do something different. I found a photo invitation that I liked, uploaded my pictures and ordered them in a fraction of the time that it would have taken me to even make a mock up invitation by hand.

Once the invitations were finished, I began to work on the decorations for the party. I found and printed some symbols of firefighters, a fire hydrant and a crest. I cut them out and traced them onto colored scrapbook paper and dressed them up with some markers. I added "The Firefighters Prayer" and a picture of my little cutie next to a real firetruck made to look like an award for Firefighter of the Year. Finally, I printed a few templates for dogs and cut them out. Then I had the kids cut out black dots and glue them to the template to make dalmatians. They had so much fun cutting and pasting that they kept asking to make more! I added all of the decorations to the kitchen cabinets where the party guests could enjoy them while they got their food.


I purchased a few plastic fireman hats at the Dollar Store for the guest of honor and all of the guests under age 5. Along with the firetruck shirt (from a set of pj's we purchased on clearance at Gymboree), the birthday boy was looking pretty cute!

The final element was the food. Though I wanted to have food that went with the theme, hot dogs, hot wings and four alarm chili, we thought that BBQ pork and cheesy potatoes was a more favorable option for our guests. I made the firetruck cake according to the tutorial I mentioned earlier. Besides the fact that the cake was dark pink rather than red, I think that it turned out pretty cute! And most importantly, the Birthday Boy loved it!


The birthday boy received so many wonderful gifts.


On a side note, I tried to create matchsticks by dipping pretzel sticks in white chocolate (colored red)like these from Modern Moments:
Unfortunately, mine ended up looking more like they were intended for a bachelorette party (sorry, image too x rated for this family blog)than for a 3 year old boys party, so we ended up eating them ahead of time and hiding the remainder before the party!
Despite the match stick debacle and the pink firetruck cake, the party was a blast and the birthday boy and guests had a great time!

The next Mia Hamm

After an excruciating week of waiting, Reese finally started soccer. Every day this week, she has been counting down to the first practice. Friday after work, we ran around town picking up her jersey, shorts, shin pads and cleats. When we got home, she had to try all of her gear on immediately to see how it looked. Immediately when she woke up this morning (at 6:30), she asked to put on her soccer shoes! I distracted her with some breakfast to keep her energized for practice, but 20 minutes later she was chomping at the bit to get dressed again. By 8:30 we were all finally dressed and ready to go. We got to the fields about 9 am and discovered that the photographer was not there. We were supposed to be there for pictures before practice, so now we had to watch and wait some more. Finally, around 9:30 a group of parents and kids began to gather, so we joined our team.

I tried to introduced Reese to some of her other teammates and suddenly she got shy, hiding behind me and refusing to let go of my hand. Then a girl approached with a soccer ball and before I knew it, they were kicking the ball back and forth. Once most of the team had arrived, they began practice with a little introductory game. The kids kicked the ball to each other and said their name and favorite food.


We moved onto the field and the kids lined up to practice kicking the ball into the goal. On her first try she ran at the ball and kicked it as it rolled to her. The ball went flying past the goal and out of bounds. The second try she did the same and the coaches instructed her to try to stop the ball first and then kick. By the third time, she stopped the ball and kicked like a pro!


The team we were supposed to play backed out, so we split our 11 kids into 2 teams and began to play. At first she hung back:



Then she started to get into the thick of things:


Finally, she got aggressive! See that arm bar!


I was so proud of her for playing the entire game! Her face was all red and she said she was tired a few times, but then she took off running at full speed, she never quit. After about 30 minutes, everybody was wiped and they ended the game. The kids lined up for fives:


Then finally, they got to enjoy a little snack!


On the car ride home, we asked Reese whether she liked swimming or soccer better? She immediately responded, "Soccer!" Then we asked her whether she liked dance or soccer better? Suprisingly, she again responded, "Soccer!"

Once we got home she wanted her new soccer net and ball out to play with~ I think that we may have created a monster!

Teddy Bear

While watching "Cars" last night, Aidan came up to me crying because Lightning McQueen had left without saying goodbye to Mater. Part of his reaction was from being overtired from a long and event filled weekend, but his reaction also showed how soft hearted Aidan is. He is definitely my little teddy bear!

Reverse bikini

It was warm enough this weekend, that we decided to put on our swimsuits and head to grammy's pool to play. I was helping Reese get dressed by tieing her swimsuit top. As I pulled the top up to cover her chest, Reese protested, "This top needs to cover my belly not my boobs!" and proceeded to pull the top down to cover her belly and expose her chest. I pulled the top back up and quickly responded that since it is a two piece, the top is to cover her chest and some of her belly would be exposed.

Soccer mania

Last night I took the kids into the Y to finally get Reese signed up for soccer. I filled out all of the paperwork and payed the fee, making sure she was officially part of the team before getting her too excited. Even though I tried to reserve my excitement, Reese was pretty happy. As we were walking back to the car, she kicked at imaginary balls and yelled, "Reese scores a goal!"

Even better was Aidan's excitement for his sister. As we were leaving he started complaining, "But I wanted to watch Reese play soccer." I explained to him that it would be a few weeks before Reese actually started to play. Then he got upset that he would not be able to play soccer too. I immediately reminded him that Reese would need somebody to practice with at home and that he would make a great partner.

I never participated in any kind of sporting activity until middle school and by that time lacked the skills and knowledge that most of my classmates had gained by playing on youth teams and leagues. I don't want to go overboard and have her involved in different activities every night of the week, but I would like to expose her to a bunch of different activities so that she can choose the ones that she likes best and begin working on developing her skills as well as building friendships and learning about staying healthy. I don't have any expectations that she become a star athlete or top musician, but rather that she is active and involved in activities that she really enjoys.