22 Weeks and Parker-isms

Drum roll please.............................

There she is!  The belly and the baby (and the booty, haha!).  I was officially 22 weeks yesterday.  All is well in babyland.  I am starting to be able to feel her move more and more, but it's funny because I don't notice it as much.  I'll feel something while I'm cooking dinner and doing ABC's with Parker, and a few minutes later I think, "Oh--that was the baby!"

Body-related things are that I am starting to notice my stretch marks reappearing, my belly-button is getting pretty close to sticking out, and my back hurts pretty much all the time.  Apparently she's about the size of a spaghetti squash right now.  I can't believe that she will be here in about four months!  We have lots to do with the first thing being emptying out the guest bedroom.  We have the bed, two end tables, a tall dresser and an armoire to take out.  Not sure what we're going to do with all of it, but her furniture will probably be here this week, meaning that we would need to pick it up or have it delivered by next week I think.

Yeah, lots to do.  Wish us luck with that!

A few things I wanted to type out to remember about my other baby lately--

-My dad has a big mounted fish he caught several years ago up on the wall in my parents' house.  He told Parker a couple of weeks ago that it was a "biiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiig fish."  Parker's version of fish sounds like, "bot".  Since then, when I ask Parker about the big fish, he says, "biiiig bot!"  If you read it out loud, you'll realize why that's something I'd want to remember!  haha!

-Another phrase Parker really enjoys using lately is, "noooooo, Daddy!"  He says it all the time--even when Ryan isn't around.  He knows that we think it's funny and he says it with the cutest little face.

-We've been trying to talk about the baby a lot with Parker.  He calls her, "sissy," which is so sweet.  It sounds more like, "ditty."  He picked out a Minnie Mouse shirt for her the other day.  I feel like he will "love" her a lot when she gets here.

-He really, REALLY enjoys using our phones.  If he sees one of them laying on the table near us, he gets really super sweet and comes up to us with the biggest smile and kind of turns his head to the side.  It's hard to resist, but we often do.  It's funny how quick the sweetness goes away!

-We currently read five different books each night.  He wants to read his Bug book, Elmo book, Ernie ABC book, Mickey Mouse clubhouse book, and his Duck book.  We used to have it in a set order, but we had a couple nights where he wanted to read them differently, so now we let him pick.  Some nights he ends up skipping the Mickey book, and sometimes we skip the ABC book.  We never know what he's going to choose, but we know that we are definitely not able to do it for him!

-We tell him all.the.time that we love him.  I was with him all day today and probably told him I loved him about 100 times.  He always says, "I love" or "lawoo" back to us.  Today, he finally said, "I lawoo."  He was giving me a big hug at the time.  That is the kind of thing that just melts my heart.  I want to be able to remember that when he wants nothing to do with me later on in life.  Maybe that will never happen??  A mom can dream.

Like I said, just a couple little things.  I'm sure I'll remember more things immediately after publishing this post, but I can add them later.  I want to get better about putting things in that I want to look back on several years from now.  If I could bottle up every day to look back on later, I would.  Until then, this will have to do!

Baby #2 Update!

Parker wanted to write a message to share the biggest update about our sweet Baby #2.....

 

Yep, it's a GIRL!!!!!!!

 Doesn't he look excited??  Haha!  I love the eyebrows.  He lifts his eyebrows up all the time now.  In this picture,  he was doing it because he was about to throw the message board onto the floor.  It was sooooo difficult to get these pictures, but I really wanted them.  He just does not want to have anything to do with the camera.  It's frustrating, but at least I could a couple cute ones.

So we found out that the baby is a girl on the January 13th.  We ended up bringing Parker with us because we were leaving right after the appointment to go on our Charlotte trip.  We let him play on the iPad the whole time in the room because we knew he would be bored and didn't want any disruptions for the ultrasound tech.  There was one time that we pointed out the baby on the screen, and he said, "Whoa!"  That part was cute.

Everything looked fine with the baby, and I was completely shocked to find out that it's a "she."  I was fully expecting the baby to be a boy and asked the ultrasound tech if she was 100 percent sure that it was a girl.  I'm sure she loved that!  It just did not seem like that would happen because this pregnancy has been mostly the same so far.  The only major difference that I've noticed was the horrible heartburn that I had in the first trimester that I didn't have with Parker.  Once we discussed it afterwards, we both determined that we were secretly hoping the baby was a girl but didn't want to fully express that.  We would have been happy to have another boy, but this will make things feel "complete", I guess.

Things have been going really well overall with the pregnancy.  I started feeling the baby move very sporadically about three weeks ago.  Within the last week, I've been able to feel her moving around more, and Ryan felt her move for the first time two nights ago.  Since we found out about the gender, I have been in full-blown online browsing mode.  I've only bought a couple of things, but I'm trying to decide what I want to in terms of decoration in the baby's room and we're also starting to talk more about names.  We haven't decided on anything yet, but we decided a couple of night's ago that we will probably not share her name until she's born.  It's one thing that we can keep as a surprise, and it makes her birthday that much more exciting!

It's my plan to post a belly picture very soon.  Better late than never, right?  I am disappointed in myself for not starting sooner, but it just wasn't on the top of my mind.  It is now, though, and it's starting to stress me out that I haven't done it!  That's going to be the next blog--get excited!

January, so far, in a nutshell

January has been a pretty busy month so far.  With work, a short weekend trip, a scary job situation with Ryan...things have been kind of crazy!  Ryan's job situation was that he wasn't working for a few weeks and wasn't sure if he was going to have a job at all.  His position was eliminated, but the company offered him a different position a couple of weeks ago, so all is well.  While he wasn't working, I started working full time.  I was supposed to work four days per week anyway because our busy season is starting, but I added the fifth day to help make up for some of the money we were missing out on because of Ryan's temporary break.  I may cut back just a little bit within the next couple weeks, but for now things are just crazy busy.

I hate  that I haven't been blogging much. I want to keep this as up to date as possible to help remember this time in our lives later on.  It bothers me that I don't write more often, but at night I just feel so tired and then it bothers me that I don't have "good" pictures to put up.  In general, posts without pictures are just kind of boring, so I figure, "why write?"  I am always taking pictures and video with my phone, though, and I don't know why I don't do short posts here and there with these just to keep things up!

Hence, this post.  Me playing catch-up with a few cute pictures that I want to remember.  Let's begin, shall we?

Ryan sent me this picture of Parker swinging toward the beginning of the month.  He looks so happy and is looking right at the camera--VERY rare!  I love it.

Stacking up his play-doh cups.  He likes doing this and knocking them over just as much as he likes playing with the actual play-doh!  

Parker and Wyatt holding hands at the car show.  They were each holding their Mommas' hands, too.  They did such a good job with the hand-holding.  I had  to get Ryan to take a picture.  So glad that I did! 

I took this picture in the hotel on a short weekend trip we took to Charlotte, NC with my parents and sister. He was reading his Sesame Street book in the bed with me before we went to sleep.  Because of our last hotel experience, we just let him sleep in the bed with us.  It's not worth the stress that it causes all of us to try to get him to sleep in the pack-n-play.  He screams like you're cutting a limb off and it's just not necessary.  We don't let him sleep in the bed with us at home (unless it's majorly extenuating circumstances), so it's not a big deal to do it when we travel. 

PLUS I got to look at these right before I went to bed.  What is it about feet and toes on a child that are so sweet??  I can't figure it out, but I know I love them.

A healthy meal!  I love seeing good food on his little plate.  We really try to give him a fruit or vegetable (broccoli) with every meal.  He eats the same "main" things--chicken nuggets, pbj, grilled cheese--for almost every meal, but we try to change up the fruits plus broccoli.  I look forward to the day where we can expand his culinary horizons a little bit, but for now, I feel that he's doing pretty good, so I'm happy! 

Finally, a picture from tonight.  This is how Parker's hair turned out after his bath.  I dried it off and didn't notice that it looked like this until we were brushing his teeth.  Maybe this is the next big thing in hair?  We'll see.

Up next, an update about my other baby--the one coming in June!  I have a few "good" pictures I need to take to make that post happen.  I'm aiming for tomorrow but we shall see.......

Tiny Bubbles

Parker had a bubble bath tonight instead of a regular, non-bubble bath.  We usually just fill the tub with water and wash him with bodywash, but he was so stuffed up today that we decided to use the bubble bath with vapors to help relieve some of his congestion.  He had a runny nose all day and sneezed a lot.  We haven't heard him cough or sneeze since we put him to bed a couple of hours ago, so maybe the vapors helped!  

He has really been enjoying his new bath crayons in the bathtub.  We started giving him a bath in the regular tub a couple of weeks ago when we had our tub re-glazed.

Parker writes all over the bathtub and Ryan goes behind him and wipes it all away!  He is very paranoid about the crayons staining the tub.  So cwazy!

Love these eyelashes.

Wow, bubbles!!  Seriously--we need to start doing the bubble bath more often.  He enjoyed it!

Alright, the bubbles were great and all but it was time to wash off.  

I cannot believe that on Friday, I will be 20 weeks along in my pregnancy--halfway through!  I regret that I haven't written much about it on the blog so far.  We've just been so busy with so many other things.  It's funny how different things are the second time around.  There is nowhere near as much free time when you have a toddler literally running around the house!  It is my full intention to document the second half of this pregnancy much better than the first.  I plan to start doing belly pictures here and there and giving more "updates" as they come.  I feel like Friday will be a good day to start......when we find out if the baby is a boy or a girl!  Then the planning can really begin and I can start envisioning what my life will be like with either two boys or a big brother and little sister.  We will see....