A sneak peek

On Friday I went and had my 20 week ultra sound done. Everything looks really good, 10 fingers and 10 toes. One head(I don't know why I was worried about that, but I was) a healthy beating heart and a beautiful spine. So I would now like to introduce you to my Ladybug:

That's right it is a girl! I didn't think Daddy had it in him! :) I have had a feeling from the start that it was a girl. It was always a girl in a pink frilly dress in my dreams and we immediately agreed on the girl name and were bickering until the night before about boy names. That's the way it was with Bear too. We had his name picked out before I was pregnant and could never agree on a girl name. Daddy also had a dream about 6 months ago that he was playing with Bear who was about 6 or 7 and there was also a little girl who was about 2 years younger.

Well they are going to be almost exactly 2 years apart. She is due on June 9, we are probably going to schedule the C-section for a few days before that. I am not worried about size or taking her too early. The ultrasound guy said that she was measuring in at 22 weeks. And if she is anything like her brother(the gargantuan) I do not need to worry about her being too small.

She is so active. I felt her first kicks on December 21. She is so much more active than Bear was at this stage. I don't think she sleeps. That or she kicks in her sleep. Bear loves to lay on my tummy and get kicked. Every time she kicks, he has to kick his feet and say "kick, kick, kick!"

I am already going nuts about baby girl stuff. I can't wait to dress her in ruffle butt diaper covers and little bonnets. And one day tutus! I have picked out and bought her bedding. Actually I bought her bedding the night before I found out it was a girl. Boy was I lucky. Because I love this bedding so much, I would have made a little boy sleep in it! Here it is and the crib I want to get too:
I had so much fun decorating Bear's room, I can only imagine the fun I am going to have with a little girls. My mind is already reeling from all the possibilities. I need to slow down though. I keep reminding myself that I have 4 more months to get all this done, I don't need to do it all tonight, which is how I am starting to think and plan and act.

Desitin

For future reference:

Desitin wipes very easily off of dressers, trucks, books, book shelves, cribs, and skin:

Desitin does not come off of clothes, sheets, blankets, hair or Does with out a lot of hard scrubbing.

Catching up...

Christmas(yes I realize this was almost a month ago...)

Nana and Pop Pop (notice the snow in the back, yes it did snow on Christmas morning.):

Cousins:

Helping mommy make breakfast:

ELMO! (He still won't go near this thing while it is giggling. He tickles it and runs across the room to a distance that he deems safe):

Since then...

Taking a picture of mommy:

Playing the trumpet:

Funny sleeping positions:

He took apart the salad tongues and was using the spoon part for rice:
The first black eye:

Fingerpainting:

Reading time:
And the kids:

Sing-a-song

This kid loves to sing. He loves to sing songs that he knows and he also loves to sing songs that he makes up. I can most of the time tell which song he is singing. The ones I can't tell, are the ones I say he makes up. :) He doesn't sing all the words of the song, just enough to tell though.

Jingle Bells goes like this:
"Deedle bells" sung about 20 times and then a "Hey!" at the end.

Apples and Bananas:
"Eat, eat eat, applessss nonanas." Over and over.

For twinkle twinkle, he just sings "tweetle tweetle dar" over and over.

And my favorite is Hakuna Matata. I am officially Hakuna Matata'd out. EVERY time we get into the car he starts in, "Tu Tata? Tu Tata?" So we have come to a compromise. He listens to it one time when I first start the car and then I get to listen to my talk radio. Most of the time this works, but every now and then I will get a teeny tiny voice pleading from the back, "Tu Tata pwease?" And I love love love to turn the volume down in the middle of the song just so I can listen to him sing. He is so funny.
I love listening to him when he is in his own world. He will be playing with his cars, just singing his heart out about cars and trucks and the sounds they make. It makes my heart happy.

The other thing that really makes me feel good is how much he loves to read. We read probably about 2-2 1/2 hours a day total. He is constantly bringing me books to read to him. "wead boot mommy?" And he is really into the story books now. The ones that take about 20 minutes to read through. He sits very patiently and listens so intently. It makes me very hopeful that I am doing something right with this kid.

I took him to swim lessons on Tuesday and he did so well. He got right into the pool and started blowing bubbles, then he would look at me and say "good?" Then we worked on putting his ears in the water. He surprised the heck out of me when he went ahead and did a full bob up to his eye brows 3 times in a row while blowing bubbles. He was so proud of himself. And I was proud of him too. He is growing up so much every day.

Today he was playing with elmo and elmo fell over and smacked his head on a truck, Bear reached right over and picked him up looked him right in the eye, and asked, "otay? otay?" And then gave him a big kiss where he had bumped his head.

But he isn't all sweet and tender all the time. This little boy is most assuredly a boy. Today he made a game of jumping backwards off the back of his dump truck and landing hard on his bum. He would laugh his head off and then do it again. I am going to start calling him Crash, I don't know if it is because the word "walk" is no longer in his vocabulary and he has to run everywhere he goes, but the kid is constantly smacking into everything. Normally he just bounces right off and continues on, and sometimes I have to tell him to shake it off.

It's official!

We have moved into the big boy bed! Last Wed night was the first time we tried since the "up wandering the house in the middle of the night incident", and it was an ugly night. He screamed for an hour banging on his door. I had to go in and calm him down he couldn't even breath he was so worked up. So I turned on some music and crawled in bed with him and we just layed there. Soon I worked my way to sitting next to the bed and then I was sitting in the rocker and then out the door. He cried for a little bit but finally fell asleep. He then woke up at 1:30 screaming and trying the door knob. But thanks to my friend Heather and her wonderful gift of a door knob thinga majiggy, he couldn't open it. He finally fell back asleep and woke up again at 5. The next night was a little less painful and each night since then has been easier and easier. Last night, he went and turned on his music, crawled into bed, we said our prayers and our nightly "I love you's," and that was it. No crying to knocking on the door pittifully crying out, "mommy! mommy!" And tonight was the same. Now we have had some incidents during this transition. One night I was sitting on the couch and heard a thud. I looked at Tela to see if she had rolled off her bed, and then went back to check on Bear. He had rolled off his bed onto the floor and was sound asleep. He did it again that night at about 12. The thud was so loud that it woke me up in the other room. I went in to check on him and he was standing at his crib, laying down on the mattress sound asleep. And then there was the morning I went in and he had taken all of his diapers out of the package and stacked them up on the dresser. This morning I went in and sometime during the night he had brought almost 20 books to bed with him. He was sprawled out with 4 books tucked in each arm and the rest around him. In the mornings he has to hand me everything he slept with and tell me what it is. Doe, might, duck, goose, book, elmo, and bear are the regulars.
Now naps are a whole different story. Those are ugly still. Most of the time he ends up sleeping on the floor. He stands at his door jiggling the knob calling out for me like he has been trapped in there for days. Today he got into the Desitin jar and spread that all over his dresser. But he put the lid back on after he was done the little sweetie. Hopefully the nap thing will come soon. Hopefully.

This is more for my benefit.

No one asks for their life to change, but it does. It's what you do afterwards that counts. That's when you find out who you are.

Extended rituals

We have our bedtime rituals. We put on jammies, brush the teeth, read a story, pray and go to bed. It takes normally about 30 minutes. The last week or so it has taken about an hour. We didn't add anymore books, it just takes us that much longer to get through one book. He has to point out everything on the pages. Tonight we read Are you my mother. He had to point out the bird on every page and tell me what it says. He had to point out the cat and the chicken and the dog and the cow and the car and the boat and the plane and the snort. He had to tell me what they all were and what they said. I just stopped reading about halfway through, and we just looked at and talked about the pictures. Last night it was a 5 page board book that had 3 words on every page. He had to point out each facial feature of the baby and tell me what it was and where his was. He is so much fun. Every month that he ages, I always say that this is my favorite age. They are all my favorite. I don't think that there has been an age that hasn't been my favorite. Hopefully I can say that for many more to come.