Baby #2

I am conflicted as to whether I want baby #2 to come quickly so I can sleep on my stomach again or have baby #2 keep cooking because he's easily portable and I am sleeping through the night (for the most part - minus the middle of the night bathroom breaks).

Here is a picture of me from this week. Please disregard the shadow which possibly makes me look even larger than I am.

I think this week makes week 37. I think you can tell that the little man has dropped as my stomach looks lower.  The doctor seems to think this baby is coming a little earlier than 40 weeks. She's the expert but if this baby stays put until 40 weeks I will cry.  A doctor should not get a pregnant woman's hopes up.

Due to the guilt I feel for rocking Miss M's world I have bought her a few things.  I realize she will be fine. I need to steal the glider and ottoman from her room and put it in the baby's room.  I don't want her to feel like all her stuff is being stolen and given to the baby. We are planning on buying her a replacement chair that can grow with her but we haven't gone shopping and it's more expensive than we are wanting to pay right now.  Thus to compromise we bought her kid chair/couch. I told her we were going to buy her a new chair and she just kept telling me she wanted a Doc McStuffin chair.  I found one on Amazon of course and bought it. She loves it. She wants to sleep in it and take her naps in it but we're sticking to her crib for real sleeping arrangements.

Miss M's first official ice cream cone

We took Miss M to the local ice cream store Friday night.

She knows what an ice cream cone looks like from various outlets ie books, clothing, television.

We don't usually order ice cream cones b/c we would prefer something mixed with candy or chocolate.

Andrew ordered a scoop of chocolate swirl ice cream and I ended up with an ice cream cone for Miss M and I to share.

The key was we were going to share it.

There was no sharing.

She anxiously awaited her ice cream cone.

She didn't share her ice cream cone.  Wait - I did get to eat the cone when the ice cream was all gone.

She did occasionally say to me, "Momma what you get?".

She calls ice cream cones, ice cones.

Some of my other favorite Miss M saying right now are when you tell her something she responds with "I know".  I tell her she's cute, funny, silly, tall, or insert adjective and she simply responds with "I know".

When she wants us to look at things now she'll say "check this out".

She also apologizes for everything. She apologizes when it doesn't make sense to be apologizing. She simply says "Sorry momma" or "Sorry dada". I have tried to correct her and tell her she doesn't have to apologize for everything but she doesn't get it. I reminded myself that there was going to be a time in the near future when she stops apologizing. Therefore, I decided I am just going to let her apologize as much as she wants to bank for those times in the future.

I am sure the girl has more one liners but these are the favorites that I can think of before bed.

Miss M's 2 year old pictures

I have been scheduling and canceling appointments with JCP for Miss M's 2 year old pictures for 6 weeks. I finally gave up. Every time I scheduled them I had to cancel them due to another commitment or a sick person or a gash on her head from Baby Jack's birthday party.  I have a list of excuses as to why they haven't been done yet.

I found a woman who was looking to expand her photography portfolio and was charging a reasonable rate to take pictures at our preferred location. I thought this would work well because Miss M is much more herself at home than trying to force her to smile on a white sheet at JCP.

She did pretty well. I am happy with the pictures we got for the money we paid.

Here are a few of my favorites.

This one is cute because Miss M loves nothing more than to play Hide-and-Seek.  It is questionable who is the hider and who is the seeker most days.

 We had to give her a sucker to entice her to play along with getting more pictures taken.

 This was just a random candid picture. I like it.

 Me and my baby.

Random pictures

Here are some pictures that were on my phone.

Miss M likes to talk to her daddy on the phone. She's really talking to him in this picture instead of pretending to talk like usual. She won't really talk to anyone else on the phone. 

 My new best friend. Peapod.  You buy your groceries online and they deliver them to your house. Genius. The groceries were cheaper than in the store and if they weren't cheaper then they were at least the same price. Since I am a new member to Peapod I get my groceries delivered for free for 60 days.  And when the 60 days is over it's still only $7 for delivery.  And you can get them as fast as the next day.  Yes. Please.

Miss M loves Wheat Thins for some reason. I don't like them but she will get them out of the pantry and eat them for snacks or breakfast.

Miss M got new shoes this weekend.  We're surely not going to lose her in a crowd with those bright yellow shoes on.

We went for a bike ride around the block since the weather was decent on Sunday.

Miss M enjoyed grilling some hamburgers and hot dogs with daddy this weekend.  

The girl who was terrified of grass has now demanded that she not wear shoes or socks outside. This could make for an interesting summer. Let's hope it's a short lived battle.

We hung curtains this weekend in Miss M's room and the living room. It was an all day affair.  Miss M likes to be in on the action and play with all the tools that are out and typically prefers the tools that someone needs at a particular moment. 

She enjoyed using the pliers to pinch cotton balls and move them to a bowl.  Quite educational on my part if I do say so. I mean seriously we dominated the coordination skills this weekend. I tried to get her to play the same game with her tools and she wasn't having any of it. Apparently she only wants to play with the real deal.

She was also fascinated by the stud finder and paint roller. I am a little skeptical of the accuracy of the stud finder since it found a stud in Miss M's leg.

The Easter-Palooza

We woke up Sunday to beautiful weather and a few last minute things to get done.  We didn't have an Easter basket for Miss M outside of the one she was receiving for the egg hunt so thankfully Aunt Ness had a present for her to open! Aunt Nessa is always prepared.

Here's a glimpse into how our new living room furniture turned out which will be another blog post when I can get some decent pictures of the area without the coloring being off. We love it. Sitting in here just makes me happy.  So does Miss M.  

The kids started arriving around 9:30 and the egg hunt transpired around 10:30.

I was very anxious to see how five two year olds would do hunting eggs. It turned out that 3/5's of the two year olds didn't care one bit. They found an egg or two and thus began the consumption of candy. They were the kids who know there were treats inside the eggs and knew there was no reason to hunt for 20 of them when there were treats inside the ones they found.

Miss M and her friend Tadgh (pronounced like tiger (without the er - it's Irish) were into hunting eggs and thankfully collected most of the 100 eggs which were scattered throughout the yard.

Here's a representation of what egg hunting looked like in the beginning. The little guy in the green and blue sweater is Tadgh. He was very focused on eggs. The three inside the play set weren't really interested. The play set was Miss M's Easter present thus why she didn't receive an extra Easter basket filled with goodies.

 Miss M filled her basket.

Tadgh's basket got so full he finally just set it down, found the eggs, and tried to stack more eggs into an overflowing basket.

 Miss M took a rest for some treats.

Everyone was able to hang out in the backyard and we had enough amusement park toys to keep the children entertained.

Eventually we had to come inside to get all the food out of the oven and on the table. All the two year olds (with the exception of Miss M) took a nap during dinner and thus we were able to have a fairly adult-like dinner which doesn't happen very often. 

Easter-Palooza was a success. I had so much fun and I think everyone else did too...maybe not Andrew and Annessa who voluntarily took over clean-up duties.  The clean up is the hardest because it's the least amount of fun but everything was washed and dried and put away before the evening concluded.

Monday was rough. I was exhausted. The adrenaline from Saturday and Sunday kept me going those days but Monday I found it difficult to want to do anything. Miss M found it difficult to go back to life without people everywhere and go back to a life without treat filled eggs.  I think we've almost got ourselves sorted out and it's almost Thursday.  

Here's to hoping there is a second annual Easter-Palooza!

Easter-Palooza Preparations

Since we didn't have any plans to travel for Easter we decided to host Easter at our house for some friends.  It started out with an idea of inviting a few people and their children over and cooking a ham and then exploded into Easter-palooza.  We have a lot of friends who don't have family in the area and they weren't traveling either so we invited them all.  We ended up with 11 adults 8 children (there were 2 under the age of 1).

Thankfully, the weather was amazing. It was probably the nicest day we've had thus far this year even though it's the end of March and we shouldn't be having 30 degree days consistently.  The children were able to play outside and stay entertained. They all consumed a ridiculous amount of candy and therefore they weren't distracted from their playing to want to go in and out of the house to eat.

I had bought each of the kids an Easter basket and filled them with goodies. I also bought what seemed like a reasonable amount of plastic eggs but after watching the children hunt for eggs it occurred to me that we could have filled half has many. I think Annessa and I filled around 100 eggs for 5 kids.  In my defense, there were supposed to be 6 kids but one was late.

We started our Easter-palooza preparations on Saturday by practicing an egg hunt (to ensure Miss M was prepared for Sunday). We then picked up Aunt Nessa (who was instrumental in the success of Easter-palooza) and came home and started food preparations.

 I don't remember if she's the hunter or the finder here b/c she ended up wanting to do both.

 She realized the eggs weren't empty.

 Keeping a watchful eye on her loot.

Helping Aunt Nessa make cheese puff bags to look like carrots for the easter basekts. 

 Helping Aunt Nessa peel and core apples for the tart.

We worked all day and night to get things prepared for Sunday. All our preparations paid off when we were able to enjoy our guests and the nice weather and not frantically worry about all the things that needed completed Sunday. I am not convinced Aunt Nessa will sign on for the second annual Easter-Palooza due to the amount of work she completed.