3D ultrasound pictures

We had our 3D/4D ultrasound today in Clarion. It was amazing! We were able to see the contours of her face and limbs. She has Grace's nose and full lips. We saw Emilia moving her tongue and her eyes. She had her hands in front of her face the entire time. No matter how hard the sonographer tried to get her to move, she kept her hands right by her face. She sucked on her forearm and fingers most of the time too. (I bet she's going to be a pacifier kid.) She even managed in one picture to get her thumb into one of her nostrils!! What a great experience!
(You will have to excuse the fact that they didn't spell my first or last name correctly. Hey, I got the ultrasound for free!!!)
Oh and you can click on each picture to make it bigger if you'd like.

More 3D ultrasound pictures

Building blocks

We had yet another snow day today. The National Weather Service had our area in a Winter Storm Warning with freezing rain and 6-8 inches of snow expected. So both Paul and I were home with Grace today and she absolutely loved it!
Lately Grace loves to stack things - blocks, books, clean clothes. If it can be stacked, she loves it. We found some big, thick Lego blocks at a garage sale awhile back and had been keeping them in storage. We washed them up this morning and let Grace try them out. I'm not sure who had more fun with the Legos - Grace or Daddy!

Pretties

During our time spent on "house arrest" (aka bed rest) Grace is keeping things on the comical side.
Today after she woke up from her nap, she decided that she wanted to play dress up.

More winter crud

It just keeps on snowing and the temperatures have stayed near the zero mark for quite some time. All this weather has played right into the survival of the winter crud viruses. At our house we have now passed everything around three times. Grace is now over pneumonia and Paul finally got to the doctor where they loaded him up with nearly $100 worth of antibiotics! Just as I had gotten over my last round of bronchitis and upper respiratory crud, I got sick again too. This never ending round of medicine, sneezing, coughing, etc. actually sent me into pre-term labor over the weekend. At just 24 weeks this was pretty troubling. I visited the doctor on Monday and have been put on one week of bed rest. I'm already into day two and am tired of it already. How women do bed rest for weeks and months at a time I will never understand. I would go crazy! Grace and I watched her favorite movie, Annie, three times yesterday and thank goodness for TIVO because we've seen Sesame Street twice already today.
I'm not allowed to lift anything other than Grace so my choices of things to do around the house are pretty limited - no laundry, no vacuuming. And believe me at this point I'd actually LIKE to do those things. Maybe I'll actually try to read a book - is that possible with a 1 year old in the room? I found invitations for Grace's early birthday party in May. Maybe I'll work on those - three months in advance.
Wow am I bored!
This is going to be one of the longest weeks of my life....

Happy Valentine's Day!

Happy Valentine's Day!
(We are celebrating tomorrow when Paul has the day off. He's taking a personal day in hopes of getting more rest to recover from the winter crud. But Grace is already planning on a morning Sesame Street marathon with Daddy.)
Grace picked out Daddy's Valentine's Day present yesterday. She found a baseball rug in the dollar area at Target. I let her walk by herself (holding my hand of course) through the store in hopes that she'd wear off some energy last night. She saw the baseball and stopped dead in her tracks, pulled it off the shelf and said "Daddy ball." For $2, I just couldn't help myself. Paul was rushed this morning and didn't get a chance to open Grace's present which she has reminded me about for the last two hours. I finally had to hide it until Daddy comes home from rehearsal tonight!



Grace loves her winter hat - so much so that she wears it in the house most of the time too.

Grace's favorite pasttime - and the scariest one for mom and dad - climbing the stairs.

This picture is from this morning. Grace as you can see got into her diaper bag. She evidently decided that it was time for a new diaper because she got out and is laying on the changing pad, had the wipes ready and is trying to put her own diaper on while lying down. I watched this process for about 10 minutes and tried so hard not to laugh!!

Disaster in the making

After a busy day at the office and an hour of running errands with Grace after work, I realized that it was past our usual dinner time and Grace was getting hungry. With Paul in the middle of rehearsals for the spring musical, it was just Grace and I for supper. Since we were still in Fort Dodge I decided that we would stop at Subway to get a sandwich. Keep in mind that this was the first time that I had ever tried to do a full meal out with Grace by myself. We have driven through and gotten a cheeseburger and fries before but had always eaten them in the van. So this was to be a new experience and I was confident that we could make it happen without any problems.
My overconfidence should have been my first inkling that this was disaster in the making.
Grace had no problem helping to order her kids turkey sandwich and even told the cashier "thank you."
But as soon as we sat down I knew that we were in trouble.
There was a group of kids (three kids probably in second or third grade) that were running around the store as crazy unsupervised kids do. Their parents were busy making out in a booth. (Evidently Subway is a romantic place for PDA - who would have thought!?!?) But Grace saw these kids running around and thought that she wanted to join in.
After finally getting her to calm down and sit in a booster seat, she started eating her sandwich. I thought we might be in the clear. Instead a nice older man stopped to tell me how pretty that Grace is. Kind of creepy, but hey I couldn't agree more. But his stopping by put a stop to the eating and a start to more showing off.
At this point more people were coming in and ordering their supper and being a people watcher Grace was more interested in the people than she was her sandwich. I tried to get her to eat more of her sandwich but then one of the unsupervised kids threw his milk across the eating area. That scared Grace and she started crying uncontrollably.
At this point I had had enough. I packed up our sandwiches and drinks, put Grace's coat back on her and loaded it all up in my hands and carried everything - screaming toddler and all - back to the van.
Once we were back in familiar territory, Grace was fine. She ate her sandwich on the way home and even asked for more milk.
While the ultimate outcome was positive - Grace ate supper - I don't think I'll be trying a solo dinner outside the house anytime soon again. Having someone else to help with the feeding and entertainment part of dinner is just so much easier.
But I think I'm more traumatized by our supper adventure than Grace is!!

Ultrasound info

Some people have had questions as to what exactly a 3D/4D ultrasound is. Here's a link to the Clarion hospital's web site that explains it better and shows a couple of pictures. (Sorry you'll have to copy/paste the link. I couldn't get it to work as a hyperlink.)
http://www.wrightmed.com/default.aspx?Page=RadioElectiveUltrasound
So we might be able to see (if she cooperates) neat facial details and more.
We have the ultrasound on the 29th.
And it's STILL snowing here. We have flurries although they say that it was supposed to have stopped snowing earlier this morning. It hasn't. We've had about 6-7 inches since noon yesterday. I'm so ready for spring!!

More snow

It just keeps snowing and snowing and snowing. We're in the middle of yet another snow storm and they are predicting around 6 inches in our area. Of course all of the schools let out by 1:30 p.m., so the kids aren't complaining. But Paul still has musical practice. I'll be happy when the spring musical is over and he isn't driving home late at night in the snow and ice!

We signed up today to have a 3D/4D ultrasound at the end of this month. Our hospital doesn't offer it, but the hospital in Clarion does. It's elective but will be fun as we didn't get to see much of Emilia with our 20 week ultrasound as she evidently was feeling a bit shy. These ultrasounds look so cool too as they are 3D. I have had friends get ultrasounds like this and they look so neat! I'm excited to have it done... not to mention the fact that I get to write it off on taxes as I'm doing a story on it for work.

Grace is still teething. They say that she should have all of her teeth by the time she's 2. But with the way she's going she'll have them all in the next month or so!


This is Grace's "leave me along I'm reading a book" look.

Life's little things

I have come to appreciate the little things in life - ohh, like breathing!
Paul and I figured out yesterday that the last time that everyone in our house was healthy was before the Christmas break.
Paul was sick over Christmas. Grace caught a cold shortly after that. She gave the cold to Paul and just when I thought we were all in the clear... I got it too. Just as I was getting over my cold and had santized every surface of our house, Grace started teething. Of course this means the hands are constantly in her mouth and so she got sick. What was a cold turned into a bit of pnemonia. She thankfully is over it, but now I have a cold again. Yuck! When will it end!
Of course I now realize how much I relied on medicines like NyQuil and Sudafed because being pregnant I'm not able to take any of them. So I'm toughing it out in a not so tough way.
I chuckled on Tuesday because the nurse put the thermometer in my mouth and all I could think of was "Hurry and get it out! Both my nostrils are plugged and I'm running out of air!" Just about the time I was ready to say something, the thermometer beeped and I could breathe again.
I hate looking at my house right now. Having been sick for so long I feel like my house is a mess. I can't wait to feel even a little bit better so that I can get little things done again.
The doctors said that this seems to be the way that the crud is going around this year and that people are getting sick numerous times and just can't shake it. I'm just tired of being sick.
It's the little things I can appreciate now - like the fact that for a few seconds I could breathe through one nostril. It only lasted about 10 seconds, but hey - that's progress!!

Dressing up

Paul's cousin Carolyn found a great used kids clothing store in the Ottumwa area that has some really cute items. (As many of you know we have a great store just outside of Fort Dodge that we frequent. Rarely does Grace get new clothes because Secrets carries such nice, good quality used clothes.)
We received a gift sack from Carolyn and Steve's little boy Garrett full of clothes for Grace. She oooohed and aaaahed over them - especially a cute little jean jacket.
She wore the cutest jumper last Sunday. It's adorable, yet Paul and I couldn't stop joking about the fact that with the jumper and the pigtails, she looked like Olivia from the Cosby Show.

A little of this, a little of that

We have had quite a few questions in the last few weeks about what we will need for Emilia when she is born.
Well after a scary dream last night that I couldn't find any of my baby stuff, we started taking inventory of what we have so that we could let family know if there was anything that we needed. And really with another girl on the way, there really isn't a whole lot that we need or want.
But we created an online/instore Target registry with a few things that would be helpful and even splurged on adding new bottles to the list. (We bought the cheap ones last time and after a year and a half of use, many will be making the trip to the landfill.)
We really don't need any clothes. We have so many tubs of little girl clothes in the storage room that we are actually running out of space.
We really don't need toys either. I have tubs of toys packed away that we haven't even played with!
So while we really don't like asking for gifts of things, we've had a lot of requests lately so we decided to make a list to hopefully make it simpler.
(Oh and the next time that I'm in Target, you can bet that I'll be getting the scan gun so that I can add diapers and wipes - the best baby gift a person could ever give!)

New video

I have two videos that I've been meaning to post for months. You can tell Grace is younger when they were taken. But they both tickle our funny bones, so enjoy!