And Now There Are Three..

The day finally came last Wednesday that our newest member of the family decided to make her appearance. We have been hit by the kid tornado. Sometimes I look around and laugh at all of the little bodies in our small house. Hubby took two weeks off to be with us and help me heal and adjust. He has been working really hard to keep everything together. It has been really nice to just be together as a family of   five.

I can't quite remember what day I took this picture of all of them on the couch. I am pretty sure it was the first day I left the bedroom. I think it was Friday. Look at how snugly they are. If you look really close you can see R just tanked out sleeping in her daddy's arms. She has always had a soft spot for her daddy and it was really nice that after I had the baby she has been able to be clingy to him.

Sweetie also came down with a nasty case of the hives. She had them for several days. At first we could give her relief with some Benadryl but by Saturday she refused to swallow it. We still are not sure what caused them and we are suspecting a mild food allergy.

Here is our little Bean all snuggly and sweet.

Big Brother has been super sweet with his newborn sister. I cant quite figure it out. He has always been good at picking on R and I was nervous how he would treat baby A. As it turns out he just wants to give her soft kisses and pats and hold her nicely in his lap. I guess it is because he is a little older now and he can tell how little she is.

 I have been having a hard time taking pictures of R with baby A because she is a little rough. Still she is getting good at giving kisses too.

Waiting for Baby

Its been quiet around here and I have been just waiting to have this baby. It keeps snowing and  I don't think I have been outside in a few days. I like the snow. It makes things cozy and I have been preparing my home for her arrival and the work it will take to get her here.

At first when I found out I was pregnant I was really upset. Mostly because my last pregnancy was still so fresh. My memories of labor and delivery were so fresh. I couldn't comprehend another nine months of feeling sick and uncomfortable. Now that its has been almost two years of being pregnant I cant really remember what it feels like to be normal. I have the knowledge that I will have more energy and no longer have heartburn but I am having a hard time imagining my life that way.

My official due date is tomorrow and last week I decided that I needed some projects to take my mind off of the waiting and wondering when this baby would come and what the labor would be like this time. I was pleasantly surprised with baby 2 how much easier it was than baby 1 but I am a little nervous about baby 3 for some reason. I decided to finish an old project that has been on the back of my mind since we moved into our house. I did a blog post of it way back when and you can see it here. All I had left to do was the binding and thanks to the internet and Pinterest I was able to find a couple of tutorials on how to do a binding fast and easy. It didn't turn out perfect but it is finished and I am happy.

Here is another project I finished. I got this idea off of Pinterest as well. They are burp clothes. I used some fat quarters that I had lying around from a project I thought I would do almost a year ago but never felt quite right about, and some old towels I had. I was really tempted to use some of my more tattered cloth diapers but decided to go with the towels because I thought they would look better. Normally when I use something for burp clothes I use my infant sized prefolds because they are just so dang adsorbent, but they are not very cute out in public. I am hopeful these will be adsorbent as well. I don't know about you but something can be as cute as it wants but if it doesn't work I will use something that does.

Here is a picture of our back porch  It is my staging ground for our home birth. It turns out that you have a lot of stuff to gather to have a baby at home, especially if you are going to have a birth tub. It is nice that we have a room to shove it all in so it doesn't have to take up a corner of our living room.

I am anxious to get this baby out of my body. I am ready to feel and look normal again. I love how right after  I have a baby I am so happy to eat. The negative associations that have built up around food for the past nine months immediately go away. Last time we ordered in Indian food and if we can we are going to do it again. It was sooooo good.

I am nervous about what labor will be like and how long it will be. I am nervous about how it will start. Even though I am doing this for the third time I still worry about my water breaking and soaking the bed while I sleep. Deep down I know I can do this at home, in the setting I have chosen surrounded with the people that I know. I know that once it starts it will be ok and I will make it to the other side. Its the anticipation that makes it hard.

I'm going to hope and wonder again if this baby will come tonight.

Our little Girl.

Here is our little sweetie. Now that she is one I thought I would tell you a few things about her...

She is walking and has been since the night before her birthday,

She is getting pickier about her foods.

She loves to snuggle blankets.

She is starting to work on her language skills, copying words we say to the best of her ability.

She loves to try to put things on as if they were clothes, always around her neck and whatever she can drape around herself.

She loves the coat her Grandma sent her for her birthday and if it gets left out she insists on wearing it.

She wants to do what her brother does and play with what he is playing with.

She really likes  to play music.

She is starting to be interested in books. She brings them to me and we read them. Her favorites right now are Richard Scarry's Boats, My Very Fist Book of Colors by Eric Carle, and Sesame Street's Bubbles Bubbles.

She likes to play and is very good at independent play.

She still really likes to play ball.

She has four teeth.

She gives kisses and hugs.

She has taken to stuffed animals and likes to hear their animal sounds and get kisses from them.

She growls when she sees a dinosaur.

She has crazy mad scientist hair that stands up and is whispy.

She is getting better at naps.

She is generally happy and easy.

She loves to snuggle, and that is one of the reasons we call her sweetie.

It Was a Very Merry Christmas.

We had a very relaxed Christmas this year. We had a nice time opening presents and we spent they day at home together relaxing in our pajamas. I couldn't have asked for anything better since I am so enormously huge with baby 3. I cooked a fancy and simple meal and we spent the whole day playing with our new toys and watching A Christmas Story (we only watched it once but it took all day with interruptions from kids and meals and such).

Here is buster in the early stage of unwrapping. It was really fun to see the excitement he had this year now that he is 3 and fully understands what is happening. The only thing that was hard for him was stamina. He got so much cools stuff he was a little lost. He didn't know what to do with him self and after 2 hours of unwrapping he lost interest and just wanted to play.

 Here is one of the cool presents he got. It initially was my idea but in the end his daddy executed it. He loves to drive cars and machines and such so I thought it would be fun to make him a canvas with roads on it. At first we thought we would paint buildings and scenery but then last minute (day before Christmas eve) we decided to just leave it green. It was a combo of me being to pregnant to crawl around on the basement floor to help paint it and the idea that with out buildings and scenery it was a little more open ended. He can use his imagination to build things out of blocks and cardboard and/or we can buy him city sets from Melissa and Doug as future presents to add to it. I think Busters Daddy did a super good job painting it and am really happy with how it turned out.

This is one of the few pictures I was able to get of little sister as she was sick on Christmas day. I would say it was one of the only bad things of the day. It was a bummer but as a parent, if your kids are going to not feel well it is nice for it to be a paid holiday and be able to stay home with them and relax. At least that's how I felt, even though it is daddy that actually goes in to work. She spent most of the day on one of our laps just snuggling. She had fun with the presents for about a half hour and then she was spent. I think that is why it took so long for the presents to get unwrapped and why her big brother got so burnt out. He ended up having to unwrap a lot of her presents because there wasn't much room for me to do anything but hold her.

This picture is silly because of the faces on Buster and his daddy. Our little guy recently took to superheroes (wonder who showed them to him?). All he kept talking about is spider man and captain america. He got a mask and shield and then proceeded to try to attack his dad. This face he has is him trying to not smile and be serious. It was pretty silly.

We hope you all had a very merry Christmas too.

This One's for Sweetie

 I am a little behind but wanted to post some birthday pictures of our little sweetie. She turned the big ONE just before Christmas. We had a small party for her and tried to make it a very special day

We decided to make it easy and had homemade pizza and cupcakes for dinner. I put up a few decorations and piled all her presents on a table in the living room. When I went shopping for the food I decided to pick up some fancy fruity soda in bottles. When her big brother took a drink of his he asked us if his drink had spikes in it.

She ate her pizza in her party seat like a champ. When she got to the cupcake we lit it up and sang to her. She tasted the frosting made a funny face and then didn't eat it. It was really silly. I guess she was just shocked by how sweet it was. I tried really hard to keep her away from sugar until her party. So her birthday cupcake was pretty much a first sweet for her.

She was pretty good at unwrapping her gifts. She got a lot of really nice presents. Many super cute clothes came her way which she was in need of. We got her a dolly and she also got a cradle from her Grandma. I was a little surprised at how much of a hit the doll was. She was in love with it and so was her big brother. We had to keep telling him that it was her little doll because he would take it away and play with it.

 It was a good party and we are so happy to have her in our family. Happy Birthday Little Girly!

Getting ready for Christmas...

 We have been getting ready for Christmas around here. I have been starting to come up with some fun things to do as family traditions and have also decided to make 5 new matching stockings for our growing family. One of the traditions we are going to try to do is build a gingerbread house every year. I even came to find out that all that yummy stuff needed to make them will never go to waste because daddy wants to eat the house with the kids after Christmas...yuck. I really want to bake the gingerbread at home and build our own designs but we have decided we will just use kits. Just for a few years until the kids can help. That works out great for us because they are faster (great for short attention spans) and smaller which is good for our small house. Lets just say that all Buster was interested in this year was getting parts of our house into his mouth. We had to really watch his little hands because they were super fast at grabbing candy and gingerbread and moving towards his mouth. He kept saying "that house looks mighty tasty."

We went and cut down our tree from a tree farm and were a little surprised at how expensive they are here. They are at least 20 dollars more here than back in Bellingham. It was a fun time, and we kind of had to do it because big brother kept talking about how we were going to go cut down a tree from our front yard. That is what we did last year, unfortunately for us we were all out of small pine trees this year so we went to a tree farm.

Here is my guy trying to smile in front of the tree. He is in that phase now were I say "smile" and he says "cheese" while making an awkward face. The tree we got is super sharp and prickly. We based our decision on size but also thought that the sharp needles would deter little hands from messing with it. I think the only hands it deters are mine. Both kids are not bothered by how much it hurts to try to touch it. Needless to say I went out to buy a few more packs of shatterproof bulbs because the glass ones I have seem like a bad idea for a few years. 

We love our sweetie too so I added a picture of her here doing one of her signature faces at the dinner table.

And last but not least some live action of the sillies. Daddy says brother has good beat.

The Kitchen

I realized recently that when we moved into our house I purposefully left out the pictures of our kitchen. One of my friends asked me about what my kitchen looked like and I replied that I had a few things to do to it then I would post some pictures. Then I found out that I was pregnant with baby R and I stopped caring about how ugly my kitchen was and just tried to survive. When my parents came out for her birth and for Christmas last year I think they were a little disturbed by some of the aspects of the kitchen that I had gotten used to living with for nine months. When we bought the house I came up with a short term fix for some of the storage issues we had in our poorly laid out kitchen and I thought I would just slam something a little more permanent together including some new counter tops and a new sink in within the first year. Now that we have lived here almost two years I have come to despise the layout of the kitchen and have a very clear picture of what needs to be moved and done to make it pleasantly functional.

Do you see those nasty cabinets back there? When we bought the house they were down in the basement. They had probably been there since sometime in the seventies, perhaps earlier. I am basing this assessment on the fact that we have a porcelain brown sink and some seventies looking tiles for a backslash in the kitchen currently  These cabinets are almost 80 years old and may even have been built by the builder of the house. I think they were the original cabinets in the kitchen.The drawers are heavy and have no gliding mechanism and they had a super ugly fake grain paint job.

Here is a better close up of the nasty paint job. The very first thing we did as soon as we moved into the house was haul those cabinets up from the basement and give them a good cleaning and put them in the back of the breakfast nook. I had to do this because we had no where to put food and pots and pans in the kitchen as it was. They were super dirty and I didn't even have a counter top for them. When I had baby R my dad worked really hard and installed a counter top for us (again out of the basement).

Here is my kitchen as it is today. Last January I started painting the bottom cabinets all the way around. I was going to paint the top ones as well but got a little burnt out and also decided that I didn't mind the wood with the blues we had in there. I used a oops paint that I got at Loews  for 5 dollars, which I also used to paint our "shoe room" as well. I really love this blue and have started using it in other areas of the house too. 

When we finally do get a new kitchen (I hope the year 2014) I am planning on a similar paint scheme. There are original hardwood flooring under about 7 layers of linoleum and sub floor. I have plans to move the stove  and fridge which are just out of view on the right side of the picture.  

And that's our kitchen.