A Stress-Free Thansgiving

We had a wonderful Thanksgiving here in Maricopa doing absolutely nothing. By a lucky coincidence David had the holiday off from both jobs and we decided that instead of running around all day visiting family and doing a lot of driving that we would just stay home this year. To further simplify things we celebrated the day with frozen pizza and bagged salad and ended the feast with root beer floats. We played games as a family and basically just vegged out and enjoyed each others company. It was wonderful.

I was also 38 weeks on Thursday. Here's a new pic. Hopefully the next picture I post will be of Maylee. :-)

I'm Official!

So today I am officially 36 weeks which means I am cleared to have my homebirth! Yea! I am starting to feel uncomfortable and really big now and when my midwife checked me yesterday I was 2 cm dilated, very effaced and the baby was at a -1 station. What does that mean?

Nothing really. You can be dilated for weeks before you go into labor. But heck it's better than not being dilated at all! My midwife predicted that I would go all the way to my due date which I thought was a little mean. :-) All of my labor companions have been putting in their "requests" for when I should have the baby. But I had a good talk with Maylee and told her to come whenever she wanted to because, heck, I'm always here.

Last Saturday my friend Mandy threw me a baby shower and it went so well. I had a great time and got so many cute things for my little girl. Here's a couple of pics:

Halloween

One of my favorite parts of Halloween is going to the pumpkin patch and picking out pumpkins. Here's the kids at the patch and me showing off my 34 week belly.

Here's the results after the great carving adventure. Guess which one David carved?
Here's the kids in costume. We were so late getting ready that I didn't get any individual pictures of my little witch or Luigi. Oh well.
Successful Trick or Treating

Baby Shower

My sweet friend Mandy is throwing a baby shower for me on Saturday Nov 7th. I'm sending out invites but I know that I am missing emails and addresses for lots of people. So please if you'd like an invitation would you email me? Sorry, I am so disorganized! Pregnancy brain, what can I say?

Swine Flu

You think that your kids never listen right?

Wrong!

Today I walked past my 6 year old daughter who was tucking her favorite stuffed animal into bed. Apparently her stuffed wolf "Dulcie" has the swine flu and is highly contagious. She has to stay in bed until her fever has been gone for 24 hrs.

I've never talked about the swine flu with her so I guessed she picked it up from watching the news at night.

99% Sure

So we finally decided on a name. (Though as always I reserve the right to change my mind at any time). Anyway, we're 99% sure that her name is going to be:

Maylee Joann

Vacation

Thanks to the generosity of David's Mom, sisters, and my parents we were able to spend a weekend in San Diego this month. I can't even describe what a wonderful time we had, or how much we needed that break as a family. So I won't try....here's a bunch of pictures of our trip.

Here's the kids at the dolphin tank, that dolphin sat there for 5 minutes or so giving Eli kisses.

Me and Emma feeding the dolphins...so cool!

You would never know from the look on her face that this was one of Emma's favorite parts.

Me looking very pregnant at 28 weeks.

Eli at the Shamu show. We actually had to go to this show twice because even though we sat in the "soak zone" we didn't get wet at all. My kids were in tears because they wanted to get wet, so the second time we sat on the third row and we definitely got wet.

David and Eli on Elmo's flying fish.

Really wet after the river ride...luckily they were already wet from the Shamu show.

Eli's a little freaked out by the giant walrus behind him.

Showing off their new SeaWorld shirts...thank you Granna!

Eli asleep at the dinner table.

La Jolla Beach.

Eli in the sand.

Emma in the sand.