36 Week Checkup

I had my 36 week OB appointment this morning. The midwife asked if I wanted her to do a cervix check today (they usually wait until 38 weeks), and of course I did. I am 1 cm dilated and 60% effaced, which she said pretty much meant nothing. (1 cm is better than 0, right?) She also said that my cervix was starting to feel soft, which means that any cramping that I feel is “money in the bank,” as she put it. I start on my weekly appointments now, so maybe there will be some kind of progress next week!

Andy and his dad got two coats of primer up in the nursery over the weekend and today I bought some more primer for one more coat, plus the purple paint. I guess I should hurry and get a dresser ordered soon too!

This past weekend I met up with my old friend Jeanna from elementary/middle school. We found each other on Facebook and it turns out that she lives about 10 minutes away and has a little girl who is Audrey's age. Here is a picture of the girls at the restaurant where we had lunch.

This next photo is of Audrey's artwork on the downstairs toilet. She has bathtub crayons that she loves - I have to force her to get out of the tub most nights because the water gets cold and she is still drawing away. She found a regular crayon in the living room and figured that the toilet is porcelain like the tub, so it should be okay to draw on.

At least that will be easy to clean off and she didn't draw on the walls!

You Make Me Feel Like Dancing

Audrey's great uncle Ronny bought her the Wiggles "You Make Me Feel Like Dancing" DVD for Christmas and it is now her favorite video to watch. I am embarrassed to say that last week, when it was super cold outside, we watched it 4 times throughout the day. Audrey has learned the chorus lines to most of the songs and wants whomever is nearby to dance - "Dance, Roscoe! Dance the Wiggles!"

Audrey has been really sweet with her baby doll lately. She feeds her, wipes her mouth, wants to change her diaper and when Audrey gets ready for bed, she has to get jammies out for baby to wear too. Let's hope she keeps this up!

As sweet as she is, she is also developing some bad habits that come along with being 2 and being independent. If she doesn't want me to do something, like take her upstairs for a nap or bedtime, she'll tell me "No ma'am! No!" She will also yell "night night" at things she doesn't want. For example, if I'm trying to put shoes on her, she'll hit the shoes and say "night night shoes!" in a stern voice. We cannot figure out what that means!

Here is a belly shot that I took last Thursday when I was 34 weeks, 5 days along. No wonder my lower back hurts so much!

We are slowly getting ready for the arrival of Baby 2. I finally took the sports themed wallpaper border down from the bedroom. Here is the blue ugliness that Andy gets to paint over. One solid midnight blue wall and midnight blue sponge paint along the bottom of the other walls.

I want to paint the walls a light purple and put yellow accents up and am having a surprisingly hard time finding yellow stuff. You would think that a lot of people do their nursery in yellow, but all of the girl accessories at the store are pink, green and purple. I found one yellow gingham hamper online but it's in a white wicker basket and I'm not huge on wicker. I may just have to suck it up and get it - only 4 1/2 weeks to go!

Potty Training Update

We had kind of a mini-breakthrough today, but I'm not sure if it means that she's ready or not ready. I started the day by bringing her potty chair to the powder room and we had one of her dolls go potty. Audrey played that game for quite a while and had Puppy go pee pee on the potty. She then grabbed the potty chair and drug it out to the living room in front of the TV, so I thought, "What the heck - maybe she'll sit on it to watch her Disney cartoon."

I stripped her down and she sat on the potty for quite a bit, but never peed on it. I had some of her big girl underwear downstairs, and I noticed that every time she asked to put on a pair of panties, she would pee soon afterwards in the panties. I would try to get her to sit on the potty every once in a while and even bring her to it before putting the panties on and after she peed, but she'd still scream and resist.

I thought it was a good thing that she seems to know when she has to pee and asks for the panties, but Tina seems to think that it just means that she prefers to pee with pants on. That along with the fact that she is resisting sitting on the potty when asked to may mean that she's not ready.

I don't want to push it on her is she isn't ready, so now I'm back to square one trying to decide whether to move forward or forget about it until after the baby comes. I wish you could just hire someone to come in and potty train for you - it's pretty time consuming!

There's not a lot new going on here, but I haven't updated in a while so I figured I better post something! I had an uneventful 34 week appointment this week, which was nice. :) I mentioned to the midwife that I was having a lot of Braxton Hicks contractions and she said that it's common to have those more the second time around, plus I'm almost full term, so it's no big deal. Considering that we are not yet prepared for Baby 2, it's kind of a big deal to me! I can't believe that I only have 5 1/2 weeks left!

It's been my intention to have Audrey potty trained by the time the new baby got here, but I am not confident that it will happen! Last weekend, I put her in her big girl panties (the cutest, tiniest panties you ever did see) and she got a little upset when she'd have an accident, but not enough to want to go sit on the potty. She sat on it a couple of times, then she'd scream and run if I tried to take her into the bathroom. I have to figure out a way to make it a positive, fun experience. My only problem is that Audrey has a strong opinion on what she wants to do!

Here are some pictures of Miss Audrey concentrating very hard on painting her nails. I will wipe most of the polish off and let her have at it.

Tomorrow is supposed to be really windy and cold, so maybe we will stay in and work on more potty training. Wish us luck!

See You Later, Cow!

Audrey's favorite new game to play is to yell "See you later, alligator" when someone leaves the room, and you have to yell "After a while, crocodile" back to her. She will continue this until you are out of ear shot. The other day, Andy was making up other animal rhymes to yell back. She hasn't quite grasped the concept of rhyming yet, so now she yells "See you later, cow" to me. Given my current big-bellied state, I'm not sure if I should take offense to that or not!

Since we've hit the new year, I've been in major nesting/panic mode. We haven't really done anything to get ready for the new baby yet. While Andy was out hunting last weekend, Mom came up and helped me go through Audrey's old baby stuff. Andy had brought the newborn to 3 month clothes down from the attic and I couldn't believe how stained some of them were. Audrey must have spit up a lot more than I remember and I suck at laundry! We sorted the clothes and put the clean ones in an old dresser and Mom brought the rest home and miraculously got the stains out!

We got the rest of Audrey's clothes boxed up for the attic and moved some of my stuff out of the back bedroom. I had to have Andy make room for my stuff in the guest bedroom closet, which he had filled w/hunting clothes.

I learned what a crazy pack rat Andy is during this process. I found an old nylon sleeping bag cover with a draw string top in the closet. Andy does not have the sleeping bag that goes into this cover anymore, but he freaked when I went to throw the bag away. "What are you doing? That's a perfectly good bag!"

"What the heck are you going to do with an empty sleeping bad sack?"

"You can do lots of things with it, like put laundry in it."

"When have we ever needed bag for laundry??"

So, in an effort to keep his beloved bag, Andy is now using it in our closet to hold his dirty laundry! Meanwhile, the back of my Xterra is full of my old stuff to drop off at Goodwill because I'm learning that if I haven't looked for it or touched it in the six years we've been in the house, I probably don't need it! It actually feels pretty good to declutter the house!

Now the back bedroom just needs to be painted and we need a dresser for the room. It's going to be tough to paint over the lovely dark blue and dark blue sponge paint that came with the room - I'm glad I'm not the one painting it!

Today I've been cleaning the floors and picking up Audrey's toy tornado in the living room. I then cleaned out the freezer and fridge - I had stuff in there that expired in '07! I also made a casserole to put in the freezer. My goal is to make at least one freezable meal a week for after the baby comes - I have two in there so far, so we will be able to eat dinner twice. ;)

Happy New Year!

I hope everyone had a safe and fun New Year's Eve. Although we were invited to a couple of parties, we decided to stay in and relax since we have been so busy the past month or so. For some reason, Andy thought it would be relaxing to have the boys come over and spend the night. I was a little hesitant about the idea, but it turned out all right!

Tina and Jason brought them over and after we all had dinner, Andy set up a tent in the living room. Here are some shots of the kids practicing sleeping in the tent:

Tina and J snuck out around 8:30ish (with threats of cutting our phone lines and turning off their phones!) and we tried getting the kids settled around 9:30. I had the three toddlers pretty calm in the tent, so I sent Andy and Tyler upstairs so we could have some quiet. Unfortunately, the twins then thought it would be fun to throw themselves against the pillows and kick the walls of the tent. Audrey was so tired that her eyes were practically rolling back in her head, but she kept getting up to join in the fun and was wandering around in a daze.

I had Andy and Tyler come back down and Andy set the tent up in front of the TV so that everyone would sit down. I tried to take Audrey up to her room, but she said that she wanted to sleep in the tent, so I left her with the guys and went upstairs to bed with the dogs at 10:30.

The kids fell asleep soon afterwards and slept pretty well until the next morning. Jack whined a few times when he lost his paci or puppy (at which times Miss Bossy would wake up and tell him to lay down and go to sleep) and Miss Bossy popped her head up and smiled at Andy a few times (he slept on the floor outside of the tent door). Here are the sleeping kids/whiney Jack - these were taken right around midnight:

All in all, I think they all had a great time (I did, since I had the whole bed to myself) and maybe we've started a little New Year's Eve tradition with the kids. Next year, Tina and J can keep all five kids at their house though! ;)

32 Week Checkup

Today I went for what was supposed to be a 15 minute OB checkup. This baby girl likes drama (remember when they couldn't find her heartbeat at the 12 week appointment?), so I got sent for an unplanned ultrasound at this appointment too. My doctor was concerned because I have only gained 16 pounds (which is not enough for 32 weeks) and my belly was measuring at a 27 week level. He wanted to make sure that Baby Girl was growing okay.

When I was about this far along with Audrey, I was also measuring small because I was carrying so low. Considering how this one is always pushing on my bladder, I suspected that it was the same issue, so I wasn't too concerned.

After having to be worked into the u/s techs crazy schedule, 2 hours later I finally got another peek at Audrey 2 and sure enough, she is down very low. Everything looked great and I had to laugh when the tech said "Wow, she's got a lot of hair already!" It looks like we are going to have another long haired little girl!

The nurse that walked me up to the checkout counter was looking at my file, noticed the estimated weight that the u/s tech wrote down and said "Oh my! She's really big for 32 weeks!" I checked babycenter.com when I got home to see how much a 32 week fetus should weigh, and it says "Your baby...weighs almost four pounds." My baby, however, weighs 5 POUNDS, 3 OUNCES right now!!

I'm not sure how she can be so huge, yet I've barely gained any weight and am measuring small!

In Audrey news, she has been doing a lot of super cute girlie stuff lately. The other night, she was looking at my toenail polish and decided that she wanted to paint her toe nails herself. I wiped most of the polish off of the brush and let her have at it. She was so serious as she held her little feet up and tried to get the polish on her nails. Afterwards, she had to do her fingers too and was so proud to run and show Daddy her nails!

Last night, Andy stuck one of his tee shirts on her as a dress and she decided that her stuffed animals needed dresses too. She went to her shirt drawer and we had to dress up four of her animals. She told me that her mousie needed a new diaper and thought it was pretty cool when I took out one of her clean diapers and put it on her stuffed mouse. She had to run and show that to Daddy too!

She has also been talking about Baby Sister a little bit. There was something at the store that she was looking at this weekend, and when I asked her if she thought we should buy it, she said something about "baby sister, blah blah blah." I'm assuming she meant that baby sister needed it? Last night I asked her if Hazel slept on the blanket at the foot of her bed and she said, "No, baby sister." So she is either getting the concept that there is something called a Baby Sister coming, or she thinks Hazel is her baby sister!