Parade of Homes 2014

This year for Mother's Day, we got my mom and I tickets to the parade of homes. She had mentioned wanting to go, and I just wanted to spend time with her. So we figured it was the perfect gift for this year. I'm so glad that we did because we had such a good time! My mom came down last week to stay for several days and we hit up the Parade of Homes for a couple of hours each afternoon. (Let me tell you, this pregnant lady was ex.haust.ed by the end of it.) It was fun to walk through some of the giant, completely unrealistic houses, as well as seeing the designs in some of the smaller, simililar-to-our-square-footage homes. Mostly, we just loved spending time with Grandma. Here are some pictures (I had some more on my phone but, due to an unfortunate incident with a pool bag - those pictures are inaccessible). 

 Oh, and yes, I had a hard time keeping Lydia out of the roped off zones in most of the houses. There were just so many fun things to see, and she just fit so well underneath the ropes. Luckily she's well behaved and just liked to look at things - not destroy the pretty staging. The only exception in her "innocent rope dodging" was when she slipped into a small nook/passageway and I couldn't see where it went. We were in a particularly open house, with lots of levels and ledges, and we were at the very top/attic area. When she didn't come back when I called, I started having visions of her falling three stories and breaking all the bones in her body. Panicked, I called for my mom who was one room over and contorted my pregnant body through the tiny passageway to get her. It was ridiculous and my heart was beating a million beats a minute. We later saw that the passageway really did lead to an overhang over the living area with a little rock wall thing that climbed up to it. It's such a blessing that she didn't start trying to climb/jump down. I held her hand a little tighter after that, but even thinking about going back to that house makes me uneasy. Moral of the story: obey the rules!

Again, we had such a good time and we are so glad that we got to go see all the pretty houses with my mom (as well as go out to lunch, and spend several days with her). I think that we would definitely get tickets again! 

Lately...

I haven't been awesome at blogging lately, due to a combination of having too much to blog about - and having too much fun playing and making more memories to blog about. But here are some things that we've been up to lately:

--We've been reading some really good books lately. David's done with the Jack Ryan series and is working his way through the Jack Jr. Series. I read Brandon Sanderson's Words of Radiance in less than two weeks (which is no small feat considering the size of the book and the amount of time I have to just sit and read) - because there was a waiting list of people behind me and I knew I wouldn't be able to renew it. We enjoyed several evenings sitting on the couch after Lydia went to bed, reading together. That's one of my very favorite things.

--Jenna and Camille came to visit for several days and we loved it!  We were pretty laid back, and thank goodness they were willing to come with us while we ran errands and such, but we did make it over to the farm. We absolutely love these girls, and already miss them!

--I really needed to shower one morning, so I left Lydia downstairs watching a Super Why. A few minutes later she came upstairs into the bathroom and we played "put your hand on the shower door so our hands are in the same spot" for a minute. I told her that I was going to rinse the conditioner out of my hair and that she should go get a book to read from her room. As I was getting out of the shower, she came back in carrying her "HippoOpposites" book (her favorite right now), and I looked at her for the first time, gasped as I saw a large bump/gash on her forehead, dropped to my knees by her and said "Oh Lydia! What happened to your forehead???" Her smiling face immediately dropped and she started crying as she leaned into me. I think that I scared her by my reaction because she hadn't been upset before. I have no idea what happened, or whether it was before or after we were playing at the shower door - but this poor girl has another scar to add to her collection. It wasn't bleeding, and wasn't really deep enough to warrant stitches or anything, but it's another "head wound" to add to the list. She now has four scars within three inches of each other - all on the right side of her forehead/eye. I held her for a while, then she asked for some pretzels and a Super Why. She cuddled on the couch for a while, but didn't seem fazed other than that! I can't even imagine what happened, poor girl. 

--My baby brother Jacob graduated from High School! David had work, so he couldn't make it to the actual graduation - but it worked out for Lydia and I to be able to get a ride up to Morgan with Matthew so that David could just drive up afterwards. It was nice to be able to celebrate with Jacob and spend some time with family. The next day we celebrated my Dad's birthday and hung out.  

(Cousin bath time! Lydia loved it.) 

--Ashley and I love dressing up Elsie and Lydia in matching outfits, and even though they had no interest in posing for pictures - I still love these pictures of them (they even have matching hair). 

--Lydia is just really cute - and David is such a good dad. He brought home this notebook from work for Lydia to color in. I just love them both.

--This is one of our favorite games, one that we've played since Lydia first started walking and long before she started talking. Lydia hides on one side of my cedar chest and I hide on the other side. Then we take turns "rar-ring" and running to the other to "catch them". I love it so much. We finally got some pictures of it, and I'm so glad. 

--We planted a garden! And by garden, I mean we hauled in a bunch of topsoil to fill the back flowerbeds where the dirt settled, added some garden soil, and planted two zucchini plants, some pumpkins, and some watermelons. It was a ton of work and just a few plants - but we are starting small and will work our way up over the next several years. (You have to start somewhere, right?)  

So the story continues when we proudly turned on our sprinklers to make sure that all our tiny little seeds would get water and then walked back around the side of the house and saw water gushing from somewhere underneath the ground. David went to turn off the water while I frantically searched for the source of the water with my hand. Turns out... with all the settling dirt, the brown pipe for our plants had kinked (and we may have hit it with a shovel while we were moving the dirt around) and there was a hole in it. Just our luck - it was nighttime (we were finishing up after we put Lydia to bed) and David was headed to Fargo, ND for a work trip in the morning. But I headed to the sprinkler store the next morning, showed the guy a picture of my problem, got all the parts I needed and came home and fixed the sprinkler myself! It was awesome. There are a couple of different ways to finish it off, so for now we still have a lot of extra pipe and a random hole in the ground - but it's functional and I'm very proud of myself.  

--I mentioned that David was headed to Fargo ND for a work training. That meant that Lydia and I headed to Morgan to play with Grandma, Grandpa, and Dante (and Jake, of course). We went to the splash pad, the park, played with Dante all day, and then headed up to Idaho Falls on Thursday to celebrate Jenna's birthday. We had a fabulous time! 

--Last weekend we made it to our third annual Orem Summerfest. We love fun parades and boutiques and everything about summerfest-type things so we try to make it to a couple each summer. Randomly, we've only been to the Lehi Roundup once, but we've been to the Orem Summerfest every year since Lydia was born. It just seems to work in our summer schedule a little better. We don't usually eat there, but this year we had $20 that had been given us as a "date night" and we decided to use that to get some hamburgers, spiral potato-fries, and a snow cone to eat while we watched the parade. We had such a good time walking around the booths, then eating our food and watching the parade. I even ended up with a super pretty sun hat that I've been wishing for all summer. I love this little family of mine and am excited about the thought that next summer there will be four of us on our summer adventures. 

--We've had a great summer so far - so many wonderful things we've been able to do. I have two more things written down in my planner to add to this post - but I don't have any pictures yet, so you'll have to wait to read about the Museum of Natural Curiosity at Thanksgiving Point and our new Nursery chair. 

Bump Update - Baby #2 (25 Weeks)

For those of you who missed the announcement - we are excited to be welcoming a 

sweet baby boy 

into our hearts and home in just 15 short weeks! 

We are thrilled, and just getting more and more excited every day. I'm feeling really awesome lately, I seriously love the second trimester. I'm hardly every queasy, still have (just enough) energy to chase Lydia around, am not uncomfortable yet, and am finally looking "really pregnant". Some people have expressed pity for me being pregnant during the summer - but in all honesty, I think it's going to be awesome because I will be in the second trimester for the majority of the hot part of the summer. Hopefully I won't get really big until it starts feeling a little more like Fall outside. 

We've been hitting up the pool, splash pads, and the new children's museum like crazy - and I think that's helped me feel a little more active. When I was pregnant with Lydia I was teaching all day and that kept me mobile and active, which I think contributed to my positive pregnancy and delivery. I've been a little worried about being at home during this pregnancy, because I'm not one to "work out". Thankfully, chasing a two year old seems to be a pretty good trade-off for teaching 7 classes full of high school students. The only thing I know that I need to do better at is drinking more water. When I was teaching, I'd go through 5 bottles of water a day because I was talking so much and they were always within reach of my desk. Now I have to walk "all the way to the fridge" and I just don't think about it as much. I've noticed a difference in my hydration and really want to do better at that. The only other thing of note is that pretty much nothing sounds good to me. It's not that I'm queasy, or that I'm not hungry, and not even that I don't enjoy the food when I'm eating it. It's just that meal planning is hard because nothing sounds good, and making dinner is difficult sometimes because I'm not really in the mood for what I'm cooking. (Doesn't matter what it is - I'm pretty much never feeling whatever I'm cooking.) The only thing that ever sounds good is a bowl of cereal. I've eaten more cold cereal in the last couple weeks than I have in my whole life. (Mostly for lunch and snacks - I'm still feeling good enough to make dinner every night, and for that I'm grateful.)

Comparing my pictures from pregnancy #1 with my pictures from pregnancy #2 - I think that I'm a little bit bigger this time around - but probably not by much. I just went to a doctors appointment and I think that I've gained about 17 pounds so far. I don't remember exactly how that compares, but I feel pretty good about that. (We don't have a scale, so I don't know my "pre-pregnancy" weight and I only can see weight gain during those doctors appointments - I figure that they will tell me if anything looks off.) Baby boy is measuring exactly on track (well, the uterus is at least) and his heartbeat was about 155.

We've been having a really hard time with names. Like, there are zero serious contenders. We have a rotating list of about five names written on our mirror in our bathroom - but I don't know that I'd say that any of those names will be the one we choose. More likely, there is a better name out there and we just have to find it. Any awesome baby boy name ideas out there? We need some serious inspiration.

More than anything, I'm just really grateful to be pregnant. We've wanted this baby for a long time, and just know that he belongs with our family. I'm grateful that I've been feeling so good because I know that there are many others out there for whom pregnancy is such a struggle. I'm grateful to be pregnant because I know others who wish they could be. We've been so blessed, and I count those blessings every day - and will continue to count those blessings long after this little boy is born.