Merry Christmas

What a fabulous Christmas we had this year! It was a nice a long break for all of us. I was so grateful to be able to spend over a week at home with my family. I loved waking up and just hanging out with Deo, Trey and the dogs all day! I actually cried taking Trey to the sitter this morning because it was so nice being home with him...and I think he liked it, too. Although I am a little sad to say that he was excited to go back to the sitter and see "Nic-Nic" (he'd been asking to see his friend for a few days now) but I guess that's a good sign that they treat him well!

We usually do Christmas Eve with my family and Deo's side on xmas day, but my brother and sister-in-law's kiddos ended up being pretty sick so we decided to do our family xmas a day early and head up to his Deo's parent's house a day early. Christmas Eve morning came around and here is Trey being super cute about Santa visiting:



We played it pretty low key this year with Trey's gifts, his "big" present was a Toy Story table and chairs that he loves to color on and play with his new Handy Mandy tools.


After we opened up our gifts, we headed up to Northern AZ (about an hour outside of Flagstaff) and got to wake up xmas morning with his family. He had such a good time just hanging out with family. We stayed up there for a few days, got to play in some snow, and then headed back to Tucson for the remainder of year.

So What Do We Think? Take After Deo or Not?

Turns out Deo and my instincts were right; we are having a baby GIRL! It kind of freaks me out still that our doctor said, "I'll give you 98% assurance it's a girl." That's a big 2%! I know it's never 100% anyways, but hopefully I can get past the 'what ifs' in the next 4 months.

I didn't realize how excited I would be to have a little girl. But I am SUPER excited now it's official (confident to the 2nd standard deviation). We both told the doctor beforehand we would be shocked if it was a boy. Yes, there are benefits to having another boy, especially since they'll be sharing a room for the time being. But all those are now thrown out the window that I can buy cute little dresses and outfits; let's face it, the selection for girls is just way better (1 rack of boys compared to an entire floor of girls).

Well, you can decide for yourself if you hope she takes after Deo....

Early Christmas Present

My hubby and I went cyber-Monday shopping and purchased a new camera....Canon Rebel T2i! It finally came in and I couldn't wait to start playing around with it. Here some of my amature photo taking and editing results...just playing around trying to figure out all the neat features.

Heartburn is the name of THIS game!

So it's been awhile so I thought I'd give a pregnancy update. I had my last doctor appointment which we did the some more blood draws and testing and so far so good. We heard the heartbeat again which is always nice and relieving to hear. I'm also feeling lots and lots of movement now, which is really really low in my pelvic area (which I don't know if that's a good thing or bad thing or doesn't really matter). The baby is quite active in the morning and evening and Deo's even got to feel it move. I try to get Trey to feel it but he just insists on sticking his finger in his own belly button and say "baby" instead.

As far as symptoms go, I'm feeling pretty good. Pretty much once I got out of the 1st trimester the extreme nausea faded and I started to get an appetite back. I haven't really had too many cravings for anything, except I want very potent food (hot, spicy, salty). Anything sweet is kind of off-putting and I think that's why I want very savory items because everything I eat tends to taste really sweet and starchy. I'm still pretty tired but I'm not feeling nearly as fatigued as I did early on, although I do pretty much crash out at about 9:00pm every night and on the weekends sneak in naps when I can.

The only other major symptom I have is extreme heartburn! No matter what I eat, when I eat, how I eat, I get heartburn. I feel like my stomach is in my throat (which is probably is) and have crazy heartburn all day. I hate Tums and Pepcid (the chalky texture makes me gag) but I'm throwing them like there is no tomorrow with no avail.

What else is weird is that I haven't really had any of the other symptoms as I did with Trey (yet). With Trey I had crazy acne (I felt like a 16 year old boy who worked at McDonald's) and had crazy upper back pain. I get a little lower back pain if any this time and my skins has actually cleared up pretty nice this time around. The other odd thing I noticed is that with Trey, my hair was so nice and shiny all the time and with this one my hair seems straggly and frizzy.

I've only gained about 5 pounds which I'm happy about, although my belly is quite larger at this point than it was with Trey. It's also kind of sad that I'm still fitting into my regular clothes that I wore for the year after Trey was born. I'm actually fitting into some clothes now that I couldn't fit into after Trey. I think that's just telling I gained a lot of weight with Trey and didn't do a good job of losing the weight until after about a year when I went on Weight Watchers. I know the weight will come though so I'm not worried!

I think that's about it. We will find out the gender in mid-December and I'm still trying to decide how I want to find out. I'm thinking of waiting until Christmas but we'll see. I'll be sure to let everyone know once we find out.

Spooktacular Halloween!

I had such a fun Halloween this year. It's fun to see Trey starting to get into it and he was such a good throughout all my kooky stuff I wanted to do. I apologize in the advance this blog is a little picture heavy but I feel like there is so much to cover. I also apologize that our camera's flash broke so we're having a difficult time getting good pictures. Maybe for Christmas Santa will get us a new camera!

The festivities started off with an early Halloween party at Trey's sitters. Two of the little boys will no longer be at the sitters so Angelique wanted to throw a costume party while all the kiddos were there. Since it was a week early, and we didn't have Trey's costume yet, we rummaged through his drawers trying to find something. Luckily, I remembered we had bought Trey a little British Soldier pajama set while we were in London, so add a golf club muff and voila...our little British Soldier. No one really got what he was and all the other kids kept saying he was a fireman...but I thought he was cute nonetheless.

Next we carved our Jack-o-lanterns. I was surprised by how much Trey got into it. He loved the squishy pumpkin guts (probably a little much as he started flinging them around by the end of the craft. We usually try to find perfectly round and orange pumpkins, but this year we went different and tried to find goofy, odd shapes. I think they turned out better than usual!








The next thing I wanted to do was do some type of baking. I don't really like to bake all that much, but I've really been missing doing some good old fashion family time in the kitchen together. I have fond memories of doing cookies and cupcakes with mom around the holidays so it always is a fun I try to do. My friend gave me some cute little cupcake decorations so Trey and I made yummy gluten-free cupcakes (so Daddy can have some yummies too) and had fun icing and sprinkling them.

For dinner I wanted to do something fun. Initially I had wanted to plan an entire haunted Halloween themed dinner but then lost the gusto after doing the cupcakes. So I decided we would go with Monster Heads with Brain Chili.

Finally, Trick-or-Treat was upon us. Chucky (Trey) headed over to the Thompson household to pick up Wonder Woman (Ella), a Mad Scientist (Cole who was asleep so I didn't get any pictures of), and a Charliesaurus, (Charlie). We went to a local toy store, Mrs. Tiggy Winkles, for a costume parade and games. It was a little overwhelming for Trey but I think he had fun and started to put it together that he would get candy out of the deal. The kids trick-or-treated through the plaza and then headed back to the store for apple bobbing, pumpkin bowling, and face painting. After that we headed over to the Sam Hughes neighborhood for the remainder of the trick-or-treating. Sam Hughes does a really good job of decorating their houses and having spooky, haunted lawns to walk through to get your treats. Trey did great at the first few houses, complete with saying "treeeeat", "thank you," and waving good-bye. Then he got tired and wanted to be held all the time. We made it up and down about 3 or 4 streets before he was about done. Oh, and there was even a house that had a telescope set up and you could look through it and see Jupiter which was pretty cool for us adults!




By the time we got back home, it was about 8:00pm. Our neighborhood was jumping! There was cars and kids everywhere. The sleep Trey perked right up once the trick-or-treaters started coming by and I think he liked this part the best out of it all. He got all excited screaming, "candy" whenever there were kids at the door and had fun putting the candy in the kids bags. In the half hour that we gave out candy we had given out 3/4 of our goods. Not too shabby. Not too much later...our little Good Guy was tuckered out. All in a day's work!