Halfway There

I'm at 20 weeks with this pregnancy now. On the one hand, it seems kind of momentous to be halfway through. On the other hand, there's still a long time left! Here's what I look like at 20 weeks:

I'm pretty positive that I'm bigger than I was at this point last time. Oh well. I know that it's common to get bigger earlier with each successive pregnancy, and I do prefer looking clearly pregnant and not just bigger.

The best thing about 20 weeks is the ultrasound! It was so much fun to get to see our baby in such detail and get to know them a little better.
1) The baby is a girl. We are super excited!
2) She is a major, major wiggle worm. They had such a hard time getting her to stay still for anything! I've also been feeling her kick and move for the past few weeks, which is about three weeks earlier than I could with Miles.
3) She's looking healthy and right on time for her April 8th due date. I really would like her to come on her due date. Not only is it Easter, but it would be 4-8-12, which would be easy for Gerrit to remember.

We immediately went out to buy her some little outfits after the ultrasound. Shopping for a girl is so much fun, and I wanted to buy her something before her loving aunts and grandmas went to town on the shopping ;)

See? Little girl clothing has so many more cute details than little boy clothing.

The Truth about Sick Days

Sick days when I was a kid were so peaceful. I got to stay home from school and my mom would take care of me. I could watch cartoons, and then there would just be a few worksheets to make up.

Sick days as an adult are kind of different. Unfortunate thing #1 about sick days: They travel in packs. Also, they stop being very restful after the first one. Here's a case study of our past week:
Wednesday: I sprain my ankle and am couch-bound for the day.
Thursday: I hop, scoot, and crawl around the house until Gerrit can come home.
Friday: My stomach starts to hurt that evening and I spend the entire night miserable with a stomach bug.
Saturday: I am so exhausted from the stomach bug that I sleep most of the day. When I am awake, I am really weak.
Sunday: Miles has a nasty cough. We stay home from church. My stomach still does not feel awesome.
Monday: I find Miles with a crib full of vomit. Awesome. He's also wobbly on his feet, so we take him to the doctor. It's either a mild concussion or a mild stomach bug. I spend the whole day checking his pupils, his walking, and fever every five to ten minutes. That's about as fun and productive as it sounds.
Tuesday: A rare day of health!
Wednesday: Gerrit comes home from work with the stomach bug. His nausea is so terrible that it triggers hyperventilating and his whole body starts going numb. We take him into the emergency room at midnight, leave Miles with neighbors, and come home at 2:30. Miles wakes up at 5:30. We both cry.
Thursday: I take care of a sick Gerrit. I take care of a tired Miles. We all sleep a lot.

See? A vicious pack of nasty sick days. Boo.

That brings me to unfortunate thing about sick days #2: nothing else in your life takes a sick day. In the few healthy breaks we've had, there's been mountains of laundry, a house to clean, a toddler to take care of, groceries to be bought, and lots of other personal and church responsibilities that have now surfaced with increasing urgency. It was pretty stressful and overwhelming, and especially lame when you're weak and tired from being sick and injured. It's enough work to make you want a sick day just to recover, except now I know better :)

The only cure? Fun things to do when you finally feel better to try to forget you were sick at all.

During Tuesday's brief moment of health, we dropped Miles off with my sister while we went out to dinner at Sammy's and then to a Savion Glover concert. Miles had a blast, I really enjoyed myself, and Gerrit at least enjoyed dinner.

I went to the American Crafts warehouse sale. Super-fun for me, but Miles kept yelling "I'm done!" on every aisle. All things considered, he did pretty well, so I bought him a cookie afterwards. Some weeks call for bribery.


Treats for me and treats for him...

We also went to the Riverwoods Christmas lighting tonight. They had so many pretty lights and fun things to look at, and there was even a free Jon Schmidt concert!



All the stores had a little gingerbread house. These are the ones from Blickenstaff's (toys and candy) and the Provo Beach Resort.

I just love this polar bear ice sculpture!


Miles got a glow necklace and a cookie. He was very, very excited.
All of this was almost enough fun to make me forget how lousy last week was, but only almost...

Gerrit's Life Philosophy

My aunt Paula put this up on Facebook last week and it pretty much describes everything you need to know about the way Gerrit thinks. He would like me to add that they should have included bailing twine and super glue.

I cannot even begin to count the number of items he has fixed with these four things. I'm sure that just about every door in every house we've lived in has been sprayed with WD-40.

We have a kitchen chair held together with bailing twine. When we move, everything is tied very, very tightly into place with the same twine. He bought the hugest spool of twine I've ever seen when we got married. I thought he would never use it, but he's already used at least half of it. It's intense.

My watch is currently held together with super glue. So is part of our dresser. The backseat of Gerrit's car is held together by duct tape. It's a very, very old car. These are all benefits of having a very handy, thrifty husband :)

Oh So Coordinated

This has been my one of my closest companions for the past few days. I managed to sprain my ankle this past Wednesday walking on a completely flat surface. Clearly, I have exceptional balance. Luckily, Gerrit was able to come and pick us up from the rec center, because there was no way I was going to be able to get us out of the gym, drive home, and then get both of us up the three flights of stairs to our apartment. Gerrit was definitely the super-hero of the morning.

I think the most embarassing thing about the situation was that I was just walking. I have pretty weak ankles, but I usually at least manage to be doing something *slightly* challenging when I fall.
Here's some of my past sprains:
-Playing volleyball
-Doing step aerobics
-Dancing in my kitchen (I did not say they were cool things, just slightly more challenging)
-Walking across rugged terrain

This, though, reaches new lows of uncoordination. The only small blessing is that I was able to put weight on it again by the time the terrible stomach bug hit. It's been kind of a bad week around here, health-wise.

Leaf Hunting and Toasty Ghosties

Here's the daily activities that I did with Miles for the month of October. It's pretty fun to do them together, even if they don't last very long each day.

Week One:
-Connect-the-dot letters. I drew dots for the letters and then we traced them together. He likes letters, and he always likes it when I let him use the markers, but I think it will be a little while until he can write them on his own.
-We had construction day. We watched them work on the construction site across from our house and then we built a city with his blocks.
-We made a little bed for Teddy out of a cardboard box and one of his baby blankets and practiced putting him to bed. This was actually his favorite and we play this game together all the time now.
-Story time had a birthday theme, so I wrapped some of his toys in foil or gift bags and we got to unwrap them.
-We went to a little gymnastics gym with play group. Miles especially loved the parachute and the hula hoops!





Week Two:
-We went leaf hunting. Apparently, October 10th is a little too early to go leaf hunting, so we ended up making a detour to the playground. He liked finding all the different colors.


-Drumming with pots and pans. Popular, but very loud.
-One of his favorites is to take pictures and play with them in a picture editor. He thinks its really funny, and we can talk about colors and shapes. Here's the three that we played with this time.



-This would have been story time, but he woke up with a fever and eventually ended up throwing up all over me. Oh, did I mention that this was a day where Gerrit was at work for 15 hours? It was a long day.
-We looked around the house for examples of "two," and then we glued them on paper. He liked this one a lot.


Week Three
-I had read in a magazine about making shapes with yarn on sandpaper. It was a total failure, partly because we tried to do it right before naptime. Not a great plan.
-We went to the big city playground. It's a big wooden playground with a science theme and really fun, so we decided to go before it gets too cold.
-Just playing with Legos :)
-We sorted all of his stuffed animals by color, and then we had a little tea party with his animals. I was surprised by how well he did with putting them together by color!
-We dipped our feet in paint and then made footprint ghosts. He loves ghosts (there's one on Kipper), and he liked helping me draw the faces on. He did not like getting his foot painted.

Week Four
-We cut ghost shapes out of toast and then covered them with marshmallow fluff and made faces with mini chocolate chips. Again, he loves ghosts, and they kind of tasted like s'mores. Yum!

-Usually, he likes playing in blanket forts, but I waited until too close to naptime again so he hated it.
-I cut a pumpkin and some facial features from felt so we could make all kinds of jack-o-lantern faces. None of his really looked like faces, but he did have fun!


-We put together clip art pictures of the seasons and then we watched some Sesame Street clips. We finished by figuring out that it was fall right now and finding more leaves. I think that 10 minutes is about as long as he can handle!
-This was my sick day. I let him read a lot of stories and watch extra TV. That was all the motivation I had!

Your Dream Stinks. I Was Talking to Her.

Miles had a dream. It was to dress like Flynn Rider from the movie Tangled for Halloween. I was happy to make that dream come true. Now, why I thought it would be an awesome idea to try to make that vest without a pattern after I hadn't really sewn anything in five years is a different story all together. Let's just say I was very relieved when I finished it.

Flynn Rider also likes pumpkins.

We did a little trick-or-treating at the grocery store in the morning. He had to check his candy to make sure it was still there.

He really loved being Flynn Rider. When we held him up to the mirror, he laughed and clapped and was just so happy. He even said "yes" when I asked him if he wanted to show his costume to his aunts and uncle, and he hardly says yes to anything. We spent a few hours on campus hanging out with them, and we also got to meet a girl dressed as Rapunzel that let him hold her stuffed Pascal and a few college-aged Flynn Riders. It was pretty exciting.



He really, really, loves his aunts and uncles! Who wouldn't?

Combining being dressed as Flynn Rider with trick-or-treating was probably one of the happiest hours of his life. We went to a trunk-or-treat instead of going door to door. I was so glad that the trunk-or-treat was scheduled for Halloween since I was not looking forward to going up and down all the stairs in complex. Miles loved picking out his candy and putting it in his Elmo bucket. Anytime I would ask him to follow me, he would say "I don't want to!," until I told him they had candy, and then he would yell "Yay!" Like I said, it was his best day ever.

I really couldn't resist buying a frying pan from the dollar store. It was the perfect accessory, even if he made me carry it the whole time during trick or treating.

We let him watch a little Tangled before we went out to help him get really excited.

Miles at 2.5

As of last week, our little man is officially two and a half. Here's what his personality is like right now:
-He loves to read. You can find him with a book in hand all the time. He even can recognize a few words.

-He still loves his blankie and teddy. It's so sweet!

-He likes to be "mommy's good helper." He helps me spread the peanut butter on his sandwiches, put apples into bags at the store, put his Legos back in the box, turn out the lights, and throw away his diapers.

-His favorite store is Macey's (our local grocery store.) I am not even kidding. He loves riding in the "car carts," which actually do look like cars, and he loves that he gets Smarties at the end.

-His favorite TV show is Kipper. We think it might be giving him a little bit of a British accent. His love of Doctor Who and the TARDIS (his space ship) may be contributing to the accent too.

-I asked him his favorite foods, and he said " Goldfish, fruit snacks, and snacks." That's pretty accurate, although he also LOVES peanut butter and oatmeal, and possibly not much else.

-His favorite game is "What's your name?" I ask him what his name is, and he tells me whatever comes to mind. My favorites include "Broken Egg," "Dragonfly," "Goldfish," and "Mommy's Puking." Sad but true.

-You would think that after a year of nursery, lots of playgroup, and two months of story time, he would be used to other kids. Nope. He is terrified of other children. We went to visit my friend Shauna and anytime her one year old son would touch him, he would cry.

-He's a two year old. I'm not sure I would call it "terrible twos" entirely, but there are definitely some trying aspects. I hear a lot of "Don't want to!" and "Doesn't like it!" Also less awesome is his newly discovered hobby of crying and flopping himself to the ground when he doesn't want to go somewhere.

-Even with all of the attitude, he's a pretty sweet kid. He gives a lot of hugs and cuddles. He loves his family, especially including his grandparents and all of his aunts and uncle.