Saturday is a Special Day, It’s the Day we get Ready for…Baby

That primary song I sang as a kid is taking on a new meaning. (In case you are wondering, the song actually says “It’s the day we get ready for Sunday”) This Saturday I am getting ready for Sunday in a whole new way. Tomorrow (sunday) night at 6 P.M. I am going to Labor and Delivery at the OSU hospital to be induced! They will give me some medicine to get my body ready for the induction and monitor me through the night. If all goes as planned, my little girl will be here sometime on Monday, February 11. She is measuring 3 weeks ahead, so my doctor doesn’t want me to go overdue. We are so excited to meet our daughter! It has been nice knowing when she will be born because I’ve had a deadline to work towards. I have been able to pace myself in getting things ready for a baby in our home. Besides getting the house clean,the hospital bag packed, fridge stocked, and the laundry done, I have been able to do some fun projects.

Benj got me a really nice sewing machine for Christmas and I have experimented on some baby things:

I sewed some soft, flannel receiving blankets.

I made these little stretch pants and matching beanie out of an old t-shirt of mine.

I still need to hang them up, but I sewed these curtains for the nursery.

And my sweet friend Elisa took the left over curtain fabric and made this adorable matching crib skirt for me. I absolutely love it! I have the kindest friends!

I also made a little tulle tutu.

I also upcycled  an old lamp from the thrift store and a thrift store sheet to make this lamp for the nursery:

This is what it looked like before:

and after:

I got all her blankets and clothes washed and waiting for her to make them even cuter.

Well, the next post will have sweet little newborn pictures all over it. Wish me luck and please pray for everything to well the next few days!

Baby Shower

My sweet friends Jess and Britney threw me a baby shower last month! I have such great friends and neighbors.

There were brownies (my favorite!)…

..and veggies, and crepes with all sorts of toppings and fillings. I don’t have a picture of the crepes, but my friend Becca (she is a pro at making crepes) made two heaping stacks of crepes. There were warm savory fillings, chocolate and nutella, fruit, and whipped cream. So good! Thanks Becca!

And there was lemonade with the cutest cups and striped straws.

Jess made these adorable banners (yup, that’s me with my pregnant belly in the mirror. Take a good look, because that’s the only picture of my belly you are likely to see.)

There were lots of friends there to support me and I was in awe at the generosity of them all. I got some really adorable outfits for the baby and lots of practical things that I really needed like diapers and wipes. And I just had to post a picture of this adorable little bouncy chair my co-worker Shelly got for little darling.

Thank you everyone who came and contributed. I feel very blessed and a little spoiled.

Little Kicker

In case you are wondering where the name of this post came from, I will explain. A few weeks ago Benjamin had a random dream that he was holding our little girl as a new born and as he looked at her said, “Little Kicker” with a very high pitched voice and a funny accent so it sounded like “Litta Keecka”. He told me about that dream and ever since then we say that phrase when referring to the baby in my belly. And she really is a little kicker. I feel like she never settles down!

Anyway, I just thought I should post a quick update on the progress of our baby. She is almost 35 weeks along. We had an ultrasound at 34 weeks to check her growth and development. It was so neat to see her at this stage of the pregnancy. She was measuring in the 84th percentile all around. Her arms and legs were very long for her age. That explains all the kicking! She was a little over 5 pounds. Everything is measuring perfectly. The ultra sound tech (I love her! She is so good at explaining things and always makes me feel like my baby is precious and special.) saw little white pokey things coming from the babies head and exclaimed “Wow! She has a TON of hair! You can see it poking off the skull!” I can’t wait to slick her hair into a little curly cue!

 

She has finally flipped so that her head is at least pointing down, although  a little to the side still. We feel very grateful and humbled that everything is going so well. Due to medical problems, we were not able to have a baby the first 4 years of our marriage. Due to some of my medical problems we were worried that I would either be very ill or the baby would have low birth weight. I have been perfectly healthy and the baby is what my doctor called “beefy”, so we feel extremely blessed. We got to see a 3D picture of her face, but it was very hard to get a good one because she was so squirmy. And after going through the scanner, the quality is even worse, but you can still see her cute little pout.

We will never forget the pain and longing that comes with not being able to have a baby and we have many, many friends who are dealing with loss and infertility. Our hearts break for them and we pray for them often. I often hear people say that they didn’t truly understand God’s love until they had a baby, and that may be true, but I also know that we felt a powerful increase in comfort, faith, and our understanding of Gods love as we went through the trial of being childless. That pain and waiting has only increased our understanding of God’s love for us and made us all the more grateful and appreciative of this baby.

My due date is February 15th and I feel like a little kid on Christmas Eve. When will the long wait to open my presents ever be over?! I am so excited and surprisingly not scared at all. Don’t ask us what we are naming her because we have about 5 names we really like and we wont be able to decide until we meet her. And I wont be posting a picture of my belly. Ever. I don’t know why, I just don’t want to. It’s big and round, though, in case you were wondering. Today I have been indulging in my guilty pleasure of watching the TLC show I Didn’t Know I Was Pregnant on Youtube and I can confidently say that my belly is much too round and large to mistake it for anything other than a baby. It is seriously crazy that these women go full term without knowing they are expecting!

Oh, I should also mention that by June my little girl will have 4 little girl cousins! Four of Benjamin’s sisters are having/had little girls. Beth had Madelyn in October, Chelsea had Pearl a few days ago, my girl will come in February, Kylie’s little girl will come in April, and Jess will finish it off with a little girl in May! How cool is that! The five of them will be such great friends!

Pray for a healthy, full term baby. I’ll introduce you to her once she is here in about 5 weeks or so. Wish us luck!

Columbus Zoo Wildlights

Through November and December the Columbus Zoo lights up the whole zoo with Christmas lights at night. It is pretty spectacular.One night they were doing a food drive and all we had do do was bring 5 cans of food to get into the zoo. We went with our friends the Picketts. The zoo is so huge that it takes a whole day to see everything, so we just decided to hit the Asia portion of the zoo and see some lights.

We got to see the new twin tiger cubs. They were so cute!

Owen and Katalyn watching the light show.

Afterwards we went to the Pickett’s and ate Katalyn’s homemade pot stickers and played games. Fun times.

Go Buck’s

I guess I should mentions that Benjamin and I went to an OSU Buckeye football game this fall. We bought Big Ten tickets this year. We sold most of them, but kept one game for ourselves to go see. It was cold and windy and we were really high up, but it was fun! It was a pretty uneventful game until the very end. I don’t have the skill to talk football lingo, but you have to know what happened. Here is what a local news station had to say about it:

“With only 47 seconds left in the game, approximately 30,000 fans had already filed out of Ohio Stadium. The Buckeyes trailed 22-14, and had to travel 61 yards—and convert a two-point attempt—to tie the score.

Those who left missed one of the greatest finishes in Ohio Stadium history; as the Buckeyes—behind back-up quarterback Kenny Guiton—did tie the game, and went on to win 29-22 in overtime.

It marked the second straight season that OSU and Purdue went into overtime and the third time in the past eight meetings.”

People in Columbus have some major Buckeye pride. Its fun to live in a town that is so obsessed with it’s college sports team.

Halloween

I guess I better post a few pictures from Halloween, although I am reluctant to share pictures of me in costume. I’m just not good with costumes.

My friend Britney threw a little “Ghouls Only” (girls only) Halloween Party. A costume was required. Thank goodness my neighbor Becca said I could come over and use her zombie make up with her.

I love the pop can stuck in Becca’s head! We had so much fun making zombies out of ourselves.

And Britney went all out with the party. There were awesome decorations, fun games, and lots of cute treats. Check out this spread:

We also carved Jack-o-Lanterns for the first time in our nearly 5 years of marriage. I am really regretting not getting a picture of them. Benjamin’s was so funny and cool!

We also had a good time at our church party. I made these sugar cookies for the party:

We threw together last minute costumes and I am really embarrassed to share this picture with you. Can you guess what movie we are from? Despicable Me. Benjamin is Gru and I am his Minion. By the time we took this picture my little pipe cleaner hair spikes had fallen off.

Circleville Pumpkin Show

Back in October, Benj and I traveled about an hour away to Central Ohio’s famous Circleville Pumpkin Show. Now, I learned the hard way that it is not the “pumpkin festival”, but the “pumpkin show”. I was reprimanded by a native of Circleville after saying it wrong. I will never make that mistake again. The Circleville Pumpkin Show has been held in the streets of Circleville since 1903. It is a 4 day event with tons of food stands, rides, fair games, pumpkin displays, contests, and 2 parades every day. We carpooled with our friends the Picketts. Unfortunately, we didn’t pick a very good time to go. It was a little cold when we got there, but by the time we left, if was pouring and we were soaked through and freezing. I’m sure we would have stayed longer if we weren’t so freezing.

In this picture we are standing in front of a huge mural. What you see is only a very small portion of the huge painting.

There were lots of giant pumpkins.

And lots of interesting gourds and pumpkins of all sizes and varieties that you could buy.

We splurged on some Bloomin Potatoes

And of course we splurged on some pumpkin food. We got pumpkin fudge and pumpkin doughnuts.

They had pretty much every kind of pumpkin food there. They had pumpkin: pizza, hot dogs, burgers, cheesecake, ice cream, bread, pie, cookies, cup cakes, taffy, pancakes, waffles, scones, and any thing else you could think of. We would have tried more pumpkin food, but our trip was cut short. It didn’t take long for us to be soaked to the bone from the rain, so we left faster than we normally would have. We did, however, sit through about 15 minutes of the parade in the pouring rain, hoping that it would stop raining. Maybe we will try again next year with better luck.