No baby yet

The long-awaited time for our new little girl to be born seems to continue to elude us. My goal was to make it through this past Saturday, so now that Saturday is past I am starting to already get a bit antsy. I actually felt more likely to have the baby around 34 weeks than I do now! I am beginning to think that this little one is either trying to hibernate for the winter or she is going to follow her sisters' previous examples and need to be encouraged with a large quantity of Pitocin. Meanwhile, I will continue to consume endless chocolate and gain more unsightly weight!

Special times with daddy
Tyler recently took S. on her first official "date." She picked out her favorite dress, had her hair and makeup done, and even wore a little necklace. She was very excited. She ordered chocolate chip pancakes, but I doubt the pancakes will be what she remembers. Rather, great time alone with daddy!

P. made her own opportunity to connect with daddy. While daddy was worshiping at the piano, P. sat down and joined right in. She was nothing but smiles ... and so was daddy. Our two little girls are priceless gems.

Our first garage sale
Years overdue, Tyler and I took part in our subdivision's annual garage sale this month. It took us two weekends to go through everything in our basement and eight hours to get rid of it. We let the kids pick which toys we sold, but S. and P. had a hard time letting go stuffed animals. P. actually found that the place she liked most was right in the stuffed animal tub! Although I was totally exhausted afterward, it felt really good to cut down on the amount of stuff we had accumulated over the past eight years and we are getting pretty close to actually having a clean and organized basement. (Translation: A place for the kids to go nuts this winter! What can they possibly do to cement floors and concrete walls? Ummm, don't answer that; I would like to live in this little Utopian idea for awhile.)

Funny faces
As part of the garage sale clean-up, we dug all of the baby toys out of our basement storage. The kids took full advantage catching up with items they haven't seen in over a year, but I think P. had the most fun. One morning after breakfast, I caught her cracking up at herself while making funny faces into a mirrored toy.

Doing school
Even though she is only three, S. has been eager to join E. in "doing school." I try to include at least one hands-on project a week in either science or history for E., so when it is doable S. gets to join us. Here she is modeling clay. While E. made a tablet with his name written in cuneiform, S. eventually decided that she would rather use the screwdriver to eat the clay. It was pretty gross and I tried to get her to stop, but compared to some of the other things she has been eating lately I figured this might be one of the least things to hurt her!

Time with Cousin Heath
Tyler's cousin was in town this past week for a conference and he postponed his travels home so that he could visit with us for a night. It has been a long time since we have seen him--I think almost two years--and it was good to catch up. Because getting out the door with a slow, slow preggo woman and three kiddos took awhile, we didn't have much time to "sightsee" so we went to our favorite local park/farm before taking him to the airport. Heath works within the agricultural industry and our youngest two have barely set foot on an actual farm! Here are some photo highlights, although I bet that Heath has much better pics because all E. did was ask that Heath take his picture. =) (Thanks for visiting Heath! Maybe at some point we will make it to NY to see you and your family!)

Ready or not ...

When I was pregnant with E., I distinctly remember a lengthy period of time where I experienced anxiety over delivery. I had read numerous books and some were probably way too graphic and detailed for a first time mom. I did not want to have to deliver this baby! Yet I knew that one thing was for certain: this baby was going to come out and there was no way I could stop it.

So now I am on pregnancy #4 and up to this point, I haven't given delivery much thought. I mean, been there done that right? How many surprises could be left unless a dreaded C-section goes down? The real variable is that this will be hospital #4 and OB #4 (I am beginning to agree with E. that that we might move too much! But more on that below.). I have gone natural, I have gone epidural, and one common denominator remained: this baby was going to come out and there was no way I could stop it.

Like I said, up to this point I hadn't thought much about delivery ... until yesterday. That is when I went to the hospital for an emergency non-stress test for the baby. I started having a specific pain on my belly that I also had at the end of my pregnancy with P. It ended up with P. that the placenta had ruptured but we didn't know it until it had started to bleed out. Since this was the exact same pain in the exact same spot (sans blood), the doctor wanted to check it out. Changing into a hospital gown started to bring back that familiar delivery-related anxiety and I realized that I hadn't really thought about this delivery much at all. However, after the initial exam and the first five minutes of the monitors charting away, the nurse told me that the baby was doing great and I knew that they would end up sending me home. Since the test had to be at least 30 minutes long, I relaxed and was actually about to fall asleep when I heard it. Awful, awful screams. Through the wall I could clearly hear the final minutes of another mom's delivery--containing mostly profanity and cries of "help!" Then it all came rushing back to me with further clarity: this baby is going to come out and there is no way I can stop it AND IT IS GOING TO HURT. I left the hospital in a daze with one thing in mind: I am not ready to deliver a baby. I am not ready to deliver a baby. I am not ready to deliver a baby. Forget all the technology and super drugs available to me, I am not ready to deliver another baby! So that is where I am--within weeks (and maybe even days!) of delivery and I can't get the inevitable pain I am about to endure off my mind. And suddenly a "dreaded C-section" doesn't sound so dreaded at all.

Will the real nomad please stand up?
Last week, E. studied nomads during his history lessons. I was asking him questions like, "What do you call home? Where do you sleep at night? Do you move every few days or every few weeks?" Pretty straight-forward questions, right? Ones that we would all answer pretty much the same way? Not my son. His answers were so strange that I had to ask him what he meant. Bottom line: he thinks we move once a year and it waiting for us to reveal the next location! (We just passed our one-year marker in our house this past August.) Perhaps we have moved a decent amount since our marriage began, but when I asked him if he remembers how many times he has moved (answer: three. An average of every two years isn't so bad!) he didn't remember anything about living in Northern Kentucky and barely remembers any of our time in Chicago. I assured him that mommy didn't have any plans to pack up and move within the next five years ... at the very least. But what about daddy? Well, daddy started casually looking at houses online and talking about "our next house" a few months ago. Maybe we do have a nomad living among us!