Thursday, August 22, 2013

Baby #2: 22 Weeks

I am now 22 weeks pregnant with baby girl #2. I'm feeling (and looking) more pregnant. I get tired more easily and my feet and back definitely hurt A LOT at the end of each day! Probably even more so on the weekends than at the end of a long workday. I can't imagine being a pregnant stay at home mom (like my friend Elizabeth who is a few days past her due date right now!!). I run around a lot at work, especially in the fall, but it's nothing like chasing after and caring for a wild 2 year old.

I'm really doing well though. I have heartburn and all of the normal stuff, but everything is really going well. Baby girl is definitely kicking up a storm in there. She is a night owl, like her sister, and loves to kick around past 11pm. I also feel her a lot early in the morning (which is my excuse to stay in bed a bit after the alarm in the AM). This baby also tends to be active not only when I'm sitting down but also when I'm standing and walking around! She prefers to kick or punch towards the bladder of course. I love feeling and seeing baby kicks!! Neil has felt some movement now and Lila was sitting on my lap reading and she said, "Hey! The baby's kicking me! Stop that right now, baby!"

Lila has said some cute things lately about her baby sister. She is demanding that the baby sleep in her bed with her. Lila has transitioned to a big girl (twin sized) bed and thinks the baby will sleep in there with her! We have the crib set up in the next room... which, by the way, makes it seem really real that we will have 2 children soon!! She also asks when she can hold the baby, says she wants to get the baby out, and one time in the car.. she yelled, "But, Mommy, what's her NAME?!" I told her we don't know yet! And we don't.


We are working on the nursery and bedding for the baby's room which will be a combo guest room/nursery. Not that we would expect guests to sleep in the same room with a newborn. It's more about still keeping the bed in there so WE can use it and have guests sleep in our room or some kind of arrangement. I'm trying to balance my desires for a super cute room VS practicality/frugality. I really want to save money by reusing a lot of Lila's stuff, but I'd like to get new bedding. The problem is is that the bedding I want is coral which is so close to the pink I already have from Lila's nursery that it seems silly to buy or make new crib bedding! I also cannot find anything I like commercially, so I'd probably have to sew it or have someone sew it for me.

This is the style and color scheme I'm going for:

pink and yellow nursery



We'll see what it looks like! I know I'm at least doing gray walls, yellow and pink/coral. I want it to be sweet, girly and calm! I'm in love with the idea of a 3-tiered ruffled bed skirt in coral! But my practical side is saying, use Lila's pink bedding and a bed skirt is pretty pointless once you lower the crib.

Here is my 22 week photo and update:








Tuesday, August 13, 2013

Baby Girl #2: 21 weeks and Names

I am excited to be more than half way done with this pregnancy! 21 weeks tomorrow. It is definitely flying by much faster than with Lila and I know the next few months will be a blur. Up until Halloween work will be crazy, so if I can make it to 10/31 in one piece then I should be able to take it easier after that and just wait for baby to get here.

I'm feeling really good. I have the occasional heartburn and backache and of course have to pee a lot, but that's it. I am really lucky to have things so easy at the moment! We've known for about a week that we're having baby girl #2, and I'm just so excited about that. I know 2 girls might be a handful at times and the teen years with a 13 and 16 year old might be painful, but we're really happy. I think Lila will love having a sister!

We are trying to figure out the name for our new baby girl! I like naming the baby ahead of time so we can start calling her by name and making letters for the room and get things embroidered! But I think this one will be harder to decide on than Lila's name. Lila was really the only name Neil and I could agree on.

And if you know me at all, you'll know I am a crazy into baby names. I have a website and blog (which never gets updated) and I help 10-15 strangers per week with name suggestions for their babies. So this is obviously a big deal for me to name a child.

Right now, these are the names that are still on the table:

Rosie (a nickname for Rose, Rosalie or Rosemary, we don't know what the full name will be. Also Neil has retracted the earlier "stripper" comment. He knows he was wrong now, LOL.)
June
Ada
Elsa
Georgia

Neil has eliminated or is not sure about:

Mae
Hazel
Cora
Ivy
Iris

I like these but have eliminated because we know an adult, child or dog with that name:

Lucy
Ruby
Susie as a nickname for Susannah
Nina
Anna
Elise
Tessa or Tess (my mom has the most awesome name, Tess, wish I could use it, but I think it might be weird/confusing to have granddaughter/grandma with same name!)
Nora
Clara
Celia
Violet
Annabel

We are pretty far from deciding, so this list will change, but right now my favorites are:

Rosalie June
Ada Madeleine / Ada Rosalind
Rose Emilia
June Annabel
Georgia Mae
Elsa Violet

So there we are! If we decide I will probably announce the name at some point like we did with Lila, but we may not decide until December!

Here is my update for 20 and 21 weeks!



Monday, August 12, 2013

Lila at 2.5 years old

Lila is 2.5 years old! She is a delight and a terror rolled up in one adorable blonde little package. Love this child but the terrible twos are very much alive. We still get hugs and cuddles and "I love yous" but Neil and I both have been slapped and/or hit with a Barbie in the last few months. We are working on it! Her sticker chart (totally her caregiver Amanda's idea) is working pretty well to correct the worst of her bad habits.



Just as far as size updates, which I usually do on posts like these... Lila is still a pretty tiny thing. She is wearing mainly 2T in everything, but can still wear some pants and bottoms in 18-24 months. Some 3T tops are fine though. No clue on height but the last time I weighed her she was getting closer to 27 lbs. I think she was 26.7?

She is fiercely independent and brave! She loves to do everything by herself, including buckling her carseat (we always check it), going to the potty on her own without telling me (of course she needs help wiping and flushing) and she thinks she can swim on her own too! She is graduating to "parent-free" swim class for this next session. How is this happening? She is doing really well in the water and loves to swim. I hope this means she'll stick with swim classes and be a swimmer for life! Love it.



We are thinking about signing her up for dance class, I haven't fully decided yet! I think it'd be adorable and that she'd enjoy it, so I'm leaning toward doing it. It's for 2.5-4 yr old beginners.

Lila loves to read! She can recite a lot of books and corrects us when we skip words here and there. She is very patient listener and I read her beginner chapter books often. Her current favorite books are Curious George (good thing we have like 30 different stories at our disposal) and anything to do with ghosts and witches. She reads many books on her own and recites what she remembers and makes up the rest. She also loves for us to make up stories and her requests are very specific. "I want a Lila is a girl Newsie story" or "I want a Brooklyn and Lainey go to school story" (those are her 7 year old idols).

She also loves to listen to music and LOVES to sing. She knows the lyrics to a lot of songs and is pretty comical when you listen closely... Our personal favorite is her rendition of Baa Baa Black Sheep: "One for the monster and one for my dame..."



It goes without saying that she is really bright and has some insane verbal abilities! She probably has the vocabulary of a 3 or 4 year old, easy. She speaks in pretty articulate long sentences. People are always confused at her age because she is so small but talks so well. She asks great, pertinent questions, is super curious and wants to know everything. We were at her friend Sam's first birthday on Saturday. And she was constantly trying to learn people's names and know who they are. We are trying to correct grammar now and she is doing pretty well. She always says, "Can us go to the park today?" and we remind her it's "We"!

She also knows her first and middle names and she knows our names. She also never stops talking and is constantly narrating what she is doing and thinking!

Some funny things she's said lately...

On the way to Mamaw and Papaw's house on route back from the beach... "Do they have a sandbox at their house? Do they have a kitchen at their house? Do they have an outside pool at their house?" She feels the need to do an inventory before visiting anywhere. Funny child.

I was cooking pancakes the other day and was trying to get her to go in the living room with Neil while I was working on them. She came back in and said, "I can't mommy. I'm just so nervous about these pancakes." I told her she never needs to be nervous!!! How did she learn this word?

This is more sad than funny, but when Neil is gone when she wakes up, she says... "Is daddy gone? Is he at the bank?" When I said yes one morning, she said, "Oh no. Not again!"

She's also getting into potty humor. We talk about her baby sister often and I was just chatting about what to name her earlier today. Lila says, what about Rosie Poop? And then laughs hysterically.



When asking her what she wants to be when she grows up, we get various answers. Some recent ones: "I want to be a doctor when I grow up, a mommy doctor and a big girl doctor" or "I want to be a teacher and a grandma."

Her responses to questions sound remarkably adult. I ask her: "Does Parky's Farm have a playground?" She says,  "I don't know. Maybe. I think so."

She tried a sip of Sprite and said, "This is NOT my favorite!"

She's fake crying in the car, so I ask her, "Are you okay, what's wrong?" And she says, "Mom, actually, it's Rosie (her doll)." My 2 year old uses "actually" correctly!

Of course my child is nowhere near perfect and I'm no closer to being a perfect parent. We are trying to teach her to be polite and not to hit us or yell at us and to listen when we ask her to do something. She is a great kid, but she is also 2, and is learning how to behave and to control herself in this crazy world. I'm so proud of her and so thrilled and lucky to be her mom!

Thursday, August 8, 2013

And the name conversations begin...

So Lila wants to name her sister Rosie Clifford. She is obviously highly influenced by PBS (Rosie is Caillou's sister). Every doll she has is Rosie and she says "My sister Rosie" all the time. I think Rosie is adorable and think it could be a possibility for our baby girl.

Below is my account of a discussion about the name Rose with Neil:

Me: "What about Rose? We could call her Rosie. It'd be cute!"

Neil: "Isn't Rose a stripper name?"

Me: *stunned, horrified silence*  "No!! Come, on! Rose is a Golden Girl!"


I am pretty sure Neil has more knowledge on the subject than I do, but on what planet is ROSE a stripper name?!!?

Wednesday, August 7, 2013

It's a...

beautiful


baby...



with a sweet little profile...



we're having a....




Baby GIRL!!!



We are thrilled. I was pretty sure it was another girl, and we couldn't be happier!

Everything looked great with the baby, except one thing, which I will explain shortly. She is measuring perfectly. Weight was 12 oz, heart rate was 135. Everything was measuring right at 20 weeks, and I'm 20 weeks exactly. We saw all 4 chambers of the heart, femur, spine, everything looked good. Okay, so onto the only issue. Baby girl has choroid plexus cysts on the choroid plexus part of the brain. Sounds super scary, but apparently is pretty common! Common enough that I wasn't scared at all because our best friends went through this 2 years ago with their perfectly healthy son!

We have to do a couple extra ultrasounds, one soon and one at 30 weeks, but the cysts should go away. And even if they don't, they shouldn't pose a problem for the baby at all. These cysts could be a marker for Trisomy 18, which is why there is any action at all. But since we don't have any other abnormalities, in all likelihood, all is well. I'm totally thinking positive and it looks like our little girl is completely fine!

Now we need to work on a name and dig up all of Lila's baby clothes! So exciting!

Tuesday, August 6, 2013

Tomorrow at 1pm: The BIG Ultrasound!


I'm so excited to find out! After we have the ultrasound and tell friends and family I will post an update. Exciting!