Valentine's Day Re-cap

Last year we went to our stake's Valentine's Dinner & Dance. It was a lot of fun, so when they announced it this year, I jumped to secure a babysitter (with about 6 young women in our ward, they can go fast). The dinner/dance WAS fun, if strangely identical to the year before... The food had a different main course, but I think that was about it. :) The entertainer was the same. It was still really nice, and we enjoyed getting to dress up and have an evening out together. (This was Saturday, the 13th, of course...) We didn't get to stay long for the actual dance part, as our babysitter needed to be home. That was just as well, since I somehow got dizzy after dancing only half a song. Go figure.
We were in too much of a rush before we left, so we set up the camera and took a few shots of us together after we got the kids in bed. :)

And her is a picture of my large belly...er baby, at about 21 weeks:

The next morning (actual Valentine's Day) I impressed myself by managing to make pink heart-shaped pancakes. I don't know if the kids were impressed or not. They always like pancakes. :) I'm not sure why this picture flipped itself. It wasn't even vertical originally...

Jeremy got a nice carry-on (for all his travelings) and got me some fun things, including a Wii game, a new makeup bag (my old one broke) and some yummy chocolate and cheetos. He definitely knows me.

The kids' Kerrigan grandparents sent them some fun books and coloring books for Valentine's Day. They were pretty excited.

Pigtails

A few weeks ago I managed to coax Jaina's hair back into some pigtails. They were SO cute, but she didn't totally appreciate the process. I am thinking this will be a cute summer hairstyle a lot of the time. Maybe by that time her hair will have grown out a little bit more and will be a little easier to get there. The problem is it grows straight forward (and somewhat longer on the top, but she doesn't have a lot of extra hair in the back. Of course I trimmed it a few months ago, too, in the back, but it IS starting to grow out.
When I looked at these pictures I realized how old she is starting to look. I can't believe she's barely two, with how she acts sometimes. She is adorable and a pill, sometimes all at the same time. She's sleeping right now. Her 3-hour naps are definitely a personality plus that skipped her brother. At this age, I was lucky if Reilly napped every other day!

We haven't been seeing much of Daddy lately. All trimester he's been super busy, but since he started clinic after Christmas he has been gone from 7 to 7 more often than not, and even had to go into the clinic a couple Saturday mornings. He is excited to be done with 7th Tri though (as of yesterday) and hopefully only has two more tri's here at Palmer before he gets to go somewhere else and precept. He likes getting to actually take films and adjust people, but I think he's looking forward to leaving the excesive paperwork and crazy clinic doctors behind...

The kids are just happy when they get to hang out with him. He's really good about playing with them and reading to them in the evenings, even when he'd probably rather just crash after a long day. They love their daddy!

Family Home Evening Messes

I thought I was sort of caught up on blogging, but that was only until we uploaded the pictures from Jeremy's camera. Apparently, we use it a lot more than "mine."
We have been trying really hard to have Family Home Evening during the last month or two, and our hit/miss ratio is getting better. We are just doing lessons out of the nursery manual, and trying to do an activity and/or a treat afterwards. The last few weeks have been a little short, because Jeremy doesn't usually get home until 30-45 minutes before bedtime, it seems, but several weeks ago (on the 3rd) we were ambitious and make cupcakes with the kids afterwards for our treat. They had a lot of fun, and even though it made a big mess, they were excited to help put everything together, mix it, and especially eat the cupcakes when they were done! Somehow we don't have any pictures of the finished product, but here are some from the production...

Night Adventures

Well, we aren't really having any. Yay! For the last.. I don't know, MANY months about every other week Reilly would wake up any time between 2 and 5 and think it was time to get up for the day. By the time he came in and woke me up, he already had it set in his head that it was morning, and we usually couldn't get him back to sleep for 45 minutes to 3 hours. Sometimes he never DID go back to sleep. Not good when Jeremy has to be gone by 7 most mornings and I am pregnant. Not good for my relationship with Reilly. There were some rocky days following rockier nights. I really want this cool Good Nite Light. But, since it's about $40 with shipping, and we're really TRYING not to spend extra money, we decided to go with a night light on a timer (like you use for Christmas lights). And it seems to be working. We put it up at the very first of the month, and told him it's not morning, and not time to get up, until his nightlight turns on. (I put a blue bulb in it that looks kind of like a green one when it's lit up - you know, green for "go?" ) Since then we have not had one night where he tried to get up for the day in the middle of the night. He still gets up to go to the bathroom 2 nights out of 3, but he never tries to stay up. Sometimes he wakes up early in the morning (after 6, but his light is set for about 6:45) and I just tell him to go to the bathroom, and then to go back to him bed until his light turns on. He is pretty good about it most of the time. I am so happy this is working, because the middle of the night thing was NOT. I was beginning to be really worried about adding a new baby to the mix.

Next matter of business with our sleeping schedule? Moving Jaina into Reilly's room, probably some time in April or May... I hope it goes well; their wake up times are so different!

Family Pictures....

taken in November. We needed some Christmas presents, and our Penney's Portrait Club membership was about to expire, (and I was already starting to feel a little fat with this pregnancy) so we headed over to our favorite department store and finally got it done! Our clothes look kind of summery because I got them all when it was still warm outside... But here they are, finally scanned in!
These are especially for my brother David, who is in Africa, and didn't get one for Christmas. Maybe we'll try to get you a copy by your birthday? :) Love you, Dave!

21 weeks and counting

There have probably been a lot of interesting things that have gone on in the last week, but we definitely haven't uploaded any pictures since the last blog post... so... my pregnant brain can't think of any. Of course there might not BE any. Mostly Jeremy is at the school (clinic mostly) a LOT and the kids and I hang out at home a LOT.

Tuesday was fun, though. I had my ultrasound, and the baby was still in there, and everything looked good. (though I have to go back to get some pics of the spine and front of his/her face - the little one seems as stubborn as my current children...) Jeremy got to come, and we didn't even have to take Reilly and Jaina! :)

Though I feel this little one all the time now, it still seems crazy that there will be another member of our family sometime in June. And that after a week or two, we won't be able to imagine life without him/her. It's hard not knowing the gender (though the tech said it was just as well; baby was curled up so much, she would have had a hard time finding out) because the few things that we DO need are hard to get. Not that we need much. We have pretty much all of the clothes we need, boy or girl, as well as all the "baby gear" that we so recently used with our other two! I have been spending a little too much on a newborn cloth diaper stash, but I've got most of what I need there, too, so...

I'll post about Valentine's Day in a few days when I get some pictures. It's been a good one. We've enjoyed it. :) (though any Sunday pretty much wears us out these days!)

Exciting things in the near future: Jeremy has finals the end of this week and the beginning of next, and then he's off to Washington, D.C. for a week for a national chiropractic convention (with Student Internation Chiro. Assoc.) and to visit a good friend and tour a doctor's office. Then he'll be home a few more days before school starts again, but he takes his second set of national Boards about a week after that, so he'll probably be studying... I hope! ;-) That's about it. Hopefully my next update will be a little more interesting. Or at least have some pictures to look at. :) (The u/s doesn't count, since most babies look pretty similar from this view...)

Activities

We don't always do fun things. Most of our days are full of mommy's boring projects, playing (sometimes nicely and sometimes not), trying to get everyone bundled up to go to the grocery store or clinic appointments, meals, snacks, and picking up the last mess we've made. Still, there are a lot of fun activities, and we generally take pictures of some of those. :) We try not to take pictures of the boring stuff.

Reilly absolutely loves puzzles. He has no trouble at all with all of his 24-piece ones, and the 100-piece are still a little hard for him, but he still asks to do them all the time. Here is Jaina with the puzzles she got for Christmas. She's actually gotten good at putting them together!
And here is Reilly with his favorite puzzle, a 100-piece Toy Story one. Yes, he can do it all by himself. It's mommy's favorite too, because it usually takes him at least 20 minutes to do it. :)

Reilly has finally started actually trying to draw (instead of attempting to force us to draw countless animals and people). He said this one is an elephant, though it looks much more like an armadillo to me. :)

This one is people, if you can't tell. :)

Jaina loves to play the piano (usually when I try to play it, and she remembers that it's there.)

The other day after it snowed I decided to shovel it, so the kids and I could go somewhere without smashing it down into irremovable ice. I started, but it was so nice outside (fresh snow, about 30º and no wind) that I went back in and got the kids dressed and we all stayed out for about 45 minutes. They had a blast. Still, we are definitely looking forward to the spring (though not the soggy-yard phase) and summer, for several reasons. The kids ask to to go to the park every time we pass one, and I, at least, am ready to be done with all the layers that must accompany any outing!

So what have we been up to this January? A whole lot of "anything-that-can-be-done-inside." The kids and I only get out a couple of times a week at the most, and usually at least one of those are because we have clinic appointments with Jeremy. Things have been going well though. We've been laying fairly low this week because of some colds, but we've been trying to enjoy ourselves anyway. Here are some pictures of some of the goings-ons around here. These pictures go from about January 13th through 22nd:
Here is Reilly lounging in Daddy's Chair. It is his favorite place to watch TV. It is also Daddy's favorite place, but since Daddy is home within half an hour of bedtime more often than not these days, it hasn't been too much of an issue. :)

















Play-dough is a big hit these days. It will keep them both busy for anywhere from 20 to 40 minutes, depending on the day, and how cooperative the play-dough is being. :) Reilly got a fun set with lots of little tools for Christmas (thanks Grandma and Grandpa!) and we trade them back and forth (as well as trading colors) at least once during the dough session. This also gives me an excuse to put their cute aprons on, though somehow they usually manage to get multi-colored deposits on the backs of their pants...

One day (when it actually got up to about 40º) a week or two ago, some industrious friends of ours organized a play group in the snow. Our kids hadn't played in the snow since before Christmas (it's just been way too cold!) so even though I wasn't feeling fabulous that day, I figured I'd better take them. They had a blast. Jaina did a little more than eat snow (though that was still their favorite activity) and Reilly got to do some hard-core sledding, thanks to one lucky dad that wasn't in classes or clinic (not his). It was a mess, but we were glad we went. We even got to follow it up by picking Jeremy up and visiting our favorite Mexican restaurant in Moline: La Rancherita. :)

The other night Jeremy had an Elder's Quorum activity. They set up a bunch of different video games and had pizza. Sounds fun, right? Well, the kids and I were a little jealous, (and Reilly misunderstood, and thought Daddy had gone "to pick up the pizza,") so we made our own pizza and followed it with ice cream cones and a movie. The three of us LOVE ice cream cones. :)

Here is the pizza. (that I managed to burn, but there were still plenty of edible parts, I promise!)

Poor sweet Jaina! She was with Jeremy at the school the other night (he was giving me a little break because the kids and I had had a long day) and she tripped and hit her face on the floor. The resulting bloody nose slightly traumatized all three of them, and he had even tracked someone down to drive them home, because he wasn't having any luck getting it to stop for a while! This is the "cleaned up" version of her that evening - she couldn't handle any more pressure on her nose. The shirt, miraculously, came clean with a little TLC.

This is the blanket I finally finished after picking out the fabric with a birthday gift card last summer. It is one just for me (the kids both have so many little blankets for curling up with!) and I'm really glad, considering what an amateur I still am with my sewing machine, and how beautiful the zig zag stitch that I used to finish it looks in a few places.
The other day I was looking in a basket of clean clothes for a shirt for Reilly, and he immediately grabbed this one, saying "I want to wear this one. It's my favorite!" Technically, this is a pajama shirt, because it's too big for him still, but for whatever reason, he's a BIG fan.