Oh boy...

Wow. Ok. I'm back. Yesterday, we finally had to break down and start paying for internet. Ever since we moved in, we have been able to pick up a very slow wireless internet connection, but alas, last week much to our dismay it stopped working. So we had to take another step into the grown-up world and get internet. AND BOY DO I LOVE IT!! It's so fast! haha Oh man. John asked if it was something worth blogging about and I said, "ABSOLUTELY!". So hopefully that is a good enough excuse for my total lack of blogging lately. That and I'm just lazy and tired all the time. Oh bother. 

So what have we been up to? Well, quite a bit. Let's start with the girl. Lucy is so huge! She is 21 months old going on 16. She is talking up a storm and I can't help but stop and laugh everytime I talk to her. It's crazy to me that I can have an actual conversation with her and she understands and can get her point across. I feel so blessed that she is such a good girl and that she has no problem entertaining herself. Especially the last couple of months with this pregnancy and the issues I've been having. But I'll go into that in a sec... She still loves to dance ( we have dance parties daily), sing(usually while dancing),

read books,

play with her "babies"(basically any baby or stuffed animal), 

help daddy do the dishes and be a "helper",

go to nursery and "play with toys", say prayers( she makes sure to say every persons name that she knows), and so many other things!! I am loving this stage and age that she is at. Its so much fun. Don't get me wrong, she drives me CRAZY sometimes, but I love her. 

John is working harder than ever and loving it. I know that he would tell me not to write this, but I'm so proud of him that I have to. He is doing so good at his job and is definitely making his way up the ladder and getting so many oppurtunities because he is so good at what he does. He shold be able to take is licensing test this fall and if all goes well, he will offically be a licensed Professional Engineer by next April. The test he has to take is, I think, 4-hours and pretty hard. He's already started studying for it. Sorry for bragging, I'm just so proud of him. He works so hard for our family and I am so grateful for him.

I don't know what I would do without him, especially right now. He has been so good to make sure I don't do too much and takes care of Lucy when he gets home from work. I am so lucky.

And as for me. Wow. This past couple of months has been a rollercoaster for sure. I am now 30 weeks pregnant.

(this was actually taken at about 27 weeks)

This pregnancy has been so different and so much harder than my pregnancy with Lucy. I have been suffering from some really bad abdominal pain for years and pregnancy only exaggerates the pain. But finally, I have been told that it's my gallbladder and that I will need to have it taken out as soon as I can after I have the baby. Probably about 6 weeks after. Unless the pain gets much worse and I really can't stand it. I have also been having contractions and cramping that's not getting better so we are monitoring that as well to make sure it doesn't get worse or more regular. If it does, I'll have to most likely be put on bed rest and meds that will stop the contractions. So far I haven't dilated or anything so that's good. So fun. So I pretty much just sit  during the day while poor Lucy entertains herself. Like I said though, she has been so good about it. I only have between 6-8 weeks left though! I will be having another c-section, so I just need to make it to at least 36 weeks, hopefully longer. It will really just depend on the pain I'm in and how I feel physically.

Anyways, no that this blog is sufficienty long enough, I promise I will now be better at updating more regularly. Especially as we get closer to Porter arriving!!

Yes, we're still here...

Hey everyone! Wow, I am such a slacker. I know there has been a lot going on with us lately so I have plenty to blog about, but alas it all remains unposted. So my goal by the end of the week is to have it updated with probably a couple of different posts, just to mix things up a bit. I really just wanted to get on really quick to let everyone know about my other blog that I am working on. It's called One Chic Baby. If you look at it now, you're not going to see much cause I'm still working on getting it going and getting pictures and info posted. A lot of you know that I have a bit of a crafty side to myself when I want to and that has only been fueled since my purchase of a sewing machine. I have discovered that I LOVE TO SEW!! It is so relaxing to me and I have found myself making all sorts of things. Mostly baby things. So many people I know are having babies and all I want to do is make things for them. So I've decided to put my services and creations out there into the blogosphere. Right now I have car seat canopies, nursing covers, baby slings, bags, fabric and felt flower hair accessories for little girls, tu-tus for little girls of all ages, and so many more things in my brain that I want to get made. So check back in the next little while and I will have pictures and pricing up for some way cute stuff. I have found somethign that I love to do and so I want to share it with everyone else! (Plus, I can make all of this stuff SOOOOOOO much cheaper than you'll find it anywhere else!) Thanks!

Going Private

So I've decided, for real this time, that I am going to be making our blog private. I will be doing so in 1 week, so January 14th. Leave me your email if you want an invite!

Gettin' ready for the boy...

Slowly, but we are! We got the crib bedding for Porter this week, so of course I had to set it up right away! It's pretty much all we have for him, except for a few little things he got for Christmas. It's so weird having the crib set up again, but so fun at the same time. It's making it all a little more real that Porter is coming.

I'm loving little boy stuff!

I'm so excited to finish decorating the room and make it work for both Lucy and Porter. We're keeping them together because the only other open rooms are downstairs and we figured Lucy was to young to be downstairs by herself.

I also decided to throw in some pictures in of Lucy's "big-girl bed". We've had it for a while but I don't think I've posted any pictures of it.

She loves her bed! If ever I can't find her, I check her room and most likely she is sitting on her bed reading books.

"The" Christmas Post

Well, I guess it's about time to update you all (well, whoever reads this) on our wonderful Christmas. This year was a little different than the past few years. We decided to be at our house on Christmas morning with just the 3 of us. But I'll talk about that in a sec. I've decided that I'll do this post in pictures seeing as looking at pictures is a lot more fun than reading.

Lucy in one of her Christmas dresses. I had already gotten her one, which is way fun, but then I saw this dress online on clearance and I had to get it for her. I love it!

The night before Christmas Eve, I decided to put curlers in Lucy's hair just to see what it would look like. She already had naturally curly hair, but I wanted to anyways.She didn't like it much in the process, but I think it turned out super cute!

I love this picture of her!

This is Christmas Eve morning after I'd taken the curlers out. She looked like Shirley Temple.

We spent most of the day at home cleaning and getting ready for the next morning. Then we went to my parents house to be able to talk to my little brother Reagan who is on his mission in South Korea. We were able to use Skype and talk to him through a webcam. It was so fun to see him! Actually being able to see him made it seem like he wasn't so far away. He is doing so good and is such an amazing missionary, you can just tell. I can't wait to talk to him again in May for Mother's day and be able to introduce him to Porter.

After we talked to Reagan, we went over to John's parents house to do presents with them. it is so nice having our parents live litereally 2 minutes away from each other. All of the grandkids were so excited to open presents. It was so fun to watch Lucy figure out the wrapping paper and opening gifts. Needless to say she got SPOILED! All of them did.

After that, we ran back over to my parents to do gifts with them before everyone had to leave. And once again Lucy was spoiled. I see a trend starting here...

Lucy in her Christmas jammies... I know I'm biased, but I just think she is the cutest thing ever!

Christmas morning we slept in till about 8:30, which was really weird seeing as my whole life I've always woken up at around 4 or 5 AM. I started making breakfast while John got Lucy up. While it was baking, we did Christmas. Lucy knew exactly what to do with the presents after the practice from the night before.

She was really good at helping me and John open our gifts too.

My parents came over for breakfast and we opened the last of out presents. Later that night we went and saw "Sherlock Homles" with my family. Very good movie!

Overall, we had an amazing Christmas! It was so much more fun this year with Lucy. And I'm so excited for next year when we have Porter. I can't believe that in just 3 1/2 more months, we will have another little person in our family. We are so excited and feel so blessed to be having him join our family. It's hit us this past week that we really don't have anything ready for him and so that's what we're going to be working on in the next little bit. Although we did get his bedding yesterday, so I'll have to post pictures when I get that set up. Anyways, I hope everyone had as good of a holiday as we did! adn I hope you all enjoy your New Year's as well!!

It's that time of year!

I LOVE this time of year!! Christmas is definitely my favorite holiday and season. It's such a busy time of year and this year hasn't been any different for us. I feel like we have something going on everyday! I love it! Here are a few of the highlights so far...

We set up our Christmas tree the day after Thanksgiving. I love it. I think it's so pretty. We had to get new ornaments this year because the ones we had were glass and we didn't want to risk Lucy having a little too much fun with them. But I love the new ones we got. It's just a lot more fun.

We watched our first Christmas movies of the season while we were putting up the tree and Lucy loved them! She just sat int his chair basically the whole time watching the movies.

My niece Elinor is in Kindergarten and had her little Christmas program. I went with my mom and dad and met my sister there. It was so cute. Here are Lucy and Elinor after the program. Such cute girls! It's crazy how much they look alike! There are sometimes when I see pictures of Elinor when she was Lucy's age, and I have to do a double-take because they look so similar. So fun!


This next picture is just something funny that we've been dealing with lately. Lucy LOVES the be naked. She is always trying to take her clothes off and run and dance around. And when she takes her clothes off, she thinks that she can take her diaper off too. I am always catch her trying to take her diaper off. This was on Sunday. We were getting her ready for bed and I got this priceless shot. She's gonna hate me when she grows up;).

Lucy had her first real experience with snow last week. We got slammed with the snowstorm that hit. We ended up getting about 8 inches at our house. So when John went out to shovel, we got Lucy all dressed up and let her play for a few minutes. She loved it!

She kept falling down but she thought it was so funny. So fun!

This is a picture of out front yard when we had about 6 inches. It was so pretty!

And lastly, a little Porter update. This is me at 5 months. I feel like I'm so much bigger than I was with Lucy at this point. But John says I look the same. This little man is quite the mover! John has already been able to feel him multiple times, where at this point with Lucy, he had maybe felt her once or twice. He is definitely a strong little thing. I can't believe we only have 4 months left and I feel like it's gonna go by so fast.

Anyways, this was a lot longer than I was planning on. So props to anyone who actually read it instead of just looking at the pictures! Merry Christmas everyone!

Time to start thinking blue...

Yep! We found out yesterday that we are having a little baby boy! We are so excited! It was a bit of a shock but not at the same time. From the beginning we've been thinking it was a girl, but the past couple of weeks we've both been thinking that maybe it was a boy. So when the tech told us it was a boy, it was just kind of like "Well ok!". Having it be a boy actually saved us from coming up with a girl name though. We were really struggling with that one haha. But we do have a name picked out for this little boy. He will be Porter David Matern. Unless we randomly decide to do something different. But I think we're pretty stuck on Porter. Anyways, only 20 more weeks!!!