EDD #1

This has seriously been the strangest/hardest pregnancy. Hard because of this and strange because I have now been given 3 different due dates. The first due date came from my first ultrasound (none were done by my LMP, which would have put me at even further along). Initially I was told to expect our baby on July 25. Then I went back for another ultrasound five days later and the baby still hadn't grown so the date was pushed to July 30. Six days later I went in again (this time to discuss the possibility of a D & C since the baby wasn't growing and they hadn't detected a heartbeat yet). This time the baby miraculously had a heartbeat but somehow had only managed to grow enough for one day. My final due date was given for August 4. Who knows what happened to keep my little girl from growing for almost two weeks, but we are SO GRATEFUL that everything has gone smoothly since about 13 weeks.

But the trouble is, now we have no idea when to expect our baby. Everyone I have talked to has said go with the original due date because babies typically come based on the first ultrasound. Well today is that day. I am still very much pregnant. I am planning on giving Peanut until she is 41 weeks by the latest due date. Send prayers it doesn't come to that.

At 36.2 weeks I was 1cm dialated, 40% effaced, and hadn't dropped.
at 38.3 weeks I am 1.5cm dialated, 50% effaced, -2 station, and my cervix is soft.
So I'm progressing slowly in every department which is the best we could hope for. I've had a TON of contractions but they have yet to get regular or painful enough to consider them the beginnings of labor. They also have been going on for 2 weeks now. Such fun. Apparently it's called Prodromal Labor.

On that note, here is a slightly blurry picture of me at 38 weeks, 3 days (yesterday):


Meanwhile Jane has been up to self-entertainment. She has been awesome the last few days, so here's to hoping that keeps up. I walked in my room the other day and saw a strange light coming from the corner...

Don't worry, it wasn't a ghost. I solved the mystery.

Jane is also really into colors (or "coyors"). She knows where we keep the chalkboard and chalk and regularly pulls them out to draw.

Although in the end she always colors her hands and comes to me panicking because her hands are pink.


Fun fact: Jane's favorite color is yellow. She is still obsessed with this yellow spatula and gets depressed whenever it ends up in the dishwasher. She freaked the other Sunday in the middle of sacrament because a lady behind us was wearing a yellow skirt. She points out everything that is yellow. But she does it in the most adorable way, she makes eye contact with me, gets an inquisitive look and asks herself, "coyor?" then she gets super excited and yells "Yel-yow!" We love it.

"Wow, Dad. She's really sleepy."

So we've been watching Enchanted a lot lately. For some reason the quote I use constantly is Morgan (Patrick Dempsey's daughter) referring to Giselle who has instantaneously fallen asleep on the couch: "Wow, Dad. She's really sleepy." --I was going to post a link to the clip, but apparently no one thought the quote was memorable enough to put on youtube. I did, however, find lots of weird videos people have made showing the Enchanted love story put to various songs. Who has time to do that sort of thing?--

I feel like that a lot.

Anyhow, apparently Jane does, too. My friend, Amber, was watching Jane while I went to WIC and when I came home Amber mentioned that Jane had fallen asleep. It was close to Jane's nap time so it wasn't so crazy but I was surprised when I found Jane asleep in the LIVING ROOM.



My friend said that they were reading books when Jane got up, went to her room, grabbed her pillow, brought it into the living room (where her blanket already was) and crashed.

In fact, she's still sleeping and it's been an hour and a half. Silly girl.






This literally hasn't happened for over a year. Think this time period. Even then I thought it was so memorable that I blogged about it. Jane isn't one to fall asleep randomly. Well... not since the jumperoo, which apparently was very sleep inducing.

Survival Mode

So last week I got the great idea to buy 50lbs of peaches. It seriously was the greatest idea ever. Jane and I ate around a thousand peaches a day, we baked a giant pie, we put them on everything, froze a bunch, and canned the rest.


I'm full term now. Which means that I'm constantly cranky. Jane feeds off my emotions like you wouldn't believe which means that she is also perpetually cranky (no matter how hard I try to fake that I'm happy around her). She has taken to doing really cool things like emptying every book off her bookshelf. Multiple times.

We pretty much look like this all the time. This baby better come soon.

The good news is that my mom came to visit last week. It was so good to see her. She was a champ and drove to see us even though she had just finished a giant cross country trip and had to leave her brand new husband behind. PLUS she was a trooper and let me put her to work an hour after she arrived helping me can peaches. Thanks, Mom!

Jane thought my mom was awesome because she always had tasty food and she brought her a dog. This dog is named "oof". So now we have "woof woof" (dog from Grandma Janet) and "oof" (dog from Grandma Sandy).




Jane is a milk addict.


We are doing the summer reading program from the library with Jane this year. They have a special program for "listeners" instead of readers. Scott thought he would impress the library by adding this book to her list.

Back at cleaning off her bookshelf. She was supposed to be napping. The good news is that after I made her clean it up every time... she is learning to only pull down a few books ;)

The last month I was pregnant with Jane I only ate burritos and Snickers. This time I only eat waffles and chocolate. Jane is totally cool with this diet. Scott not so much.


We really do love our Janie.



Yesterday I decided we needed to get out of the house desperately. We decided on the Milwaukee Public Museum because we had some friends going and it was FREE (On Mondays for MKE residents, fyi). Poor Scott was running on 3 hours of sleep because he worked all night.

Jane thought the museum was awesome. She spent over an hour running around the Native American exhibit pointing out every duck.

It was there that we ran into her friends. Jane proceeded to set a terrible example and got them all crazy and riled up.

I don't know where she gets it...

We thought she would like the interactive butterfly section, but she really just wanted to attack everything with this piece of butterfly puzzle.

Then I did something truly terrible. I put the puzzle together and Jane lost her mind. She proceeded to throw a fit on the dirty carpet. Awesome. All because I put the puzzle together and Jane didn't want me to. Yeah... we went home after that. Like I said, stellar behavior lately.

Good thing she's gorgeous.


Later we went swimming in the kiddie pool outside.

Jane loved it as usual, she is such a water baby.


But also she was secretly drinking half of the pool water.

Every time she caught me taking a picture she would make this face. You'd think she had been watching toddlers & tiara's or something, who taught her to pose like this?


Anyhow, sorry to be a downer. Life really is good, it's just been rough lately. In fact as I write this Jane has emptied out around 50 DVD's from their cases. Good thing I'm stocked on Hostess products now.

The 4th of July!

Scott and I are kind of lazy holiday celebrators by nature. We're trying to rectify this now that Jane is starting to notice that all of the other kids have cooler parents than hers. We did a pretty good job this year at celebrating the 4th of July. Well... other than the fact that we ate tacos for dinner. Sorry, the pregnant lady gets what the pregnant lady wants.

We started off with patriotic waffles:


and while Jane isn't much for mornings (unless it involves a pile of animals/blankets and watching a movie) she thought that the waffles were pretty awesome. Especially since they came with "bewwys".

Because "bewwys" can turn a cranky toddler into this (sorry it won't flip):


We decided to kick off our Fourth by walking down to the Tosa Parade, a longstanding tradition in Milwaukee that we have somehow managed to miss every year.

On our way through our neighborhood we passed our very own neighborhood "parade" which actually was a bunch of cute neighbor kids who decorated their bikes/scooters/wagons with flags and received a POLICE ESCORT through the neighborhood. It was awesome. They were SO excited. They had a cop car (with lights going) at front and back and a motorcycle patrolling in the middle.

Jane actually really enjoyed the parade. She made friends with another little girl (who was very sweet and probably around 6) and REALLY loved that people brought their dogs to the parade. She spent the majority of her time trying to pet every dog she saw (which was a lot). Everyone was so nice and let her-- she was in heaven.




On our way home we passed our park and arrived just in time to see a firetruck shoot off it's hose for kids to run and play in. I hadn't seen anything like it! The water shot SO FAR into the sky (probably around 50 feet).




Scott, since he is the fun parent in Jane's book took her in her stroller and ran through the water.


We spent our afternoon at Fred's eating delicious food and hanging out with good friends. The weather was perfect, not too hot for the parade, but plenty hot for swimming.

We closed out our day with sparklers and smores around a campfire with our neighbors. I was lazy and didn't take any pictures, but we sure had fun. It really was the perfect fourth.


& a random picture of one of Jane's random quirks:
She is kind of a hoarder and will often try to bring all of her favorite "treasures" around with her wherever she goes. This particular day I had gotten out of the shower to find that she had decided to camp out in the bathroom with all of her treasures and wait for me.

Weekly Goodies/Little Baker

An update on our lives for the last week:
NOT PICTURED-- My Dad moved to Chicago! Gah! We are so, so excited and I've caught Jane several times running around our house yelling "GWAPA! GWAPA!" She is in  love. Yet somehow I have managed to capture exactly 0 photos of him. I will fix this soon (when he gets back from his road trip).

In other news:
I continue to grow exceedingly large. Peanut has stopped growing out and is just growing up (in my ribs, woohoo) and down now. Maternity pants/skirts/capris no longer fit because I carry so low and even wearing my lowest things I am constantly pushing the tops down because of pressure. Yes. I carry LOW. We are getting anxious to meet her. I am hoping for a natural birth, so I would love input and stories from any natural birth mama's out there!

Jane has been quite the little baker lately. She has helped me make brownies (from scratch) and banana bread in the last few days. She adores helping so we finally bought her her very own apron. She also is big on the color yellow (the only color she can correctly label) so she was thrilled when her grandma sent a care package that had a yellow spatula in it.

If you ever wondered what Jane would look like with brownie batter a beard on her face...
 
We all know the batter is really the only reason we make brownies.



Oh! We also made cupcakes. Jane took great pride in cupcake holder placement. She did it all on her own! (well I separated the wrappers but she put them in the pans on her own)

Cue Jane's excited face:

Jane is still obsessed with all things Daddy. This has been going on since the womb and is still going strong.



melt my heart.


Meanwhile I bribe her with food. Last week she very sweetly asked for chocolate cake for breakfast. At first I thought she was nuts but then I realized that she hangs out with a pregnant lady all day and probably thinks chocolate first thing in the morning is totally normal. In fact, I agreed that it was a fabulous idea and we ate cake. For breakfast. Don't tell Scott.

Jane was very sad the other day because she couldn't hold all of her babies at once. Naturally I asked if she wanted a "moby". She lit up and immediately said yes. After wrapping her up in her muslin blanket she grabbed her dog and put him right on her shoulder and tried to slide him into the moby... Can you tell she's watched it a few times? haha. Especially since I haven't been able to moby really for a while, but I've been helping out some neighbors so she has seen it modeled quite a bit.

She thought I was a total genius and hauled her dog around for quite a while after that.

What a cutie.

I turned on music the other day and a dance party ensued. All of my pictures are blurry because she was so busy dancing, but they made me happy anyway.


Again with the I-bribe-my-child-for-her-love... I caught her licking our peanut butter straight out of the container and since it was almost gone I didn't bother to stop her.

She was thrilled.

I didn't take into account, however, just how messy it would get. She did really well with her  clothes but then when I went to wet a paper towel to wipe her hands she stroked her hair. Yeah... it was completely matted with peanut butter and we decided a bath was in order ;)