A week in pictures

I never post pictures because frankly, it's a pain in the butt. Also, we no longer have a functioning camera so I have to take pictures on my iPhone, email them to myself, download them to my computer, and then do the resizing thing. And they aren't even that high-quality. Ugh. Maybe there's a new camera in my future, seeing how I have a birthday coming up tomorrow and Christmas in another month? ;o) We'll see!


This is the best family shot we were able to get for the Christmas card. Good grief. We all look like we're in pain....I think I'll do a Christmas card with multiple pictures this year, and make this one small! ;o)

Ava looking pretty cute...wish she'd have smiled like this for the family shot!

Ava at Beaverdam At Falls Lake...Tuesday, Nov. 23rd it was gorgeous outside (low 70s!) so Ava, Mom, and I packed a picnic and set off in search of a park...Beaverdam is awesome! I can't wait to take Craig...there are picnic areas, a playground, beach, etc....good stuff. 

Ava and Mommy at Falls Lake...is my face puffy from pregnancy or does it always look like that? :-/

Ava and Mimi at Falls Lake

A shot of Falls Lake...it was a windy day, but on a calm day it would be fun to take out a canoe and explore from the water.

Wrightsville Beach--this is where Craig and I went for our weekend getaway. Not exactly beach weather but it was beautiful and the time alone with each other was fabulous!

On the beach...first sort-of belly shot for Baby #2! I guess I'll have to get on that.... ;o) 

 Craig on the beach...he's so cute... :o)

Ava with her prize for sleeping all night in her own room: a Tinkerbell doll! 

She was SO proud! Unfortunately, it was a fluke and she has yet to do it again: she ends up on the chair in our room at some point every. single. night. Yeesh. 

Happy Thanksgiving!

Just like last year, Thanksgiving 2010 was celebrated a day earlier with my mom, as the rest of the family stopped making the journey after 2008...we had a few busy years before that and then it just trickled off. Sad, but what can you do? We had a great traditional meal with my mom yesterday, complete with decorations provided by Ava (turkey hats, autumn leaf placemats, pinecone turkeys....totally cute). My mom left today and then we relaxed with Ava, ate turkey leftovers for lunch, Craig and Ava napped while I cleaned, ate turkey leftovers for dinner, and then conducted the bedtime routine. Ava didn't make it past 10pm in her own bed: she's sleeping on the chair-and-a-half in our room even as I type this. I have no idea how to get her to stay in her own bed all night but as I've said before, this is one case where the tough love thing is not the answer. It's been nearly two months and she has GOT to get over it! As much as I hate to admit that I do think it's sweet to hear her moving around and sucking on her fingers, she needs to remain in her own space at night.

Anyhow, in baby news, nothing is really new....the last of the first trimester symptoms are finally releasing their grip on me: it seemed like they were going away but then came back again, although not as severe. Oh, I had to reschedule the anatomy scan so now we have two more days of waiting...augh!!!! I hate Craig's stupid work schedule....and I almost didn't reschedule it because waiting an extra 48 hours just might kill me. ;o) Still nothing new to report in the movement dept...wish (s)he'd just haul off with a good kick already. Oh well.

Oh, on Sunday we celebrated my birthday a little bit early--while Craig and I were out of town, Ava and my mom made me a cake. The best part is that after the cake was done, my mom apparently got out a bag of potatoes so she could make a baked potato for dinner, and Ava insisted on putting one on the cake....haha! She was so excited about it too...it was definitely the most unique cake I have ever seen, and given my insane-o, gaudy, over-the-top wedding/baby shower cakes (anyone who knows the story knows what I mean here)....that's saying a LOT. I love my crazy daughter, and the fact that a potato sitting atop a red velvet cake is perfectly logical to her. :)

My next post will simply be a collection of pictures from this week: the trip to the beach, spending time with Mom, the potato birthday cake, Thanksgiving, etc....I just don't feel like doing the necessary resizing and editing at the moment.

15 Weeks and All is Well!

The title of this post sums it up nicely: everything is fine, of course. I have been feeling sporadic movement, mostly changes in pressure rather than real "kick"-type movements. In 19 days we will find out if baby H is a boy or a girl, and of course I'm going to continue to lose my mind until then! Yes, I would prefer a girl but a boy would be awesome too...it's not like I'll be mad if it's a boy, you know? (Seriously, as long as it's not a hermaphrodite we're good. Although even if it is, I'll still love it and they can do that genetic testing thing and fix the parts accordingly. You know what? I'm going to shut up now.) Instinct tells me it's a girl, but I have crappy instincts so that doesn't actually mean anything...we shall see!

Raging hormones....well, the "rage" part is true enough...

Craig and I just had a discussion about whether I'm suffering from crazy pregnancy hormones, or if I always hate people this much. Mostly it consisted of me asking him what he thought, and him making grunting noises because he was probably too afraid to answer. There are just a lot of people rubbing me the wrong way lately...I don't know if I want to blame myself/pregnancy crazies, or if I want to think people really are that obnoxious/lame/passive-aggressive. It's a lose-lose situation.

Speaking of pregnancy, since that's most of what I speak of here...things are weird and tense right now, because it's less than a week until my next appointment. This happened with Ava: there's a month between appointments, right? So I go, and everything is fine and I feel good about everything for about a week. Then another week and I'm pretty neutral...then the last two weeks I go into panic mode thinking of a hundred things that could have gone wrong and time slows down to a crawl until I FINALLY go to the next appointment, find out everything is great, and it starts all over again. Maybe I'll start feeling a little better about things when I can actually feel the baby moving? I keep thinking I feel something, but maybe I'm imagining it...it's not exactly kicks, just more of a sensation of something moving around in there. With Ava, I remember the exact moment I first felt something, she kicked me twice and it was unmistakable. Is 14 1/2 weeks (where I am right now) too early to be feeling something? Also, I'm not very excited about this baby yet...so, either I'm a horrible mother or this is normal for the second child. I am so consumed by everything else going on that I am not as focused on it as I was when it was pregnant with Ava. I think it'll change once we know the gender and pick out the name and start to really prepare for him/her, won't it? I just don't know what to think or expect I guess.

In Ava news...not much. Spanking today because she spit on a kid--SPIT ON THEM--at preschool. I have no idea where she comes up with this stuff...it's mortifying but as long as we can knock it out of her before kindergarten, I'll be happy. I'm sure she'll be fine, she just likes to test the water. And see how quickly she can turn my hair gray. She's still funny and says the most random things...in the course of a discussion we had today, she told me that God made the moon, Jesus made the sun, and Mommy made her. Haha! She also spotted a pile of cat barf on the newly cleaned floor (don't even get me started on the stupid cats) and started to shriek and cry, so maybe in spite of not liking to pick up toys, she's inherited the cleanliness gene after all. ;o)

All right, off to bed...I need all the rest I can get! Still fighting the neverending cold, plus tomorrow I have to pick up Mom from the airport and pack for the beach getaway. Woohoo!

Sick and Tired

This will be short, because Craig is standing in the other room, giving me the evil eye, saying, "GO TO BED! GO TO BED!" The title of my post doesn't actually refer to the pregnancy (although that's always a factor these days), but rather the fact that the entire three-person clan of the Haynor family has been pretty sick for over a week now: Ava is a little under the weather, Craig and I are faring considerably worse. It's some kind of evil cold that will not let go (not flu, we've had our shots)...today I went to work with a leaky faucet for a nose, and virtually no voice to speak of. No pun intended. THAT was a fun way to teach, let me tell you...but, I saved myself a sick day so it's all good. Praying it passes soon because my throat hurts, my nose is raw, and my body aches. On the upside, I think the morning sickness is almost completely gone! I had a few mild, passing moments of nausea today and didn't even have to take Zofran, woohoo! And my aversion to all things fruit/vegetable has improved greatly, although I still wanted to vomit when Craig stuck a slice of watermelon under my nose at dinner. He does not get it. At all.

Ava is still going through the phase where she doesn't want to sleep in her bed, so we've resigned ourselves to allowing her to sleep in our room...sort of. We insist that she goes to bed in her own room (I have to sit in her rocking chair until she falls asleep, which actually forces me to have some down time...I just take the iPad and some earphones and watch movies. She lasts until sometime between 1-3am, and when she wakes up she just comes into our room and sleeps on the chair-and-a-half/ottoman in our sitting area....she usually doesn't even wake us up, although we do hear her and make sure she's got a blanket. This results in all of us getting more sleep than when one of us would go sleep in her bed with her, and hopefully it'll pass before too long.

In six days, my mom arrives to (sort of) spend Thanksgiving with us! She'll actually leave Thanksgiving morning to be with the rest of the family, but we'll celebrate the day before. And next weekend, she's going to watch Ava so Craig and I can get away for our first ever escape since becoming parents nearly three years ago....I'm so excited! We're going to stay at a resort on the beach, and even though it's far from beach weather the view will be beautiful and the smell of the ocean will be refreshing. I can't wait to have him all to myself for a whole 48 hours! We're going to go out and eat great food that someone else will cook AND clean up, we're going to see the latest Harry Potter movie (holy crap, I'm way too excited about that), we're going to sleep without interruption and wake up on our own...and we're just going to generally enjoy being together without the stress of being parents for a couple of days....not that we don't love Ava like crazy, but every couple needs time together, right?

Ava has had quite a few funny quotes recently, but the one that stands out the most is this: the other night at dinner, Craig handed her a cup of milk and she turned to him and said, "Thank you, Peanut!" We just about DIED....I have no idea where she got that from! hahaha!

Whew....

We had a little bit of a scare today when I went into the bathroom and found that I was bleeding. It wasn't very heavy but I'd had some cramps earlier in the day, so I was sufficiently freaked out to call the doctor. They had me come in right away and it turns out everything is fine: the baby was kicking away, with his/her little heart beating strong, the doctor checked out all of my various components (you don't want the details about my ovaries and cervix, I'm sure) and they look great...so the bleeding was entirely random, which happens for some people. Scared the crap out of me though....Craig is out of town, which made it a LOT worse. Luckily I have a friend who was willing to pick up Ava from day care and watch her if I didn't get back in time (the doctor is a good 45 min away), but I was able to get in and out fairly quickly considering the short notice. Still keeping my Monday appointment and if things still look great, we'll be spreading the news. :) I cried quite a bit watching that little bean jump around on the ultrasound.

Something I think I realized--and I talked to Craig about it, and he said he was thinking the same thing--is that this is it. If we were to lose this baby, I could not do this again. I couldn't go through trying to get pregnant, having it work and then losing yet another one, or having it work and dealing with the way I've been feeling the past 5 weeks. I know it sounds stupid, but I feel like it's been going on forever and will never end. No matter what happens I do not see any more pregnancies in  my future. Having said that, I really think it will be fine....I mean, the funny thing is that we didn't even try and it happened, which I NEVER would have believed possible. All I can do at this point is pray every day and know it's out of my hands and trust it will all work out for the best, no matter what.

On an amusing note, I was sitting in the exam room waiting for the doctor (you know, when they make you sit naked from the waist down with only a sheet over your lap) and some guy with a beard and tattooed arms burst into the room and said, "Hi!" I didn't even know what to say because I was still trying to work out if he was a very unprofessionally attired doctor, but a few seconds later he realized I'm NOT his wife and he slowly backed out. I really hope he didn't see my butt crack, which was hanging out the back because I couldn't get the sheet wrapped around back there. Classy! Ah well, at least it gave me a distraction. ;o) 

Ava-isms

Let me start by saying I was going to attempt to post a few pictures, but apparently the image uploading is down right now, so I get to be lazy a little while longer. ;o) There are about a million funny things Ava has been saying and doing lately, and I never write them down....I really want to remember them later though, so here are a few of my recent favorites:

Ava: "Is it raining?"
Me: (bursting into song) "IT'S RAINING MEN!"
Ava: (looks excitedly out of the window, but then looks at me like I'm crazy) "No, it's not."

When she wants to get out of her car seat: "Mommy, buckle me OUT!"


Bursting in on me while I'm in the bathroom: "You're going pee-pee in the potty?! I'm so proud of you!"

In response to a reprimand from Craig: "Yes, ma'am!" (To be fair, I'm teaching her to be polite but she's rarely around men, so "yes, sir" has not come up often...we're working on it.)
 
Names she has given her three dolls: Baby Lauren, Baby Tasha, and Baby Haynor


Proof she watches too much Dora and Diego: "Mommy,  there's a caiman after me! Help! Help! Ayudame!"


Mistaken Identity: She thinks I'm Jessie, the cowgirl from Toy Story. This is a step down from when she identified a picture of Padme (Natalie Portman) as me....

After I told her that there's a baby in my tummy (because it's starting to become much more noticeable, everything really popped out this week): "But *I* want to be the baby in your tummy!" (I told her that she already was....now she is referring to my little baby gut as a "pocket")

Craig: "Ava, do you want Mimi and Papa to come visit?"
Ava: " NO! Just Dada, Mommy, and Ava!" (This was after our trip to IL a few weeks ago, she really missed her daddy and being in her own house, even though she had fun with my family)

I guess that's about it for now. I'm determined to get some sleep...last night I was down around 9:30 (woohoo!) and woke up at 2:45 due to some psychic mom vibe. Sure enough,  few minutes later I heard little footsteps and Ava wandered in, asking to sleep in our bed. We went back to her room and slept in her bed instead, although I use the word "sleep" very loosely: she kicked a lot and kept turning her music on. GAHHHH. Could've been worse I guess... :)