Things are looking up

Happy Valentine's Day!

Pregnancy - almost 21 weeks and doing well.  Everything with the baby looks great.  Everyone around me seems shocked at how little I am showing: it seems more like I have a beer gut than a baby in there.  I haven't gained as much as I did with Rachel at this time, but I've been exercising way less and not eating as well - go figure!  Rachel is getting more excited about the baby and is pretty sure she is having a sister.  In fact, I think it might be a bit difficult for her if it turns out to be a boy!

We have signed up for a birthing class in May/June and have decided to go with a bit of an unusual tactic.  I will write more as I learn more, but we've chosen to have a 6 week 'hypnobabies' class.  Our hope is to actually learn some techniques around partial hypnosis, so that I can have a mindset change around labor and some coping strategies.  I still plan to be aware, able to move around, and feeling the typical feelings, but I plan to practice changing my perception of what I am feeling so it's more comfortable.  We'll see!

Potty Training - is going pretty well.  Many days without accidents.  Night time diaper and diaper at nap time at school.  Seems like familiar people lead to less accidents, and less familiar people lead to more.  All in all, it's going well.

All the cool kids and stuffed animals wear big girl panties

Valentine's Day - we took 18 valentines to school and cookies.  Rachel helped make sugar cookies in the shapes of hearts, polar bears, snow flakes, penguins and seals.  We received many other treats and valentines from school mates, including several temporary tattoos.

Studying and work - studying for my big exam is going well.  Last weekend we had a responsible stay-at-home weekend where we took turns with Rachel while the other one got work done.  It wasn't much fun, but it was productive.  The house got cleaner, meals got prepared, studying and work got done.

Telling time/numbers/letter - Rachel is very interested in looking at face clocks and trying to tell the time.  We have a few books from the library where she gets to put the hands to the right number.  She's very interested in telling us how many minutes things will take, or what time a store will open, or what time the pool closes.  We were recently given a lovely train set by friends as a hand me down and she'll say 'It will take 4 minutes for Thomas to get from the police station to the airport'.  (It takes him about 6 seconds.) The hilarious thing is that she is really good at all this with the numbers she can recognize in print.  She knows 2,4,6,8,10,12 quite well but doesn't seem to know odd numbers (this is because of the way one of our books goes).  So recently we've been talking a lot about numbers more so than letters.  As far as ABCs go, Rachel can tell you about 10 things that start with the letter R.  She can recognize A,B,C,D,O,R,T,W, and sometimes others but not as well.

Names: Rachel loves to name everyone and everything.  Popular names for toys/blankets/cans/stuffed animals/characters in books include Donner, Blitzen, Cupid, Teagan, Griffin, Cooper John, Daddy, Physical, Donder.

Big Girl Bedroom: Since we know Rachel can climb out of her crib and she continues to sleep on the carpet, it seems like a good time to switch over to a big girl room/bed and make that a fun thing.  This way, when the baby needs most of Rachel's current furniture, we're hoping it won't seem like the baby took it away from Rachel.  So my procrastination time recently has been addicted to craigslist.  Rachel has decided that she would like a big girl bed in a new bedroom and the baby can have her current room with the crib in it.  This current room will remain with stars/moons/planets theme, and Rachel's new room will take on an animal/jungle theme with monkeys, elephants, giraffes, etc.

So today I finally found an affordable twin bed in Boulder on craigslist.  Plain pine wood, sturdy, mattress included, and less than $100.  It's no race car bed or fire truck bed or really cool bunk bed set up, but it also didn't cost $600 like many of the cool ones do.  And I wasn't crazy about medium brown pine wood... but I think it will blend in if the rest of the room is fun or maybe we'll paint the pine.  Fitting the bed into the Subaru wagon next to Rachel's car seat and then driving back to Lafayette was an adventure.  Poor Rachel napped in the car on the way home with half a headboard in her lap.

Next projects: moving queen bed out of the guest room, putting together twin bed, finding fun sheets, finding animal wall decals, finding a dresser and some kind of chair, and then moving Rachel into the new big girl bed in one exciting sweep that will not disturb her sleeping!

Sleeping: has been significantly better.  Not all nights are perfect, but we have had a handful of nights where Rachel has slept from 8pm-7am.  She's never slept 11 hours until now, and it's lovely.  We've had to wake her up to get ready for school on several mornings.  I think a few things helped us get out of the dark gloomy place we were living and start sleeping again: bedtime snack, bedtime visual schedule with sticker reward for sleeping through the night, being consistent about what we said yes and no to in all of her many requests, letting her scream it out consistently for a few nights without changing plans/answers/parents.

Snow: Front Range weather in Colorado is interesting.  The mountains have been having an ok time after a terrible start to the season.  We've seen many days of dusting, but hardly a day where we've had more than 1".  Thursday in Boulder we got about 2", in Lafayette we got a dusting, and today is was 60 degrees and wonderful.  Most people in Boulder want a good dumping of 3 feet of snow-us-in-so-we-can't-go-to-work snow, or else let's get on with Spring and make it warm already.  Every time we go out, we take a hat/gloves/puffy over a tshirt because you just never know.  We haven't made a single snowman or gone sledding with Rachel once in town.  Neither of us has missed any work due to weather.  Bor-ing.

What's next? Jason is away this weekend skiing with male colleagues in Steamboat Springs at a fancy cabin with a snowmobile and a cat to take them skiing.  It's an annual staff trip called "Man Camp".  I gather it's a lot of fun.  Next weekend he leaves Sat night and will be gone for 3 nights/4 days with students to a DECA state competition in Colorado Springs.

My work schedule changes this week, so I will work shorter days Mon-Thurs and add Friday mornings for 5 hours at our Lafayette clinic, which is just down the street.  I'm looking forward to this change because it will mean no evenings of work later than 5pm and should help our evenings run much smoother.  Working Fridays will mean that I don't get a chunk of time for housework or studying.  But Jason will get more time after school to work and will only have to get Rachel one night per week.

I am hoping to start a prenatal yoga/exercise class asap.

We leave for Mexico with Nana and Grandma in one month to go to Playa del Carmen!  Wo-hooo!!