At the hospital

Sorry to those of you who get these posts through email. I'm doing some catch up, so you're going to get a number of them in a row.

Here are some pictures of people who visited us at the hospital.  For some reason, I didn't take pictures of any of the people from my side of the family.  There is one of my mom holding Cecily, but it's only her arm.  Haha!

Nesting

I am due to have a baby any day now.  And every time I'm pregnant, my nesting instinct kicks in like a turbo-power jet pack.  It drives Steve crazy.

Honestly, it kind of drives me crazy, too--though in a different way than my husband.  I go crazy trying to complete all the projects my hormones are telling me are completely necessary to complete RIGHT NOW, while being pregnant or very pregnant.  It doesn't work so well.  I get stressed out.  But for some reason, my brain can't or won't override the hormones.

The up side?  I get A LOT done.

In the last month (since the beginning of April), I have:

• Removed all the chair rail from both my bedroom and the nursery
• Removed all the beadboard from my bedroom walls
• Filled holes, smoothed paint, and re-textured the walls (where the chair rail was) in the nursery
• Primed and painted the nursery
• Built bookshelves and window seat and installed and painted them (including recycled beadboard backing and facing)
• Organized and held a garage sale
• Sold 3 beds and a box spring on KSL (the local classifieds)
• Cleaned and organized the garage
• Did two photo shoots and finished processing the pictures from one (so far)
• Attempted to potty train Mira
• and Made 5 teacher gifts (since Emilia has 3 preschool teachers and 2 bus drivers)

And that's just the stuff I can remember--mostly because it's documented in pictures.

All of the above-mentioned things are why you haven't seen much of me on the blog.   It's also why there hasn't been much of anything exciting to tell all of you about.  Although I will be putting up the pictures of the nursery.  I'm excited to show off my work.

Hopefully in the not-too-distant future, I will have the exciting news that we have a happy healthy baby girl.  If she wants to come Thursday or Friday, that would be great.  In fact, it would be rather perfect timing.  We'll see how accommodating she is.

Preschool graduation

I've always thought it was silly to have "graduations" for every grade.  But...when Emilia finished preschool, her teacher threw a party with cookies and prizes for the kids and called it a graduation party.  Of course, we couldn't be left out, so we went.  It was short and low-key, so it wasn't as bad as my fears.  Miss Emilia wasn't too enthusiastic about having to share space with all of her classmates (too chaotic for her), but I wanted to document it, so here are the pictures.  You can barely see Emilia in the group one: she's in back on the left next to the teacher in gray.  In the second picture, she is being hugged by her main teacher, Miss Rachel--and not looking at the camera, as usual.

friends

Emilia is hair-doing resistant. She doesn't like having to sit through getting her hair done. Mira is much better if I give her a book to look at. I did this "rainbow" ponytail look on Mira one day, and Emilia had to have it, too. Not that she didn't complain through the whole thing.

Being goofy together is one of their favorite ways to play.

Our little friends scrubbing walls and their white board desk after having a little too much fun with the markers.

Aww... Mira adores her big (and now little) sister(s) so much!

Skating party

On the 8th (of April), the company who did our mortgage banking threw a party for all its customers. The company throws this party every year, though I can't imagine why--I really doubt someone is going to choose a mortgage banker based on whether they have the coolest annual party--but I enjoy going, so I'm not going to complain. :)

This year the party was at the 7 Peaks Ice Arena. Everyone could skate for free, they had games set up on the ice for the kids, and they had brownies and popcorn for all.

Emilia loved doing the games. She won a candy bar and a 2-liter of pink pop. She doesn't drink pop, but it was pink, so she was ecstatic. She's not much of a skater, and I didn't put skates on even though I enjoy it because I didn't figure ice skating at 7-months pregnant was high on the smart-things-to-do list. Steve and Mira didn't go. It was a rough evening with a tired two-year-old, so Steve stayed home with her and Emilia and I had a mommy/daughter date. I hope we can do those more often. It was a lot of fun. :)

I actually got them to smile at the same time!

Book Learnin' (attempt #2)

I sent this to the blog from my phone, but apparently the picture didn't attach like it was supposed to.  I thought I would try sending it again. This is the picture emilia drew after reading a book with her daddy about the solar system. (This is the earth orbiting the sun.) She is always impressing me!