As of right now (Tuesday and 2:30 pm), Noah has not met his baby sister yet. We think he has a little stomach bug, so we don’t want to bring him to the hospital just yet. Last night Rick stayed home with Noah and my Mom stayed with me and Faith at the hospital. This morning, Rick and Mom did a shift change, so Mom is spending time with Noah. If he’s doing better this afternoon, we might bring him to the hospital tonight to meet his baby sister.

We will be able to come home tomorrow, so that will be nice. I’m sure it will be an adjustment to get used to a newborn again. I just hope that Noah doesn’t bury his sister in all his Hot Wheels and trains!!

I’ll be adding more pictures, but for now, here are the pictures we have so far.

My mom is on her way down as I type this. She has the next week off so she’ll be a big help when we have this little one! If I don’t go into labor by Monday morning at 7 am, then they are going to induce me. I’m not too excited about being induced, but at least there is an end in sight!!!

The photos were done by Amanda Trei with Bits of Life Photos a few weeks ago. She only lives a few miles from us and when she found me on Facebook, we started talking and she was willing to take some photos. She is also planning on doing some newborn photos too!!!!

Well, hopefully the next post will be that we have a healthy baby girl!!!!

Not much else is going on around here. We are getting close to our due date – just a shade over 3 weeks away!!! At my last doctors appointment, I found out that I’m starting to dilate, so that makes it seem really close!!! Now every time Rick leaves, I get the whole “if you start going into labor, call me right away” speech. First of all, DUH, of course I’m going to call you….how else am I going to get to the hospital!!! And does he really think I’ll just surprise him with, “oh, by the way, while you were out, I gave birth to our daughter”?

I start going to the doctor every two weeks now for a checkup. It’s always nice to hear that little heartbeat!!! I’m still having those lovely round ligament pains, mainly when I’m laying down or trying to roll over in bed. So bedtime is usually a painful process.

Rick must have gotten tired of listening to me complain about my back ache, so he got me a prenatal massage at the gym he goes to!!! Yeah, it was GREAT!!!!! I told him that he needs to start giving me daily massages now…so far, that hasn’t happened!!!

I’m pretty sure, Noah doesn’t have any idea what is going on. He is way more interested in his cars, trucks and farm than what I have in my belly! Every once in a while, we’ll ask him where his baby sister is and he’ll lift up my shirt and point at my belly button, but then he jumps off my lap and gets a toy. I guess she’ll be here soon enough and then we’ll be trying to keep him away from her!

I’m 22 weeks along today (out of 40 weeks total). So I’m just over half way!!!! I’m feeling pretty good these days, but I can tell I’m starting to get a tummy!!! Noah does like to use it as a jungle gym, so his little sister is learning to fight back already!!!! I can feel her kick and Rick has felt her a few times already too!!! I do have some round ligament pains from my muscles starting to stretch, which I’m sure will not be going away for another few months. But all-in-all, I’m doing great!!!

I’m starting to get over the shock that we are actually having a girl. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still trying to find something she can wear that is cute and also does NOT have pink on it!! I think it might be impossible to find anything that isn’t pink or purple for a little girl!!! I guess that is going to be my next hurdle – accepting pink.

We had some visitors this last weekend. It was kinda of un-expected, but that seems to work out better than trying to plan something!!! I talked to Pam Arends on Thursday morning and her husband was going to be gone all weekend and the kids didn’t have school on Friday because of Parent Teacher Conferences, so if we weren’t doing anything, they were going to come on down!!! I told her to start packing her bags!!!

The got to our house about 6ish on Friday night and Noah got his second wind when they come. He was pretty excited to have some other kids to play with!!! We had some Papa Murphy’s pizza and hung out at the house. On Saturday morning we got up and had some breakfast and then me, Pam and her kids left to go shopping. We left Rick and Noah at home to do some man stuff! They actually hung the Christmas lights on the house and Rick even set up the Christmas Tree in our entry way. Seems way too early for Christmas already!!!! I’m not sure when I’ll decorate the tree, but I think it will be at least another week or two.

When we got home from shopping, we told the kids that we would hook up the microphones and they could sing, play guitar and drum and then they could play the Wii. So it was noisy for awhile!!!! And then the competitions got going on the Wii!!! We decided to grill out for dinner and then we ended up having Movie Night later on.

It was a great weekend for them to come down. It was nice and warm all weekend, so we didn’t have to worry about any weather.

Everything looked good on the sonogram. They check all kinds of stuff and measure about everything! I have no idea how they make out some of the stuff they do…I can only see the obvious stuff, like the head, feet, hands, spinal cord and bigger bones. The heart is beating and you can see all four chambers, so that is pretty cool. We are still going off the March 20th due date, so we seem to be right on track!