20/20 Vision

I just had my 20 week checkup. This of course is a really big milestone. 20 weeks in 20 weeks to go! The big halfway point. And of course, the BIG ULTRASOUND! We had an amazing tech who did the ultrasound for us. She was so friendly and reassuring. So many times you get these techs that almost don't even look at you and tell you up front that they "will not be talking or answering any questions not to disturb them during their measurements!" But this young lady was truly amazing. We brought the kids with us so that they could see the baby moving all around. Brady's favorite part was "seeing the baby's bones!" I mean come on, does that really surprise anyone, especially with how excited he was to see dinosaur bones up in NYC? Abbey of course loved all of it. The Lord answered our prayers and all the measurements and anatomy came back healthy and strong. Baby J's heartbeat was at 152 today. We were able to get all of the scan on VHS to show all the movement and we also got some still shots as well. Baby J is weighing in at a whopping 12 oz. (basically a can of soda) which is right where he/she should be. Thank you for all your continued prayers. We are so excited to now officially be in the downswing of the pregnancy. May will be here before we know it and we can't wait to snuggle up to this baby! I have included probably the one and only intentional shot of the bump that you will see on here. I will also try to add a survey to the side of the page for anyone up for the challenge of guessing the gender. As of today's appointment, I am up 5 pounds. Let's hope I can keep that trend going. I gained exactly 22 pounds with both Abbey and Brady so I'd like to shoot for that again give or take a pound or two!

This was a really good shot of the umbilical cord on the far right of the baby's abdomen

Have you ever seen such a perfect little foot?

Baby J appears to be a thumb sucker. The tech said she has rarely seen a baby actually get it's thumb in its mouth during an ultrasound, but Baby J had a good hold of it's thumb and was sucking away!

These shots are always a litttle freaky looking, but this is the face straight on. You can make out the eye sockets in this one.

NYC - Part 2

As most of you have heard, Brady couldn't wait to get the camera out and start taking pictures, so as soon as we arrived at the airport he began!

Brady asked me to take a picture of the three of them riding the airport tram!

This was the Burger King in the airport! He acts like he's never seen a BK before!

Me holding a banana to eat once we boarded the plane! And yes, that it my enormous (according to my sweet husband and son)19 week belly as the backdrop.

Brady took this picture of himself sitting on the airplane waiting to take off

And of course, you can't go ice skating without Santa Claus.

Brady really loved the Museum of Natural History. If you've never seen the movie Night at the Museum, this is the location of the film and he was so excited to see all the stuff from the movie, especially the dinosaurs. So the next few shots are from the museum.

T-Rex - His favorite

Wall mural at the entrance to one of the dinosaur rooms

Stegosauraus (I think)

Several dinosaurs together.

Triceratops

Wooly Mammoth - His 2nd favorite

The "art" if you can call it that on one of the walls inside the subway station.



I'm sure you can guess the next few are the Statue of Liberty.

View of the NYC skyline from the statue.

Brady being the statue in front of the statue!

And last but certainly not least, a picture of his Avatar toy from McDonalds.

NYC - Part 1

Since I don't have a lot of time to post all about our vacation to NYC, I'll break it down into parts. The first two parts will be the pictures the kids took with their very own disposable cameras. Part 1 is from Abbey's camera. And for some reason, I can't change the order of the pictures! GRRR!

Abbey had one last shot when we got home, so she took a picture of our tree.




The arch at Washington Square park (in the middle of the NYU campus)



The Statue of Liberty (with a little mittened thumb in the upper corner) from the ferry




Another view of the statue from the ferry



The skyline from the observation deck of the Empire State Building

Another great shot from the top of the Empire State Building

Not exactly sure why this was photo worthy, but it's the kitchen at the Museum of Natural History food court.

Abbey thought it was hilarious that someone wrote on a car in the snow! It definitely deserved a photo!

The snow beginning to fall outside the filthy McDonalds window where we were refueling our waning energy!

Visiting with Santa at Macy's

The ice skating rink at Rockefeller Center

Abbey's ice skate

One of the horse drawn carriages near Central Park.

Me and Brady in the car that picked us up from La Guardia and took us to our hotel.

What a month...or longer!

November and December get very busy around here, but add in a virus infected computer that goes kaput, children that tag team you with a very strange stomach virus and a "what was I thinking when I signed up for this" PTA project and you get a very bad blogger! I have a "new to me computer" to replace by sickie computer, but I have no photos (not that I've taken too many anyways) because they are on the old one that we have not had a chance to get to Matthew's IT guy at work to try to recover.

So this will be a fairly random post to try to catch you up and what all we've done or will be doing! In the middle of November we took the kids to a USF Bulls football game. A client of Matthew's gave us the tickets and they were fantastic seats! We all had a really good time, even though it did get a little warmish in the stadium, but hey that's the trade-off to living in Florida! We had all of my Mom's side of the family over for Thanksgiving and had a great time! The food was YUMMO and the weather turned out to be really nice! The kids spent the night with Matthew's parents on Thanksgiving night and Matthew and I got up at 3:15am to hit the Black Friday sales! This was our first time and although I felt a great sense of accomplishment when we were done shopping at 9:30 a.m., I don't think the deals were quite worthy of a 3 o'clock wake up call!

Our November ended with Abbey coming down with a stomach virus and for the last two weeks we have literally been on house confinement while the kids swapped middle of the night sick sessions! Hmmm, we'll be adding a third child into the mix soon, that should make for interesting cold and flu seasons around here! The kids went back to school today, and dare I say, I think they might be rid of that nastiness! On Friday, we will be heading out early for a family trip to NYC! The kids are so excited! This will be Brady's first plane trip ever and the first one that Abbey will actually remember! We have lots of fun and exciting things planned while we're up there. The kids got disposable cameras as early Christmas presents from my parents and it is killing them that they can't take pictures yet! We told them they had to wait until our trip, but once we get there they can take whatever pictures they want! So in other words, we will have two disposable cameras each with 27 shots, filled with pictures of the Orlando airport. What's really humorous (or sadly age defining) is that the kids don't understand the concept of a camera with film. They keep asking if they can delete a picture after they take it to make room for more pictures! Ahhh the spoils of the digital world! We of course will have the digital camera and I haven't quite decided if we will take the video camera as well. I mean come on, we're already a bunch of touristy Floridians traipsing through NYC, we don't want to look like complete fools with a video camera in our hands too! ha ha! We'll get back in time for Christmas at home and then a nice relaxing week off before the hectic new year begins!

As for the new year, that will probably be the start of babyizing the house! We go for our big 20 week ultrasound the Tuesday after X-mas, but don't get all excited because we are not going to find out what we're having. I haven't decided what I like more...the element of surprise in the delivery room, the random old wives tales used to predict, or the sheer shock on people's faces when they hear us say "we don't want to know what we're having"!

Thanks for continuing to check in on our little fam! We hope you all have a very Happy Holiday Season, because who are we kidding, I probably won't be posting again for another week or so! Who knows, maybe I'll surprise you!