This will be a quick post, but I wanted to get these pictures up. Max’s Oma is an expert knitter and we’re lucky to have received several sweaters from her for Max. Recently he wore one out and about with me while running some errands, and we received no less than four separate compliments on what a cute sweater he was wearing (as well as comments on Maxwell’s general cuteness ). When we got home I took some pictures, which will make up the rest of today’s post!

A slightly belated Happy Valentine’s Day from Max!

Blowing a kiss:

Our big news from this past week is that Maxwell graduated from speech therapy! We had a visit on Monday and they did another assessment to see where he was, and lo and behold, he is caught up. Max remains above his age level on receptive speech, and is within the normal range for expressive speech. Our speech therapist gave us a few things to continue to work on and said we can check in with her any time if needed, but that she didn’t see a need for continued therapy at this point. It was great to hear this, we have noticed how much more Max is talking but it’s always nice to get reassurance from an independent professional. Max knows and can say the colors red, orange, green, blue, purple, pink, white and black. He also loves to count to three and can go as high as 10 with a little help. He’s started to sing parts of the ABC song along with us, which is just amazingly cute. It’s hard to believe his birthday is in just under a month!

Yesterday Jeff took some great pictures of Maxwell playing with his yellow ball. Balls remain a favorite toy and Max looks for them whenever we visit someone’s house. Yesterday he went to Grandma’s house so Jeff and I could go on a date for lunch and a movie (we highly recommend “The King’s Speech”) and he was so excited to play with the balls at Grandma’s house. He talked about them after we got home and remembered what colors they are.

In pregnancy news, I’m 22 weeks as of today! Things continue to go well, I have a prenatal visit this week so hopefully everything looks good there. Here’s my belly picture from this past week:

What’s that they say about mothers’ intuition? Maybe that it’s sometimes wrong? We didn’t get a 100% certain opinion, but both our ultrasound tech and the radiologist said they are confident our baby is a GIRL! Needless to say, we were quite surprised, but thrilled. She had her legs together the whole time, so we didn’t get a full frontal shot, but they saw enough to be quite sure. Most importantly, everything looked good…heart, brain, spine, kidneys, all appear to be as they should be. It was so wonderful to see our baby in there, moving around and looking good. It really is amazing how much is developed at this point, and we are so grateful that things are going well with this pregnancy. As of today I am at 20 weeks, so halfway done! I’m still feeling good, I had some back pain the past couple days but it isn’t as bad today. We are enjoying exploring a whole new world of girl names and clothes.

Some pictures of our daughter!

At the end of the ultrasound they turned on the 3D equipment. It’s still early in the pregnancy for 3D pictures, so the tech didn’t take very many, but we did get this sweet one of her face. She had her hands up there pretty much the whole time:

Max has some kind of tummy issue going on, though we can’t quite figure it out. Thursday he didn’t want any dinner and later threw up once. No fever, seemed fine Friday and yesterday, then this morning threw up again after breakfast. Again no fever, seems fine now. We can’t pinpoint anything new or unusual that he’s eaten lately, hopefully it was just a very minor tummy bug of some kind and is on its way out. We’ve had a pretty low-key weekend, just taking it easy and playing at home. This morning when Max had just gotten sick, we mellowed out with a little Thomas the Tank Engine on TV, while holding my phone:

Maxwell has a bike helmet to go with a bike trailer we have. It’s sized for three years, and is currently just a bit too small for his giant head.   We have been getting a lot of use out of it around the house, as Max enjoys putting it on, taking it off, having us try it on, etc:

Another favorite thing to do is try on Daddy’s shoes:

A couple random cute ones:

And a special treat to end the post: A video! Jeff’s phone has a video camera, and Max loves to sit with Daddy and watch himself on the screen. A little translation for the middle of the video…when Maxwell leans in very close to the screen, you’ll hear him say, “Hi Max,” followed by “Phone.”   Enjoy!