Happy Easter to my dear blog readers! More about our Easter in a minute, I’ll start with the baby update. I’m now 31 weeks pregnant and our little girl is now about 16 inches long and weighs approximately 3.3 pounds…about the same as four navel oranges. She had the hiccups for the first time (that I noticed, at least) today. It’s so much fun feeling her move around in there. Everything looked good at my prenatal visit last week, I’m measuring right on track and her heart rate was about 140. Here’s the latest belly picture:

Our Easter weekend did not quite go as planned, poor Maxwell came down with a fever Saturday afternoon and didn’t want to do much except cuddle with me the rest of the day and Sunday. We took him to the doctor yesterday as he is coughing quite a bit, but I’m glad to report everything looked good–no ear infection, lungs sound clear, so the verdict is just a bad cold to wait out. Saturday morning was beautiful and sunny here, and Max was still feeling peppy at that point, so we were able to participate in our neighborhood egg hunt.

Waiting for the signal to go:

I don’t have any pictures of Max actually collecting eggs as it was kind of a mad rush of children, but here he is checking out his spoils with Daddy:

Showing me what he got:

There’s chocolate in those eggs! Note the messy mouth.

Sunday we had planned to head up to my grandma’s house for the big family Easter dinner and egg hunt, but we had to bail since Max definitely wasn’t up to it. He did rally to find some eggs Easter morning. He definitely remembered that there were treats in there this time, every time he found one he’d shake it, then turn to us and ask, “Eat it?”

Pausing in egg collection. Note Dory checking out what’s in the Easter basket behind him. Pixel tried that as well and Max quickly said, “No no, Pixel.”

Later that morning came the crash. We knew he was feeling crummy when he fell asleep on me in the chair, that never happens:

I hated to see him not feeling good, but I did treasure all the extra snuggles we had over the weekend. Yesterday and today he does seem to be on the mend, not back 100% yet–still not much appetite and more resting and snuggling than usual, but also more playing, running around, etc, which is very nice to see. He’s been watching more TV than normal the past few days, and the current favorite show is “Blue’s Clues.” He was watching an episode yesterday where the main character (Steve) drew a picture of a soup pot. As Steve was drawing the lid, he mentioned that it was shaped like a circle. Max was quick to correct him by saying “Oval” and it was indeed an oval shape, not a circle.

This last batch of pictures has nothing to do with Easter, but I wanted to share them. The other day Max spotted one of his winter hats in the stroller and wanted to wear it. He was able to get it on and off by himself and would narrate “Hat on” and “Hat off.” He wore it for a good part of the day. Of course we had to get photo evidence of the cuteness:

We got Maxwell’s two year photos back from the fabulous Justine Shelton of J. Shelton Photography yesterday, and I’m in love! She did a great job as always of capturing us. We were struck by what a little boy Max looks like in these photos, not much trace left of our baby in there! I’ll share them below.

I’m 30 weeks pregnant as of today, the baby is the size of a cabbage and weighs about 2.75 pounds. I have a prenatal visit this week, hopefully I’ll get another good report there. We’ve been working on her room; yesterday we sent Max to Grandma’s house and spent the day cleaning our office and condensing the office and guest room into one. Now that the bed is out of the baby’s room, it is really starting to come together. After a fruitless search for a crib skirt and valances that (a) I liked and (b) would fit the windows in that room, I gave up and decided to make them myself. This could get dicey, but thankfully my mother-in-law, a master at sewing, will be here next month and I figure she can help me with the tricky parts. Wall art is ordered but not yet arrived, including a wall decal to go near the crib. It will be a great feeling when the room is complete and ready for our daughter!

Here is my 30 week belly pic:

One of our weekend rituals is Max helping Daddy make the morning coffee. Maxwell loves to tell Daddy what to do for each step and is very helpful with putting the filter in, scooping the beans, and pushing the button to grind them. He gets the cutest expression on his face each time, it’s such a proud smile. Yesterday and today I snapped a few pictures of the process:

And as promised, the photos from Justine. It was quite an adventure to get these, we originally planned on an outdoor setting, but the weather didn’t cooperate, so we moved to our backup–a large nursery in a nearby town. Unbeknownst to us, that day happened to be the day of their town Spring festival and parade, aka the busiest day of the year. The street in front of the nursery was completely closed. Finally we parked in a nearby shopping center, but then had to wait for a break in the parade before we could get across the road! Thankfully all turned out well as we got some beautiful images. Enjoy!

I’m now in the third trimester and 29 weeks pregnant. Baby is about the weight of a butternut squash and her head is growing bigger to make room for her developing brain. I’m very happy to report that I passed my one hour glucose test last week, so I don’t have to undergo that torture, er I mean three hour test, this time around. We’re continuing to work on the nursery. This coming weekend will be a long session of purging, cleaning and organizing so that we can move the bed from the guest room into the office, and then we can really begin to pull the nursery together. It’s a lot of fun to pick out what will go in there and imagine the time we’ll spend with our baby girl!

Here’s the belly pic from last week:

Maxwell had a good week. His sleep has been shifting a bit lately, with naps only happening sometimes. I keep telling him it’s way too early to stop napping! Thankfully even on the days he doesn’t sleep he’ll lay happily in his crib and talk and sing. It’s pretty funny to listen in on the monitor to the things he says. He continues to really enjoy reading books and will fill in the words on favorite ones if we pause. The way he pronounces some words is so cute–like “sawbabies” for “strawberries.” Every so often he’ll say something that reminds us what a good memory he has….yesterday we were out for lunch and I was sharing a couple bites of my burger with him. I said something about “hamburger” and he immediately said, “Grandpa’s house?” Well, when we were in Florida last month we did indeed have hamburgers one night at my dad and Helen’s. It’s amazing what goes on in his brain!

It’s still pretty rainy here, but we had a dry day on Saturday, so we took a walk to the park. I’ll leave you with some pictures:

Look at those gorgeous eyes!

What Chinese cabbage, you say? Well, that’s the size of our baby girl in utero! She currently measures about 14-15 inches long and weighs about 2.25 pounds. Her brain has developed more tissue and has formed grooves on the surface. I love to feel her moving inside, and Jeff is now able to regularly feel and see the movement also, which never gets old. Tomorrow morning I have quite the prenatal visit….I’ll get my 28 week Rhogam shot (given because I have a negative blood type and Jeff has positive) and I’ll do the one hour glucose test. Some of you may recall that I failed the one hour glucose test when pregnant with Max and had to take the three hour one. That did not go well for me, and I really don’t want to take it again. I’m going to eat nothing but protein tomorrow until I have the test and hope I pass!

Here’s the latest belly pic:

My friend Leanne made this cute dress for the baby. She is a very talented seamstress and whipped it up in a weekend. I can’t wait for our daughter to wear it!

Max continues to be his wonderful, amazing self and we’re soaking up every minute with him. Last week we had one glorious day of sun amidst what’s been a very rainy spring, and we seized our chance to go to the park:

Max can now climb these steps by himself (though we stay close by!):

The swing remains a favorite activity. He’ll still usually do the sign for “swing” whenever he says “park.”

I’ve posted before about how Max likes to do “Tripod” (putting his head on the ground while his buns stay up in the air). The other day I came home from work to find the following scene. Max wanted Grandma to help him put all of the stuffed animals in tripod position:

This week I made a pasta dish for dinner one night that had chopped tomatoes in it. As I was prepping dinner Max asked to eat some tomato. Since getting fruits and veggies into him is trial and error lately, I was all over this request. I put some pieces of tomato in a small dish and he sat on the kitchen floor by me to eat it. He talked about how Chester (his bear) couldn’t have any tomato, and then he laid down on his tummy on the floor, put his face right in the dish and said, “Hi tomato!” He kind of combines “potato” and “tomato” so it came out more like “Hi ponomato!” I was cracking up. Later at dinner he wanted more of the fresh tomato, so I grabbed one and started slicing pieces for him. He indicated that he wanted to eat the whole tomato, not the pieces, and so he did:

Yesterday Jeff and I went to Ikea while Max stayed at Grandma’s house (a place he loves to go!). We were on the hunt for a couple things for the baby’s room, and I’m glad to say we were successful in our search. We got a chair and a bookshelf/storage thing (it has open squares, we’ll use some for books and put bins in the others). Yesterday Max helped Jeff assemble the chair.

Trying out the screwdriver on his rocking chair:

Daddy’s helper:

The whole family got in on the act. Dory tested out the box:

Pixel helped with the directions:

The finished product!

Today our friends Laura and Dave came over for lunch. Laura’s birthday falls just a week after Maxwell’s, so we got a cake to have for dessert. Max was very excited about the possibility of cake, so much so that instead of eating lunch he kept asking to eat the cake. We explained that we would have cake after lunch, so then he asked “Max hold cake?” Yeah, nice try buddy….”I don’t want to eat it yet, just let me hold it.”

We have a running joke with Laura that involves cakes that say “Happy Birthda” instead of the traditional “Happy Birthday,” so that’s what we had today:

The birthday celebrants:

I’ll leave you with a couple images of Max enjoying his cake at last:

Two blog posts in three days! I just may be getting caught up. I can’t believe our Maxwell is two years old! This is such a fun age, we hear new words all the time and interacting with Max is a delight (well, most of the time, he is two, after all). He is officially 36 inches tall (top of the growth chart as usual) and weighs 29 pounds. He says three word phrases now–“Max do it,” “Bye-bye yellow bus,” “Mama up steps” and many others. Max knows his colors and shapes and can count to ten. He sings the ABC’s, which has to be one of the cutest things I’ve ever seen. Somehow the “W” part morphs into “Grandma” and sometimes “Grandma’s house.” Gone is the boy who would happily chow down on broccoli and spinach, we have to sneak those in now and sometimes he’ll still reach into his mouth, grab out the offending vegetable, and hand it back to us.

We’ve found it helpful to warn Max of impending transitions by telling him one minute ahead of time that he has “one more minute” (sometimes also preceded by a five minute warning). Now if we say we’re going to do just about anything, he’ll ask, “One more minute?” When the minute is up and we say “Time to change your diaper” (or whatever the case may be)  he’ll inevitably say, “One more minute?” We remind him that we had one more minute and now it’s time, which is usually followed by, “More one more minute?” Can’t blame a kid for trying.

Maxwell remembers so much it’s almost scary sometimes. A minor fall will merit pointing to the spot days later and saying “Uh-oh” and then making a fake cry, followed by “Careful.” We are very lucky that he remains a good nighttime sleeper, clocking 12 hours or more most nights, and does a great job of falling asleep by himself. While he’ll occasionally surprise us with a long nap of two hours, average nap time remains on the shorter side, at an hour to an hour and a half. He always sleeps with Chester bear and his blankie. When he wakes up in the morning we sit in the chair in his room and snuggle for a few minutes before starting the day. I love those quiet moments together.

If you look at most of our day-to-day pictures of Max, the odds are good he’s holding a ball in at least one hand. He loves to carry them around everywhere, even taking them in the bathtub with him. At night we put them on the shelf when he goes to sleep, and the first thing he says when I go in in the morning is, “Ball? Ball?”

We are so blessed to have a happy, healthy two year old. Maxwell, we love you so much!

Max’s second birthday fell on a Saturday this year, so we had his birthday party on his actual birthday. We held it at the gym where we do parent-tot gymnastics. It was a great way to go…we had a small group of kids about his age, and they got to run around the gym and do all sorts of fun things before we went upstairs for food, presents and of course cake. Whenever we would talk to Max about his party, the first thing he would say was, “Cake?” Definitely a must have!

I have a lot of pictures from the party (no surprise there!).  I narrowed it down for this post but it’s still picture-heavy!

After all that playing, time for some food!

Blowing out the candles:

Maxwell got lots of wonderful presents: puzzles, a drum, books, balls, new jammies….so many fun things!

After the party, a few of the guests made a spontaneous trip to the nearby beach park. We made a quick stop by on our way home, the weather was too beautiful to miss a beach sunset!

Throwing rocks in the water was a big hit:

What a wonderful day!

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!

On Wednesdays Max and my mom go to music class. Since I’m at work when they go, I haven’t gotten to take pictures yet. This week I had a shorter workday on Wednesday so I was able to get away from the office and join them at class. Here are the pictures:

This was the first class of a new session, so they had name tags out. Max didn’t think they belonged on his shirt (or on mine, for that matter) so we put it on his back when he wasn’t looking:

Sitting in a circle, watching the teacher:

They did a new song that involved rolling over. Here’s Grandma helping Max try it:

Maxwell thought it was really funny when the teacher rolled over:

Saying and signing “More” when she stopped:

Fun with Grandma:

Bells!

And quite possibly Max’s favorite part of music class: Snack time afterward! For the last 10 minutes or so of class he would sign “Eat” every so often, and we’d explain that snack time would be coming soon.

Max didn’t want to do much rolling over in class, but since then he’s very interested in it. He’ll say “Wo ober” and have one of us do it. Very cute. He still does lots of saying “hi” and “bye” to things. The other day I was giving him some string cheese, which was a big hit. After he finished a piece he would say “More chee” and I’d pass him another piece. When it was gone I explained the cheese was all done. He thought for a minute and then said, “Bye-bye, chee.” It is so fun listening to him talk and try out new words. Maxwell’s current favorite thing to play is Hide and Seek (“Hi-See”). He gets the general idea but not always the fine points of the execution. Sometimes he’ll hide under his coloring table or behind the rocking chair, and other times he’ll stand in the middle of the living room and we pretend not to see him as we hunt all around. As soon as we find him he’ll immediately say, “More!”

I’ve entered week 19 of pregnancy and am feeling good. I am feeling the baby move every day, which is always wonderful. So far the flutters aren’t strong enough to be felt from the outside, so Jeff is still waiting to feel it. We find out this week if the baby is a boy or a girl….or should I say, we get confirmation that it is a boy. Hopefully baby is not shy and shows off the goods!