Nesting, Bedrooms, and 24 Week Picture

I've been starting to "nest" a little bit lately and my latest project is the little girl's bedroom. Our house has 3 very small bedrooms and I need one room to remain the office (at least most of it) since I do some work from home. So the plan is to have the girls share a bedroom (after of course the first few months of baby girl sleeping in our bedroom). Well trying to fit in a crib, toddler bed, dressers, changing tables, toys, books, etc. has proved to be quite the challenge! At first my thought was to move the dressers into our office and then I could just keep the clothes in a separate room. But after I keep checking on Ellie at night and finding sites like this (yes that is a dress up princess skirt around her neck)...

I'm really thinking that maybe I need to move all the toys and play stuff into the office! Oh how I wish for a playroom....

For those that have asked, here is a picture of me in all 24 weeks of pregnancy. 4 months to go!

Sleeping, Sleeping and Trouble

Ellie's been starting to not want to nap every day. BUT we've been so busy that she usually does end up falling asleep at some point in the afternoon or going to bed really early. She's not ready to go without a nap yet! I've caught her in the funniest positions lately and have tried to capture some of them on camera.

In her room at night I've caught her sleeping with ALL of her stuffed animals, with toys in her hand, or sleeping on the floor:


One afternoon I put a show on in my bedroom and came back to find her sleeping on the edge of my bed with her legs hanging over:


Or sleeping at the very bottom of my bed stuck between the mattress and the foot of the bed:

Or sleeping with her hands up on her face:


When she's not sleeping and I'm trying to get her to take a nap, I usually find her getting into trouble... like this mess with baby powder (that was stuck clear at the TOP of her closet and she managed to climb up and get down):



Or just having fun sneaking food into my room to watch one of her shows on tv:


Helping me make treats:

Or reading stories to the dogs or her stuffed animals:


We finished up our month of swimming lessons last week and Ellie improved a ton over the second session. She is a little daredevil now and got in trouble for trying to run and jump in the pool when I wasn't there to catch her! We're going to skip the next session of lessons and try again towards the end of July. Of course it started back up with the normal 100+ heat this last week so I'm wishing we were going to be in the pool everyday...

And tomorrow marks exactly 4 months or 16 weeks until this baby girl is due to arrive. I know it's going to fly by! I'm starting to make my lists of the things I still need to get for a second baby and the things I need to do (mainly figure out to arrange toys and furniture in our small house). Should keep me busy!

Swimming, Swimming & More Swimming

This is my 8th summer in the hot Valley of the Sun and I've learned that pretty much the only way to survive the summers is to swim A LOT. I will say that we've been spoiled this June with lower temperatures than normal. But I still dream about a day when I have a pool in my own backyard in Arizona. At this point I'd even take a neighborhood pool. At any rate - we are still managing to do lots of swimming!

We have swimming in the backyard with friends in our kiddie pools<

Playing on the toys in the backyard in swimsuits:

Sneaking into the house with Brooklyn and climbing on the counters when done swimming




Swimming lessons:





And then yesterday we tried out Mesquite Groves in Chandler. It's a great little mini water park and totally cheap to get in. They had a lazy river, whirlpool, toddler slides and big kid slides, water contraptions that shoot out, etc. I didn't bring my camera in but it was a ton of fun. Ellie's favorite part was the lazy river where we sat on a tube together and floated around and tried to avoid the buckets that would dump water down every so often.

Summertime Catch Up

Summertime is in full force and keeping us busy! I haven't taken very many pictures lately but I needed to get this somewhat caught up. So excuse the very long post with not many pictures but I needed to document stuff for myself.

In order to keep myself in some sort of shape this pregnancy, I decided to join a gym for the next few months. It's been wonderful to be able to workout in an air conditioned space and I haven't been dealing with as many pregnancy leg cramps or soreness and I'm liking that part! And Ellie is adjusting to being left in the kid's club area a few times a week. She wasn't sure what to think at first but doesn't cry when I leave her now and constantly reminds the workers that I'm coming back. I specifically picked a gym with a swimming pool so I can hopefully keep working out in the later months!

After we hit the gym in the mornings, we've been heading to swim lessons. Ellie is doing soo much better this time around! Since she's only 2 and we're doing lessons through the City of Mesa, I still have to get in the water with her and work on it all with her(not too bad when it's so hot out anyway). It's so amazing what a difference a year makes! Now I can hardly get her out of the water (last year she cried and screamed every day). She has had fun the last two weeks playing with her friend Brooklyn in the same class and is getting more and more brave. Her least favorite part is when I help her float on her back! Lots of screaming and kicking is involved. We're signed up for another 2 weeks of lessons so maybe she'll master that skill. She's far from being able to swim on her own but it's a nice break in the day and makes her tired enough for a nap each day!

I decided to try out the Harkins Summer Movie Pass with Ellie this summer. I know lots of theatres do this but it's basically a program where you pay $7.00 and get into 10 movies for the summer. They are all G and PG movies and older ones but it's still a good deal. I was wondering how Ellie would do since she doesn't even sit through a whole movie at home but so far she's done better than I thought. It helps that we go with one of her friends I think! And I bring lots of snacks. We missed the first week but have seen "Nim's Island" and "Horton Hears a Who" so far. It's been worth the money so far and maybe by the end of the summer Ellie will actually sit through an entire movie...

Rob can't seem to catch a break with his health lately and a couple weekends ago we ended up in the Urgent Care office again. This time he was having breathing problems and his regular doctor sent him to get some chest x-rays and breathing treatment done at Urgent Care since they were worried he had a collapsed lung. Thankfully they weren't collapsed and with some breathing treatments his oxygen levels went back up. No one could give us a good reason for why his recent cold or allergies caused this but it was scary! He had to go to Hawaii this last week for 4 days (rough life, huh) and check on one of his Reps out there for work. I wish I could have gone with him but June is really expensive for last minute Hawaii tickets so that didn't happen. Ellie is enjoying her new Hawaiian dresses and I'm enjoying the chocolates he brought back today.

I'm feeling much better lately with just a bit of nausea and heartburn each night. I had a check up last week and I'm measuring exactly on track and the heartbeat is right where it should be. I feel her kick a ton now which is always fun and Rob and Ellie have felt the kicks too now. I'm really trying to enjoy this stage of pregnancy because I can still move around pretty well and am not too uncomfortable yet!

Ellie is continuing to amaze me every day with something. Lately it seems like her imagination has taken off in a whole new direction and it's coming out in what she says to me and the things she wants to play. This last week she decided she wanted to have a picnic and dragged a blanket into the kitchen with some of her toys and spent a good 20 minutes talking to them all. She's been wanting to dance with me around the house a lot. Or have me march with her like we are in a parade. And pretend she is a princess and I'm a queen. It's never boring at our house (especially with her fascination of getting into all my lotion no matter where I try and hide it).