Spring is here, finally! It seems we have had what has been a very cool spring. Our big news that we recently sprung on everyone is that we are expecting our second little one. The due date is October 23rd. This baby could be a Halloween baby if it is anything like its brother, who was 13 days past his due date! We are excited. I am especially excited to have the first trimester behind me. I felt awful! Way worse than I felt with Henry. I had a lot of nausea which hung around all day, but became the worst in the evenings. I had no energy. I also got sick during the time I was pregnant, which didn't help matters. All that to say, I am beginning to feel better. I have gotten some energy back. I am exercising and getting more than just the bare minimum done around the house, and I haven't had to take nausea medication in over a week. I still have periods of feeling icky, but they usually are manageable or pass quickly. At almost 14 weeks the good days are outnumbering the bad days, so we can get to the "yay, we are pregnant" phase instead of "ugh, I'm pregnant."Sam didn't actually believe me when I gave him the pregnancy test. I got a faint positive pregnancy test pretty early on. Henry was really into pretending to be the FedEx man and delivering packages, so I had him deliver it to Sam in a Fed Ex package. He didn't see the positive at first, and it took some convincing. A positive sign is a positive sign, no matter how faint. So, here we go, on another journey.
We aren't really sure how Henry will react once the baby is here. He is pretty attached and likes his one-on-one playmates to be at his beckon call. I think he will be a very loving big brother. He is affectionate and likes to take care of things. He is good at being gentle with Delilah. We haven't actually explained everything to him. We are thinking that once we actually know if it is a boy or girl, we can give it a name, and it will be more like a real person inside of mommy's belly. We have also ordered a few books to read to him about some of his favorite characters getting a new baby in the family (Bernstein Bears and Little Critter). He is pretty inquisitive when reading, is attentive and asks a lot of questions. We think (hope) we will be able to paint the picture for him. Henry is really into playing with cars right now. He will play with cars for hours a day. He will act out pretend scenarios (birthday party, sick, fire, racing) with the cars and have them talk to one another. It is really amazing to watch. He can carry on conversations and say things that surprise you. He is also starting to tell his own stories. He will say stories like "Once upon a time, there was a little boy named Henry, and he liked to eat ice cream, and he played outside." It is really cute. With the cuteness, he is also using words that aren't so nice, but I'm not sure if he realizes that his words can hurt people's feelings, or if he knows what hurt feelings means. He can tell us what he wants and doesn't want now. Like it her wants me to change his diaper, he will tell Sam, "I want Mommy to do it. Your not good. Go away." So, we have been working on using nice words.
People that don't know him ask if he is almost three because of his size and how well he can talk. People have asked me if I do speech therapy on him to get him to talk so well, and I haven't. I probably naturally approach play situations as a speech therapist and don't realize it, but I think that we have just played with him and read to him and talked to him like a little adult. I think that he also just has a natural aptitude for language...I mean both of his parents were English teachers...there has to be some genetic inclination there. Who knows, he may grow up and be a math and science kid....(yay! There is more money in that anyways). Although, right now, if you ask him how tall he is, he will say "300 lbs." We are working on that....
Henry is starting to get the concept of drawing down. He still just draws lines, but he can tell you what it is. He was drawing on his chalk board and for each line he drew, he said what it was. "This is Lightening, this is Mater, this is Doc, and this is Sally." And, he is of course still really into books. When he is into a book, he will sit and listen to it over an over again, even longer ones. We got a book that has multiple stories in it for him for Easter, (over 200 pages), and he sat and listened to it in its entirety and wanted to hear it again when it was over.
We are also clocking a lot of time outside, now that the weather is nice. He has a sandbox, which he likes, and a water table. He also likes to just run around the yard, squirt things with a water gun, and swing. He is just a bundle of energy right now and so much fun.
One thing we are not sure how to handle at the moment is his obsession with saying "pow, pow" and "gun." We don't actually think he knows the implications of what he is saying, but we are also not sure where he learned it...
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| Henry eating a blue dinosaur cookie in downtown Hendersonville |
He has continued to expand his eating habits. We can usually get him to try eating one new thing a week by introducing him to something new that we are having at dinner. However, he likes to read at dinner, so that actually distracts him, and we aren't sure if he pays attention to what he is eating. We have discovered that tomatoes and too many strawberries give him a diaper rash...so we try to steer clear or go light on those.
We have had a rough patch with the sleeping. He slept really good from mid-January to mid-March, but then, he started waking several times a night wanting someone to come sleep with him. And because it is hard to resist, and easier than making him cry it out, usually Sam (because I was also in the depths of first trimester despair) would go sleep with him. He is finally in the last week starting to work it out and we are getting more sleeping through the night. He was also wetting through a lot at night which we think was waking him up, so we got some nighttime diapers and so far, so good. We are wondering how bedtime is going to go when the new baby gets here because we are still rocking Henry to sleep. We are going to try to wean him off of that this summer when we can be home with him and be really consistent. But for now, he is still our baby! He will go back to sleep on his own though in the middle of the night without rocking.
We took our first ever family of three trip. We went to Wrightsville Beach and stayed at the Holiday Inn Resort Hotel. It is a very kid friendly resort. For older kids there are kid's clubs you can send your kids off to do. There was an indoor pool which was nice since it was cool 2 of the three days we were there. We also paid for breakfast. They had a yummy breakfast buffet each morning with an omelet bar. We stayed for three nights in a hotel room with a king sized bed and a pull-out couch bed. We weren't sure how it would work out with us all being in the same room and sleep, but it worked out fine. Henry was going through his funky sleep thing anyways, so he would wake up a couple times a night, but go right back to sleep when someone would lay with him. We put him on the pull out bed. He even took his naps.
We also went to the "circus" that was in town. Henry enjoyed watching the animal and motorcylces. He wasn't so keen on the train ride. We had to abort mission early.
We had fun swimming. We bought him this float thing that he puts his arms through, and it straps around his chest. He seemed to really like getting in the pool with it and would even float for a few minutes by himself. It was really windy on the beach for the first few days we were there, so we didn't spend a lot of time out there, but Henry did play in the sand some. On our last day, he developed a strange fear of the ocean and didn't want to go near it. The last day was warm enough for us to swim outside, and Henry really enjoyed the kiddie pool where he could walk around by himself. We, of course, ate ice cream every day.
On our way back from the beach, we stopped for an overnight stay in Raleigh with Matt and Tanya. We stuck around on Saturday and went to Marbles, a really neat kid's museum, and then for Matt and Tanya's baby shower! Sam got to see some people that he hadn't seen since college....I won't say how long that has been....
Before we went on our spring break escapade, there was Easter. Henry had a fun time hunting Easter eggs this year. He was looking pretty snazzy in his Easter get-up, but was pretty dead-set on not cooperating for a picture.
I also had a birthday. We celebrated at Outback. It was totally pregnancy craving that I wanted to go here. I rarely crave steak an ceasar salad. Of course, my wonderful husband made strawberry-rhubarb pie happen again, even though it is next to impossible to find rhubarb at that time of year.... Thank you, dear husband. Here is my 31year old, pregnant cartwheel at the beach!
In other news, our house is really moving along. We have walls and a second floor. This weekend, Schumacher is putting on a open house, so we hope that we can go and walk through the house, even the second floor, and see where all the rooms are going to be. It is really exciting to see the progress! Over the next month or so we will just be getting ready for Henry's 2nd birthday (it is so hard to believe!), counting down the days until summer, and watching the progress on our house and belly. It is a busy year for the Summers, for sure!
A note from Daddy:
Just a few thoughts on your playing. You really like to hide cars and then go find them with other cars. You like to chase me while I say "Tra-ba-da-ba-dee, tra-ba-da-ba-doo!" Sometimes I chase you and carry you back to my "cave" aka your bed and say "Come back here, coyote!" when you run away. You can swing for at least 30 minutes at a time. You like to play on the keyboard. You keep me hopping but it's amazing. Love it and love you!
