Spring Break

So, two weeks ago was Spring Break for LSU. Mike got a whole week off and O and I thought it was the best thing ever!

We started off our break with General Conference and Easter, which were both fantastic!

Mike's friend Tim invited him to watch the season opener for the Cubs with him, so Sunday afternoon we headed for Mobile, Alabama. Tim's parents invited us to have Easter dinner with them, which was so nice! They thought O was so sweet and fun, which was good since he actually threw up at the dinner table right before dinner started, darn texture issues. We're still working on that, obviously! They were super sweet and patient about it though.

The Cubs lost, so that was a bummer.

We spent the night at Tim's and then toured the USS Alabama the next morning. It was such a neat experience. O eats up everything that has to do with trains, planes, cars, and boats, so he was pretty much in heaven the whole time. I can't believe how huge the ship is! I was so exhausted by the time we got done, and we were only able to do one of the three tour routes! We'll definitely have to go back someday and take some snacks with us. We could spend hours and hours there!

 This is inside one of the artillery rooms. Those yellow cones are the shells that go into the biggest gun. I couldn't believe how huge they are!

 The bow of the ship.

After this we had a delicious sea food lunch with Tim, and then took our time getting home. We stopped at Bass Pro Shop, of course, and saw all the critters there and fed the ducks and turtles. O loves checking out the fish in their big tank and then feeding the ducks. Mike's pretty much just in heaven whenever we step in there. I'm becoming accustomed to the fact that war museums and sporting goods shops will pretty much be our tourist destinations with all this testosterone in the house.

We took a couple days pretty easy after this, although I don't know that Mike would agree with that statement. He was really awesome and helped me vacuum under all the furniture and take care of some other things that I usually do, but need his help with due to my growing belly. O pretty much played outside all week, it was so great!

 This is just a couple hours after we gave him a bath. We had to strip him down and hose him off before he could come in. Who needs bath time anyway?

Our garden is growing, sort of. After we planted it rained for 3 weeks straight and most of our seeds didn't make it. It probably also has to do with the fact that our soil isn't that great and we should have tilled it. We mostly just wanted to see how things would do.

 This is our lettuce. We planted a row in front and a row in back. There's a couple stragglers and that bunch in the back. We did find out that the best place to plant in closer to the house, the ones in the front row really struggled to grow at all.

 We planted six pea plants and ended up with two, one of which has started to die since this picture, poor little guy!

We planted two rows of carrots, too. We have two or three that came up in the front and that sparse row in the back.

We're not too disappointed, and we have a plan for our fall garden, so we'll see how that goes.

Half-way through the week we went to the Swamp Center, which is one of our favorite places! Just as we were about to start up the trail our friend's the Sparks happened to show up and we had so much fun going through the trail and getting eaten by mosquitoes with them!

Here's O playing a little golf. Please excuse the roughly played hymns in the background, it was apparently during my practice time.

Our last tourist outing was to the USS Kidd here in Baton Rouge. It was so interesting and, once again, O really loved it!

 Mike says this is an "action shot." Apparently waddling counts as an action, lol!

 Those chains hold the anchors. They're so huge! On the USS Alabama they were even bigger, O had to climb over them.

 The bow of the ship.

 Mike climbed out to a lookout spot to take these shots of the entire destroyer. O and I are the little people sitting on the steps in the bottom of the picture.

 The Mississippi

What a great week it was!

Here's one last photo and video for you of our silly kid.

Our silly little kitty cat. Just as a side note, this is usually totally unacceptable, but we must be getting lax in our old age, lol!

Now we're just getting ready for this baby to come. Tonight, I was working on getting O and I's journals caught up so I'm ready to add another one to my journal keeping. The crib's up, the baby clothes are out, and my deep cleaning to do list keeps getting shorter, so I think we're getting there!

We can't wait!!

Easter

I feel like the weeks are flying by! How could it already be halfway through April?!

We've had a bout of great weather, and have been living it up outside!

O has been playing and playing outside. He especially loves riding his trike. I think he might start to get the pedals soon...

We got a charcoal grill for a great deal and use it all the time. It's so nice to take dinner outside where there's much less mess and it tastes so awesome!

O's been eating up any time he gets with Dad lately. He really misses him when Mike's at school.

He was reading Dad this book that he pulled off the shelf the other day. We thought that it was awesome he wanted to read the "Free Composition" book, it must be because he's such a smarty-pants, lol!

O had a blast at our Ward's Easter Egg Hunt.

They put the eggs for the nursery-age kids in swimming pools filled with shredded paper. I think the kids got a kick out of it, it was really fun.

Afterward, they had fun riding down the hill in the pool. It was so cute!

We took Easter morning pretty easy, it was so nice. O had fun waking up to his Easter basket and finding eggs around the living room.

I love his excitement about everything, it's so sweet!

Potty Training, Easter Wreath, and Third Trimester

The title of this post pretty much covers everything we've been up to lately.

We've been working on potty training, so underpants and all things bathroom related are hot topics in our house. O is earning a skittle each time he goes and putting marbles in a jar to work toward a special reward. He vacillates between getting a marble tower and a wooden train set.

He's been doing great and has many days with no accidents. We're still working on his remembering to go on his own though. Mostly Mom or Dad have to remind him or drag him to the bathroom, so we still have a ways to go.

The other day we made an Easter wreath for outside our door. It was so easy and O did most of it by himself! He did such a great job, too!

He's getting to be such a big boy! Just a couple days ago he pretty much made our cornbread muffins by himself. He poured everything and did the mixing and filled the muffin cups, it was awesome!

Where did my Little Man go?

The baby is doing great! Elliott is such an active baby, he kicks and stretches all the time! He makes my belly move and bump so much, I love it. I am 29 weeks now, so already one week into the 3rd Trimester. I can't believe it's going so fast, the weeks are just flying by!

Here I am at 28 weeks.

It's been a couple months since we've seen our lizard friends, but we found two outside our door today. O was having so much fun chasing them around and trying to touch one.

Here's a video:

Mike is pretty much just doing the same thing poor man. School, school, and more school. Last night he stayed up until 2am to finish writing a paper only to go to class and find out it had been postponed, so it was a rough day. I hate it when that happens!

We love you all!

A Digital Concert

At lunch the other day O was singing away, so I caught a couple songs on camera.

Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star

One Little Monkey Swinging in the Tree

One Little Monkey Jumping on the Bed

Twinkle, Twinkle Little Bat

For a little while he was doing a mash-up of  jumping on the bed and swinging in the tree and it was so cute! I was trying to catch it, but didn't quite get it.
Snapped that Monkey

Jumping on the Bed

Then he just got crazy!

I hope this brightens your week, it sure has ours!

Sensory Fun and Our Garden

Lately we've been trying to help Oliver start eating more. He's a pretty good eater, but has a hard time with textures. He'll try something and seem to like it, but gag or vomit before he can swallow. I did some research on the internet and found another family who was struggling with the same thing. This mother said they started doing sensory play each day and it helped their little one with his texture issues. So, I did a bunch of pinning on Pinterest and we started our sensory play.

Here's O's first sensory play: fun with dry macaroni.

We try to do something different a couple times a week.

He loved this shaving cream day...

At first he thought the shaving cream was pretty gross, but then he started to get used to the texture and by the end he was covered with shaving cream from head to toe!

We've also done flour and some different textures in gallon-sized bags. The easy part about sensory is that he often encounters new sensory experiences as we go through our normal day. The sandbox at the park is a good one, or the leaves and grass, just anything I can think of that would have a new or different texture. I think Thursday we're going to do boiled spaghetti noodles, it should be fun!

We've already seen it starting to help his texture issues, too. He's a much better eater now and hasn't vommitted at dinner for about a month, yay!

Two weeks ago I had a bit of an energy boost and it is still continuing, so we've knocked several things off the to-do list, hooray!

First was the garden.

Our last lawn maintenance person would only mow when he would come, and if there was anything on the lawn then he mowed around it. I can't believe they actually paid him, how does that even count as lawn maintenance? Whatever. So, it meant that the weeds around our apartment were crazy huge, especially lately since we've been getting quite a bit of rain. We had been planning on tearing them all out and planting a garden anyway, so we weren't too worried about it. Then, I actually started to work on pulling the weeds out and it was exhausting and took forever!

Here's O and I's progress on Day 1:

This chunk took me about 1 hour.

We only needed this front bed on the right clear to plant in, but I was going to do the strip on the left and the back bed on the right so we could actually see our sidewalk and it didn't look so trashy. I could see it was going to take me forever after I finished this first day, so I hit it for an hour a day as often as we had sunshine. Mike came home one afternoon and helped me do a chunk and then helped me finish it last week, woohoo! He would have helped me more often, but he almost always gets home after dark.

Then, this awesome thing happened... a guy showed up to do the lawn maintenance. This was surprising because we hadn't actually even seen the lawn guy for months. He mowed... then he edged... then he blew the clippings off with a leaf blower! What?! We love this new guy, he actually does something! Woohoo! This meant I didn't have to clear out the strip on the left or the bed in the back, since he knocked them down with the weed eater, yay! So much faster than a pregnant lady with a two-yr-old and a hoe!

Here's the friend O made on our first day:

I don't know what this thing is, but I was trying to be brave for O. No one wants their boy to be afraid of bugs! When we first found him I was a little surprised and I said, "Oh!" and jumped back. When O saw him he said, "I don't like him, let's run away!" I felt the same way, but I said, "Oh no, he's our friend! Look how cool he is!" O talked to him the rest of the time we were out there. We found him again the second day we went out to weed, lovely! Haha!

On later days we found a worm and a grub, both of which O took to immediately. He called them his friends and held them for awhile. He even wanted to kiss them, but I drew the line at that, no kissing critters! Unfortunately for his friends, he's not very gentle yet and neither of them survived the day. He didn't mean to kill them, but I'm pretty sure they didn't make it, poor little guys. Too much love I guess. We'll have to work on that.

Here's our spot all cleared out and planted, yay!!

We have two short rows of lettuce, a couple pea plants, and two short rows of carrots.

Now we wait... and weed! :)

O's been trying out his photography skills, here are some of his prints. :)

It definitely gives us an idea of what he sees... silly boy!

Baby Mitchell

I've been a horrible blogger lately! Maybe it has something to do with the fact that all I can seem to do is keep up with O and the house and then collapse into bed shortly after getting Little Man to bed. This pregnancy is kicking my trash! I don't remember being so exhausted when I was pregnant with O, but I guess I also wasn't chasing a 2-year-old around and Mike wasn't working through Grad School.

Anyway, I thought I should do a post on the upcoming new addition!

When people ask me about how it's going, all I can tell them is how excited we are for this little one to come.

It might seem vague to them, but that's really most of what we're feeling. After losing our little one last January, it feels almost surreal for everything to be going so smoothly and we couldn't be happier!

A couple Sunday's ago I was sitting at the organ during Sacrament Meeting and it hit me how different that Sunday was from the first Sunday in February last year. I sat at the organ last year on the Sunday after our miscarriage and held back the tears as they announced the birth of a sweet baby to a family in our ward that week. It's sometimes hard to mourn the loss of a sweet little spirit that most don't know existed. This year though, I sat at the organ already bulging enough to make it difficult to use the foot pedals. While I still miss the little ones we've lost, I feel so incredibly blessed to have another sweet spirit on it's way to our family.

As for the pregnancy itself, it hasn't been too bad.

I was horribly sick during the first trimester, but Mike and I just considered it a blessing and a daily reminder that there was still a little one growing in there. (Mike had a little easier time at looking at the bright side of my morning sickness then I did, lol!)

6 weeks is a little early to see a baby bump, but I wanted a record just in case our time with this little one was short.

After I hit the 2nd trimester my sickness cleared up and I've been feeling pretty great, just exhausted.

I had a little problem with heartburn, but was able to clear it up pretty quickly, thank heavens!

I have spider veins and vericose veins, so I get to wear these incredibly fashionable compression socks around the house, which is pretty awesome.

20 Weeks

Here are all the pictures we have of our sweet little one.

 Profile

 Isn't it so tiny and cute?!

 Face

We're excited to be delivering him in Bear Lake. Especially since the office I've been going to here has forgotten I was there 4 times in the last 4 months I've been going there. Seriously? You can't even keep track of the patients you have checked-in? How could I possibly trust you to deliver my baby without forgetting about me or something?! 

After discussing it with my doctor here and the doctor I'll be delivering with in Idaho, I've decided to try for a VBAC. In order to VBAC(vaginal birth after Cesearean Section), I have to go into labor on my own, so we'll see how that goes. The plan is to give my body until June 8 and if nothing happens by then, then we'll have the baby by C-section that day. I'm a little nervous. What if it works and I actually have to deliver this baby?! I've never done that before. Last time I just laid down on the table and the doctor took it from there. I know that sounds totally ridiculous, but it is a little scary, right?

That pretty much covers this pregnancy, except for one very important detail:

Our little one's name!

We've already picked it and O loves it.

His name will be Elliott Dan Mitchell

O's middle name is after his Dad and Papa Mike, and Elliott's middle name is after Papa Dan. Both are incredible men for our little men to look up to!

Oliver is so excited, he talks about baby Elliott all the time:

"And then we will play with him and love him"

"I'll teach him how to run and run and run so fast!"

"Baby Elliott Dan kicked my face!"

"I love baby Elliott Dan!"

So do we, little one!

June 8th, here we come!

Pre-Trip

We seem to have dropped off the blogging world once again, but we're back!

Here's an update from before we left...

Aunt Tauna sent O the cutest Halloween shirt and I don't think I shared it on here. He loves it and still wears it all the time, even though Halloween is obviously over. Being a bat is totally acceptable any time of year, right?

We finally got O's last birthday present ordered and he loves it!

He was so excited about it that when he first got it he'd get up from bedtime and play in the dark. Later we'd find him fast asleep on his new mat.

A couple weeks before we left, O and I decided to make a playhouse out of a washing machine box we had. I cut out the doors and windows. O decided on the shapes of everything. He loves it! He calls it his house. Sometimes we decorate the outside or inside with markers and crayons. Sometimes he likes Dad or I to go in there with him. It's a tight squeeze, but he thinks it's so much fun! :)

The only surprise about his house was that we got it all fortified and then tried to put it in his room, and it didn't fit. So, now we have a playhouse living in our living room. Oh well, what do ya do?

Other than that, things were pretty quiet. We were just getting things ready for us to go on our trip to Idaho to meet baby Kirra and have fun with Nana and Papa Fisher and then to Washington to visit our family for Christmas.

Here's a picture from when we were packing and a silly video from about the same time.