30 weeks at the Rose Garden

Here I am at the Point Defiance Park in North Tacoma. Luke and I strolled over there a couple of nights ago to visit the duck pond and see the Rose Garden, one of my favorite places! Can't believe that I'm at 30 weeks already. Time is moving faster than a pregnant lady towards a bowl of ice cream! Lots of kicks and squirming is coming from the baby these days, and most mornings it wakes me up at 4:30 a.m. and is ready for breakfast. I can see how easily my child is going to train me (wink wink).

Graduation, Crib Assembly, & Shower "oh my!"

It has been such a busy June already! Luke graduated from UW Tacoma with his Master of Ed. on June 11th. The hooding ceremony was on June 10th. There are some quick snapshots of us at the hooding ceremony with our friend Jesse, who went through the same program and also graduated:

More pictures from graduation to follow. We took several lovely ones with Luke's parents the day after commencement. (Due to the size of the class of 2010 and the commencement location-Tacoma Dome-we weren't able to get many great shots during the ceremony.) We held a small open house at our apartment right after graduation and welcomed family and friends alike to come and help us celebrate Luke (and Jesse's) achievement. It was a fun time, and we are so thankful to everyone who showed their support--it's been a lot of work and we couldn't have done it without our friends and family and church family.

Also happening that weekend was the baby shower hosted by the members of Mount Cross Lutheran, our home church. Again, more photos to come from the shower. I didn't get any on my phone or camera because I was otherwise occupied during the festivities! We received so many beautiful and generous gifts including: 3 bouncers/baby-rockers; a stack of blankets a yard high; over 15 onesies; sleep sacks, crib sheets, teddy bears, lots of books and board books, 2 Baby Bjorn carriers, a sling carrier, a gender neutral diaper bag, a towering "cake" made of diapers, bottles, binkies, booties and rattles, about 20 different rattles and toys, a large blow-up rubber ducky bath/pool, baby legos, a Boppy nursing pillow, 3 bath sets including a miniature bath robe that is so cute it breaks my heart, a first aid kit and lots of other delightfuls as well. The two large group gifts given at the shower were 1) a $400 gift card to Babies R Us (WOW!) and 2) $645 towards the cost of moving a vehicle out from Michigan this summer so that I can have my car back! It was so overwhelming and so exciting. We feel so blessed to have received so much. There are too many people to thank. (We tried, and fell overwhelmingly short of expressing our true gratitude.)

One special gift from the "grandparents" otherwise known as Luke and I's parents, was our Crib! During Luke's open house we were presented with the crib, and Luke was so excited about it that we had it set up the next morning. Here are some pictures of the set up (he took the wise advice to set it up in the room where it will live--often people set up their cribs in other rooms, go to move it in to the nursery and then find that it won't fit through the doorway! We fortunately didn't have that issue!):

Birthday fun and another belly shot!

A lot has been going on since our last post, and I'm sure it's just an indication of the many busy times we've got ahead of us. At the end of May we celebrated Memorial Day weekend by enjoying a lot of quiet time around the apartment and taking a day trip to Olympia. We had a great time walking in Olympia; the sun came out and we haven't ever really gotten to spend much time there. As a cool and unexpected bonus, we found this statue titled "Motherhood" and I just had to get my picture next to it!We also found this pretty little garden near where the Olympia farmer's market normally is. It's a garden that is kept and maintained by the botany students at the Washington State University Extension program. I was ready for a break anyways, so I took full advantage of this pretty little bench in a quiet resting spot. Plus, it had been kind of a long time since I'd had so much sun on my face, so I rather enjoyed it.
June came and we started to get ready for all the excitement and activity that it brought with it. I have two showers in June, Luke graduates with his Masters of Education from UW-Tacoma, which his parents are coming out for, and it was my birthday at the beginning of the month. Here's a lovely shot of my chocolate raspberry cake with curly-cue candles before I tore in to it with a vintage cake cutter. The cake cutter was the high-light of the evening, as it looked like a large, straight, thickly pronged comb (or as I pointed out at the table, "worst toothbrush ever!"). I think I figured it out though, and by the third or fourth piece I had worked my technique perfectly for slicing and thumping each over-sized piece of cake on a plate. There were many jokes around the table about this--you know me, always good for providing a laugh (usually at my expense somehow!).Although it was cloudy and drizzling on the day I celebrated with my family, my actually birthday turned out to be a pretty sunny day, and it was a good thing, because we spent he evening at the ballpark here in Tacoma. We had a staff outing planned for all the church staff and their families to attend a game at Cheney Stadium to watch the AAA league Tacoma Rainiers face off against the Reno '51s. This turned into a double-header due to the rain the day before so we got two games for the price of one (only one hot-dog though...). Here's a shot of us between games. Notice that it looks as though I've stuffed a football under my shirt (I'm already at 26-27 weeks!)

24 Weeks/6 Months

Here I am at 24 weeks and 6 months. I can't believe that there are only 3+ months to go.

It really looks like I'm carrying around a soccer ball instead of a baby, but I've heard the heartbeat each month, so I know that the baby is in there. Which is a good thing, because we don't have room for any more sports equipment! I finally just figured out where we would store the hockey bag! The baby is moving very frequently on most days and is a strong little stinker. I've already had a couple of nights where the baby has either kept me awake or woken me up from a dead sleep by tumbling around. I don't think this would be such a big issue if it weren't for the fact that I get so excited each time I feel it move. It's really become quite a distraction and I think I need to become a little more disciplined with myself before the baby actually gets here.

Luke's Birthday and a Garden too!

We got together with my siblings and parents this weekend to help create a vegetable garden in their backyard. Luke and I were particularily excited for this, as we don't have space for a garden. Even I got to help out, although most of the work was (thankfully) done by my Dad, Luke and my brother. It was a beautiful and sunny day, and we ended it with a delicious meal and birthday cake for Luke! That's right: Daddy is now the big 2-8, which as I keep reminding him is another blessed year closer to 30.

The baby and I are now at 23 weeks and growing by the minute. The great thing about this garden is that by the time the pumpkins that are planted are ready--it will be just in time for baby's first Halloween! (and I'm sure that all the other nutritious snacks we are growing in there will be appreciated too).

For his birthday, we all decided to get Luke a flaming pan of cake!

Mother's Day 2010

This year Brittany and I took our mom to a Mother's Day Tea at her church Holy Spirit Lutheran, and it was a really nice way to spend a Saturday. I helped decorate our table, and we got to dine on miniature sandwiches and brownies. We even got a portrait taken and had time after the tea to sit in the sun with the dogs on their deck and drink "virgin" Bloody Marys for a couple of hours. It was pretty much perfect, and I was happy to be with my mom and sister on such a special day.


On Sunday, (Mother's Day proper), I told Luke, "all I want to do today after church is eat, nap, then go for a walk!" And that's exactly what we did. We also found time to sneak in a few more belly shots:

After a walk that was absolutely lovely, but probably a bit too long for my ever widening hips...we decided on greek lamb wraps for dinner and shot up the hill in Old Town to the Met Market for supplies. I remembered a very funny "mama" (Lisa Ganung) telling me that they had an "expectant mother's" parking spot...it was worth checking out and cashing in on! Sure enough, we found it and it was vacant when we pulled it. I made my proud papa Luke take a picture, that I'm thinking might be a favorite of mine for a long time:

All in all, a pretty fine weekend. Although Luke and I both agree that I still have a lot of work to do before I'm a bonafide Mother on Mother's Day--we had a great time celebrating the little one who will be heading our way in a few months. I can't believe I'm already at 22weeks!

comic relief

My dear friend Kim found a book for me that has been an excellent source of stress relief and humor over the past couple of days. It's called "It Could Happen to You!" by Martha Brockenbrough, who met her husband in Tacoma, and now lives in Seattle. It's written in a loose "diary" style, and follows the candid observations of a woman and her husband through their first pregnancy. As I read from her chapter on the first trimester this morning, this passage gave me those old "warm & fuzzies":

Still, I was counting the days until I got to hear the heartbeat. And when the day finally arrived, I was thrilled...'What's it going to sound like?' I wondered. I grew less rational from there. 'What if we can't hear it? What if this is all some sort of mistake? What if something is wrong?' I felt myself get very cold as I lay on the table and waited...[then] the room was filled with steady drumming, like the sound a horse makes when it runs across hard ground. It's a dancing rhythm, filled with energy, a music that made my chest squeeze with joy. Then the nurse moved the probe to pick up my heartbeat as well. Mine was a slower, rushing rhythm, like moving water. Together this was the sound of two lives sharing a body, a curious, beautiful song that I could have listened to for hours while I tried to find the meaning within. Maybe this is why all human cultures have music. It's the way we bring our heartbeats outside and share them, and say, 'We're alive.'