40 weeks!

Well, yesterday we hit 40 weeks and today we are officially overdue.  But I guess that's normal.  Here's my 40 week picture.

I think I've grown a lot in the last 4 weeks... right?  Or is this just me feeling huge?  Well, according to the doctor scale, I've only gained 3 or 4 pounds since week 36.

Christmastime is here!

This post contains a million pictures. 

Well I know you just want to see how big my belly is.  So here I am at week 34.

And here's today, at week 36 and a day (yup, wearing the same shirt).  

 We also took this one earlier today (week 36 and a day) but then I thought it might be inaccurate looking belly size because it is a closer up picture.  But I included it anyway.

Had another ultrasound at week 35. Baby looks like he's screaming. Or something. But they said his estimated weight so far is 5lbs 10oz.

And this one shows that he has hair (so the technician says).  Those 3 dots in the middle are hand icons pointing to those white lines, which is the hair on the back of his head.

My work threw us a baby shower party and among a few generous gifts, we got this fabulous diaper cake.  It comes with like 50 diapers, some onesies, blankets, pants, socks, sleepers... and other trinkets too.  But it was so cool, I almost didn't want to take it apart.

 Here's a back view.  Cool right?

Well going back a few weeks, we survived the big storm.  Fortunately for us, we weren't very affected up in our area.  The whole subway system closed for about 4 days (no work or school!)

And several trees fell in the park by us. We went to survey the damage the day after.  But the park was closed and stayed closed for many days.

Lots of things were uprooted.

And unfortunately for some, those trees were uprooted onto their cars.

 Things started to get cleared up.  Here's a tree that crushed a bench.

And these are a bunch of trees that they cut down and piled up.

This also happened at the grocery store just before the storm. Bread sold out.

One day Adam was at the bookstore and Roger Moore was there signing copies of a James Bond anniversary book.  My oh my he has aged!

We also went to a taping of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire for fun.

We took the cub scouts on a hike in Harriman State park in mid November.  It was a lovely day and a neat hike.  We explored a mining cave too.  We're pretty washed out in this picture but it's kinda funny.

We ate lunch with this view ahead.  So pretty!

And now we're gearing up for Christmas. Santa's beard is almost full, which means Christmas is around the corner!

Last week I decided that maybe we should try to be somewhat festive and have a tree. So I got crafty and made this tree out of a wrapping paper tube and scraps of a magazine. It's kinda cute, right?

And here's our little set up. Two of those bags are actually our stockings. But since we don't actually have stockings, we make do with what's on hand.

Hope ya'll have a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!!

PS. We caught a mouse! And then we caught another one a couple of weeks later.  And hopefully that's all there is.

Playing catch up... kinda

 Oh boy.  Six months gone since the last post.  And it was a such a busy summer! We had a string of visitors (and hardly any pictures to show for it), and also took a little trip to Portland to meet this little guy (and see his mom and dad... and all the other members of my family).  We were privileged to be part of his sealing to his parents in the temple.

 Oregon waterfall... can't remember the name of it.

 Multnomah Falls.  I wanted to make sure Adam got to see this area.  Especially since the only other time he's been to Oregon was at Christmas when there wasn't much greenery.

We went to the zoo where the hippos showed their best side.

We also had these crazies taking photos everywhere :)

That trip to Portland was in early June. Following that trip, we had Adam's sister and a couple of her kids visit for a few days.  We tromped around the city and sadly took no pictures!  On the day they left, we had our next visitor arrive later the same day.  Adam's friend Ryan came to stay for a week.  Another unfortunate incident of taking no pictures.  A couple of weeks following, my dad came to stay for a couple of night.  Again, no pictures (well, on our end... dad took plenty)! But we should really get better at documenting our lives.  

In the meantime, I tried growing some herbs in our window.  The started growing and it was exciting!  And then after a while, I didn't show enough love and they died.  No fresh herbs for us.  But let's be honest, I'm not sure they would have thrived growing in these starter pots inside a semi humid apartment.

On the 4th of July, we decided we should go see the fireworks! Turned out to be an awful idea.  Seeing the "best fireworks show in the US" is the worst experience you can have trying to see a fireworks show that, frankly, was not that spectacular.  You have to arrive early to even get a decent place to sit/stand, it was like 100º out with like 90% humidity and there's not even any grassy knolls to sit on.  Everyone is herded into gated sections of a highway they close down and you can't even leave or they won't let you back in! It was a lot of sweaty bodies packed into one long stretch of road.  We left out original spot to get some ice cream and sit in some a/c before going back to a place further away from the show but closer to the time they would start.  This was the view... a raised road was sorta blocking part of the view.

In September, our little nephew came to visit from Portland (with his parents), and we had a great time with them!  We did my things we hadn't yet done (and lots that we had done too).  Once again, we didn't take many pictures (but they did... and we have them somewhere...)

Right after they left, we received another visitor... this one uninvited, unwanted, makes messes, poops on your floor, avoids all traps, and chews through your food (in this case, just dried beans).  A single mouse. Don't know if you can see it the crumbles but he's been hanging out behind the bookshelves, eating dried beans, which you can see scattered on the floor and in crumbs.

We have set all kinds of traps (snappy ones and sticky ones) but for some reason we got the smart mouse who has not touched any of them.  We've chased it around, made barricades to trap him (twice now) but he's so quick and there's always a weak spot that he finds (we were SO close to catching it yesterday but he disappeared somehow).  Once he got to under the sink so we plugged all the holes up with magazines and boxes (yes, things it could chew through...) and set some traps in and hoped for the best.

 Unfortunately, there was a large opening under the cupboards that we didn't know about and so this attempt was unsuccessful. But we closed it up and left it blocked up so that he has one less place to hide.  Any ideas on how to catch him????

And lastly, this has also been happening... (this is my "Look what you did to me Adam!" face).  Haha, it's just a joke of course.

We're having a baby in January! And it's a boy Grigglet!  Here he is at 9 weeks.  I don't know what I'm looking at either.  The doctor said, there it is, and I said, I don't know what I'm looking at.  She pointed out a blinking light and said, well that's the heartbeat.  

Here he is at almost 12 weeks. Finally, a shape I can distinguish!

Here he is at almost 19 weeks.  The hospital here doesn't give us very good ultrasound pictures.  I feel like I've seen better ones... but oh well.

And here he is at just over 22 weeks. This was our follow up anatomy scan since they couldn't see all the angles of the heart they needed to see.

This was taken 10/18, two days from 27 weeks (third trimester!). Not much has changed since week 23 (that's the yellow shirt picture)

*blink* and there goes April...

April whizzed by somehow.  We hardly took any pictures.

Except this one...

Pretty funny picture, yes?  One day we found this little guy behind the cold water knob in the shower.  The antennae were just moving around.  Sometimes there was just one out.  Sometimes both popped out.  Sometimes they disappeared but then they'd come back.  Kinda gross.  We didn't know how to get it out and we didn't want to spray it because we didn't want a dead cockroach just sitting there.  

Well, that plan backfired because the next day, those once spry antennae were droopy and lifeless.  And we still didn't know how to get it out.  So we just let it sit there over the next few days.  Until it was finally discovered that the one piece moved away from the wall.

In other news, I finally found a permanent full time job.  Yay!

welcome spring!

Well, winter is over and spring is here.  Although, I don't remember seeing much winter this year.  Hope we don't see much summer either.  I'd be happy for spring or fall weather all year round.

Anyway, March was somewhat uneventful.  But we did have a couple of celebrity sightings this month, but no one too exciting.  So not exciting that I didn't even notice till someone pointed them out.  

We did have our cub scout pinewood derby.  It was a stake event although a lot of the cub scouts in our stake are just members of our community and not members of the church.  Here are some of the cars that competed.  There were a a few more that came later but these are the majority of them.  We had 2 boys in our pack win trophies for design.  That one with the pac man characters on a skateboard won 3rd place design in the Bears.  And the one on the right with the lights around it won best design over all the cub scout cars.  You can't see, but it also has a small compartment with water that you drop dry ice in to make it smoke.  Pretty high tech stuff.  Anyway, we were really happy he won best design because every other year he's competed, he's won 2nd place design and he was determined to have the best design since this is his last year to compete.

  One of our leaders and his son, pictured here, made this cool ghostbusters car.  The car did fairly well placing 3rd among the Wolves.  Unfortunately, this kid is only 5 and not a cub scout, which our leader  fessed up in the end because he felt bad.  They were racing for fun and it just ended up being one of the faster cars... oops.

They gave all the kids those rubber bracelet things and this is what some of the kids (from different packs) were doing with them during the race...  I was laughing so hard.

 Oh, what?  You want to see a close up?

We also visited the Natural History museum again and was able to see some other exhibits we didn't get to last time.  I think this display was in the hall of Pacific Peoples.  I can't remember what's going on here or what the figures mean but I thought they were humorous.

We also visited the Highline park one day.  It's not really a normal park you'd picture. It follows an old elevated railroad track that transformed.  It's about 15 or 20 blocks long.  So most of it is like a pathway with some wider areas to stop and sit or stand, or sometimes just benches along the sides.  And they had vegetation growing all along the path.  It was pretty cool.

Here you can see some of the old tracks.

And here you can see that they just built around the tracks.

We were there long enough to see the sunset behind New Jersey over the Hudson.

 We also did something cultural by going to see this play called Galileo.  F. Murray Abraham played Galileo.  I know you don't think you know who that is, but you do.  He played Salieri in the movie Amadeus and won an Oscar for it.  The stage was really small and round and the audience was wrapped around three sides of it so there were really no bad seats and we had a clear view.  It was about Galileo's life and condemnation by the Catholic church for his scientific beliefs.  It was really enlightening.  Worth a watch if you get a chance.  Well, if you like that kind of stuff.

And that wraps up the month of March.

it's leap day!

Leap day is upon us. Are you wearing your blue and yellow today?  Did you cry for candy?  Did you see the episode of 30 Rock last week and maybe you know what i'm talking about?  Well, whatever, it's not that important.  What's important is what is going on with us.  That's why you're here right?  To read about us (it's not that exciting). 

Let's see.  We got haircuts!  Yay!

We walked down 5th Ave one day and came upon this....

Whoops.  Not sure how this happened but I know it happened a few minutes before we walked by because we could hear the sirens on their way to the scene shortly after we passed.  

We were actually on our way to our first visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  However, that museum is SO big that we only saw most of one section in a couple of hours.

While searching for the washroom, we were in the Egyptian section so we went and took a looksy at this tomb.

But most of our time was spent in the Roman/Greek art.  

After a couple of hours we were pooped.  So we left and walked through Central Park and saw this tree with a built in seat pretty much.  It doesn't really look it, but it was kinda high off the ground.

On the 16th, we went to a taping of the daily show with jon stewart.  It was really fun to go to a live taping.  They were so good at it that they did the whole show without having to retake anything.

We were #107 and #108 in line.  This was the ticket we waited for.  A badly cut piece of yellow paper.  I know, super official looking.  Then we had to come back an hour and half later to get seated.  We didn't get to choose our seats, but when we finally got into the studio, they sat us in the second row!  Sorry, no pics allowed inside.

Anyway, those were the highlights of February.  Sorry we aren't very interesting people.  Maybe  March will be different.  Meh, probs not.  haha.