Phone Pictures

Time to post a few recent pictures from my cell phone! 

Looking so grown up

Enjoying time on the front porch

 Helping Daddy plant flowers

 

Carter got 2 different water guns for his birthday, and he had a water fight with Eric in the backyard one afternoon. 

 

Some kids play on an iPad at dinner, mine plays with an old school calculator! 

 

We had a picnic at the park on Good Friday..... gorgeous day!! 

My sweet girl at breakfast one morning 

 

Gavin & Lucy came over to play one day and 5 minutes after they got there I found the girls in Ella's room like this :)

 

Time for a movie. Cute while it lasted... a whole 3 minutes.  

I've been washing a lot of baby clothes lately, and while I was folding a load, Ella came and snatched some Christmas jammies and tried to put them on her baby. :) 

 

Ella wanted to ride in Carter's car seat down to the park by our house one day, so I obliged. Look how big she looks!!  

 

Attempting to get a picture of the kids and the birthday card Carter made for Andrew to send to him! HA! These always crack me up!! 

 One of Ella's favorite things to do lately is play with my hair, or give me a "hair cut" as she calls it.

It usually just ends up in a lot of pulling or teeny, tiny doll combs getting yanked through my hair, but I still love that she loves to do this!!

:)

I use coconut oil in my hair occasionally, and Ella wanted some this time. So we had matching oily coconut buns!! 

 

Love Ella playing drive-thru at Sonic!! 

 

Rough Riders Game with FBSA

This past Friday night was FBSA team night at the Rough Rider's Game. About half of Carter's team and their families went, and it was a lot of fun! The boys and their coaches even got to go on the field for the National Anthem!

Ella and Lucy looking cute walking into the ball park. 

 The team lined up about to head out onto the field.

 So excited to be there!

 Gavin & Carter

 During the national anthem.... Carter's team was lined up near the Hooks (blue jerseys) on the field!

 Cutie pie!

Ella cracked us all up shakin' her groove thing! 

And of course, the boys had a game the next day. They had fun, as always, but it was the little sister's that stole the show this week in their cute new shirts. :)

Easter 2014 Celebrations

We had lots of fun this Easter week/weekend! It started on Thursday afternoon with Carter's class Easter egg hunt and party. Ella and I joined them for the fun!

Handsome boy getting ready to hunt!

 Counting eggs with his buddy Dylan

Ella always makes new friends at Carter's class parties. She definitely thinks she belongs in his class, too!

 Carter's whole class!

Back inside, the kids enjoyed a game of jellybean bingo, made a cute little Easter craft, and decorated an Easter cookie for snack.

He's always so sweet to include his little sis.

 snack time!

Later that evening, we went over to my parents' house for our extended family gathering - an easter egg hunt for the kids and a delicious Easter dinner! My cousin and his family were in town all the way from California, so we had a big group, and a great time!! 

Carter and Ella getting ready to hunt eggs again!

 Ella, Carter, Hayden and Zoe (and her little brother Nathan is missing from the picture)

 Zoe, Carter and Hayden off hunting!

 Ella got the hang of it right away!

Love my pretty girl to pieces! 

(She is cooperating more lately with smiling for pictures... yay!!)

 Grandad took all the kids for a ride after the egg hunt!

On Easter morning, we had a wonderful, delicious brunch at Bonnie Ruth's in Frisco with my parents, Andrew and Eric's parents. No pictures from that, but it was so, so good!! Then we headed to our church for a great (but SO packed!) Easter service. When we came home, the Easter bunny had paid the kids a visit with Easter baskets and even left some more eggs to hunt in the backyard!!

Getting into their Easter baskets

I took some pictures with my "real" camera before heading out for the morning, and just look how many smiles I got!! It was so hard to choose a favorite of these two! 

 

 If I HAD to pick a favorite, it might be this one :)

 

.......Or maybe this one :)

 Love this family shot, too! Baby #3 making an appearance, too!

And a few pictures from our egg hunt at home. Ella got so into it!

 So handsome!

 

 So serious.

 All finished up! :)

 Ella said, "Can we go in now?!" She was eager to get inside and get into all those eggs! She knows how this works by now!!

And the rest of our Sunday was spent eating too much candy, relaxing, and watching a movie the Easter bunny brought. Our Easter weekend did also include a lot of baseball, but that'll be in my next post! Wonderful weekend with family celebrating, as always!

2nd Trimester Bump-date

Since I'm almost halfway through my pregnancy, I figured it was time for my first pregnancy update, or "Bump-date", as a friend of mine calls it. :)

Overall, I've been feeling much better in the second trimester than the first. Although I do still have moments here and there, the nausea and some of those yucky symptoms has majorly subsided, thankfully. I did start getting some headaches a few weeks ago, and the fatigue that I was lucky enough to miss out on the first few months has caught up to me. I'm SO tired.... all the time!! I have to take a short snooze each afternoon just to make it to 9pm. So that's new stuff, but I'll take that over being sick all the time any day! 

I have been feeling a lot of little baby movements since about 15 weeks. I love it! I can't wait until it's strong enough for Eric and the kids to feel it. I know Carter especially will enjoy that! 

Speaking of Carter, he has really gotten into this pregnancy with me. I wanted to write down some of the sweet things he has done and said lately, so I'll always remember. 

At school, his class started doing Joys & Concerns recently. His teacher tells me that each day he has something to say about the new baby. Usually it's a Joy that Mommy was feeling good today or was able to eat her dinner. HAHA!! Sometimes it's a concern that Mommy had a headache or didn't want to eat. What a sweet boy, always thinking about me. He also always prays for the baby in Mommy's tummy each night before bed.

We've been talking a lot about the baby in there, what it's doing and how it grows. He knows about the umbilical chord, how it sleeps most of the time, and about what size it is. We even look at pictures each week on Baby Center of what the baby looks like inside of me. He's very interested and intrigued by it all, that is why I can't wait until he can feel it and see it move in my belly. 

The other day, Carter innocently asked me, "Mom, does the baby have clothes?" I said, "Oh yeah, we have a lot of baby clothes in boxes up in the attic, and we'll bring them down soon and get them ready for the baby to wear." He said, "No, I mean, does the baby have clothes on INSIDE of you. Will it be wearing clothes when it's born?" How cute is that. I explained that the baby would be naked and he was concerned about it being cold. I told him we would put a diaper and clothes on just after s/he is born, he giggled a little and felt better knowing that. :)

At bedtime the night of Carter's birthday, I told him the story of the day he was born. I told him that we were so happy when we saw him for the first time that we cried happy tears. He smiled a sweet smile and said to me, "I bet you will cry again when this baby is born! ......I bet I might cry too!" He gave me a huge hug and buried his head in my stomach. "I love that baby so much...... I have tears right now!" He raised his head up and looked at me with his gorgeous blue eyes, and they were filled with tears. And of course, then mine did too. We laughed at ourselves and it was just a really sweet and special moment that I'll never forget. The love he has in his little heart already for this baby is just amazing, and I'm so proud of his tender and sensitive little spirit.

Ella is funny when it comes to this baby too.  She loves to talk to the baby through my stomach and always prays for the baby at night. She currently thinks she has a baby inside her tummy, and she talks about feeding that baby. Her understanding and interest in it at this point is obviously much more casual and less involved than Carter's is, but still sweet nonetheless.

Here are some pictures of the last few weeks. I have a sonogram scheduled in May, and this is when we could find out the gender.... if we want to. It's still up for debate, but we may skip out on that this time around. We'll see how tempted (or how strong-willed) I am in that dark sonogram room the day of!! 

15 weeks

 17 weeks