Boy or Girl?

I know I'm only 10 weeks along, but I have to tell you that I would be surprised if this baby isn't a boy. This pregnancy has been really different than the one with Mara. That one was a breeze. This one, however, I've had to deal with more issues and it hasn't been quite as easy. I'm not sure how much of that I can attribute to getting sick before I was even six weeks along or just the fact that every pregnancy is different.

Whichever it is, here are some of the things I've noticed that make me think this baby is a boy.

I think I've actually had morning sickness or all-day sickness this time around. It's not like I've been throwing up or anything – my stomach just feels off most days. Hopefully it will go away soon as I leave this first trimester behind in a few weeks.

My skin is the clearest its been since I became pregnant with Mara.

The spotting is something that is definitely new.

I went to Carter's last week and was just drawn to the boys clothes. I know that doesn't really mean much, but considering we bought Mara two dresses from Carter's before I even knew I was pregnant with her, it's almost like my body is telling me. :)

Then you have to look at family history. On John's side, it's common for a girl to be born first followed by a boy. That's also the way it was for my siblings.

I guess we'll find out in 9-10 weeks if I'm right. If this baby turns out to be another girl, I'd love her just the same, but I would still be surprised. Besides, we already have two boy names waiting to be used, but we've already used the only girl name we had. :)

ETA: Apparently Mara thinks this baby is a boy too. When I asked her if she was getting a baby brother or a baby sister, she said baby brother. Of course, this was after I verified that she realized brother meant boy and sister meant girl. :)

Happy birthday, Mara!

It's hard to belive that our little girl is three years old today. Although, if you ask her, she's decided to skip three and move right on to four. :)

We're still trying to get everything together for her birthday party this Saturday, but I don't think there's much left to do. I think she's going to have a blast at her party, and we're all looking forward to it.

We have a busy day planned today. I'm taking some sugar cookies up for snacktime this afternoon, and then we're going to run some errands and celebrate Mara's birthday with some Chinese food this evening.

He Is Risen!

Happy Easter!

Today has been a nice day. Mara loved everything in her Easter basket, and had a lot of fun going on an egg hunt around the family room.

I'll come back later to post some pictures, but I first have to download them off the camera. :)

ETA: Pictures! The first one is of Mara's Easter basket.


Looking to see what the Easter bunny brought for her.


And going on her first Easter morning egg hunt.

Tagged

OK, so I've been tagged by Kendra, and I thought it might be fun to actually do it. The rules of this tag are: "Look up from the computer, look around the room where you're sitting and pick up the closest book. And closest really means closest. No cheating by running to another room to pick out a book. Open the book, turn to page 123, count down to the fifth sentence on that page, and then post the next three sentences."

Here's from the Handbook of Technical Writing, Fifth Edition. (Hey, I'm at work – what can I say? And I didn't count the numerous documentation drafts that surround me either.)

"Other readers may finish a letter that presents bad news at the outset, but they tend to read what follows with a predetermined opinion. They may be skeptical about an explanation, or they may reject a reasonable alternative presented by the writer. Furthermore, even if you must refuse a person's request or say no to someone, you still may wish to work with him or her in the future, and an abruptly phrased rejection early in the letter may prevent you from reestablishing an amicable relationship in the future."

I don't know anyone else who reads my blog that has one of their own, so I can't really tag anyone myself.

Home again

I know it's been several days since we returned from San Antonio, but I'm just now getting around to blogging about it.

Our trip to San Antonio started out with an interesting turn of events – there was snow on the ground here in north Texas. Here's a picture of our house as we were leaving town.

We got to San Antonio a little later than we wanted to, but we headed straight to SeaWorld. The first thing we did when we got there was go to Dolphin Cove to feed the dolphins. I'm glad we did that then because the opportunity was never right the rest of the weekend.

After feeding the dolphins, we made it to the dolphin and beluga show. Mara loves belugas and would sing the "Baby Beluga" song every time she saw them during the show.

Mara surprised both of us with her excitement over the Shamu Express roller coaster. She wanted to ride it when we were at SeaWorld back in October, but she was just barely too short (had to be 38 inches). This time, she was well within the range to ride it. John went ahead and took her in line for the coaster, but both of us though she would back out at the last second. But nope, she didn't. In fact, she rode with her hands held high up in the air. As soon as she got off, she asked to ride it again. On Sunday, we let her ride it one last time, and she requested to ride in the very front car. While I'm surprised by how much she liked it, I'm glad she really enjoyed the ride.

On Saturday, we decided to do the Shamu Up-Close tour. This was similar to the Dine with Shamu that we had originally planned to do, but we didn't eat. Instead, we got a tour of the backstage area where they keep the killer whales. It was really interesting, and we even got to meet one of the trainers. After the tour, the baby whale, Halyn, was out in the show tank swimming around. Because we were part of the tour, they let us go up to the glass to get an up-close look at her. There was another girl about Mara's age who was on the tour with her parents. Halyn kept coming up to the glass where Mara and the little girl were, and I think they were all enamoured with each other. What's funny is that Halyn's only about 6 months younger than Mara (she was born October 2, 2005).

(Check out those blue eyes on the whale.)

After the tour, we got close seats for the show. They were in the "Splash Zone," and our tour guide said we would probably get a little wet. The seats were fantastic, though (third row right in front of a platform), and I was beginning to get confident we wouldn't get splashed because of the platform. Boy, was I wrong. We were safe until the finale when one of the whales came in front of us and did its tail splash right in front of us. John caught the brunt of the splash, and Mara got pretty wet herself. She did not appreciate getting wet.

When we went back to the Shamu show on Sunday, Mara kept jumping when the whales would splash because she was expecting to get wet again. She finally settled down part way through the show when she realized we were safe.

All in all, it was a fun trip. We'll definitely head back there at least one more time this year.

Before I go, I wanted to leave you with one more picture of Mara with some giraffe statues that she insisted on getting a picture with.

Updated Website

With our family growing larger and Mara growing up, I decided it was time to update the look of our website here. I don't have pictures up from our trip to Oklahoma, but it's fairly up to date otherwise.

We're Back!

We're back from our trip to Oklahoma. We had a nice visit with everyone – just wish I felt a lot better. It was hard to get going Friday morning since I still wasn't feeling too great, but we finally made it out of here before noon. That means we didn't make it to Stillwater until after 4 (after stopping for lunch on the way).

The first thing we did was head to good old Gallagher-Iba to inquire about tickets to the game. They didn't go on sale until 6 p.m. and we would have to order them online. And who knew how quickly they would sell since the Cowboys are on a winning streak. We wandered around Gallagher for a few minutes and ran into someone I used to work with at Sports Info. He said the Cowboys' practice was open to the public, so we decided to go in to watch for a little bit. Mara loved it. She would squeal when the guys would make a basket and cheered them on. We spent about 20 minutes there before she started to get bored, so we left. We decided that getting to watch practice along with the uncertainty of getting tickets and me not feeling well were enough to forgo the game the next day. One of these days we will make it to another game. :)

So, instead of spending most of our Saturday on the OSU campus, we got to visit with John's family and then we headed to Clinton and Evelyn's Saturday evening.

Overall, it was a nice trip despite my constant coughing and stomachache. I'm just so ready for this silly virus (along with the spotting) to be over. Hopefully it will be in the next day or two so I don't have to worry about it when we go to San Antonio this weekend.