38 weeks

That me... wearing a sweater because it was cold this week (60 degrees brrrr)

 And.... BAM big ol' belly in yo' face!

I am feeling HUGE right now. Waddling around the store I feel so OBVIOUSLY pregnant (which I should, I mean I am 38 weeks) It's nice because people go out of their way to rush to open doors for me, or if I ever drop something on the ground, strangers run over to pick up the dropped grocery list. But sometimes I just feel like everyone is staring at me wondering if my water will break right there in the store.

When I went to my weekly doctor's appointment last Tuesday I was dilated to a 2 and 50% effaced. I have decided that the ideal time to have this baby would be this Saturday (or a few days before) because that will give me a full week to pack up the house, and a week to recover before the move. The worst time would be May 3rd, the day we move. Speaking of moving, I packed my first box on Friday. 1 down, 99 to go.

Jeff had his very last day of medical school on Friday (his last day was spent doing a rhinoplasty- a nose job).  Finished with medical school! Crazy! He has submitted his papers for his medical license, and everyone can start calling him Dr. Hamaker. Now that Jeff is done, he will be home all day with us so we can begin packing up the entire house. We will probably have to take turns taking Christine to the park to get her out of the house while the other one stays at home packing. I hope to make some serious progress this week.

Christine is soooo excited for the baby to come. Last week she pretended Madeline (her baby doll) was Jacob and was feeding "Jacob" his bottles, changing his diaper, rocking him to sleep. We had to pull out his new blankets and she put the baby doll on them and then told me "Jacob is sleeping" and we had to leave the room and shut the door. Then Christine made a crying noise "waa waaa- Jacob is awake Mommy!"  Yep, I think she is ready to be a big sister. I took this photo of Christine because she asked me to. "Mommy take a picture of me!" (I had the camera out taking pictures for my crafting blog). At the time Christine was playing "picnic at the beach"

Then, "Now take a picture of Tangie Bear Mommy!!" So here is a picture of Christine's "friend" Tangie Bear (her words not mine) Tangie Bear is wearing "underwear" (an outgrown diaper cover of Christine's) because she is a "big girl like Christine" Most days Tangie Bear wears full outfits including pants (usually a pair of blue capris) on top of underwear, and a shirt (most often a red tank top with a butterfly on it- because butterflies are Tangie's favorite).

Two months ago we took Christine to her bi-annual dentist appointment and he told us it was finally time to take away the binkey. I attempted to take away her binkey a year ago but she quickly started to suck her thumb- her dentist told us it was better to keep the binkey. Her binkey was only a bedtime/naptime thing, so it was just a matter of her learning to fall asleep without her binkey. Except our stupid apartment complex decided it was a great time to do a construction project on all the catwalks, which involved construction workers being right outside Christine's room banging hammers, ripping down wood, yelling at each other, whistling, and just being as loud as possible. Great combination. But we couldn't put it off, the construction is still going on today and will continue on after we move, then we will be dealing with transitioning to a new house and a new baby. NOT an ideal time to also take away the binkey so we had to press forward. We had a REALLY hard time at nap time, and there were several days that she just skipped having a nap or else we would go for a drive and she fell asleep in the car for 30 minutes. yikes! it was HARD. But now, 2 months later she's a champ. If we didn't have the dumb construction going on right now I think it only would have taken 2 weeks to transition to no binkey. After 2 weeks she stopped asking for her binkey and saying things like "I'm missing something in my mouth" or "I need something in my mouth mommy!"  Our biggest helper was an mp3 of white noise purchased from Amazon for 99 cents loaded to an ipod. It really helped drown out the construction. She calls it her "soft music". Much better deal than a $30 white noise machine.

Jeff and I plan to post updates on our blog when we go to the hospital just like we did for Chrisitne, so if you are wondering if I've gone into labor just check our blog.