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.

April update

Angela here. I know, big surprise. Jeff has taken over all household duties including keeping our blog updated. He's such a good husband. I figured it's about time for a real update: How have we been doing?

I am 37 weeks pregnant. The baby is the size of honeydew melon. I feel like I should be at 40 weeks already. Pregnancy just seems to drag on and on and ooooooon. Little baby you can come now! We've had 2 nights already of timing contractions for several hours and making phone calls to our friends to ask them to keep their cell phones nearby in case we have to drop off Christine. But the contractions always slow down and stop. Last night we got really close to going in to the hospital, we had our bags all packed up and ready to go. But finally after 4 hours, the 4 minute contractions went away. I just hope that all that pain and annoyance at least did some dialating.

Did you notice the hair? I got the "baby haircut" something low maitanance that doesn't take so long to blow dry. I'll be honest, I was a bit upset when I got it cut because it was NOT the haircut I asked for. I brought in a picture of shoulder length hair but I guess I didn't describe the hair cut well enough because I walked out with an a-line bob. It's not that I don't like the hair cut, I am just worried about having something high maintance. So far I really like having short hair, and it DOES fit in a pony tail. So it should be good enough for those weeks of zombie-like existance.

Here is Christine enjoying a chocolate Easter bunny. We had a really fun Easter. Christine wanted to make a trap out of legos to catch the Easter bunny, because that it what we did for St. Patrick's Day- we made traps to catch the leprachans who left us candy. So obviously, that is what the Easter bunny would do right? Thankfully the Easter Bunny is clever and did not fall for the trap, and still left us an Easter basket full of candy.

Today while Christine was falling asleep for her nap I was singing songs to her and she asked for the "Happy Song" I attempted to sing If you're happy and you know it and the smiles song but she told me "no no no that's not the right song" So I asked her what was the "Happy Song?"  She proceeded to sing (to the tune of if you're happy and you know it) "If you are good and obey you get a chocolate bunny for dessert". "That's the right words mommy!"

The Easter bunny also gave Christine two little people princesses- Ariel and Bell. Christine is starting to love the Disney princesses. Cinderella is her favorite. We read her Cinderella book before nap time AND before bedtime every single day.

When we went to the Galleria to get my hair cut, we were going to go to the Rain Forest Cafe for lunch. We thought it would be a fun thing to do with Christine before we moved and had the baby. We walked in the restarant and got a table, and at first Christine thought it was pretty cool (she really liked the butterflies) but then the elephants and tigers started to rawr and move around and it terrified her. So we left and went to the Cheesecake Factory instead.

I got the Red Velvet Cheesecake... Yummmmm. and Christine got chocolate ice cream. She was pretty happy.

We had a fun Easter egg hunt at Gigi's house with Christine's cousins. Eric and Sandy were visiting on their way to their Disney cruise. Christine was excited to play with her cousins Zack and Brad.

Christine now has a massive supply of jelly beans. This is good, because there are so many she doesn't notice when mommy sneaks half of them.

Jeff is currently doing a rotation in plastic surgery.  After he finishes next week, he is all done with school!

We are going to be moving in 3 weeks, at least we will be moving our stuff. Christine and I might be moving in with Jeff's parents until the baby comes if he waits too long to be born. I am hoping he comes sooner than later!!

Funny Christine

In Nursery, we have laminated pictures that represent the songs we sing.  Each kid gets to come up and chose the picture/song they want to sing.  For the "If you chance to meet a frown" song we have a smiling face that you can turn over to make it into a frowning face.  Well, last night Christine was being defiant.  I held her in my lap and told her when she does not obey she makes Daddy sad.  Then I asked her, "how can you make Daddy happy?"  She reached up to my exaggerated sad face and tried to push up the corners of my mouth and began singing the song.  I said, "No Christine, you make Daddy happy by obeying."  Defiantely she responded, "Turn Daddy's head over," and proceded to try and turn my head over. Exasperated she said "Oh no! Daddy's head is attached.  It won't turn over." At this point Angela and I could not keep up a stern face and began laughing.  Oh what are we going to do with this girl?  Sometimes she is just too cute!

She has also begun making up her own songs to sing.  Today in the bath tub she sung "cooking the water" over and over to a sort of tune.  She also sung to the tune of Ring around the Rosey, "Splishy, sploshy, we all fall down."  She also asked Daddy to sing with his lips and then made a weird hmming noise with her lips puckered out.  Her new favorite animals are Chimpanzees because we saw them eating tomatoes at the zoo.  So we thought she wanted me to make Chimpanzee noises. Turns out she wanted me to whistle.

This is her classic "say cheese" face.  She looks at the camera for one second, puts on this strange fake smile, closes her eyes and says "cheese, click".

  She is obsessed with the book Critter goes to the Dentist.  Which is rediculous, since she was terrified when we went to the dentist a few weeks ago.

She is quite a talker and spurts out long streams of sentences passing tangentially from one thought to the next.  If you ask her if she wants to play a game she says, "Yea! Let's play a board game. I love board games. Candy Land is a board game. Yea Candy Land is a good board game. I love Candy Land.  Maybe I draw cupcake."  From this stream of sentences you would think that we have several board games that she likes to play. No, we only play Candy Land.

We successfully got rid of the binkey over the last few weeks.  It was a rough transition especially since the apartment complex decided to do a huge remodel for the next 3 months.  They bang and pound throughout naptime.  I want a set of ear plugs and a binkey myself.  To get through it, we bought a brown noise MP3 from amazon-- that's the best 99 cents of static I've ever bought.  I don't know who decided to name certain static white and this static brown, but I think the brown static got a raw deal.  Brown noise sounds like bad bathroom humor.  It actually is very soothing.  They should have called it chocolate dream or something like that.

Our big rewards right now are to watch Blue's Clues or the Mickey Mouse Club House.  She also requested to watch Frasier with Daddy today.  Daddy shows include Frasier and Mythbusters. Christine often gives me permission to watch one of these shows if I'm especially good, or sometimes when I just go to the bathroom on my own.

This is a classic picture of Christine everyday.  She has her sunglasses on, her fancy necklaces, her sparkly braclet.  She has several of her "treasures" on the chair with her (in this case some colored plastic ball and a ring).  Tangy bear (our other daughter) is fully dressed sitting in her pink princess chair "watching".  Two of Angela's high heals are out in the living room.  The Dora car (her "bicycle") is out with the trunk open where she stores her treasures.  The pink bucket is also a favorite spot to hold her treasures.  The card board paper towel roll (her noodle), was claimed by her before we could throw it away.  And she is asking Daddy to move the chair in to the kitchen so that she can cook some soup. We love Christine! (Angela made both the yellow dress and the beautiful tunica. She is amazing!)

Our New House

It has been a whirlwind of two weeks.  After matching we made an appointment with a realtor and then headed out to Temple the next weekend.  We saw all the houses in two days, and then re-toured the ones we liked.  This last week we have been negotiating, inspecting the house, and negotiating some more. Buying a house is quite an involved process!

But now the contract is final! We close on April 26 and move in May 5. I know what you are thinking... when is Angela due?!? Yeah sometime between May 3 and May 8.  We figured that moving to a new city would be much more exciting if there was the added suspense of when our baby would come... I've been reading up on how to deliver a baby in a car.  Luckily we have my parents in town to lean on during that time.

Well now for the stuff you really care about.  Drum roll...

 The house is in a really nice neighborhood.  They have a neighborhood pool, and the Elementary School is just up the street.

Here's the backyard.  There are beautiful big windows that look out to the backyard from the living room and breakfast room.

 Our favorite feature of the house was the nice open kitchen.  The breakfast room, living room, and kitchen are all open to each other.

  The living room is a good size, and has a small fireplace in one corner.

The house has four bedrooms and two bathrooms.

And we have a laundry room!!! In our 5 years of being married we have never had a washer/dryer in our apartment.

We are so excited for out new house!

The "renting stage" of life

Things are looking good on the house. If all goes well we will close on April 26th. (photos will come when things are more official in a day or two).  In the meantime please enjoy our top ten worst moments of renting. (Totally stole the idea from my cousin Jamie who just bought a house and shared her top 5 worst neighbors)  When you read this you may wonder why we stayed in this place the whole time, paying 4 digit numbers in rent every month. Ummm I am asking myself that same question right now!

10. Tiniest bathroom ever. When we moved into our complex we lived in a one bedroom apartment, after deciding that we were not going to buy a condo here we decided to move to a two bedroom. When we moved across the courtyard I walked around the new unit and saw our bathroom and started to cry. It was half the size of our old bathroom and our old bathroom wasn't very big. There was no counter space, no drawers, no linen closet, just one cupboard under the sink and a narrow space in front of the tub. I somehow managed to organize the space really well to fit everything we needed  in there, but I have hated that bathroom every day of living here.

9. Loudest dishwasher ever. Seriously, the thing sounds like it is grinding all our silverware to dust. The first time my mom came to visit and turned on the dishwasher she thought something was wrong. "No that's how it always sounds"

8. Cockroaches. Every once in a while we find a gross black cockroach wandering around our apartment. Just a few weeks ago Christine came to me in the living room very distressed, "Mommy there is a bug in your room". There indeed was a cockroach in my room (dying a slow death after eating the poison in the cockroach boxes we have behind our fridge). When we first moved in, I would scream in terror and run to the other room while Jeff killed the intruder. But after years of experience I can now calmly kill the nasty thing pretty efficiently. The key is to be calm. If you move too fast the cockroach will bolt- usually under the stove or somewhere unreachable. But it you slowly back away, grab a flip flop (or some other cockroach killing tool) and then go in for the kill, you will be successful.

7. Valet Trash Service. You would think I would like for someone to come to my door every night to pick up my trash. But no, they don't have nice boxes outside our apartment to place the trash bags in, they gave us small ugly black garbage cans that we have to keep inside our apartment. When they introduced this new "service" a few months ago we complained about having to keep the garbage can inside and they told us that they didn't want the eyesores to be outside uglying up the place "and you think we don't mind the ugly thing inside?" The next issue is the matter of what to do with the garbage can we already own- the nice white garbage can with a step lever. Garbage cans are surprisingly expensive and we knew we were going to be moving in a few months so we weren't exactly going to be getting rid of our nice $50 garbage can that we will need after we move, so we have two garbage cans in our small dinky kitchen (we rebelled for a little while and kept it outside anyways until we got a few notices that we would be fined if we didn't keep it indoors). Then there is the matter of the service actually picking up the garbage. We are only allowed to place the garbage cans out after 6 pm (since they are so ugly) and then the service men come at unpredictable times and somedays (okay most days) not at all. We joke that they only come on full moons. It is very common to put our trash out at night and find it still there in the morning and have to bring the trash out to the dumpster anyways. We told the management that we would like to opt-out of the service, return the stupid trash can to them and just keep bringing the trash out ourselves. Nope, not an option because they supposedly have nowhere to store the trash cans.  sheesh. The worst part? they added this trash service because people wanted to have recycling bins but recycling bins had too many restrictions so they felt valet trash service was a good alternative. What?! where is the logic behind that?

6. Parking lot theft. After having two bikes stolen (with big metal u locks on them) we decided it would be cheaper for Jeff to ride the bus than to keep buying new bikes every few weeks. (these were not expensive bikes, they were cheaper than our insurance deducible so we couldn't even submit a claim on them)

5. Neighbors who don't know how to do laundry.  Let me start by explaining that in our apartment complex we don't have washer and dryers in our apartment units, we have several laundry room around the complex. These laundry rooms are free so there is nothing to discourage people from running small loads of laundry. I have gone into the laundry room to do some laundry only to find all the washers filled up and when I open the washing machine to see if there are clothes in there what do I find? TWO WASHCLOTHS and nothing else. really? you did an entire load of laundry to wash two washcloths? another time the washing machine was filled with one pair of socks and three baby outfits. The worst part about it was that the mom came in while I was loading my clothes into another washer and I watched her pour her laundry softener into the washer and run it through a second round.

4. Leaking AC. (I already shared this story on the blog, but it deserves to make the list) Immediately after moving in the air conditioner started leaking all over Jeff's clothes. We called the service man he came over and supposedly fixed it. We washed all of Jeff's clothes that got wet, hung them back up, and turned on the supposedly fixed AC and it started dripping again. We called maintenance back only to learn that the guy came over saw that it wasn't leaking any more (because we had turned the AC off)  and thought the problem was fixed. Luckily after the second time, with us standing over his shoulders this time to make sure he actually fixed it, we had no more problems with it.

3. Neighbors who do not know how to use a garbage disposal. We had these neighbors who used to live next door to us who would chop up an entire cabbage in their garbage disposal. How did we know this? because our pipes are connected and they would clog the pipes and water would start rising up into our kitchen sink. dirty water filled with chopped up cabbage. And every time this happened (yes, it happened on several occasions) we would call maintenance only to learn that they were already over at our neighbors unclogging their sink.

2. Bad Pipes. One morning I woke up hearing a weird glug glug glug noise coming from our bathroom I chose to ignore the weird sound and went back to sleep. A little while later Jeff went into the bathroom to shower, except he couldn't because the tub was filling up with a black sludge, and it was coming up the floor boards too, and the carpet in front of the bathroom was wet. A call was made to the management but Jeff was only able to leave a message, so he headed outside to find one of the maintenance workers. By that time the sludge drained from the tub. The worker came over only to spray everything down with a nose and eye-burning chemical spray and pull up the carpet and bring in a big fan to dry it all out. Jeff asked him what he was going to do about actually fixing the problem (instead of only cleaning up the mess it made) and he said there must have been a clog in the pipes further down and it must have worked itself out.

1. Flooding: During a tropical storm it was raining really hard for several hours. Jeff was at school studying for his Step One test. During big rainstorms it is very common for the courtyard of our complex to flood about 6 inches because the drainage here is really good. But this day the water kept rising and I kept nervously looking out the window watching the rising water get closer and closer to our front door. As it continued to rain, it finally  reached the doors and  kept rising higher. As I was watching the rising water levels out the french doors in our bedroom (in the back of our apartment) I noticed the carpet was wet. Oh great! I called Jeff and he was very casual about it, telling me I was overreacting. I called the apartment management and they said lots of people were having flooding and they would come over after the rain had stopped. sheesh, what do I do in the meantime? I raced around the bedroom pushing towels in front of the doors and sticking garbage bags underneath all our furniture and moving everything that could be moved off the floor. About 30 minutes later the water had made it's way across the whole bedroom. I called Jeff again in a panic. I told him the water had reached the closet, and that is when he finally believed me that there was a real problem going on at home. He wanted to come home but I told him if he came home I wouldn't open the door for him because there was a foot of water in front of our door and there was already enough water in the house. The rain finally stopped, and the apartment management sent a team over to move all our furniture from our bedroom and Christine's bedroom into our living room and dining room (the front of the apartment had managed to stay dry fortunately). They ripped up all of our carpet and brought in a billion fans and we were left to pack up and stay with Jeff's parents for several days while everything dried up. You would think after that the complex would do something  to improve the seal on the doors, replace something, caulk something, Nope. After that incident last summer I would get really nervous every time we had a heavy rain. Luckily we are moving before hurricane season comes back.