36 Weeks + Baby Shower

Let me begin with last week's baby shower, since I am so late in posting about it!

Last Saturday, our church was so sweet and thoughtful to host a baby shower in our honor!  It was a fun time, and I was overwhelmed by the amazing food and numerous gifts for baby.  My parents were able to come up for the weekend, and my mom joined me at the shower.

Mom and me

Baby received many clothes, and this outfit came with a matching one for Big Sister!  How cute, and how fun to dress them alike.  :)

Big Sister was not forgotten in the gift-giving.  This shirt of course came with a "little sister" outfit.  Perfect for pictures!!!

This is my friend T.  She is an amazing cake decorator, and I loved the idea she used for my cake.  It says "April Showers Bring May Flowers", and one of the flowers has a baby face in the middle of it.  Yes, I ate the face.  :)

The princess loved playing with and in all the gifts, bags, and boxes.  :)

36 Weeks:

I had an appointment with my midwife on Wednesday.  I think I posted on here before about how Baby was breech at 32.5 weeks and transverse at 34.5 weeks.  Well, at this 35.5 week checkup, she seemed to be transverse still.  I was disappointed.  I was hopeful that the breech to transverse position change was a slow turn into being head-down.  Not the case.  :(  My midwife ordered an ultrasound to make sure what she was feeling was correct.

On Friday, we went for the ultrasound.  My midwife was correct, and Baby truly is transverse in there!  Otherwise, she is doing just fine.  She measured to be 6 pounds (give or take a pound...so how accurate is that?!).  Her heart rate continued in the 140's, which is consistent with every other checkup.  Unfortunately, she was also consistent with every other ultrasound and did not offer any good pictures!

So what do we do now?  A transverse baby cannot be delivered vaginally, for obvious reasons.  I have another appointment on Tuesday, and we will talk about our options.  We already talked a little bit about seeing Sister Maureen, who specializes in pregnancy massages.  She has had some success turning babies through her therapies.  Also, there are some things I can be doing at home to encourage the baby to turn. 

I am still hopeful that Baby will turn.  She is still making large movements in there, and she still has some space.  I will update as we learn more though!  :)

Tot School: Letter Ff and Training the Tot

Our princess is currently 27 months old.

Tot school has been limited the past few weeks.  I will admit, with this pregnancy winding down, I have not been doing the necessary planning and preparation for Tot School.  There is so much other stuff to do.

We have done a little more work on "Training the Tot".  Click here to read about the first few sessions.  The princess did so well in our last session last week.  I don't know if it was due to being indoors rather than out, or if it was the new toys I gave her to play with, or simply her mood that day.  But she sat on her blanket and played with 2 dollar-store finds for 25 minutes.  25 minutes!!!  So close to our goal!

I found a bag of beads at the dollar store, and she loved putting them on pipe cleaners.  I also found these link-together toys (supposed to be used to make jewelry), and she enjoyed putting them together and taking them apart.

 Look at that concentration!

 The only other day we did Tot School, we used some Ff pages from 1+1+1=1.  She colored some objects that start with F, and we practiced our "fffff" sound.

 I taught her to trace the Ffs, and she did pretty well at that.

 She colored the capital Fs green and the lowercase yellow.

 She is getting the hang of tracing from left to right, and she stayed on the lines really well this week!

 Finally, shapes.  She did better with these, though she needs some work identifying the more obscure shapes.

I will admit, I do not have any Tot School plans for this week yet.  I'm tired.  Maybe I will work on that tomorrow.  :)

34 Weeks

Today marks 34.5 weeks for this pregnancy.  I had a checkup with my midwife today, and all looks good with Baby at this point.  She was telling me today that if I were to go into labor at 35 or 36 weeks, they would try somewhat to stop it, but they would not be very aggressive.  After 37 weeks is of course considered full-term, and labor would be more than welcome!  :)  I told her I was planning on 41 weeks, and she said that was a good idea.  Any guesses on when this baby will be born?!  (Technically, the due date is May 21.)

The princess likes to point to my belly and say "Too big".  :)

 Baby's heart rate was 144 and she was moving around like crazy.  However, she is laying sideways in my uterus.  That is why I am switching to weekly checkups at this point (a week earlier than usual).  If she does not seem to be head-down next week, I will have an ultrasound to confirm, and we will go from there.  The way she is laying right now, she has a great angle to kick at my right pubic bone.  She seems to enjoy doing that.  Note:  This transverse lie of the baby is usually an issue at this point of pregnancy, but she was breech two weeks ago.  We are hoping she is simply in the middle of turning head-down!

A gift from a lady at church.  So appropriate!

I have been doing some more serious nesting.  I completed one more project this week.  I had an idea to make matching burp cloths and bibs, but I ran into some trouble when sewing on bias tape around the edges.  I finally learned how to do that, and here is the result!  I have 3 reversible sets for Baby, so we are set on these!  My only regret is that I did not purchase enough flannel to make matching receiving blankets. 

Another nesting project:  I spent an hour and a half yesterday working on bat-proofing our attic.  We had 2 bats last year and 1 so far this year, so we are trying to eliminate any possible entrances.  Bat-proofing the attic really amounts to rearranging all our boxes and duct-taping any seams or holes in the boards up there.  This is phase one for decorating Baby's room.  Phase two will be cleaning out the big bedroom (aka exercise room).  Phase three will be moving the guest room into the big bedroom.  Then phase four:  Decorating and setting up Baby's room!  :)

We are getting excited!  The church is hosting a baby shower on Saturday, and I am looking forward to celebrating Baby with everyone!  I still cannot believe we are so close to meeting her though.  This has gone so quickly.

Tot School: Ee is for Elephant and Eggs

Our princess is currently 26 months old.


 Our focus this week was the letter Ee.  I did something new and actually planned what I was going to do on each day.  Novel idea, I know.  Up to this point, I was just printing out a bunch of activities and doing whatever I felt like, whenever I felt like it.  This resulted in missing several activities each week or doing 5 the first day and only doing 1 on the last day.  I like the planning idea.  We ended up doing 3-4 activities a day, which was the perfect number for her attention span.

We began by making an elephant.  You can find the template on the first-school site.  She enjoyed making elephant noises as she pasted shapes in place.  I also drew the letters Ee at the top for her to trace, and she enjoyed coloring those in more than tracing.

We did this week's left-to-right tracing from 1+1+1=1's Ee printables.  She did a really great job of tracing the lines this week!

But when we moved on to the next activity (also from 1+1+1=1), I wanted her to color each object as we talked about it.  Instead, she kept drawing lines from left to right.  :)

She practiced putting the lids back on the markers.

The bottlecap activity from COAH was not a big hit this week.  After 1 letter, she decided to play with her trucks instead.

We tried again later in the week, with similar results.  She liked dumping the bottlecaps out and stuffing other objects in the jar...but she had absolutely no interest in matching the letters.  I think we will skip this activity next week and come back to it later.

 

She made an Ee page for her alphabet book this week.  This week's pictures featured Elmo, Eeyore, egg, elbow, ear, elephant, and envelope.  You can see in the picture on the left that she's making an elephant sound as she glues him in place.  :)

Her coloring page for this week was "Ee is for Elephant" from DLTK's letter E coloring pages. 

And again, you can see her making an elephant sound as she colors :)

We tried this activity from 1+1+1=1's Tot School printables.  This sheet served as a way to talk about colors, numbers, and the letter E all at the same time!  I would tell her to color a certain number of Es a certain color, and she would occasionally follow directions. 

We tried these coloring sheets from 1+1+1=1's letter E printables. She did a great job of listening to directions and coloring the eggs the colors they were labeled.

She also did this Ee egg puzzle from 1+1+1=1. This was a bit simplistic for her.

This week was our first attempt at doing any sort of sequence (from 1+1+1=1), and I did not think she would be very good at this.  She got it first try!

She colored shapes and numbers.  Shapes are definitely something we need to work on.

I attempted to let her stamp the letter "E" on her big "E".  She was not a fan of this activity.

We had a great week, and planning ahead really made it a lot more fun for both of us.  We are going to take a break from the alphabet this coming week, in order to wait for more printables from 1+1+1=1.  :)  I am looking into doing some Easter focus, so we will see how that goes!

Sunday Scrappin'...plus some "nesting"

I have been a scrappin' slacker lately!  However, this week the ladies at our church had a "whatever" day where we met at one lady's house and worked on whatever craft we had going.  For me, that was of course scrapbooking.  I was only able to be there for 2 hours, and in the midst of the talking and bonding, I did complete three more pages!

Here is "6 months" from the princess' baby scrapbook.  The written highlights say:

"Bluebeary goes everywhere with you now."

"You can drink from a sippy cup."

"You can crawl now...military style."

"You like to play with Daddy's shoelaces."

"New foods:  Bananas, pears, applesauce, prunes, oranges"

"You like to play peek-a-boo."

"You seem to be trying to say 'blue' and 'hi'."

Here is "7 months" from the princess' baby scrapbook. The written highlights say:

"You like Mommy to sing, 'My God is so BIG'."

"You still wake up 2-3 times every night."

"New foods:  Meat (you like it), popsicles (you don't like the coldness)."

"When you wake up in the mornings, you like to pull down your crib bumper and play with anything nearby."

"You saw the ocean for the first time at Guadalupe Beach.  It was a hot day and we went for a drive so we could have air conditioning.  You slept in the car and were not happy to wake up!"

"You can pull yourself to a stand and you try to climb over everything."

Here is "10 months" from the princess' baby scrapbook. (I skipped months 8 and 9 for the time being because the photos did not fit with the template I wanted to use.)  The written highlights of this page say:

"We live in a tiny, temporary apartment in Columbus, Ohio while Mommy works at The Ohio State University Hospital.  You stay home with Daddy all day, and on the weekends we travel to see Mawmaw and Pawpaw, Nana and Papaw."

"Your sleep pattern in horrible.  You have to be walked to sleep or pushed around in your stroller until you fall asleep."

"Your favorite things all seem to start with "B":  Bluebeary, Book, Bottle, Ball."

"You took your first step at Mawmaw's house on November 29th.  Only Mommy and Mawmaw saw."

"You LOVE cars and trucks.  We bought you your first tractor toy this month."

Here are some more products of my nesting.  These wearable blankets were actually made for a friend to give as gifts.  I think I'm finally getting the hang of making these.

And I decided to crochet a little hat for the baby.  Love it!  I hope she's a hat-wearer like the princess, because hats are my favorite...on little ones, not on myself...  :)