3rd Birthday

Happy 3rd birthday to our sweet little girl! She sure has gotten so big!

We love you!

Amelia Island, FL

Dave and I had a really enjoyable time together this past weekend. The Elizabeth Point Lodge was a wonderful recommendation from a friend. It's right up against the ocean; the area is just a 30 minute drive from Jacksonville airport.

The island is as busy as you want it to be; if you want to golf or do spa outtings or shopping, all of that is available. There is a great 50 block historic district that has some really excellent (and inexpensive) restaurants and neat shops. The whole area pretty much looked like below. I love the spanish moss hanging from the big trees!
We chose to spend most of our time at the beach relaxing. (Having towels and chairs and umbrellas there made packing light and easy too.) The weather was wonderful - sunshine and upper 80s on Friday and 94 on Saturday. Thank goodness for the steady breeze to help cool things off! We even saw dolphins a couple of times each day; they were fairly close to shore. In the picture below, you can see one of them in the water if you look right above the umbrella on the far left.

I even woke up early Saturday morning to watch the sun come up. There's just something about having your morning coffee watching the sun rise over the ocean.... wish I could do that every day!

Pictures

Here's Cori receiving her gymnastic trophy at daycare. Apparently she is very good on the balance beam! (of all things!)Here's Benjamin from this week's ultrasound. He is measuring 3 lbs, 11 oz which is 81st percentile. He is also breech.My blood pressure has been good and I lost 2 lbs, so overall gain is 5 pounds at 30 weeks pregnant. Interesting. The insulin I've been taking has been helping my sugar levels.

Tomorrow we head to the beach at Amelia Island Florida for a brief weekend away - very much looking forward to it!

Clothes sale

Over the weekend I hit up Gymboree in Cranberry for their "box sale". As the employee explained to me, their store gets a lot of product; anything they don't sell, they box up and place into storage. (They don't send it to the outlet as the outlets get their own merchandise.) So this weekend, they pulled out their fall & winter boxes and held a big sale!

Nothing was over $9.99 and you got an extra 30% off, so pretty much everything was less than $7. And everything was sorted - boys on one side of the store, girls on another. AND they had everything sorted by size too - so you could go right to what you wanted to look for. Since it was fall and winter merchandise, I went for the sizes 4 & 5. But I soon found myself also grabbing some larger sizes because the items were priced so well, and the fashion would definitely still be "in" when she fit them... like $2.99 (less 30%) for plain pink leggings in a size 7 - she'll fit them in 2 years no problem!

Anyway, for $80, I was able to get 11 tops / sweaters, 4 pairs of pants, 1 skirt, 2 pairs of leggings, and a pair of pony-tail holders. The check out lines were really long, and the store said they'd be able to hold items until the next day and still honor the prices and discount. (plus you'd still earn Gymbucks!) So I decided to have the stuff held and came back today. When I went back I was also able to sign up for advanced notice of their next box sale. So if you're interested, leave me a comment and I'll be sure to let you know too!

Gestational Diabetes update

It's been a week since I met with the dietitian and started my modified diet for the gestational diabetes. While I do miss some of the sugar I used to freely have, what is more annoying is the glucose monitoring. It isn't very convenient to have to schedule when I eat and then be available an hour afterwards to test. Sometimes I have work meetings or am out grocery shopping, etc. The numbers haven't been that bad - my fasting levels are a little high and so was breakfast, but they'd be fine for lunch & dinner. Oddly enough, the more sugar / carbs I have, the lower my numbers. What can I say - I'm an anomaly!

Today I met with a fetal specialist to go over the numbers and talk about what will happen next. Basically they want me to start on insulin at night to help with the morning numbers. Right now I'll just continue with my modified diet and watching my numbers. In the next few weeks, I'll need some more ultrasounds to monitor the baby's growth. Then around 35 weeks, I'll begin non-stress tests 2x a week just to check on his activity. They will not let me go past 39 weeks, and if things start to get "worse" (high blood pressure, large baby weight, bad sugar numbers) they will do an amnio to check on lung maturity and then induce labor (which may be a c-section depending on baby's weight). But it's all a waiting game at this point because we can't predict how things will turn out. I'm fine now, and so is baby, so that is good.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go prick my finger again and test my levels....

Three Generations

Happy Mother's day!

Never judge a book by it's cover

I was a bit worried when the person I hired to finish the swing set installation came to our front door today. He was 90 minutes late (said he forgot that he had to take his son to work and didn't bring my number with him). And he had a lite cigarette with him and looked like he was a long time member of Hell's Angels or something....

BUT not even 5 hours later we had the finished product.... plus he corrected the multiple breaks in the beams without complaint or extra charge!

As a side note, I think I've discovered that I'm allergic to goldenrod. Our back acre is covered with it; while it looks beautiful, I'm a bit tired of sneezing blood and coughing up a lung daily for the past week.