Happy Mother's Day!

I looked through my baby book to see if there was a picture of my mom holding me when I was a tiny baby but it seems she was more often behind the camera than in front of it. I did, however, find this picture of my mom posing with my brother David, about a week before I was born. I paired it up with a photo Miriam took of me posing with Benjamin about a week ago:

Benjamin took one look at it and said, "Wow. Those look same!"

Mother's Day Cards

 Miriam, card-maker extraordinare, has been peppering me with cards the entire week and they are therefore scattered all around the house, but here's one that I found. When Miriam handed it to me she said, "Is this good enough for a blog post?" Yes, my dear. It definitely is...

Door decorating

Today was a crazy running-around-nonstop kind of day. Andrew asked me to cut his hair just before I had to leave for the doctor. I was like, "Really? Now?" He volunteered to start it himself (and did start it himself) as a commitment device. So I finished it for him. Then he decided to convince Benjamin to get his hair cut as well.

"Come on, Benjamin!" Andrew said cheerfully. "Let's cut your hair."

"No, sanks," Benjamin replied calmly. "I don't like haircuts. Them is scary. I will cry."

When I came home from the doctor Benjamin had a freshly buzzed head so Andrew was successful in luring him over to the clippers eventually.

Andrew left for work as soon as I got home and Benjamin and I left to pick Miriam up from preschool soon after that. We came home for lunch, we made an attempt to clean up the house a bit, I rode the exercise bike and washed a nearly-brand-new garbage can we're donating to a family at Rachel's school (an apartment complex nearby burned down a week or so ago and we're trying to refurnish apartments for a few families at our school who lived in the complex and lost everything), and then we gathered up materials to decorate doors at the school and headed on our way.

Here's what we did for Rachel's teacher (one of her favourite colours is pink):

36 weeks: We did it! We did it! We did it! Hooray!

I had my last 17P shot today and everyone who saw me treated it as a capstone event of my pregnancy—cheering and so forth, which I felt was apt, though also a little funny. I mean, I know that I'm happy to be finished with those beastly things but I didn't think anyone else would be more excited than I was. I'm a glutton for punishment, though, and asked for a Tdap since I hadn't had one yet and I'm supposed to get one (I guess it's a routine pregnancy thing now).

Permission to go into labour has been granted. It would be best if we waited one more week, which we probably will considering the injections take about a week to "wear off" (thus the reason for the weekly injections).

In fact, when we were Skyping with my family on Sunday everyone took guesses about when the baby will be born.

Benjamin: May 5 (sorry, buddy—you lost)
Rachel: May 10 (Mother's Day)
Miriam: May 12
Grandma: May 15 (Auntie Emily's birthday)
Patrick: May 17
Naanii: May 18
Josie: May 24
Andrew: May 28
Me: May 31 (because if I don't have my babies super early then I have them two days before my due date, which is June 2)

Basically, no one believes this baby will come in June (I certainly hope she joins us sooner than that (I want a milkshake)). It looks like she could come any time in May and make someone feel like a winner.

School lunch and chicks

It's teacher appreciation week at our school so it's been a bit of a crazy busy week. Somehow or another I've managed to be room parent for the past three years so I'm involved in these things whether I want to be or not. Not that I mind appreciating teachers...it's just that some people get way more into appreciating teachers than I do and therefore this week has been a little crazy. I'm happy I'm not the one organizing everything!

Today I took Benjamin and Miriam in for lunch hour so I could help supervise the lunch room (so that the teachers could go to the lunch hosted by the PTA). They were super excited to go, especially Miriam who is desperately longing to go to kindergarten. She got dressed in her Duke shirt and then dug out Benjamin's Duke shirt as well, so they were quite matchy-matchy.

Volunteering at the school is rather nice now that we've been here for a couple of years because we know kids in a lot more classes and they were all excited to see us (kids from Rachel's class last year's who were divided into all the classes this year as well as kids from church) and it was fun to see them. I wasn't sure if I would see Rachel because she couldn't remember when her lunch hour was when I asked her so I took a stab in the dark and signed up one of the three hours—but it was the hour she had lunch so we lucked out.

And she was wearing her Duke shirt, too!

When she saw her little brother and sister were matching her she rolled her eyes and said, "Seriously?"

That pesky little Miriam, always trying to coordinate everyone's outfits! Rachel was a little embarrassed to be dressed exactly the same as her siblings, but she joined them at the special tables for students with "company," along with a friend, and they had a fun little lunch together.

A family dinner

When we moved out here I never imagined that we'd ever host an informal family gathering. I knew we'd have visitors, certainly, but casual family dinners? I thought those were a thing of the past.

But Andrew has a cousin who lives in Raleigh and we've had them over three times now...which really isn't a great track record considering we've lived here three years. But still.

About five months ago, Andrew's cousin Scott—or, rather, his wife, Angel—had a baby boy and we had never met him so I messaged Angel to see if we could get together for dinner sometime. She messaged back to say that would be great and that Scott's parents (Andrew's aunt and uncle) were going to be in town in May. She originally suggested May 24th but I said I was going to be 39 weeks pregnant then and didn't know that I would up to hosting a dinner, so she suggested May 3rd instead.

It's been on our calendar for quite a long time. And then Grandma asked if she could come that very same weekend, so it all worked out perfectly (and not only because Grandma got to see her brother, but also because she cooked (which meant I didn't have to))!

Angel commiserated with me about gestational diabetes because she had it, too.

Grandma-grams

Benjamin climbed up onto Grandma's lap her first evening here and felt her face, just to make sure she was really here. He kept turning her face so that she would look at him and saying, "Oh!" He was just so happy to have Grandma here and not on a screen. But then his face fell and he scrunched up his eyebrows with worry. Grabbing Grandma's face again he said, "Gammy-mom! Don't leave from us!"

"I'll stay for a few days," Grandma promised.

Mini-vacation

"Are we officially boring old people?" I sighed to Andrew as we were driving home from our mini-vacation this morning.

"I don't think so," he said. "I think this pregnancy has been hard [insert short discussion of things I did while pregnant with Rachel and Miriam and Benjamin that we didn't even dare do this pregnancy, like traveling to Israel or camping in the middle of nowhere] and that's what's made life seem boring. With you having doctor appointments every week and not being allowed to drive more than two hours away we've been pretty much stuck since we got back from Utah in January."

"That, and soccer or cheer every Saturday and you being so busy finishing your prospectus," I said—because not everything's my fault, surely!

But it's true that we haven't done anything, really, and can't do much, so when Andrew's mom suggested we take a vacation I was wondering where and what'd we'd do. I had my doctor appointment on Thursday, Andrew needed to coach soccer on Thursday, and then Saturday morning we have soccer games. And we can't go far away anyway. I was like, "What is even the point?"

Andrew said "the point" was that I haven't ever been away from my kids, except to have another baby, so it was high time I experienced that because he's gotten to do it loads of times (always going off to conferences and leaving me behind with the kids) and it's awesomely relaxing.

So Andrew ended up booking a hotel in south Durham (how exotic) with a beautiful view of a lake. We skipped soccer practice on Thursday (it ended up being cancelled due to a thunder storm, anyway) and went to the temple instead. We went out for dinner at Chili's—Andrew wanted to do a more local "foodie" restaurant but with diabetes it's easier to go to bigger chains that have published their nutrition information online—and then went to Target and walked laps around the store to burn off the dinner we just ate (because food is the bane of my existence).

A sunny day for Andrew's prospectus defense

It's been rainy, rainy, rainy since Grandma arrived, but Wednesday morning was beautiful so I took the kids to the park while we waited to hear about whether or not Andrew passed his prospectus defense.

The night before when he was working on finishing up his presentation he moaned, "I just wish it was 11:00 tomorrow!"

He texted me at 11:02 on Wednesday morning with three big letters: ABD

So now he's an official PhD candidate!

A much more relaxed Andrew met us back at the house a few hours later and helped clean things up a bit (we had so much stuff in our room waiting to go into the attic) before his mom got here. But before putting the kids to work cleaning their rooms and sweeping the floor we had a beautiful morning at the park.

We even took pictures!

It's finally gone!

Last night Grandma convinced Rachel, who was almost having an existential crisis about it, to put out her tooth. She was bawling in bed because her tooth hurt even when her lip would touch it and she was afraid it was going to fall out in the middle of the night and then she'd choke on it and...basically she'd never be happy ever again.

So Grandma let her get out of bed to play on the iPad with the condition that she wiggle that tooth the entire time. She did, and eventually that tooth popped right on out! Hallelujah!

We didn't get to see Rachel's beautiful gap until she came home from school today: