Nothing Yet

If I had any lingering doubts that this pregnancy was very different than my first, they would now be long gone. I have actually lost weight. I've heard that near the end some women lose weight which is completely normal - so I'm not worried - but I am amazed. With Aidan I just blew up like a big water balloon but that's not the case this time which is awesome. My doctor estimates the baby is about 8 pounds right now. Anything under 9 1/2 pounds is fine with me - well, I know I don't really have a choice in the matter, but if I did...anything under 9 1/2 pounds would be great. Somehow I thought I wouldn't have any more appointments between now and having the baby, but I've been booked for a non-stress test at the hospital, another doctor's appointment, plus my induction - July 25th. All the appointments are after my due date and my doctor thinks that things will move along and I won't need to be induced - we'll see what happens.

Aidan's last day of daycamp is tomorrow. He's had a really good time and enjoyed himself a lot. I think the girls running it are doing it as part of their college schooling, they're really good with the kids and the kids seem to love them too. They've gone to the park nearby, made crafts, played outside, used a Spiderman slip and slide and little wading pool and take time each day for a nutritious snack. I've also enjoyed having a little time to myself to either run some errands around town, do some shopping, pick up around the house or just relax at home. Yesterday I went shopping and picked up some activity books for Aidan and I to do together. While I'm home with Aidan I want to start making some crafts a couple times a week as well as help him get a head start on letters, numbers and phonics. We'll see how it goes but I want to make sure that we definitely do something just me and him together every day, especially after the baby comes.

Today in the mail I got a note and gift from my grandparents. My grandmother sent me a little bib that she made when she was just a girl as well as some money for us to buy something for the baby. The bib is really cute and has a little bear and says 'As Hungry As A Bear'. I thought it was really sweet of her to send that :)

Gopher

We've had no luck finding a renter for our basement so far, but it seems like our backyard came with a previous tenant. Michael and I were undecided as to what it was - he thought it was a beaver and I thought it was a cat - but after getting a better look at it and taking some pictures we have discovered that it is a gopher. A really big fat gopher.

If you see him from the front he looks like a beaver (at our old house there was a beaver that hung out behind the sheds by the church) but if you see him from the back he has a short tail like a cat and since he's so fat, it was kind of confusing for awhile. He seems to really like the clover and spends a lot of time sitting and rolling around in it. Not really rolling, maybe wallowing is a better word. Or maybe it just looks that way because his feet are so short and his belly is so big. So far he hasn't been agressive at all and if we come outside he hightails it either around the corner of the shed or to his little hiding spot between the concrete blocks of the porch and the outside house wall where he can just fit in vertically and then he hangs out there until we leave. One day he hid down there and I looked down on him and he was just sitting there looking up, like if he ignored me and was really still I wouldn't notice him or something, it was pretty funny. Michael's mowing the lawn today and hopefully that will help us discover his hole which we will then wet down. According to Fish and Wildlife that's the best way to deter him from coming back. He hasn't been aggressive yet, but I'd feel better about Aidan playing in the backyard if there wasn't a random gopher hanging around!

Busy Saturday

It is really amazing how much you can get done in a single day! For the past 3 weekends I've been putting in some long Saturday's trying to get our house unpacked and all set up. I know there's no big hurry, but I also know that I am way more motivated to get it all done before the baby comes than afterwards. This Saturday I organized the garage (I didn't really mean to, I was just in there looking for some stuff and then was on a roll), finished unpacking Aidan's room and re-organized it, cleaned out Hagatha's room, dragged the crib and rocking chair in the house and put them together. Today I've been working on the kitchen a little bit more and I'm hoping that by the end of the week we can be totally and fully unpacked which would be so awesome. There's not really that much more to do, a little in the kitchen, a couple boxes in the living room and some in the bedroom, but I don't want boxes hanging around for the next 6 months. It's definitely feeling a lot more like home which is a good feeling. I did take pictures of Aidan and Hagatha's rooms, but I must have been really tired because a lot of them are blurry - sorry.


Aidan's closet. I moved half of my old wood shelf in there so that he could reach his pants and shorts and underwear and socks by himself and he was very pleased with that. I bought that wood shelf up here, I think, my first year of PRBI. It was $20 and although cheap and cheaply made, is still around :)

I'm not sure why he insisted on posing like this in all the pictures - he's holding his little lizard up in front of his face. This is his toy corner where he spends most of his time. Books, race cars, superman figures, blocks, tools - every time we clean up his room I try to weed out some toys but it's almost impossible!

There's his Brother Bear banner over the window until I can make some curtains, and for now we aren't having any problems with it. It used to be up on his wall at the old house but he found it very scary for some reason, every night we were in there 2 or 3 times telling him 'It's just a picture!' so I finally took it down. For some reason I thought his train table wouldn't fit in his room - maybe because there were boxes everywhere at first. Thankfully it does, but we haven't set up a train track yet. I was not looking forward to explaining to him why we had to sell the train table, somehow I don't think it would have gone over that well!

This is Hagatha's room. It looks like we're expecting a boy because the walls are blue and the crib bedding is blue as well. We'll get around to painting later, it's not that important right now. And my mom made the matching crib bumper, blanket and sheet (as well as lots more sheets) for Aidan before he was born. It's so cute - light blue with little green birds flying around on it - and still in great shape. Change table and corner shelf thing. I can't get it to stop leaning, but again, it's super old so I guess it's doing the best it can. My parents bought it from Ikea when I was a kid and I hauled it up here and it's moved around with us since we lived in our apartment. I'm excited to try that little lounger in the corner. Someone gave it to us and it vibrates and everything. Hopefully she loves it as much as Aidan loved his little lounger.

Mini-movie posters from Piglet's Big Movie. I'm horrible at decorating! Before Aidan was born I got this mobile and the huge poster from Michael's theater and put them up in Aidan's room.

There's the big poster and the cradle. Aidan's been pretty good about passing down 'his' stuff (like that green backpack hanging on the closet door) to Hagatha. Or rather, I should say he's been pretty good about the idea. Hopefully that trend continues once she actually arrives!

So tomorrow's Monday and I'm not going to work! We are going to be pretty busy though. Aidan has daycamp in the morning, then we have a doctor's appointment and have to go grocery shopping, pay some speeding tickets and stop in at the lawyer's office to clear up why we're paying property tax twice! It's like they're trying to make it as confusing as possible with the stupid property tax - one lawyer figures it out one way, we're told we owe so much, the other lawyer figures it out the other way, first lawyer calls us to say we owe $2000 more to them, we freak out, go pay it, and then the bank (acting on first lawyer's initial paperwork) withdraws the mortgage amount plus 1/12th the property tax! Hopefully it won't be too painful to clear it up.

Last Day!

Today is my last day of work!!!! I am very very excited to be done work - well, to be done having to go to my job, there is still lots and lots of work to be done in the house, in the yard and in the shed. But that kind of stuff is not super urgent and sometimes it's 'easier' to do.

Aidan was also very excited this morning that it was his last day at Darlene's house. I was going to make him chocolate chip cookies to share with his friends, but I didn't have enough chocolate chips, so we had to stop at Safeway and pick up some mini-cupcakes. I think he was more excited about the mini-cupcakes in the end. We talked about the fun stuff we could do together while we stayed home like watching special shows, going to the park and doing crafts.

I wanted to do something special to celebrate it being my last day at work, but we're too broke to afford anything - but then yesterday something came in the mail. Our realtor had sent us a letter with a gift certificate to the Golden Star chinese restaurant! He had already given us some gift certificates to Gulliver's so we really weren't expecting anything else from him, but it was a very welcome and timely gift. Now I just have to wait and make sure Michael's not out on a job tonight. His work is picking up again which is very very good. He took a test yesterday and is now officially an Intermediate Operator. That means he has more responsibility as well as a higher base salary and gets paid a higher percentage of the job.

Well that's about it for now. There are a few things I need to make sure are finished before I leave so I should start them now to make sure that they are all taken care of. This weekend I am tackling Hagatha's room so watch out for pictures!

eBay

We're selling a whole bunch of our movies on eBay, starting the auctions at $0.01 and then charging a little extra on the shipping and making our profit there. If the movie sells for more than $0.01 it's a bonus, but usually they don't.

Michael got a message from someone interested in buying one of the movies up for auction recently and it was so funny I thought I would post it:

"hi. I will be willing to pay 25 cents for this movie, but can you pay the shipping please? I live in Vancouver, and what condition is it in? thanks :)"

Michael responded by saying that he (Michael) would pay the guy $0.25 to take the movie off his hands and furthermore would personally drive down to Vancouver and deliver the movie.

Some people!

Air Hockey

Have I mentioned that I love freecycle? This past weekend we went to go pick up an air hockey table that someone was getting rid of. It worked out quite well because we had to borrow a truck and then we used that truck to haul the rest of the garbage off our old porch and all the garbage bags of pop cans to the new house. I keep meaning to go to the recycling depot, but it's one of those things that just never happens.

We set it up downstairs in the same room with the tv and projector, and you can see Michael's big Superman Returns banner on the wall as well.

Here they are battling it out

Aidan was super excited when we went to pick up the table.

He was very concerned we wouldn't be able to set it up and play a game IMMEDIATELY, but Michael managed to get it downstairs and set up and Aidan was very pleased.

Now every night after he gets home he asks Michael if they can play air hockey.

He's pretty competitive - here you can see him gloating after he's scored on Michael

Usually Aidan always wins and he's not shy about cheering for himself. He says 'I the best, Mommy!'

Roots of Empathy

This coming October, Hagatha and I will be part of a program called Roots of Empathy. Once a month I will take Hagatha and visit a classroom for half an hour (or 1 hour, I can't remember) and let the kids interact with the baby. The goal of Roots of Empathy is to reduce aggression and bullying in school-age children through these visits to the classroom. Grande Prairie has 3 schools with various classrooms participating in the program and it sounds like a really good idea. This is from their website, www.rootsofempathy.org:

"Roots of Empathy (ROE) is an award winning, evidence-based classroom program that has shown dramatic effect in reducing levels of aggression and violence among school children while raising social/emotional competence and increasing empathy. The program reaches children from Kindergarten to Grade 8 across Canada, in English and French, in rural, urban, remote and Aboriginal communities both on and off reserve and is being piloted internationally in Australia and New Zealand."

Babies need to be 2-4 months by October, so Michael and I are both excited that Hagatha will be the right age to participate. The lady who co-ordinates things here in Grande Prairie said that the instructors were very flexible as to what day of the week and what time (within school hours) the school visit would happen, as well as rescheduling if the baby is sick or teething or something. The only things they aren't flexible about are what is taught during the visit and who visits. Unfortunately I'm not allowed to bring Aidan, but the lady said that she was working on getting some money to reimburse me for the cost of a babysitter which sounded great to me. And with Michael's shift work I would probably be able to pick a time during his week off where he could look after Aidan.

I think it's great that there is something pro-active, rather than just re-active, being done about this problem with bullying. There are constantly stories in the news about bullying in schools and it's good that someone has come up with something that can address the problem. I guess it's been in various communities for long enough for studies to be done regarding levels of bullying and aggression and where the program was in place, those levels had all dropped.

I thought I would post this on my blog in case you hadn't heard of the program - tell all the new moms and close to delivering pregnant women you know! If they're doing it in Grande Prairie chances are they're doing it in your community as well :)