Baby Gardiner Update

On Monday we went to get an ultrasound to measure the baby. He is still measuring at 35 weeks (which is what I measured at 3 weeks ago...so he's only 3 weeks bigger instead of 6 weeks). So we are kind of catching up to where he should be. He looked so big in the ultrasound! His head measurements are off the charts and he has long legs. Based on his measurements, the ultrasound estimated that his current weight is 4 pounds, 12 ounces (about a pound bigger than average), and estimated due date was January 20th. My official due date has not changed from February 4th, but I'm going to be ready for him to come early anyway!

Here are a few pictures from our ultrasound at 31weeks and 5 days:

We have also been using the small pieces of free time we have to work on the nursery. James has put a lot of work into assembling the crib, painting the walls, and putting up this cute border. James did all of this a while back as a surprise to me. He is so wonderful! We are going with a safari theme and I absolutely love it. I think the baby decorations are more for the parents than the kid! I think it's just something that is a part of the experience that helps you to feel connected with the baby while getting ready for him.
James and I are both excited for the semester to be over. I turned in my final project to complete my Master's program and I should be graduating on Saturday, the 19th! I am so excited and relieved that I am finally done. A lot of hard work has gone into this program and I feel so grateful to have had the opportunity to gain the knowledge and experience that I have so far. And we are also so excited that James now only has one year left for his Bachelor's! He has been working so hard and making good grades, I am so proud of him! He is so much more diligent at studying than I ever was.

We can't wait to celebrate the holidays with our families and look forward to the upcoming events of 2010!!!

Thanksgiving Break

Well we had a great Thanksgiving break! I got to spend a lot of time in San Antonio with my family and had a friend from Virginia, Jackie, come and visit me!

Thanksgiving day was great. Lots of great food and family. It was nice to spend time with family that I don't get to see as often as I'd like and hang out with my siblings. We watched the UT/A&M game that evening and BOY, was it exciting! Everyone was surprised at how well A&M played. It was the most yards in history during an A&M/UT game...there was constant action on the field. In the end, A&M was outscored but it was still a great game.

Friday the girls went and ventured out for Black Friday. We just got a few things at Kohl's but decided to call it a day after that. You had to wait an hour and fifteen minutes just to check out! How insane!

Later I showed Jackie a little around town and we went back and relaxed at my parent's house. James went to Bastrop for the day to hang out at his parent's ranch. Later that night we saw "Old Dogs" at the movies in the Quarry Market. It was a pretty funny movie and we had fun walking around and getting ice cream nearby.

Saturday my mom, me, and Jackie went to downtown San Antonio for some sightseeing. We went to the Menger hotel, the Alamo, and got a horse drawn carriage ride around downtown! I had never done that before and it was really awesome. We got to see a lot of neat stuff. We ate dinner on the Riverwalk at Rainforest cafe and then walked around to see the Christmas lights on the river. It was beautiful!

Sunday we went to church and Jackie finished up the baby blanket she had started crocheting for the baby. It is super cute! I need to take a picture of it to post online. Baby Gardiner sure is lucky to have all of these people who care about him!

Sunday evening we decorated the Christmas tree at my parent's house with Pat and Melanie. I love decorating the Christmas tree. It is one of my most favorite traditions. We always have lots of funny stories that we recall--things we did as kids, funny moments, etc. Dad always tries to taunt me by putting his UT ornaments front and center on the tree, haha.

I am so glad we had such a fun and relaxing Thanksgiving break. I really needed it! I have been so stressed out and tired lately. Now I just have to muster up enough energy to finish the final project for my master's program, and then I will be done! I'll get a little breather before the baby comes. I can't wait to graduate and then get to see our little guy!

Almost Thanksgiving

Well the past few weeks have been extremely busy. We just finished the group paper for our semester project-now I just have my individual project to complete (still have a ton to do, but at least I'm getting closer to the end).

I went to the doctor yesterday and so far everything is looking good. The only thing is the baby is still measuring big. I am almost 29 weeks and he is measuring 35 weeks! The doctor just thinks he is a big baby and she is not too concerned. I go back in three weeks and I will have another ultrasound to check everything out.

So since everyone tells me I "look like I'm about to deliver any day," I guess that they are really not too far off in terms of how big I am getting. But the doc said just because he is big enough doesn't mean he is OLD enough to deliver. They still need lots of time to develop their lungs, etc. Because they scheduled my appointment so late yesterday they did not have time to administer the glucose test. I had to go back this morning and drink that nasty drink (but honestly it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be) and then get blood taken an hour later. The drink didn't make me feel sick or bad or anything, so I guess that's a good sign. I worked on my project on my laptop while I waited so I really didn't mind the test too much.

Here are some pics that I took at 27 weeks. I am sure I am even bigger now than in that picture. We are going to take some maternity/holiday pictures soon, and probably send them out with Christmas cards. I am excited!

I am very much looking forward to the holidays and a little bit of a break! It will be great to visit with family, eat turkey, and catch up with an old friend!

My favorite pic (hi little baby!!!):

Halloween

Halloween was simple but fun this year. Some of us dressed up at work and that was a good time. I didn't really make too much of a costume, but one of my coworkers let me borrow her vampire makeup which really made the look! I think we look pretty scary.

I can't believe how huge I look in that last picture! That is me at 26 weeks. I feel like I am getting bigger expontentially! Hard to believe I still have three months of growing to do!

Friday night James and I swung by the "Trunk or Treat" at church and got to see all the cute little kiddo costumes. I'm amazed at how creative so many of them were!

On actual Halloween we got candy and waited for trick or treaters to come by while we were working on our projects/homework. We did not even get one trick or treater! Oh well, maybe next year.

Weekend in Aggieland

We had a really great weekend. We arrived in College Station Friday evening and visited with James' brother Nathan and his wife Lesley. The next morning we went to Northgate to go shopping in some of the campus bookstores. I got a new A&M t-shirt that fits over my pregnant belly and we got a few Aggie outfits for the baby. They had soooo many cute things! Of course they were overpriced but I had to get at least something for the little guy. The best part of the outfit-it says "Aggies" on the bottom!

Then we walked around campus and I got to reminisce over all the places I used to go when I went to school there. I absolutely LOVE College Station and the A&M campus. It is beautiful, the weather is great, and overall it is just a pleasant place to live. The campus is pretty big so even though I was wearing tennis shoes I ended up getting tired really fast while we were walking around. I haven't done that much walking since I've been "more" pregnant and I can't believe how quickly I got tired! I had to sit down and rest a few times and my feet were killing me. I am starting to get a tad bit of the "swollen feet" pregnancy stuff. Not too excited about that but I'm hoping that I don't get "Shreck feet," as someone so kindly put it the other day.

Here is me by the century tree...a lot of people propose underneath this tree. We ate at Freebirds for lunch on Northgate and it was AWESOME. I miss the College Station classic restaurants...it was SO good!

Later that night we went to the murder mystery dinner party at Nathan & Lesley's and it was so much fun. It was probably the best one they have thrown yet. This year there were several murders/murderers and it was a Clue theme. I ended up being one of the people that got killed and James ended up being one of the murderers. Unfortunately my camera battery died so I didn't get any pictures! But I'm hoping that Lesley can give me some of hers. I highly recommend doing a party like this for anyone that wants a fun Halloween activity for adults. It was nice to get away this weekend. I am really glad that we went!

Monday we got our crib bedding in the mail. Although I'm trying to keep costs reasonable with baby stuff I did splurge a little bit on this because we had some extra money this month and I have just fallen in love with this design! So we are going to go with the "safari" theme for the baby's room. I love it! Can't wait to start decorating his room!

Pregnancy Progress

I haven't posted in quite a while so I thought I would just post some of the highlights of the pregnancy from every few weeks. We have been able to see the baby several times in ultrasounds which was an amazing experience. It has been neat to see the baby grow and see the baby moving around in there.
This is the first at 7 wks. You can't see too much there but it was awesome to hear the heartbeat for the first time! It made things seem so much more real.
Here is 13 wks. It's amazing how much the baby grew in 6 weeks!Here is my belly at 13 wks. Not a huge change yet, but my old clothes were getting uncomfortable enough that I needed to start buying some maternity clothes. Luckily my mom really helped me out with that!We got to find out the gender at 18 wks. We were BEYOND excited. The sono showed very clearly that it was a BOY! We were a little shocked because we kind of thought that it would be a girl, but nonetheless we were extremely happy. It was great to know that it was going to be a little boy and we have been trying to think of the right name ever since.My belly at 18 wks.The 20 wk sono was amazing. We got to see a close up of his heart and everything. He was moving a lot and doing really cute stuff-especially when he started sucking his thumb at the end! We got a DVD of the ultrsound and we have watched it several times since then.My belly at 20 wks.My belly at 23 wks. My belly at 24 wks. It's amazing how much my belly has grown in just a week or two! The doctor said the baby must be going through a growth spurt because I am measuring at 30 wks! I am a little scared to see how much bigger I could possibly get...but we will just have to wait and see I guess! For now, we are just happy that the baby is strong and healthy. We feel so blessed to be bringing this life into the world and we cannot wait for him to get here!

SoCal Vacation

Our trip to visit San Diego in July was absolutely awesome. It was the perfect getaway and we had the best time. I'll post a few pictures here and describe some of the highlights, but if you want to see all the pictures you can go to: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2785155&id=8319038&l=50e3d22c2e.

We arrived in San Diego on Saturday. We had a nonstop flight from San Antonio which was AWESOME. James had been in touch with one of his companions from his mission, who also happened to be visiting San Diego at the same time that we were. So we called him up and went to lunch together.

After that, we went to the LDS temple in San Diego. I had seen pictures and thought it was beautiful. In person it was even better! It's huge, and has such beautiful details. On the inside there is a spiral staircase that goes up into the spires and in the middle there is an atrium with a garden with plants and flowers. It was incredibly peaceful there and you could really feel the Spirit.

Then we drove around and looked at some of the apartments James lived in while he was there on his mission, and drove around the area. There was actually the gay pride festival/parade going on while we were there. I'll just say that it was interesting...I hadn't really seen anything like it before! We didn't really watch, we just kind of drove by.

This is the downtown San Diego skyline. This is such a beautiful city!

Later on we met up with this guy Garrett that James knew and we went to Old Town San Diego and walked around. We ate dinner and then looked at the little shops and everything nearby. We wanted to go see the Mormon Battalion Center, but it was being remodeled.

On Sunday we went to church in the Chula Vista ward, an area James served in. We got to say hi to a lot of people he knew and after church James drove me around to see some sites. We went to Point Loma and saw the view of the bay and the city. It was totally awesome, such a great view!! I took a ton of pictures, this is just one of them.

We also toured some of the old ships that were on the bay, including the "star of India" and a Soviet sub. We had a really good time doing that and it was very interesting. The submarine was probably my favorite thing, it was just so crazy to think of all those people living in that tiny space.

On the following Monday we went to La Jolla cove and got to see some cute seals laying on the beach. It was funny to watch them flop around and play in the water, and sun themselves.

After that we went to the beach and layed out. The beach was really great, and the weather was PERFECT as usual. I had heard that the water was colder than what we had in the gulf of mexico, but when I tried to step in the water, I almost screamed it felt so cold. I didn't know if I would go any further than ankle deep, but then I thought, what the heck, I've come all this way, I at least have to get in! So we went further and further, close to waist deep, and then I waited for a wave to come, got completely wet, and then I got the heck out of there! My skin was tingling from the cold. Some of you may think this sounds weird...but if you compare going swimming when it is 95-100 outside, with a water temp of 85 degrees....to an outside temp of 80ish degrees in 70 degree water...it was just so different. But I am GLAD that I have now been swimming in the Pacific ocean!

Later that night we went to the zoo. We got there around 5pm and stayed until about 9. It was really neat to go to the zoo at night. The weather was so nice and all the animals were out. I wasn't sure why everyone always said the San Diego zoo was so great and that it was world famous. But I was extremely impressed, the zoo was awesome! It is definitely a must see. It is different from any other zoo I have ever been to. The habitats were so natural looking at you get to be so much closer to the animals. We were told that the cost of all the plant life is actually more expensive than the cost of the animals. I can see why because there are tons of trees and all kinds of exotic plants not only in the habitats, but all around the zoo. There are lots of trails and you feel like you are walking through a rainforest or jungle or something. Then later that night we saw a bird show and got to see lots of birds actually fly into the audience and go right by us. Not just little birds, but hawks, owls, and a stork looking bird--in full flight. It was so cool.

Tuesday we drove to El Centro, a small town that James served in, which is in the middle of the desert and still close to the border. It was so HOT! At 10:00 a.m. it was already 102 degrees. I'm not sure how much hotter it got, but when we got outside and walked around a little bit later, I thought I would die. The sun just BEATS down on you out there. There wasn't too much too see there but it was still cool to see where James spent some of his time.Then we drove up to Palmdale where my grandparents live. Our GPS took us through the middle of nowhere and for a while we thought we were lost. It kept telling us to turn left on these dirt roads, and we didn't...so it kept yelling at us. We were getting so frustrated that it was funny. We finally got to a little town and bought a physical map that we could look at. We were basically on track, but it was nice to know for sure where we were and where we were going. It was a pretty fun roadtrip overall. We went through some REALLY ghetto small towns though. I took so many pictures.

When we got to my grandparents, we mostly just hung out and talked that night. On Wednesday we went to Universal Studios Hollywood. It was a huge waste of money, but we wanted to get out and do something fun in the area. It was annoying because there were so many restrictions on what pregnant ladies can do. But we still had a good time. The last day of our trip, we just rested. We bought a 1000 piece puzzle and worked on it with my grandparents and my aunt. It was nice to spend time with them and James got to hear all my grandpa's war stories and his post-retirement "career" of look alike contests (he looks--or looked--like Mickey Rooney). But it was cool and I actually learned a lot about both my grandparents that I didn't know before. They are interested in doing family history and using the LDS church resources, so I am kind of excited to help them with that. Overall it was a really great trip. I am so glad that we had the perfect mix of fun and getting reacquainted with family and friends. I am grateful that we had the time and means to do this together and have memories that will last a lifetime.