I'm Sexy and I have Proof...

Even with three little children running around the house, I managed to get pregnant!

We are expecting a baby in October!

For your Information:

I'm 21 weeks.

I felt a lot of nauseousness during the first trimester but mostly exhaustion.

We are not having twins.

We have decided on the baby's name.

And...

We are having a boy!

Sunday- Lottie's Birthday

On Sunday, our adventure continued with our baby girl turning 2 years old!!!

Memory Lane:

When I was pregnant with Lottie, Matt was in Korea.  She wasn't really a kicker, she was a 'roller'.  I'd feel her but her movements were so subtile that sometimes I'd worry about her.  Matt was able to come home for her birth, which was perfect.  I ended up being induced 4 days after her due date but the pitocin really only jump started my labor and they turned it off because my body picked it up on its on.  My water broke and I remembered with Emmaline that I'd only had about 4 hours left until she was born so I elected not to have an epidural (horrible backache after the one with Emmaline!).  She was born mid morning and had a bruise on her forehead.  Sorta made her look funny but she was so beautiful anyway.  We went home as soon as we could to spend time with just family and we figured out that she is definately a child with an attitude.  Any dirty diaper was fussed at, any time she was hungry we had .5 seconds to get her fed.  But she turned out to be the cuddliest baby ever and I think that completely compensates for all the stress :)

I thought and thought and thought about having a big bash for her but when push came to shove, thats all I did- think about it.  I didn't actually get around to planning anything.  So we had a quaint little family party at home.

This is Lottie coming down the hall to see the room decorated after her nap time.  She was so excited for her hat and kept asking for it to be replaced when it fell off!

Opening presents!

She got a My Little Pony train and train car!  That thing seriously kept the girls occupied for an hour this morning. Jackpot!!

Time for cupcakes!  I thought it was funny that we just happened to have strawberry cupcakes for both her first and her second birthdays.  It was mostly a coincidence...

Happy Birthday my beautiful baby girl!!

Saturday

Our Saturday adventures were marred by a trip to the ER.  Thursday we noticed that Lottie had a sore on her foot.  It looked like it could possibly be the remnants of a sliver she'd gotten a few weeks ago.  Matt tried is best to push the remaining portion of the sliver out and called it good.  But Saturday morning Lottie woke up fussing about her foot. When we saw the state of it, we decided a trip to the ER was in order.  This is what her poor foot looked like.  That red streak was the start of a pretty nasty infection.

We had a few things to do before we headed to the ER.  We stopped by a garage sale and bought the affore shown double stroller.  It folds up smaller than our single stroller and I love it!!! We then stopped by the famous Dededo Flea Market.  I wanted to pick up some Soursop and some Breadfruit that you can't get at the commissary and browse around.  There were a lot of booths that sold food, a lot of booths that sold clothing, knock off dvds/cds, and sun glasses.  We might head back there for some girls clothes later because I saw a booth that said '3 for 10$', which is a really good price when you have little kids that refuse to stop growing.

Once we got to the ER it was pretty smooth sailing.  It took about 2 hours to get through everything but that included an x-ray to make sure the sliver was gone and a trip to the pharmacy to pick up the perscription.  So not too bad.

As the end of our family festivities for the week, it was pretty sad.   But it was an adventure! Now we've had Emmaline at the ER(for the mysteriously vanishing toy up her nose), Matt at the ER (for his appendix) and Lottie at the ER.  We've only been here a year and a half, how many more time you think we'll make it here?

Friday

Friday we went out on another adventure.  We'd heard of the "Guam Cultural Theme Park" and were mildly curious about what it was.  Turns out it wasn't that great, but I'm glad we went.  I'm even more glad for the military discount that took the price from $50 down to $20 for our family. That made  it worth it.

The idea of this park is to show how Guam was about 500 years ago. 

 

A boat similar to what they used a long time ago.  It was really thin- I can't imagine me sitting inside of it. They must have been much smaller people!

This was part of the 'nature walk' portion of the park.  It was really interesting to see several plants we recognized as well as many more we didn't.  There was this weird smelling white fruit that had fallen off the trees.  We stepped in a few and the smell wasn't that great.  There was one point where we could go back into the jungle a ways. There were so many geckos and blue tailed skinks running around.  Lottie kept saying "deko" and pointing everywhere at them.  There were also hundreds (not exaggerating there!) of shells from hermit crabs laying around.   Not sure if they were collected and placed there as part of the nature walk or if that was a natural thing for the area.  But cool!

This is what the outside of one of their houses would look like.  This isn't a very high-ranking person's house- its smaller and not raised far off the ground. 

This house was raised about as tall as Matt and I and had a tall ladder to climb up.  Emmaline was brave and conquored her fear of climbing the ladder and we were able to explore what the inside of the A-frame would have looked like 500 years ago.  It was pretty impressive and Matt should build us one :)

I don't have pictures of the kids feeding the animals but there were a few local animals- chickens, deer, carabao, hogs, iguanas, goats, etc.  They got to feed them bird feed and bananas.

After we finished up looking around at the 'park' part of the adventure we went down to the beach.  It wasn't a nice beach- it was all very rocky and seaweedy. But there was some of these cool chairs we could sit on:

And Lottie managed to find a bed to 'sleep' on:

Then Emmaline had to copy her:

And then this picture is just cute:

After going through all the pictures I discovered that we have none of Gabriella or Matt for this trip. Evidentially he had the camera the whole time and was carrying the baby.  It was a plesant trip out and was very interesting to see so much of the culture. But Matt and I agreed that it probably wasn't the most exciting of our adventures.  And we probably wouldn't highly recommend this to other people.

Thursday

Thursday  we took a trip to a beach we havent been to before.  Turns out, we really should have found a way to come here earlier! It was a perfect beach for our family.  The water was shallow for hundreds of feet before the reef and had so many fish that would swim around our feet.  We all loved it.

I've discovered that there is something about being at the beach that completely relaxes me.  I find that I can't think of any of my problems while I'm out there.  All I hear is the sound of the waves, all I feel is the breeze on my face, all I see is the deep blues of the water and the ocean meeting in the distance.  All I feel is peace.  Add to that the fact that I get to watch my children and husband having so much fun and every trip to the beach becomes a mini piece of heaven.

Gabriella loves putting anything in her mouth that she possibly can.  Its quite annoying at home when I have to keep everything off the floors, but at the beach, it means keeping her 100% away from the sand or we'll be cleaning sand out of her diapers for a month!  This is a picture of one failed attempt to keep her on the towels. She face planted into the sand and got it into her eyes, ears, and mouth. And then she rubbed her hands into her eyes and made it worse.  Poor girl had red eyes all day!

This is me, sporting my new swimsuit! 

Matt found this blue star fish while walking around in the water.  He tried to take a picture of it but declared that we really just need to have an underwater camera.  Later a few Japanese tourists found the starfish, tore it off and was playing with it. That made Matt grumble quite a bit because he said that hurts the starfish. Hopefully that starfish found a way to safety and was able to recover.

I'm so grateful that I get to be here, experiencing some of the most beautiful things on this earth.  I'm also grateful that Matt got the week off.  It was time we really needed together!



Wednesday

This week we were so glad to have Matt off work for a few days. After cleaning, mowing the lawn and running errands, we took off for some adventures.

We had some tickets for a river boat cruise but because of soeme misunderstandings on my part, we showed up almost an hour early! So we wandered over to the nearest beach and poked around for a bit.

Once we got on the riverboat, we enjoyed the breeze, watching the little fish in the water, and looking for the animals on the shore.

This is a view from the riverboat of a site that used to have a Chamorro Village:

An Iguana sunbathing on the tree:

Here we were able to land and look around the old Chamorro Village site.  These are called Latte Stones and are the foundation for their houses. The higher off the ground your house was, the higher rank you were in the tribe. 

We got a few family pictures:

This one is funny- we had to wait in line for the chance to get to the mouth of this cave.  While doing so, I noticed a VERY big spider had built his web at the top of the opening to the cave.  Emmaline, if you recall from our last cave adventure, is terrified of the spiders.  So, I elected to not point out how big he was.  Well, just as we were getting our turn, the tour guide thought he'd be helpful and point out to our kids the really cool spider.  Emmaline Freaked out.  I grabbed her and she clung to me like butter on bread.  Matt went lift Lottie up for the picture and she bumped her head on my hand in the process. The guy was snap happy and took the picture too fast so what we got was Lottie saying "Ow", Emmlaine still mid- freak out, and Gabriella looking at who-knows what while Matt and I were laughing our heads off.  Best family picture all week.

After enjoying our time on the riverboat we went to Ipan Park for a lunch and to explore the beach.  Gabriella was exhausted and fell asleep on the ride there.  The girls looked for crabs and built a sand castle.

Lunch:

As we were leaving Matt wanted one more family picture:

After assessing the entire week, we decided that out of everythign we did, the riverboat cruise was easily the favorite and we'd probably do it again.  It was so nice to have our whole family together and to be able to enjoy some of the beauties of Guam!