Pregnancy Update-31 weeks

So here we are about two months away from having a new baby in the house again. For those of you wondering, yes I'm getting very uncomfortable,but I'm grateful for perscription heartburn medication, air conditioning, and that Eden really doesn't need me to carry her anywhere.

I have been having more braxton-hicks contractions, especially last Sunday. We ended up coming home early from church because they were getting pretty hefty and were about 7 minutes apart. But after drinking a lot of water and laying down for a few hours they tapered off. So I'm giving myself permission to take it easy. I'm seeing my doctor every two weeks to make sure that I'm not having any preterm symptoms and I have my handy perscription of tributaline just in case. I'm really hoping things will be calm and I can make it to Ellen's wedding on August 19th!

Laura and Eden, Laura especially, are excited to meet their brother. Laura loves to sing to the baby and asks me all the time if the baby is sleeping, or if there's a light inside for him to see, and if he has any toys in there. She's going to be my little helper I can already tell. Plus she already understands that mommy can't bend over all the time, so she gets to be my special picker-upper.

We still don't have a name picked out, so if anyone has 'serious' suggestions we're open to ideas! If any of you have 3 kids and didn't think it was too terrible of a transition please comment, so far everyone I talk to has just said it's not good. Even if you're lying please give me some encouragement:)

little imaginations

Going to Grandma's house..... We've been building lots of tents since we went camping.


Least favorite repeated quote: a Laura favorite: "NO EDEN"
Favorite project: Working on Eden's baby book.
Major Milestone: Eden starting to potty train a wee little bit.





Best garage sale find: Laura's pink bike helmet and knee pads, $1.50
Favorite quote of the week: Laura pointing to the ceiling, "Look Mom, it's a sky wall!"
Favorite song lyric: I love to see the Temple's last line, "I'll prepare myself while I am young.... This is my secret tooty!"


Family Home Evening Topic: What good things we can do on Sunday, complete with pictures to demonstrate a few activities that we're going to make into a little book for our church bag.

Adventures in cooking with Brent: Donuts with our newly opened fryer, thanks Rosemary! Let's just say I think we shortened our lifespan by a few more years.

4th pictures

Our 4th was pretty low key. The girls and I slept in while Brent had a great early morning bike ride up Mueller Park. We wanted to go to the Layton 'Freedom Days' fair at the duck park to watch some of Laura's friends' hula performance but got the time wrong and were a few hours early. So we grabbed a pizza and had a picnic on a blanket in the shade. Unfortunatly the 100+ temperatures combined with the disapointing lack of of rides or animals or interesting things to do brought us home after not very long. We spent the rest of the day just hanging out and having a good old fashioned barbecue as a family. The girls took really good naps, so we let them stay up pretty late watching a movie and then put them to bed. They had a hard time, but at about 10:15 when the fireworks were going off I went in to check on them and found two empty beds and two little girls behind the curtains watching out the window. We had a perfect view of the Clearfield City's big show out our second story windows so we all sat and watched them together as a family. When you can't beat 'em, join 'em!

Eden's blessing two years ago

Four generations of women: Abby Beattie, Brent's mom Rosemary Beattie, my mom Martha Tew, Brent's grandmother Geniel Bartholomew, and Eden and Laura. I love this picture

I've been working on the girls baby books, well just Eden's really, and loving it. This morning I've been working on her blessing day and realized that it was two years ago to the day! I've been going through all of her baby pictures and editing them. I'm amazed by how much better cameras are than they were two years ago. I'm so glad I have photoshop. If you look at the picture of our family you'll see a few pictures on the wall, very distracting. Unfortunately they were too hard to take out, but in the bottom two pictures I managed to take them, plus a lamp out of the back grounds.

I've been slurping my blog

This is from Sarah's Blog:



"At Nate's softball game tonight I chatted with an old friend & she told me about a website she has used to print her blog as a book, complete with digital scrapbook pages included! I came right home and check it out for myself. SO COOL!!!! Its called BLURB. Their software is free to download and use. Its available for Mac and PC, plus is works well is most blog services such as BLOGGER! It can "slurp" your blog (upload it into their program, complete with photos & text) and uses it as a first draft of your book. From there you can edit, remove, and add text & photos. Click HERE to go to there demo video. They aren't exactly what I'd call cheap, but they are reasonable and seem VERY high quality. My friend made a family "yearbook" and then is having several copies printed; one for her and one for each of her kids. I really like that idea. I figure if you include the price of photo printing, supplies, and an album cover, this is about the same cost as traditional scrapbooking. The really bonus comes in the amount of time it would save, especially doing duplicates! Now, I'm not ready to give up traditional scrap'n, but this definitely deserves a trial run"



I've also downloaded the software and really like it. There's not a ton of room for creative expression, which in a lot of ways is good! I've done a little bit with our wedding pics, and am working on making baby books for the girls, and forthcoming boy.

Photoshop Fun

Per request, the long story of the negatives, which as it turns out really isn't that long: I found I had two sets of negatives, the normal kind from a film camera and another bigger format. So I took them all in to Sam's Club and said 'help!'. They charge $.19 a picture to take them from negative to CD, about $20 for my 110 black and whites,which isn't too bad considering. I didn't really check around anywhere else because Sam's generally is good quality for the best price. I should have gone through them a little more closely and picked out the good pictures that I really wanted to keep; I could have done without about half of them, but oh well. My next step is to take the bigger negatives, which happen to be all my color pics, to Inkleys or the equivalent. I'll let you know how it's going!

p.s. for Sarah: I spent about an hour last night putting my favorites into a blurb book. They look really professional and classy.

Wedding Memories Recaptured

I have nesting lately, in the form of decorating and organization around my house. One of my biggest projects has been to decorate our bedroom on a very limited budget, because even though I have all these ideas and motivation doesn't mean I have the resources to match. Anyway, I wanted to put some pictures up on our wall from our wedding, so I pulled out the box of negatives and realized that I would never be able to do anything with those wonderful pictures unless they were digitalized. Long story short I just got back the black and white negatives now on a digital CD. I'm so excited to have these in a useable format. Plus, nothing brings back memories like these pictures. The top picture is Brent's favorite and the bottom is mine.