15 Weeks Pregnant and Kindergarten!

As many of you already know we are expecting baby #2!

This pregnancy has been strikingly different from my last.  I felt continuously tired and nauseous the majority of the first trimester and my belly seemed to pop almost as soon as wee found out we were expecting!  

Now in the second trimester I am feeling quite a bit better.  Raine and I have even left the house several times in the last few weeks! :)  I feel my ligaments stretching and my body accommodating the baby much earlier than I did when I was pregnant with Raine.  I felt amazingly like myself up until the last month with Raine and this time around I worry that I am a bit whiny because I am feeling everything so early.

Raine is SO excited to be a big sister!  She is looking forward to the new baby and has told Dan and I that she will get up to feed the baby in the middle of the night. :)  She is also looking forward to kindergarten (I know I can't believe it either)!  I think all the coming changes and the hard work of growing is making her a little grumpy but she is handling it pretty well anyway.

She got accepted to 2 really good kindergartens:  Mountain Phoenix Waldorf Charter School and The Studio School (an art based magnet school).  We are still figuring out which school we will send her to but are excited to have such great options (considering 2 months ago we had no options and were just going to home-school).  Raine really likes the playground at Mountain Phoenix and she LOVES that the Studio School has a ceramics class and a stage!  We will decide for sure in a week or two which school she will be attending.

Happy Birthday Raine!!

We had a little family birthday on Raine's birthday last week. We are having a party for her in a few weeks so we just let her pick whatever she wanted to do on her birthday.

I took her to a place called Little Monkey Business, it is just a play center for infants to preschoolers. She had a great time and then we came home to celebrate with Dan. We played all her games and then Raine and Dan played play dough while I made dinner. She requested pizza and watermelon. And then she had a very large cupcake that she picked out from the store. We opened presents and watched Sid the Science Kid.

It was pretty fun to have a day that we did whatever she wanted to do! Her favorite gift from Dan and I was her Kilan night light, she loves it, and even wanted to take it in the car and everywhere she went. But when she saw the playhouse from Nana all else was forgotten. :)

Last night we spent last night making our own Christmas tree decorations. (We have only a handful of real decorations). It was pretty fun. I thought the decorations would be cheesy and silly on our tree, but I think it looks cute. :) Raine was super excited because she got to use scissors and glue! A very big treat for her, she feels so deprived not getting to use scissors that whenever she has a chances that's all she wants to do. :) Raine was in charge of hanging the decorations on the tree, which she really enjoyed. Grami Tami gave us a nice tree, it is actually our first tree bigger than 2 ft tall. And it already has a pile of presents under it for Raine from Grami Tami. We also made super chocolate cookies for Dan's work cookie bake off. Raine loves to bake (she thinks everything requires a cup of butter, cup of sugar and a mixer). She loves licking the beaters more than eating the cookies.

Raine Reading

Raine loves to read to Jasper (the boy I nanny for now) and I. Here she is reading Brown Bear, Brown Bear. Usually she just reads the pictures and makes up a story, but there are a few books she remembers the words to pretty well. :D

Raine was going to do some signing in this video but once I turned on the camera she decided to talk about dinosaurs.

Halloween Fun

We had a great Halloween and hope all of you did as well!! We went to the Children's Museum and the Aquarium for their Halloween events and then trick or treating to a few houses on our street. Raine had a blast! She really got the hang of things this year. She said "Trick or Treat" at most of the houses and kept pointing out houses to ask if we could trick or treat them.

Raine and I did the trick or treating pretty early so that we could come home and hand out candy. It was our first year that we had trick or treaters. I bought 6 bags of candy and we ran out around 6:30pm! I felt bad that we had to turn out the lights so early, I guess I shouldn't have been so generous with early in the evening (I was giving kids one of every kind of candy). :)

Happy Halloween!!

It has been a little while since our last post... sorry. We were so happy to have the chance to go to Utah for Heith and Haiden's birthday party! We had so much fun and loved spending time with everyone! I will post photos of that later (they are on Dan's laptop).

Last night Raine and Dan carved our pumpkin from Grammy Tami's house. They had a lot of fun, it was super cute to watch. :D Raine keeps telling me that the pumpkin is a girl, named Pumpkin (NOT JACK! as Dan had been calling it) and it is hers! She was so funny, she didn't want to touch the slime at first but soon enough she was playing in it. Raine designed the face of our pumpkin this year. Dan asked her what she thought he should look like and she drew a big circle with big circle eyes and a big happy smile.

Vacation Utah

Raine and I are having fun with Grammy Tami and everyone in Utah right now, Dan had to stay in Denver and start his new job. We really miss him and wish he was here with us! We have been to a carnival, played in the creek, to Gardner Village, to a brand new temple, the children's museum, a parade, the Air Force museum and lots of fun things. Raine LOVED the carnival! She rode everything like such a brave girl! Her favorite was the dragon roller coaster, which I don't have any pictures of yet because they are on my phone. Aunt Kuki won a little kitty cat for her, I think she has named him Freakado after her real kitty. She climbed a tree, rode a horse and hugged a goat at Gardner Village. Oh, and she was licked by a lamb. She wasn't too impressed with the parade because she wasn't quick enough to get any of the candy tossed our way. But she thought the airplanes were pretty cool.

As we toured the temple she was so good and asked lots of questions (about the chandeliers and things of that nature), she wanted to sit on every chair in the temple and ride the "alligator" (elevator). I think her favorite part was the beautiful "swimming pool". She was very worried because she wasn't wearing her swimming suit and she really wanted to get in! When we got to the sealing room she wallered all over the altar and when the speakers asked us to take a silent moment to reflect and absorb all that we had seen and learned she said, "neigh-ha" (yep, that is a donkey noise)! At least she wasn't throwing a fit, right?

She had a great time at the children's museum I think we could have spent a week there and she wouldn't have been ready to go! She loved playing with the castle that had horses and fairy figurines. She flew the fairies around on horses for quite a while. They had some really cute houses from all over the world to see fun different cultural things. She also got to milk a cow, feed a pig and a lamb a bottle and ride a wooden horse.