My Ever Expanding Belly!

Baby Updates:

• At 22 weeks, Peanut is sleeping in 12 to 14 hour cycles (though it feels like he's kicking me all the time!), weighing in around a pound and growing to a whopping 11ish".  He can now perceive the difference between light and dark and is developing his grip.

• At 23 weeks, he now has a developed sense of movement and can distinguish when I'm swaying around, and this is supposed to lull him to sleep while I go about my everyday activities, leaving him wide awake during the times I'm trying to sleep... get ready for post-birth, Mommy!  Supposedly we should be able to hear his heart with a stethoscope at this point, but I'd rather hear it loud and clear on the doppler.  His face is fully developed and next up on the list is nippies!  While thebump.com has a large mango as the comparison for the whole 5th month, that is the size that babycenter.com equates with this week.

•  At 24 weeks, we're back at the hospital for another ultrasound (ie another chance to look at our little mister).  This week, we're hoping to get a good enough picture that we can use this as the image for our baby shower invitations - which we'll be printing and sending out in the next few weeks.  Our little man has put on about 1/4 of a pound since last week (wow he's packing it on quickly, let's hope I don't follow suit) and is about as long as an ear of corn (which they're saying is around a foot)!

• I've been feeling under the weather for the last week or so, so I stayed home from work today in order to visit the wonderful world of doctors... but below are some images from the ultrasound we had today (as you can see, Peanut is doing fine, even when Mommy feels like she got run over by a truck!).  Our little chunker is already weighing in at a pound and a half and is in the 47th percentile (but measuring just a tiny bit ahead) and we got to hear his hiccups on the doppler - and oh, how pissed he was that he had them and he was kicking me like crazy!:

Family Updates:

• Nate's birthday was on 8/20 and although we didn't do much to celebrate (since he just got a new guitar/amp/pedal and there are a million and one amazing games coming out in the next couple months), I did have my mom make him a Nutter Butter ice cream cake and we were lucky enough to have my daddy join us for birthday dinner (his bday was on 8/23, so they got to share the cake).
• The girls went back to school on 8/25 (a Thursday, how strange!) and Alyssa has two teachers that she's had previously - science teacher from 6th grade and math teacher from 7th grade.  Natalie has three out of the four core teachers that Alyssa had last year, so she'll be familiar with the practices of them and Lyssie can help her with the teaching styles that they uniquely have.  Also, the girls' class pods (because the 4 core classes are grouped together in the hall) are next to each other so they'll be able to keep an eye out for each other.  Alyssa got put in art instead of life skills - which is taking quite a bit of finagling to get changed over, but Natalie is pleased with her art class, though not necessarily the teacher.  The girls - luckily - got a new bus driver this year, but have been late to school quite a bit in the mornings because the bus driver 1) is new and 2) has a long route before them.  While some kids don't want to learn and would love to have the excuse of being late, our girls would rather get to school on time... so hopefully they'll get this corrected soon!
• Nate has finally gotten the word that they're going to be proceeding with his promotion.  He's been the up-and-coming General Manager In-Training (ie the next boss) since around December of last year, but they had a few setbacks in terminating his old boss, closing a store, consolidating teams, and getting production up/overhead down.  But the time has now come where he will officially start his training and get the title to go along with all the hard work he's been putting in - and I am so proud of him!
• Well Steve and his family didn't end up visiting us over Labor Day weekend because Nate and I were both sick and we didn't want to infect the kiddos... but maybe one of these days I'll finally be able to meet him.
• Our anniversary is coming up (9/12) and for it, Nate has bought me a new laptop (early, so I can play a game with him) but I absolutely love it - and am using it to type this update now!

Life Updates:

• We felt the effects of an earthquake in Virginia on 8/23 - the first time I've ever experienced something like this, especially since I live on the east coast. 
• On 8/27, Hurricane Irene came through and pummeled the eastern coast of our country.  Coastal NC and parts of MD, NY, and ME were without power for a week+ with tons of property damage and some lives lost.
• 9/6 brought flash flood warning and tornado watches all across our region - talk about weird NC weather!