Our wee garden - in all its glory!

Our back patio has been transformed a few times since we've lived in our condo, and this year it took on a new task! Growing some vegetables! Mind you, our patio is tiny... and the planting area is even smaller, so we had to limit our farming ambitions. However, you will quickly see that the squash are 'winning' the territory battle - in fact, I'm not sure if our peppers are even going to produce at this point! However, the satisfaction seen in Matt's face as he picked our first yellow squash and cherry tomatoes is worth the jungle we're currently dealing with!

Where to start?

I am rather behind on blogging, when you get right down to it.  So, hang with me while I try to catch up and keep it in some kind of order!

In the last month, Matt and I tried to compete in the category of  'worse thumb injury' -- he started the event by cutting cheese (yes, cutting cheese, not cutting the cheese).  That's right, cutting cheese!  His knife blade came out of its handle and neatly sliced (deep) into the end of his thumb (weird, I know)!  He possibly should have gotten stitches, but a little over three weeks later he is almost completely mended (yay!).  Eight days later I took my own stab at the event (hardy har har) and decided to dice my thumb with the onions... yikes!  While I waited for Matt to fly home from school to rescue me from myself I laughed like a maniac in my kitchen (can we say shock?)... and ended up unloading/loading the dishwasher and wiping down the counters to distract myself... weirdo?  If thats how I react to trauma, I think it'd be pretty great if I laughed while giving birth.  Yeah, right! :)  I ended up at InstaCare, but managed to escape stitches (hooray for a clean cut with a chef's knife).  About 2 weeks later now, my thumb is looking less mutant and is starting to regain some sort of feeling.   So, the moral of the story: take care of your thumbs (especially when around the Spanns!).  

When the doctors are away...

the Pokemon deck comes out?

Can't say I was ever into Pokemon (still not), but here is our office living it up over lunch the other day... people have come a long way from 'just playing a game', we do our research now! I was just there to bake the cookies :)

Neglect

I feel like I've been neglecting our 'child' on the blog... so, here are a few pictures of him!  Figure we'll give him a little spotlight before his world gets turned upside down by our new addition  :)  

WHOA

I had no intention of blogging today, but just noticed we're in the double digits! (see ticker) I remember reading when other people hit that milestone and feeling like I would never be there... and poof! here we are. I have to say everything is going so well! I had a doctors appointment this last week and had the great opportunity of having my glucose (gestational diabetes) and iron tested and passed with flying colors! ... so far so good! (knock on wood). I had heard horrible things about the glucose test - about how disgusting the drink was, but really, not so bad. It was just like a sugary off-brand orange soda - definitely do-able. The receptionist told me I had 10 minutes to drink it and had to be poked exactly an hour afterwards... I took a look at the 10 oz. bottle and couldn't imagine sipping on it in the waiting room for 10 minutes, so I quickly guzzled it down and handed it back to her!

The nursery is slowly taking shape... in my mind at least! We got our baby bedding this past week (thanks Mom!) so the hunt for paint is underway. I went and got some paint samples yesterday and am still trying to decide what I want to do... Matt is really involved in all this picking-out business and as cute as it is, it is making progress a little slow! Oh well, I'll take that over the alternative :) Hopefully we'll be able to agree on a design soon so I can get going on it!

Celebrating the land we love

4th of July was spent in our typical fashion -- checking out the scene downtown, swimming, bbq, fireworks, and watermelon!  I even made a homemade apple pie - how American is that??  I had to include a picture of our snowies we got downtown... Matt's cost $2 and mine cost $4, who got the better deal?  Guess we should have just shared the $4 :)  Hope y'all had a great day too!!

Waiting for the fireworks... waiting... and waiting... 

forget Hannah Montana, we want fireworks!

(p.s. in this picture you can see my patriotic quilt in the background - king size for $20 at Walmart!  how great is that?)

24 weeks!

I don't think I've blogged about the pregnancy for a while... sorry to neglect! Things continue to pick up pace -- Matt felt the baby kick for the first time on Father's Day (how about that for timing!) and now we can feel/watch him ALL the time! He is a lively one and keeps us entertained already! 

We also went and started the grueling process of registering (for whatever reason, I have yet to truly enjoy a day of any kind of registering... it just saps the life out of me). Even though it wasn't my favorite 6 hours spent, I'll admit it was fun picking out and looking at things and feeling like we were making progress at getting ready!  It was also funny to me how extensive those check lists are they give you in the store... making you feel as though your baby needs 2 million items to survive.  Don't they just eat, sleep, and poop?  :)   

On another note, I was thrilled when I first saw the "stork parking" spot while shopping; however, it got me thinking about what it implied when a pregnant woman was given the chance to park closest to the handicap parking.  So, although I may have been excited about the spot initially, I have a feeling I am going to now park further out (even if it's just the parking spot next to it)  just in spite.  haha  I know, I know, beware of pride.  It's alright, you can call me silly...

After a quick view of the photo below, you will easily see that I have apparently "popped"!   I have been comparing the 20 week to the 24 week picture in amazement... no wonder I've been having these terrible growing pains in my hips!  The belly is still a shape shifter - sometimes I look like this, sometimes I think I look twice as big :)  

Alas, no name still... but we're starting to work on it!  Too bad I'm not one of those girls who had a full name picked out by age 5.  What can I say, I like to live life on the wild side ;)

I'm going to end this post with a question/shout out to all the Moms out there (and Dads, if you feel so inclined!) -- after experiencing the plethora of baby gear/accessories/doo-dads out there:  what one baby product/item could you not live without?