photography give away

Just wanted to share a little something great with everyone! My dear friend Lindsey's sister-in-law has started her own photography business: Chelsea Davis Photography! We already have her booked for a maternity/family session next weekend ( which I am SUPER excited about) and she has graciously decided to do a give away for a photo session!

She truly has an eye for the camera has tons of talent. Who doesn't like love great pics of your family and kiddos!? She is giving away two regular photography sessions ( for two hours and up to 4 people) for HALF price! Great deal! All you have to do is go to her blog and enter!


You should enter...you won't be disappointed!


Oh wait! Did I mention she also has her own paper/invitation design company? Yep, she's very talented at that too! She designed Cole's 2nd Birthday invites which I LOVED all from me basically kind of telling her just the theme of what I wanted and a few ideas. You can check out all of her paper goodies here!

a sneak peek!

Today we got a sneak peek at our little baby girl! I am 30 weeks today and so we had a 4D ultrasound done and she is such a cutie! She was so cooperative that it was very easy to get LOTS of pictures of her! She is just perfect with her ten little fingers and ten little toes.

She's also was a busy little thing smiling at us and sticking her tongue out. She stuck her toes in her mouth and curled up and was sleeping just like I do with her hands tucked right under her chin. I can't believe we only have 10 weeks to go "officially" before we get to meet her.

Here is a current belly pic of me:

I am feeling pretty good still for the most part. Some days I feel like I have NO room left to grow- I guess just because of the way she moves around and postions herself sometimes I feel like it is hard to breathe, even though I'm not really trying to get air...if that makes sense. Sometimes I get told it looks like I swallowed a basketball because I am "small" and other days kids at school tell me, " Mrs. Peterson, you're really getting big!" Ha ha. Love the honest truth coming from a 4th grader.

She's got her feet in my side and her bottom up towards the top of my rib cage so I still get the hard kicks and jabs, but I am now starting to get the "belly rolls" where your whole belly just looks like a bunch of weird movements. Ten weeks are going to go by so fast that I will quickly miss these moments.

It seems like just a couple months ago that stick turned positive and she was saying " Surprise!"

nursery progress

Today began a new phase of "honey-do's"... we officially started working on Ryann's room. Hooray!! I am ashamed to say that her room did not always look like this:

 In fact, it used to be organized and clean and well, used as a guest bedroom. It did have a bedspread, nightstand, lamp, and floor space.You could walk around the bed, there wasn't random stuff piled in there like bassinets and a crib and well, all that crap baby stuff and bags from Target on the bed. It somehow became a storage "dump everything in here and deal with it later" room in the last 9 months. My sister in law was here not even a year ago and it was clean.
In fact, I know how it happened: Riley grew out of her toddler bed and we got her a new big bed this summer. Then I cleaned out her closet and started piling stuff in here and the cycle began. Just for the record, this behavior is not typically me. Just to put it out there. I normally can't stand anything in excess that accumulates.

BUT! today it got cleaned out. We decided not to rip out the sheetrock down to the studs like we did in Riley and Cole's room and re-do EVERYTHING. I just didn't want to mess with it. ( I say it as if I am the one who always did the work.)

I'm just about sure ( well, I know) Brian is probably tired of me nagging him to get started. It seems my urge to have it done/organized/clean/girly (does that qualify as nesting?) has kicked into high gear. Throw in a few hormonal surges at 30 weeks pregnant about design ideas and I can only imagine what he may be thinking. (ahem, crazy, pregnant wife that is anal retentive and has a running list of "to-do's"). Luckily, being the great guy he is, he seems to "forget" those moments. I guess I feel like the next 10 weeks will be here before we know it and I hate getting stuff done at the last minute. I've got baby stuff everywhere.

So today the room got a new window:
                          
It is super nice to have a handy man around but I wouldn't probably advise that most take this approach:

 he got as much as he could out cleanly...and the rest went on the roof and back porch. His dad showed up to give a helping hand and voila!

 and just for giggles...this is what the room looked like when we bought the house. It was probably the most "un-wallpapered" room in the entire house. Just one wall of library books. Lovely.

We are going to add crown moulding and new baseboards, then re-paint. So that is coming soon enough. I am going to try and keep documenting the progress. But, I am excited about some ideas I have and the colors we chose.

Pismo Beach, Part II

Did I say somewhere in my last post that we spent a week in Pismo Beach? I can't remember so if it's redundant, sorry! Pismo is a very quiet beach town- more of a touristy town, rather than probably a permanent spot for most, but their were some fantastic houses! Prices were high, but no surprise there, it's California. brian and I went to the grocery store to buy a few snacks for the room during the week- ha ha, what a joke. We are so lucky here.  Here's a summary of what we bought:

• a small pack of diapers
• 12 pk of root beer (to appease the preggo)
• grapes
• fruit snacks
• string cheese
• 12 pk water
• travel size contact lens solution
• half gallon of milk
• triscuits

That's it! Our total was $63!! My jaw dropped when the poor guy hit total, but I laughed. He asked us if we had a  "super saver" type card for the discounts to which I said, " Um, no, but if you wouldn't mind, you could enter yours" and he obliged so we walked away spending about $50. Yes, I expected it but it was kind of jaw dropping to compare the prices. I have no idea how people live out there.

The weather was pretty good - low 40's in the mornings, highs in the 60's and sunny- for the most part. And beautiful sunsets! With all the rain in LA and california that had been happening, I think we all thought we'd get more than we actually did. It rained and rained and the winds howled on Christmas Day but the other days were great.

Brian and I packed up the kids on one of our first afternoons and decided to head North on the Pacific Coast Highway and see what we could find. We tried to do some exploring on our own and happened to

stumble across some tide pools further down the beach..

 

I just loved this house up on the cliff...personally, I was wishing I had their view every morning.

On the way back into town, we found this great little park- with a beachview!- and the kids had a blast! We let them run around for about 30 minutes and burn off some more energy. They loved this digger and we had to pry their little fingers off of it when it was time to go.

Daddy had a great time making them dizzy...Riley didn't hold on too well the first time and she flew right off, got up with the giggles, and jumped right back on. I just love their expressions.

and...at the end of day after day looking at the gorgeous beach ...this was our view at sunset from our room:

Pismo Beach, California

So we've been home from CA officially a week, and I figured I may just do these posts in parts because I took a LOT of pictures! Somewhere around 300! Yeah, I know, crazy. But it's easy to do in a new place and on vacation. I posted some on FB and some were duplicates so I promise I won't post all of them on here, even if in parts, but I will post let's say the highlight's or the best ones.

We left on the 22nd and flew from here to LA where we had a small 2 hour layover and then caught a much smaller plane to San Louis Obispo (the kids crashed before we even took off and caught a short 45 min nap) where we all rented cars and made the short drive to Pismo Beach....on a back road, through some vineyards...very pretty. We made the trip with my mom's family, in part to celebrate my my grandfather's 85th birthday. The kids did really well on the flight over.  For the most part, they sat still and we had no crying or screaming incidents. Thank goodness I was not THE person you dread having on a plane with cranky kids. It probably helped it was an early flight and not later in the day for a 3 hour flight into LAX. I always wonder when people see kids get on a plane if they are thinking to themselves, " Oh great, small kids! This should be fun." We were spared the anguish of having to deal with that. The kids each brought their own small backpacks, which they wheeled and carried themsleves, packed with fun stuff for the plane and they were for the most part entertained. Cole didn't really understand why you need to stay buckled when the seat belt sign is on or why we couldn't always have the tray table down, but sometimes you just can't reason with a 2 yr old to make them understand. LOL.

Pismo Beach is a very small town on the Pacific Coast Highway about 3 hours north of LA. Gorgeous!! Great weather, great views, and great food. We ate LOTS of seafood during the week. This was our view everyday from our hotel balcony! In the mornings, the tide would be so high you couldn't really walk down there and the water was inside the "cave" but I was just waiting to find a time to get the kids down there.

We followed that white fence to what I will refer to as the "stairs from Hell". Sorry for my speech, but they were AWFUL. Not so bad going down....easy peasy...but I was sucking air on the way back up. Go ahead and laugh because I can NOW, but then, I didn't think they would end. I should've taken a picture. Let's just say I burned some fat off of my legs that day.

But once we got down, this was the other side of that "cave"...we walked around and let the kids explore and check it out...

and run down the beach...

                            We found sand dollars and crabs and wrote our names in the sand...

and we made it about half way down to the Pismo beach pier....

and then turned around let the kids race daddy back to the stairs and burn some more energy...can you tell mommy walked behind them and just snapped pictures!? Good thing I did, I had no idea how awful those stairs were going to be going back up.