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Christmas day: Opening presents

Kind of sparse underneath our Christmas tree this year. I'm sure the piles of presents will continue to grow through the years as our children want bigger and better toys. But for now, Josh and I don't give each other presents (we can get what we want throughout the year anyway) and Raleigh is pretty content with a few new Thomas the Tank Engine trains.

Notice Raleigh's Christmas outfit. Another beautiful outfit knitted by Grandma Deb. We'll have more pictures of him in that outfit after Saturday when we'll celebrate Christmas over at Erika and Joel's house with the rest of the Thompson clan.

Once again, Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas!

Oh, the anticipation. The thrill. The waiting. No, I'm not just talking about the big event that will happen for us in January. I'm talking about the way that I felt as a child growing up on this night. The eve that prepared little minds and bodies for the massacre of wrapping paper the next morning.

I'd like to say that I have some major religious connection to the way that I felt growing up, but I can't really say that. I can't say it was greed either. It is the same reason that I loved every holiday. Time with family and normally, everyone was in great spirits. We could see cousins that we didn't get to see year round. We could eat the delicious foods that mom or grandma made. There were plenty of cookies around this time of year, not just because they were good and sweet and delicious but also because running the stove helped keep the house warm on the cold cold days and nights in MN.

Tonight, more than ever, I look forward to nights that are different than these. I look forward to Christmas Eve dinners with more family members. Raleigh and I had left over lasagna tonight, while Josh ate some cookies. I look forward to Christmas days with a whole boat-load of toys under the tree and anxious kids waking Josh and I up way to early. I look forward to watching whatever Christmas parade is on, or making a trip to the skating rink.

Plenty of good things to look forward to. Plenty of good memories behind me too. I feel right now, like we are slightly disconnected from the past Christmas goodness, and we are on the brink of the future Christmas goodness. It's an interesting place to be right now. Waiting for our own family traditions to sort themselves out.

What will our children carry on from their childhood holiday traditions to their own families? It's just too exciting to think about.

I hope that all of my readers have a very blessed Christmas and that you all are surrounded by your family and loved ones. As that is the best way to spend Christmas.

Our weather as of late...

... has been crappy. Although, now we have pretty white snow everywhere.

Here's some proof.

And here are the cookies that we make indoors when the weather outside is crappy.

And here is what Raleigh likes to do with his toys.

Never-before-seen Raleigh videos...

... fresh out of the archive. Sorry I've been so bad at posting videos lately. I'll try to be better.

Can you guess what I'll be doing today?

Belly Watch: 35 weeks along

Only 5 weeks to go. I hope that it will go quickly...the five weeks and the labor. No 18 hour labor this time (cross your fingers).

We're getting pretty excited to meet this new member of our family. We've been fielding a lot of questions about the gender lately. Mostly, people are supportive of my decision not to find out the gender.

After my dream last night, my only inkling of what "it will be" is.... a cat. Seriously, I had a very disturbing dream last night that I gave birth to an adult cat. I remember vividly, the doctor handing me this...cat. I remember the dissapointment on my face and the confusion on my face. And the cat looked like my childhood cat, Bentley. It was an orange adult cat.

Gives me shudders just to think about it now. It seemed so real. I can remember, when my senses finally returned to me, how relieved I was that I was still pregnant with a human child :)

So there you have it. My creepy dream and a lovely picture of me 35 weeks pregnant.

Happy Anniversary to Erika and Joel!!

It is Erika and Joel's 3rd wedding anniversary today. If you see them, say congrats!

Big achievement for Raleigh

I'll spare you the pictoral evidence, but... Raleigh pooped and peed on his potty today!

I noticed that he was working on something, and I asked, "Raleigh do you want to poop on your potty?". We usually ask him that when we know he's doing his business, but today he said "Yah," and then he walked towards his potty.

He sat on the potty for a good 5 minutes and every time he peed, we sang the pee-pee-on-the-potty song. And then when he pooped, we sang the poo-poo-on-the-potty song.

He loved the songs, and we're just happy that he did it.

At the end, he said. "Raleigh poop on potty!" with a big smile on his face. Very cute.

Homemade pizza tonight

Thanks to Angel in the Kitchen , we made homemade pizza tonight. We used her dough recipe although we didn't get all that original in our ingredients for the actual pizza toppings. Just pepperoni tonight.

Raleigh got to help us though. He enjoyed poking the dough with a fork the most.

He helped put on the cheese. It was more of a fistfull drop in one place and then on the second pizza he decided to push the cheese around in the sauce. Kind of funny actually.

Mmmm, the finished result!

Busy bee today

So I must have had extra rest last night as I was super-productive today. Here's a list of what I did today:

• Baked a loaf of no-knead bread (it's already all eaten now)


• Made home-made-from-scratch chicken and rice broth-based soup


• Made home-made-from-scratch rasberry muffins (Raleigh wanted muffins and I just happend to notice that we had frozen raspberries in our freezer.)


• Did a load of laundry


• Swept the kitchen floor


• Finished "Twilight" - by Stephenie Meyer ( I just purchased the book late last week, now I'm hooked)


• Semi-cleaned off the table.


• Brought the x-mas boxes that contained the tree and the ornaments down stairs


• After this, I can say that I blogged :)


• Joined http://www.paperbackswap.com/ so that I can get more books that I like for less money and get rid of old books that I liked but don't need to hold on to anymore

And shockingly... I didn't take a single picture of anything today. You'll have to be content with the pictures below :)

Above: Side profile of Raleigh admiring a x-mas ornament

Below: Josh helping Raleigh hang his first ornament

Below: Raleigh in an art museum here in town. We were there for the annual family x-mas party that my employer puts on.

Belly Watch: 33 weeks along

We just barely got a picture of Raleigh too!

The other day a female coworker asked me how many days I had left. DAYS! I wanted to say, "Lady, I'm not even counting in days yet, I have a whole month and a half left." But I didn't. I was polite.

More and more people keep asking me when I'm due or similar questions to the one mentioned above. I just imagine people thinking to themselves, "geez, when is she going to pop? She's huge."

I want to say to people, "I'm not a tall woman, there's no room for the baby to grow upward...so instead it must grow out, which is probably why you look at me like I should be due tomorrow."

Anyway, enjoy the pics.

The birthday celebration

I promised pictures, and here they are :) Enjoy. These are all from Raleigh's birthday day.

Above: Raleigh admiring a starfish.

Below: Mommy and Raleigh watching some kind of fish swim by.

Above: Josh pointing out a fish to Raleigh.

Below: Some kind of shark swimming above us.

Above: Raleigh standing next to the beaver statue. He was kind of scared of it at first. Took a lot of coaxing to get him up there.

Below: Raleigh peering at some fish in a smaller aquarium.

Above: Raleigh opening up one of his gifts.

Below: Everyong playing with Raleigh's gifts.

Above: Raleigh eating the graham cracker that Chelsea and Jenna decorated for him. It had a frosting "Emily the Train" on it.

Below: A picture of Raleigh's birthday cake. Ice cream cake from DQ, and the graham cracker that Chelsea and Jenna decorated for him.

Above: Raleigh attempting to blow out the candles from 2 feet away. I think Jenna helped him a bit.

Below: Success! Candles blown out.

Above: Raleigh successfully squeezed next to Chelsea and Jamie on the stairway.
Below: Raleigh's first painting lesson with Chelsea. (two pictures)

Happy Birthday Raleigh!!

I can't believe that he's already 2 years old. The time, seriously, just flies by. I'll have pictures to post later. We're actually venturing out to the Mall of America today to take Raleigh to the Underwater Adventure Aquarium. I'll have pictures to post later, and in a week or so, I'll have video to post.

So, have a happy Saturday!

-from the mom of a two-year-old boy

Happy belated Thanksgiving!

I was going to post yesterday but I was just too busy traveling and eating. We left our house at 6:45 am yesterday morning and drove down to Coon Rapids, MN, to participate in the glutany that is Thanksgiving.



Josh's Aunt Soni had a delicious meal prepared and other family members brought dishes to share as well. A few of the dishes were new to me. There was a yummy cold noodle salad that had tomatoes and feta cheese and some kind of balsamic dressing with penne noodles.



The stuffing had golden raisins, sausage, and awesome mushrooms. I think that was my favorite dish. The cranberry sauce was also delicious. Overall a very good meal.



The company was great as well. We saw a lot of Josh's relatives that we hadn't seen for quite some time. His Aunt Sara had never even seen Raleigh.



Speaking of Raleigh, he behaved so well and even ended up taking a nap on Aunt Soni's bed with Grampa Steve.

Above: Raleigh wearing the hat that I purchased for the New Baby.

Below: Raleigh wearing his new Thomas the Tank Engine PJs while eating a blueberry bagel with cream cheese.

Below: Raleigh with staticky hair after jumping in his bouncy thingy.

Happy Birthday Mom!

Today is my mother's birthday. Remember to wish her a happy birthday if you talk to her!



Here are some photos of mom.

Above: Mom and me as a baby.

Below: Mom and me as an adult.

Below: Mom on the hunt.

Raleigh's 1st 2nd birthday

Raleigh turns 2 on the 29th. We've decided to have multiple little parties for him. Last night we celebrated at Grandma Wanda and Grandpa Dave's house. It happened to also be David's 30th birthday so it was double special.

Grandma Wanda made taco/taco salad fixin's and she also had an ice cream cake ready to go. Everything was delicious and fun was had by all. Today, we'll be celebrating Thanksgiving with the Wilsons. I'll post more about that later.

Belly Watch: 30 weeks along

Ok, so kind of a dark picture, but you get it... I'm bigger now than last week.

The baby has been moving quite a bit, especially in the evenings. I don't think that it has settled in the head down position yet. I had an appointment with my doctor last Thursday and things are going quite well. I'm measuring where I want to be, my weight is where it should be, and the baby's heartbeat was around 154 beats/minute.

Josh and I have settled on a girl's name if the baby is a girl, although it's not the same girl's name that we had settled on before we knew Raleigh was going to be a boy. We're still struggling with finding the right boy's name. Can we just call it Raleigh # 2?

And to provide more of an update on our lives, things are going pretty darn good. We've made some changes to the house in the last few months:

• Installed vinyl tile in the kitchen
• Ripped out existing door jambs and trim in kitchen doorways and replaced with much better looking jambs and trim. (We still need to paint the new jambs and trim though)
• Purchased a new entertainment center that fits our small living room better but still provides ample storage
• Purchased a large mirror for the wall above the kitchen table.
• Cleaned and organized the laundry area of our basement and caught up on laundry
• Purchased a new car
• We cut down the oversized trees that were too close to our house corners

In general, we're on good pace right now to have all of the necessary changes made in order to put our house up for sale this upcoming summer. I still need to go to the bank and find out how much house we can afford. We still need to package up about 2/3 of all of the stuff we currently own so that our house doesn't look like pack rats have been living here.

And among all of that, I need to give birth to a healthy baby and find time for Raleigh. He's been extra clingy lately and only wants "mom" to do things for him or carry him. It's pretty tough carrying Raleigh with this massive belly. I have to find ways to bribe him into walking, either that or distract him enough so that he forgets how much he wants to be held by "mom". Part of me just loves how clingy and cuddly he is though. After he stopped nursing around 1 year of age, he became a very independent little guy and he didn't want to cuddle anymore. Now, he'll suprise me with impromptu hugs and kisses. I guess I'll take it while I can get it.

All right, so this blog ended up being a novel. Sorry. It's just nice to be able to have some time to write. I got a 2 hour nap today while Raleigh was sleeping so it doesn't seem that bad for me to be up past midnight right now.

Raleigh's boo boo

We babysat Reise Berg the other day and so we brought our infant swing up from the basement. Well...Raleigh wanted a go at it too.

Raleigh playing with playdoh. He asked mom and dad to make him tunnels for his trains.

And today, I came home to see this.

Raleigh and dad were rough housing on the couch and Raleigh fell on one of his train toys. He's got a pretty good cut on his brow. He wasn't nearly as sad as he seems in the picture above. Especially when I took of that "normal" band-aid and put on a Nemo shark bandaid after I got done looking at the wound.