January Happenings

The month of January has been fun for us, especially considering that we're not one month closer to having our little one! We're now in our 29th week and in our third trimester! This month also brought another fun event, Art's 28th birthday! We enjoyed the day before hanging out at Dave and Busters together and on his actual birthday spent the day with his parents. Art really enjoyed putting together one of his new presents for the baby, a swing.

A few weeks prior to his birthday, I had also surprised him with the bedding we'd been wanting for the nursery. The nursery is almost complete now, just a few final touches and we're ready for Izzy to be here!
Everything is really coming together in preparation for the baby. Art is so excited that he even likes to write her little messages on my growing belly. We're excited for February to start tomorrow with our annual Super Bowl bash!

Happy New Year!

For New Year's Eve this year we went down to Denver to spend some time with our friends Brett and Theresa. They host a great party every year with a theme. This year the theme was the Best of SNL. Art and I dressed up as Wayne and Garth. Art was Wayne and I was Garth. Our costumes included a few Top Ten lists, drumsticks, and a guitar. I think we looked pretty good!

The party was at Theresa's parent's house in their newly finished, incredible basement. Here is Art and Brett, dressed as SNL character Matt Foley ("...in a van down by the river."), playing foosball. We had a really good time bringing in the New Year. We can't believe it's 2009.

On a side note, everything is going great with the pregnancy. I feel like I'm getting bigger every day. We have a doctor's appointment next week. Right now we are 25 weeks along. She's kicking all the time, Art can feel the kicks now too. She'll be here before we know it!

Gizmo's First Grooming Experience

For Christmas we thought we'd get our precious little Gizmo groomed. For those of you that have seen Gizmo, he's a big ball of fluff. He is most definately a long haired cat. He has a huge fluffy tail and a thick white beard below his chin. Because of this he sheds constantly and has hair ball issues. Poor little guy. So a few days ago I took him to the groomer. Getting him in the car was quite interesting and when I dropped him off I felt so horrible. He was shaking and meowing, he was down right scared. So here is his before shot.

And here is his after. He looks like a sheep that just got shaved when you see him up close. It's kind of hard to see in the pictures. The most hilarious part is that the short hair stops about a 1/2 inch below his head and tail. So his head and tail still have the long fluffy hair. We think he likes it though because he wants us to pet him all the time lately. He weighed 13 pounds with all his hair and since his haircut he weighs just a little over 12 pounds. We like our big fluffy Gizmo a little bit better!

Holiday Fun

We've been really enjoying the holidays this year, especially knowing that our little girl will be here before we know it. I'm now off of school for a few weeks and Art was lucky enough to get a little over a week off during Christmas as well. We've kept ourselves busy by...

...baking cookies.

...taking a day trip to Denver to see the Christmas Carol play and looking at the beautiful lights.

...getting Isabella's room ready.

...and spending time with our families.

We feel very lucky this year to be celebrating with everyone so close to home and to be expecting our little miracle baby!

Thanksgiving Fun

We had a very eventful and fun Thanksgiving this year, not to mention a lot to be thankful for. We started out the day by walking in the 3 mile Turkey Trot.

Then we went and had lunch with Art's family at Sylvan Dale Ranch.

And for dinner we went to my parents house.It was a great start to the holiday season.

It's a girl!

We had our 20 week ultrasound yesterday afternoon. We told the technician when we got there that we wanted to know the gender of the baby. She was going through measuring the leg bones and arm bones and then all of a sudden she says, "looks like it's a girl." I yelped a bit. I wasn't expecting her to tell us so quickly. We were only in the room a few minutes. I had this feeling it was a boy, so I was totally surprised. The doctor came in a bit later and confirmed that it's a girl. She was kindof sitting on the machine at one point so they could really tell. The pictures are a bit harder to see her in this time. She's too big to fit on the screen at once.

Here is one of her back, you can see her head to the right and her little spine.

Here is one of her little feet.

Here is her boney little face. I had a hard time seeing the face. Her face is on the right hand side, you can kindof see her eye sockets and her nose bone. She opened and closed her mouth during the ultrasound which was cute.

This last one is a view of her from above. The big round thing to the right is her head. The white circles farthest to the left are her knees. She's sort sitting with her knees by her chest. And in the middle are her little hands. We're so excited for Isabella Rose to get here!

Happy Halloween!

We went to a Halloween party last night. We had a lot of fun meeting some new people and playing volleyball on an indoor court that the hosts had. I dressed up as a black cat in honor of Gizmo.

Art was a red neck. He had these really funny teeth, but they were hard to talk with, so he didn't wear them for very long.