Still here

When your husband leaves for 3 days and 3 nights and you are 7 months pregnant with an almost 2-year old who has more energy and willpower than you can handle on your own, and a mountain of work to do, what do you do?  You call your parents to come spend those days and nights with you and the little man, and then you go and sit at Starbucks with a decaf latte and a cookie, take a deep breath, and get caught up on that pile of work that keeps getting bigger catch up on a seemingly abandoned blog.

Oh hello!

Yes, 30 weeks and counting.  Baby Girl will be here in May.  She is still nameless as there are no good girl names out there.  None.  So it seems.  At least none that we can agree on.  With Baby #1, whose gender we didn't find out until his birth, we had a girl name ready to go along with his name, but that one is now a no-go.  Neither of us were particular enamored with the name to begin with, and now that we know for sure we need a girl name, we have pretty much knocked it off the list.  The name we playfully tossed around before I was ever pregnant, Jennie Anne, has also been ditched.  We do have a few names that we're tossing around as possibilities, but the fact that I like one one day and then don't the next day is not very encouraging.  No good girl names.  None.  We'll figure it out though.  I refuse to have a Baby-No-Name at the hospital, and also don't much believe in "waiting to see what the baby looks like" to pick a name, so we'll figure something out.  Something.  Something strong and beautiful.

In other news, Clyde remains the apple of my eye.  As much energy as he sucks out of me everyday, he also fuels me through the days and weeks.  He is a ton of fun and going through a major language explosion with lots of words.  He loves to build towers out of anything he can stack and then ferociously knock them over, play with cars and trucks and trains with accompanying sound effects, play in the dirt, and demands to be read to countless times a day (current favorites are the 2 volumes of Mother Goose that we own, and The Little Engine that Could).  He enthusiastically brings me my towel (yelling "Towel!  Towel!") when I turn off the water at the end of a shower, and loves to yell
"Ready, Set..." before throwing a ball, going down a slide, or anything that seemingly requires premeditation.  Everything that he can put on his head is a "hat", The Winston Churchill books in our living room are lovingly displaced multiple times a week while yelling "Chuch-uh" and the garbage truck and mail man are his favorite visitors of each week/day.  Woe to me if the mailman comes in the middle of our lunch (we can see him cross our porch from our window)... the kid wants his "mae" immediately.  He gives an amazing hug and throws passionate tantrums.  He sings and dances on command.  He eats spinach like there's no tomorrow.  In short, he's the best.