I'm trying to keep my resolution to update the blog more! No pictures for a while, though, because my camera cord broke. The other way of transferring photos isn't working, either. I'll have to see about that... one day.

Nora's birthday was great! I was a little worried about the informal playgroup I had planned. Many of our friends weren't able to make it for various reasons. A few people canceled at the last minute because of illness. Then it started raining right as we were beginning--and we were holding it outdoors, at a park! We moved it indoors to Leapin' Lizards, a few of our awesome friends were able to make it, and all was well. Nora had a fantastic time playing with the other kids. She had a great day. In fact, here's a picture from pre-camera cord loss.

This was taken after a long afternoon of play.



The weekend after her birthday, we went to Pensacola Beach and stayed in a condo for a few days. Woohoo! I lived in Pensacola for many years, but I've never seen it through a tourist's eyes before. It was awesome. The condo was a high-rise, which I didn't think I would like, but then we walked in and saw the view. Breathtaking! We had a few people over Saturday afternoon for presents, food, and cake, but spent the rest of the weekend in the pool or at the beach. Highlight? The calm, clear, beautiful Gulf. Lowlight? Jason lost his wedding ring in the calm, clear, beautiful Gulf. It just slid off of his finger. I posted a "Lost & Found" ad on Pensacola Craigslist, but I don't have high hopes.

On my actual day of birth, we got up and enjoyed the beach one last time. Then we packed up the car and started (slowly) heading back towards Atlanta. It took us a while to get packed, then we got deterred by a quest for gumbo. We found the gumbo at Sam's Seafood, but although it was delicious, they took forever serving us. Then we had to drive through town and drop some stuff off at my mom's, so it was pretty late when we hit the road for real. We stopped and ate dinner at Panera Bread in Montgomery, and I bought myself some maternity tops at Motherhood since I like short sleeves year-round and they were on sale. We got home really late that night.

Thursday was Nora's first ballet class. She love, love, loved it! I was so excited for her as we got settled in the classroom. I got her shoes on and within seconds she was joyfully running around with the other girls, waiting for the teacher to get there. I was a little bit surprised when we parents got kicked out right away, though! I'd been looking forward to having time to do other things while she was in class, but I would have liked to watch a little bit more closely, at least that first day. We could watch through a glass door, but that didn't provide much of a view, especially with a bunch of other parents jockeying for position. Next week they will be in another room, one with a glass wall, so we should be able to see more even if we can't hear anything.

This week we have preschool parents' night and open house. Next week, the first week of preschool! I'm not sure who is more excited, me or Nora. I'm excited because this is a big milestone for my confident, independent girl. Today at her 3 year check up, the doctor asked her what she was most looking forward to about school. She paused and then said decidedly, "I'm the most excited about going outside." All right, then! I'm excited about that for her. Woohoo!

Happy Birthday, Nora!

Tomorrow morning, I will wake up the mother of a three year old. (Actually this morning as it's already past midnight.) Awww... I didn't realize I would feel so emotional about her turning three. I've been referring to her as three or almost-three for a while now, and she's certainly very grown up lately in her speech and mannerisms. She's not the same girl she was a year ago. I love her independence, but I can't believe how quickly her babyhood is slipping away. It brings tears to my eyes when I think about it.

She's such a sweet girl, and she loves to cuddle, which is nice for Mommy - but I don't know how long that will last. We used to cuddle in my bed every single morning, it was kind of a routine for us, but a few months ago she started waking up saying, "Mommy, I don't want to cuddle!" She wanted to get right to breakfast and whatever else was awaiting her. We still cuddle a couple of times a day, but a lot of times she will want to wiggle in my arms for just a minute and then jump up and show me a trick (like her "ballet" or "gymnastics" moves, all made up at this point since she hasn't started classes), or play catch with her "balloony loon," or any number of things that an active three year old girl might want to do.

Recently she's been telling us that she plays tag with Scout, our cat. Jason and I find this hilarious. "I bet Scout's always 'it,'" I told him. "And somehow she always wins, too." So cute! Today Nora crawled under the bed after Scout, who is good natured but only to a point. Scout actually took off for the other room and had been gone a couple of minutes before Nora realized it. She told me, "I'm trying to give Scout a kiss." Later I heard, "Don't be mad, Scout! I'm just a sweet little monster!"

Happy birthday, sweet little monster!

Word to your mother.

Nora: Mommy, sing the ice water song!

Me: I don't think I know that song.

Nora: But Daddy sings it every day! It goes, "Ice, ice, water--"

Update on previous post

I had my glucose screen. As I suspected, I had a high reading. I ate a protein breakfast and walked in between drinking the drink and getting my reading, but it wasn't enough to offset the way my body processes sugar. One thing that's different about this time, though, is that my reading was not as high as it was for the one hour test with Nora. This time I'll be taking the three hour test. The one hour is a "screening" and the three hour is diagnostic. I'm not that optimistic about the three hour test, mainly because it is a fasting test. They'll do multiple blood draws, but if my fasting draw is elevated then it doesn't matter what I get on the other draws. Fasting is the number I have had the most trouble with in the past, so... we'll see.

So if I have gestational diabetes again, what does it mean? It means that I will have to be more diligent with nutrition. I may have to take insulin, which I've done before and is not as bad as I thought it would be. I will receive more monitoring than a low risk patient, but probably not as much as I had for the last pregnancy. I've done some research since then and the extreme monitoring I had last time has not been shown to improve outcomes. In the grand scheme of things, it probably won't be a big deal. I'm glad I took the time to learn more about pregnancy and my particular complications before I got pregnant this second time. For me, it's easier to apply logic and reason when I'm not pregnant. I'm using a different OB this time and I met with him a couple of years ago and asked him what he thought about GD, how that would affect things, etc., so we're all on the same page. Good stuff!

I did get Nora signed up for ballet, which starts in about two weeks, and gymnastics later in the fall. She asks me every day when her ballet classes start. Today she was "doing her ballet" on my bed and she fell off - twice! I told her we needed to make a rule about not doing ballet on the bed because it was too dangerous and I didn't want her to get hurt. She was still upset at this point and wailed, "But I don't want to do it on the FLOOR!"

This weekend our good friends the Emersons are coming to visit us. (I have to pout a little bit because they're only staying about 24 hours.) We're going to a concert and our baby-sitter is going to keep Nora and her friend Penelope. We're not sure how that will go since P doesn't know the baby-sitter, but the concert is only a couple of hours long. I'm sure we'll enjoy the company!

A little bit about me.

I usually keep things light in this blog. I mostly talk about Nora and what she's doing. Since I'm pregnant right now, I thought I would write a little bit about my pregnancy and how it's going so far.

As I mentioned before, I don't have a lot of symptoms as far as morning sickness, tiredness, etc. I am actually surprised about that because fatigue is something that strikes me from time to time when not pregnant, and I was pretty fatigued early in my last pregnancy. In any case, it hasn't bothered me until the last week or so, and now it is directly related to insomnia. Insomnia is frustrating and puzzling. I've always been a night owl, but I've never lain awake in bed for hours, unable to fall asleep even if I'm tired. I've been averaging about three hours of sleep a night, which is clearly not enough. I'm hoping that this is something temporary and not something I will be dealing with for the next 6+ months.

I have an appointment tomorrow morning. I'm 12 weeks pregnant now. I'm doing an early glucose screen for gestational diabetes. I'm getting screened early for a few reasons, not the least being that I had GD in my last pregnancy, also diagnosed early. I'm not exactly nervous because I feel like whatever happens will happen. I'm pretty resigned to dealing with GD again, and it wasn't really that bad. It does bring up some negative thoughts, though, mostly frustration with my body. There's also a small part of me that hopes I can avoid the early diagnosis this time, I'm just not sure how realistic that is in my situation. I'm not a diabetic when not pregnant, but my body does have some issues with insulin that are probably exacerbated by pregnancy. How annoying.

Other than that, everything's good. Our membership at the Y expired about two weeks ago, and tomorrow I need to renew so I can try to sign Nora up for ballet and gymnastics. She was all set on ballet, then one of our friends mentioned gymnastics. I think she would enjoy both. For a while I waffled about choosing one over the other, but I've decided to let her do both if there's room in the classes. We tried to renew our membership this weekend, but the membership desk was closed at our location when we stopped by. So I need to stop by East Lake tomorrow and then drive over to the Decatur-DeKalb Y and try to sign her up for classes there. The classes may have filled over the weekend, so I'm going to cross my fingers and hope something's open.

The other day I was looking at the picture at the bottom of this blog. It's of Nora at 22 months. Hard to believe that was just a little bit over a year ago! It's also hard to believe that she she was almost 2 and had so little hair. :) My hair was slow-growing as a baby/toddler, too, so I guess that's one thing she got from me. She's almost 3 and she still doesn't have enough for a real ponytail.

I'll leave you with a video I took last week. I think it's so funny because it's so Nora. At the end you can see her run up to a little girl and grab her hand as if they'd been friends forever, but that was the first time they met. My memory card on the camera filled up right after that moment, but the girl, who was older, seemed confused at first, then ran back into the fountain to play with Nora. They played for a while, holding hands. Then Jason showed up (we were meeting him after work) and we said goodbye and went to check out other parts of the park. An hour later, we passed the little girl who was having a picnic with her family. She said "Bye, Nora!" and waved like they really would be friends forever, even though we'll probably never see her again.

Is it August already?

It's a cliche, but time flies when you're having fun. Recently I was trying to remember what Nora was doing and saying this time last year, and I realized that it was all becoming a blur. And I knew it had been a while since I updated here, but I didn't realize it had been since Easter.

I'm going to try to update every month from now on, for my own records as much as for my small handful of readers. :)

The big news for our family is that we are expecting another baby! The estimated due date is late February, which means I am about eleven weeks pregnant now. That's still early, I guess, but it seems like the time is going by quickly. February will probably be here before we know it. I had an early ultrasound so I was able to see a beating heart when I was about seven weeks along. Everyone keeps asking me how I feel, and so far I feel awesome. I don't have a lot of early symptoms; I felt similarly when I was pregnant with Nora. So, no complaints here. We were going to wait to Nora, but when we told people on Facebook and at our church some people assumed she already knew, so we just went ahead and filled her in. She's vaguely excited. She doesn't know what to expect and it seems so far off that she's not worried about it right now.

Since I last updated we've been a lot of places: South Carolina, Alabama, Florida, Kentucky, Alabama again. We were pretty busy for a while there! We all enjoyed the travel, but by the last trip Nora was over it. She likes being home. Here in Atlanta, we've enjoyed the weather, the parks, the pools, at least one festival (the "Bluesberry" festival in Norcross) with more on the horizon. August will bring birthday cakes--one for Nora and one for me--and September will bring preschool! We talk about school all the time and Nora can't wait.

Here she is picking blueberries.



Getting down to business at the beach.



At the park back in May.



There's not a single day we don't laugh here. There's a lot of sweetness. Almost-three-year-olds come up with the most adorable bits of hyperbole. This morning, Nora told me, "Mommy, all I ever want is to make you happy, happy, happy!" I laughed and told her how much she already made me happy just being herself. She had a baby-sitter this evening ("I love Miss Brooke! I can't wait until she gets here!") and when we got home the baby-sitter showed me a block tower that she had built. "She said, 'Mommy and Daddy are going to be so happy when they see my block tower!'" Brooke explained. (Of course the cat knocked the tower over before we got to see it. Typical!) Nora reminds me of that old song - she's "Alive, awake, alert, enthusiastic!"

Guess that's about it from here. Blog time is brag time here on the Glass Fam blog. Obviously.