less than 4 months and counting

I'm almost 26 weeks along and approaching the end of my second trimester!  Baby t is the length of a an English hothouse cucumber or a burp cloth (really? neither of these seem like good analogies to me), which means he is around 14 inches long.  Another source says he's the size of a head of lettuce, which is much easier to imagine, so we'll stick with that.  Apparently he now has eyelashes and is taking his first breaths of amniotic fluid.  I can also feel his kicks much more strongly and frequently than before, and while that is so fun, it has made it harder to sleep because he's extremely active when I'm in bed.   Speaking of kicks, as you can see from his latest ultrasound pic, his foot looks HUGE, so that explains a lot...

Since we recently had a weekend at home together, which is a rarity these days, we decided to paint the nursery (ok, mostly it was Ben painting and me watching, but I did help some).  Of course we also had help from bubby and nibby, and as you can see by the picture below, bubby really did try to help by sitting against a wet wall so he could spread paint around the room.  The best part is that we now have at least one of his hairs permenantely painted to the wall.  I like to think he wanted to leave his permenant mark in his new brother's room.



I took it as my responsibility to keep bubby occupied while Ben finished painting



Speaking of bubby, he is officially a year older!  We celebrated his 6th birthday on September 12th.  I was unfortunately out of town for the big day, but Ben made sure he got some extra attention.

We also had some other birthdays to celebrate.  Cam and Leni had their little girl, Annabelle, 6 weeks early on September 10th.  She's beautiful and doing really well.  I got to meet and hold her when she was just two days old and can't wait for her to meet baby t. 

Two sets of our friends, Kyle and Julia and Kent and Annie, had their little girls this month too, but we haven't had a chance to meet them yet.  Baby t really will have his pick of beautiful ladies to date in a few years...

After meeting little Annabelle, I spent the weekend with some of my best girlfriends from college for our alpha chi beach reunion.  This is our second year in a row at Ocean Isle, and we plan to make it a tradition.  I will say that it was quite different than last year  since I wasn't drinking, but I figure I'll just make up for it next year when I leave our 8 month old home with Ben.  Fortunately, there were three of us who weren't drinking, so I wasn't alone with my mocktails (thanks MG for the intro to ginger beer!).  Also, my sweet friends gave us a mini shower that included a delicious cookie cake (Ben says thanks for the leftovers) and a piece of artwork made just for baby t by Mary Grace.



Thanks Casey for providing my first AX t-shirt since 2005!