Starting to Brainstorm

Christmas is next month which means that it's time to really start narrowing down our ideas for Christmas cards. I love everything about Christmas, and making/sending/receiving cards is no exception. There's something special about having real mail all month long! I think we've narrowed down our ideas to what type of pictures we want to take and have on our card, but we're still deciding between whimsy and vintage. We'll probably make the final decision after we take the pictures and can play around with the Christmas cards (We use Shutterfly; always have and always will). I know that we can trust them to deliver good quality and timely shipping since, let's face it, we're always a bit behind in actually getting the ball rolling on these. This year, especially, since we're hoping to wait to find out the gender of little babe before ordering. We just ordered Jeffrey's birthday cards from there and were extremely happy with them, and all of his photo books are from there, as well. Well, the ones that I've actually finished, at least.

I'm super excited to actually start acting on our ideas and see our card come to reality! AH! I know it's only early November, but I just can't help but get excited about Christmastime. I love it :)

A Big Check

Yesterday, we signed and handed off the final payment for the little baby's arrival into the world! All we have left to do is wait 27ish weeks of pregnancy now ;) It feels quite strange to have it paid so early, especially since we didn't pay for Jeffrey until afterwards. I'm loving it, though. It was so stressful to have hospital bills come pouring in during Christmastime. Bah humbug on that. Plus, we're paying substantially less this time. Majorly. Even more if we get reimbursed at all, which we're not counting on. Would be pretty amazing, though! I loved having a set amount that I knew in total beforehand, so we were able to completely budget it into our holiday spending. Now, it's done! We'll still have to pay for our ultrasound when we have that done, but we did for Jeffrey, as well.

As a reward, the little baby let our midwife find the heartbeat immediately at a beautiful 156 bpm! So, now I'm feeling better, know the little baby is healthy and thriving and can just enjoy the pregnancy until little one decides to slide on out. Love it.

Such a Happy Halloween!

Jeffrey is such a blast now, so I was really looking forward to all of the Holiday experiences this year. Halloween did not disappoint. He jumped right into the thick of it and loved Trick-or-Treating. He did so great at walking up to each house (even past scary decorations, except one big inflatable cat...I had to pick him up at that one, lol), holding out his bag, saying "tick teet" and then "thank you!" Then he's skip down the sidewalk to do it again! Most of the houses on my parent's street participated, so he'd get all upset and confused on why we were skipping a sidewalk. He'd start going up it, look back at us and say "come on!" So adorable. My niece was there, as well, which he loved. I had a huge smile on my face the entire night. Then, he put on his Halloween pajamas that have a ghost on them and started jumping around yelling BOO. It's all just too much. I cannot wait for what the rest of the holidays have in store for us!