Introducing the newest love of my life

It's been a while since I've posted, but I have a good excuse. We have a little girl!! Meet my new little darling, Calista.

I had great intentions of announcing this sooner, but between staring at my little girl, and recovering from a c-section,

and my blood pressure randomly skyrocketing after she was born to the point that I was diagnosed with postpartum preeclampsia and almost had to be readmitted to the hospital, and trying to figure out how to balance caring for my newborn with giving my precious two-year-old son enough attention,

and nursing, and my OB suspecting that I might have a blood clot and sending me in for a CT scan (no blood clot - whew!), and staring at my little girl some more, and sleep deprivation, well... she's a month old now.

Can we please talk about how much I love these chubby cheeks and thighs? SO much!!
(I guess that was a pretty short conversation.)

Anyway, I have like five half-started posts that I might post someday, but here are some pictures that our friend Rebekah took of our new baby, our first baby, and my love and me.

(In case you want an adorable tutu like this, I bought it here.)

Ta da! My new and improved family!!

So... what's been going on in your life since I've been gone?

Here's what I look like pregnant

Alternate title: I feel like I'm the size of a house.

So, I've been MIA for a myriad of reasons. Vacation, broken laptop, cleaning up more vomit, moving every bed in our house to a different floor, doing very important research into the most delicious brand of mint chocolate chip ice cream (Kroger store brand, for the record)... you know, important things. I actually do have some real live posts in the works, but while you wait for those, I thought I'd share some maternity photos that my good friend Rebekah took a few weeks ago. (These pictures were taken about four weeks ago... when I was feeling slightly less house-ish.)

This is my family. In case you couldn't guess.

I've carried both Lucas and this baby like I'm smuggling a watermelon under my shirt, which of course elicits a lot of ridiculous comments from complete strangers. Because everyone knows that women like nothing better than people she doesn't know making weird remarks about her body.

I have leggings on. I'm not randomly posting bottomless pictures of myself online. This isn't that kind of blog, people.

So far, I've been asked twice to please not give birth in a store, which is a little disappointing, because I had really hoped to bring my child into the world in the plumbing section of Lowe's.

This is my "no, I'm not going to give birth in a store" face.

When I was pregnant with Lucas, Rebekah took this picture of me:

I put Psalm 139:13-16 over it and gave a framed copy to my OB after Lucas was born, and she has it hanging in her office. I knew I wanted to do a similar picture with this pregnancy, but I hadn't given it much more thought than that. But then at one of my OB visits, the nurse pointed at the picture and said "So what are you going to do this time to top that picture?" I told her I wanted to do the same one facing the opposite direction, and she said "Well, I think you need to do it facing the opposite direction, but with Lucas kissing your belly." So, voila! Below is the product of my OB nurse Kara's genius idea, my friend Rebekah's awesome skills, and a toddler who was feeling cooperative.

Also, this:

Anyway, stay tuned for some more posts, but in the meantime, how cute is this child??

If you wanna click below, I won't say no. :)

And then we went to Disney World...

As I've mentioned before, my husband Dan is an ER doctor. And like most doctors, he's required to get a certain number of Continuing Medical Education (CME) credits each year (I could ask him the exact number, but he's in the basement, and this couch is really comfy.) The point of CME credits is to keep doctors up to date on new technologies, advances in medical research, etc. To get those credits, he takes courses online or at conferences. Since there are a lot to choose from, conferences try to entice doctors by holding the conferences in places that people might actually want to visit. Like Orlando, Florida.

And since Dan was going to Orlando anyway, we figured Lucas and I might as well tag along and extend the trip by a few days to make it a family vacation.

The resort where we stayed (and where the conference was held) was pretty dang fabulous.

I'm pretty sure that it's against the law to visit Orlando and not visit Disney World, especially when you're only staying a mile and a half away from it. So we figured that on our last full day there, we'd check out the Magic Kingdom for one day and see what the hype was all about (I had never been to Disney, and Dan hadn't been since he was a little kid.) I thought that maybe if our trip went especially well (or especially horribly,) I could share some tips on taking a toddler to Disney World. But I basically only have one tip:

If you are pregnant, and your pregnancy-induced irritability makes you want to "accidentally" run your stroller into the back of people's legs when they suddenly stop and block an entire walkway to have a conversation about the weather, and you have a toddler who really does not function well without a nap, and you're sick with a cold, and you happen to be in Orlando during what is apparently Disney's second-busiest week of the whole year - do NOT go to Disney World. Just don't. Stay in your hotel and let your toddler ride the glass elevator for an hour. Because the elevator will cause him to make this face:

Whereas Disney World will cause him to make this face:

To be fair, he had just woken up from a short nap in his stroller when I took this.
He did smile at other points throughout the day.

And then you'll make this face:

There were some highlights, though. Like when Lucas met Mickey Mouse and was beyond thrilled about it.

Let's take a moment to notice how gigantic my 20-week- pregnant belly is. Sweet Moses.

And the carousel ride.

And when he got to dance in the streets with Disney characters, (none of whom he recognized.) And a show at Cinderella's castle where we were in the very front row and Lucas waved at Mickey the entire time. And when we bought Lucas a Mickey Mouse toy that he loved madly (and lost at the airport the next day. And I felt so sad about it that I immediately bought him a new, larger one on Amazon, even though he never even noticed the first one was gone.)

And when we left early to go have dinner at a Mexican restaurant instead of dealing with the crowds for another second.

I think we'll probably attempt a Disney trip again sometime in the future once our kids are older and less in need of naps (and when it's not one of the two busiest weeks of the year.) But this time was kind of a bust.

Still, the vacation as a whole was about as good as they get when you have a toddler in tow (in spite of the killer cold I caught.) He slept well, and I feel like that will probably be the standard by which I judge the success of any event, ever, for at least the next three years - "Did everybody sleep? Yes? Well ok then. No whining."

So... there's my vacation story. Does anyone have any fabulous Disney tips in case someone stumbles on this post by Googling the phrase "tips for taking a toddler to Disney World" and then ends up majorly disappointed by my post?? Please and thank you. :)

Happy Anniversary to Us!

Seven years ago today, I said "I do" to the man of my dreams. There are a lot of cheesy things I could say about him and about us...

... and about our little family.

But mostly, I would just like to say: I love you, Dan. And I still can't quite believe how much I lucked out when you got down on one knee in the snow and asked me to be your wife. I have absolutely adored spending the first seven years of the rest of my life with you, and if I had it to do all over again, I'd marry you again in a heartbeat.

Photo credit: Jenni Grace Photography