Seeing The Light

I don't know what it is. Maybe it's the warmer weather, maybe it's the fact that June is here in just 6 days, but suddenly that heavy cloud that was over my head and robbing me of the joy of this pregnancy is gone. I can finally see the light at the end of the tunnel, and my excitement to meet this new little person is back and in full bloom. Yay! :)

Here I am, 34 weeks pregnant. :)

My gestational diabetes is still as complicated as ever, and even though I'm still having to watch my diet and take insulin injections, it's suddenly become so much easier now that I can see the end in sight and I know I will be holding my baby in no longer than 4.5 weeks.

A lot happened this past week to remind me of why I'm doing all of this.

The first and biggest reminder was the ultrasound we had on Friday. I had forgotten how cool it is to have a visual picture of that life growing inside you. Our baby is definitely in on the keeping everything a secret/ mystery/surprise plan. Baby was head down and face down so we couldn't even see his or her face. Then the technician said it was a good thing we didn't want to know the gender because baby was doing a great job of hiding that from all of us too. :)

I just left the ultrasound thinking about how I can't wait to meet who God has chosen to be the perfect and last addition to our family.

Another thing that lifted my spirits this week was my most recent Dr's visit. On Wednesday, my Dr. informed me that they will likely schedule the c-section at 38 or 38.5 weeks (sooner than she had originally told me) so I know now I have no more than 4.5 weeks left!

Then, with all of this new excitement in me and knowing we don't have a ton of time left, I had fun creating a baby pool for friends and family to guess the arrival date, gender, weight, etc. for this baby. Please, feel free to make a guess if you'd like.

Here's the link:
http://babybookie.com/pools/1345-baby-howard-3/bets/new

We've really enjoyed reading over all of the guesses! :)

And last but certainly NOT least, I'm excited to announce that we FINALLY have names picked out (well, sort of-the girl name is down to 2 options).

For a long time we were trying to find names that started with E since we have an Elliana and an Ethan. Then as time went on we realized we weren't really in love with any E names and we felt like we were trying to force it too much, so we decided to just go with names that we really liked with special meaning to us.

If we have a boy we will name him Noah. If we have a girl, her name will be either Audrey or Emsley.

I would love to go into the meaning of each name and what they mean to us, but I'll save that post for another day.

In other news, we had a wonderful Memorial Day. We went with Caleb's parents to the mountains for a picnic and had SO much fun with the kids! After eating lunch we walked by the river, let the kids splash and throw rocks and watched the many white water rafters that came by.

I think it may have been one of our last outings as a family of 4. Here's a few favorite pictures from today:

I hope you had a wonderful Memorial Day too!