Allie's Here!

As most of you probably already know....Allie is here and absolutely perfect!!

Allie Grace Rearden

October 29, 2010

8:42 A.M.

8 lbs 14 oz

19 inches

Allie has been a perfect addition to our family!! Mommy and daddy are head over heels for her and her brothers are just in love with her too! Adding a third child to this already crazy house as been an adjustment, but we are finally getting into a routine!

Our family is complete!

Last Month as 4

So I haven't blogged in the last month because I have just been trying to eat up my last days with just my family of 4. I am so excited about the arrival of Allie, but of course I do have some sad feelings about leaving my family of 4. At the beginning of the 9 months, I thought October would never get here. Now that it is here, I just want to look back and make sure I enjoyed every moment I could with my boys before my time is divided even more. With all that being said....I look forward to the new memories we are going to make as our family of 5. I look forward to seeing the boys with their little sister and seeing Joe with his sweet baby girl. I look forward to having a baby girl that I can teach all things "girlie" to!!

So here is what has been going on for the last month as we have counted down the days and prepared for Allie!!

At the beginning of October, some amazing family and friends had a baby shower for me and Allie. Being that it is my third child, I didn't know if I would have a baby shower, but I am so glad I got to!!! There was so much pink stuff and I loved it!!! I am so grateful for all of the thought and hard work put into this shower. It meant so much to me to have all of my family and friends celebrate Allie's arrival!!

The ladies who made it all happen!!

Audra, My Mom and Corrie

The whole crew of family and friends!

With all of my mixed feelings about becoming a mommy of 3, I have not wanted to miss out on a thing with the last few days of just having my boys. I wanted to do every family tradition and every school activity. Well as things sometimes go, my blood pressure started going up at the beginning of October. This is the reason I was on bed rest with the boys so I was petrified that the last month I had with the boys was going to be spent on the couch or in the bed.....Thankfully, the doctor just told me to limit my activity and my walking. So we had to cancel one family tradition of going to Cagle's Dairy, which I was disappointed about, but I had to make sure I was taking care of me and Allie. I was worried I was going to miss the boys pumpkin patch activities at school, but there wasn't that much walking involved so I was able to go!! It was so much fun to see them interact at school with their friends and teachers and I am so glad I was able to go. They had a hayride, fun games, face painting, cookie making and story time. It was a fun day!!

Their class at school which btw has 2 sets of twin boys in it!!

So several months ago I bought tickets for us to go see Toy Story 3 on Ice. This was going to be our last hoorah as a family of 4 and I was so excited to take the boys. The blood pressure issue threatened to take this night away from us and I was so upset. Again, thankfully when I went back for my checkup, my bp had not elevated anymore so I was able to go with the boys!! We had soooo much fun and the boys were sooo excited!! Throughout this evening Luke got quite the crush on "Jessie" the cowgirl and hasn't really stopped talking about her since!!! :) On the way home he said "Mom,.....I want Jessie to hold my hand!!" It was the cutest thing ever!!

Enjoying his $10 foam hat and cotton candy....

they rip you off but it is worth is to see that smile!!

Enjoying his $10 Jessie snow cone...he insisted on having Jessie!

"The Crush"

Intently watching the show

"Buzz"

"Woody"

Our family of 4.5!! :)

We will be complete when our little girl joins this picture!

Lastly, Joe's bday is next Wednesday....there is a possibility he could forever share this special day with his daughter!! Hopefully she will hold off until Friday to make her appearance, but you never know!! Because I know next week will be crazy and she could come any day now, I wanted to go ahead and celebrate his birthday. So I surprised him with a special date night out to Morton's. Joe loves a good steak and unfortunately for him he is stuck with me who only eats chicken. So I wanted to treat him to a nice night out to his favorite steak house! As we sat at dinner, I reminded him it was probably our last quiet night together just the 2 of us for quite a while. Needless to say....we enjoyed our night out!!! This is his last year as a young man in his 20's so I hope it is great!!! :) Happy Birthday Honey!!

The next time I write may be to announce the arrival of our daughter...wow that is just crazy!!! (I'm trying to hold back the tears...) If I don't go into labor or have anything crazy happen with my blood pressure, Allie will be here by c-section next Friday, October 29. I am so thankful to God for keeping Allie safe in my belly and me on my feet with my boys. I will truly cherish every fun and quiet moment I have spent with them in the last month!!

I am physically ready for Allie to be here, I am just praying God helps me prepare mentally and emotionally for being a mommy to 3 amazing children! I feel so blessed!

Fall Break

With the new school schedule, the boys have a fall break, Thanksgiving break, Christmas break, Spring break, etc... I feel like we are barely into school and we already had our first break! Last week the boys had fall break and it was a great week to do some fun things with the boys. I am starting to have some of the typical mom feelings when adding a new child to the family....I feel like I am going to miss out on time with the boys because I will have a new little one occupying some of my time. So in dealing with these feelings, I really wanted to make the most of our week together and do some fun stuff. Well, the boys were not really feeling well most of the week so we couldn't really go out and do anything like I had originally planned. We ended up staying home most of the week, but we made the best of it anyways!! So.....some of the fun stuff we did.....

Although it was "fall break" it did not feel like fall at all!! The temperatures were still in the 90's! I figured although it was the end of September, it was still blazing hot outside so we pulled the slip and slide back out!! I didn't get any pictures, but we spent a couple of afternoons just enjoying the weather and playing in the water!! This is always a winner with the boys!

Next, I'm sure you are wondering what we did with all of those apples we picked at the orchard....well, we made applesauce!! I have never made applesauce, but I thought we would give it a try.

First, we peeled, cored and cut up all of our apples.

The boys squeezed a little lemon juice onto the apples...

then we added a little sugar, brown sugar and cinnamon sticks...

We then put the whole mixture into a pot to cook down and get the apples nice and soft.

After it was cooked, we mashed it all up and then

you have applesauce!!!

Then we had some fun with a cardboard box... For lunch one day we had dinosaur chicken nuggets. This led us to a discussion of dinosaurs and I thought it would be fun to try and make a dinosaur for the boys to wear out of a cardboard box. (Please note that I am not creative at all, but we made the best of it :) ) We cut and taped for an hour and this was our final product! The boys thought this was the greatest thing and had so much fun playing with it!

They spent the afternoon chasing each other around pretending like they were a big dinosaur!!

Lastly, the boys have been working on the colors blue and red at school. Although the boys have known their colors for a long time, I thought it would be fun to do an activity to incorporate what they are working on at school to something at home. So we did a "red" collage! This little activity actually incorporated a lot of the skills they are working on at school so it ended up being a good "project." I gave them each a magazine and a pair of scissors. They went through the magazine and cut out all of the red pictures they could find. (this was their first time using scissors so it was a learning process!!) After practicing with the scissors for a while, they just started tearing out red pictures. Then they took all their red pics and glued them to a red sheet of paper and that was our red collage!! They were so excited about our "craft"!!

(I just had to post this last picture because I thought it was funny...I tried to lean over the counter and take a pic of both their collages.....but a big ole' belly covered up half the picture!!!)

So, we had a great break and I'm glad I got to spend the week doing some fun stuff with the boys!! I just love hanging out with them!! :)

Mini Trip to the Mountains

Well, we finally got our mountain trip in we've been trying to plan for several months now... we just didn't have all the snow this time around!! Last February we had a trip planned to the mountains with our good friends the Jeffords. Some of you may remember, this trip was initially cancelled because we had a really bad snow storm that weekend and couldn't get to the cabin. (it all worked out for the good though, because that same weekend is when Cade was put in the hospital with pneumonia.) We made it all the way to Blue Ridge on icy roads, but couldn't make it up the back roads to the actual cabin. So we had to stay in a hotel for the night and hope the cabin rental place would let us get our money back. Well, they didn't give us our money back, but they said we could postpone our trip and come back without any additional charge within a year. Here we are several months later and we finally tried our mountain trip again. When you go to the mountains, you expect beautiful views and cool weather....well we definitely didn't have the cool weather!! We didn't want to get too close to the baby coming, so we had to go ahead and go and just enjoy the mountains in 80 degree weather. We made the best of it and it was a nice relaxing weekend!

The mornings were a little cool, so we put sweatshirts on the boys and turned the fireplace on....for about 10 minutes!

On Saturday morning we headed to Merciers Apple Orchard. We had a great time there picking apples...although no one in my family really likes apples except for Joe!! The experience was fun though!!

The ladies and their men!! (Although we were in the mountains, it was still a "Game Day" so we all had our best Tech attire on....a BIG yellow shirt is about the closest I come these days to Tech attire!! :)

The beautiful view at the orchard.

You can't pick apples without at least trying a few along the way. I never knew there were so many different kinds of apples!

After we rode on a tractor, picked apples and had homemade ice cream, we walked around their apple store. It was huge and had sooooo much good stuff!!!! We only bought some apple butter and 12 fried pies!! They had every kind of fried pie you can imagine and they were pretty delicious!

After the orchard we headed back to the cabin where Corrie was already trying to teach the boys how to play Poker.....or just work on recognizing numbers and colors on UNO cards!!! That is poker for 3 year olds! They thought they were big time "using" the chips and sitting at the table!

Nana read everyone some bed time stories and then it was off to bed!

I am glad we finally got our mountain trip in and we had a great time. We had good food, good company and a beautiful landscape!