Family Update

Claire: 

     Our second pregnancy is now Facebook official! We aren't sure of exact dates, but I'm hoping that this baby will be born some time in the first week or so of April.  Karl was 12 days late, so who knows :) The great thing about having been pregnant once before is that I am not in a rush to have this baby get here.  It will be nice to have the next few months to spend time with Karl, get his big boy room ready and finish house projects.

We told Karl that he was going to be a big brother and he exclaimed loudly "NO!!"  We asked him why he didn't want to be a big brother and he told us "I want to be a big sister like Dora the Explorer".  He had recently seen a Dora video where she becomes a big sister.  Now, he often asks where the baby is and told Erik that the baby was in my pants. Ha! 

I've had quite a lot morning sickness with this baby.  It is more nausea than actual throwing up, but even now beyond the twelve week mark( when a woman is supposed to feel better) I notice that my stomach is still touchy.  I feel full very quickly and smells can make me gag easily. I guess that good news is that I am twelve pounds lighter than I was when the pregnancy test came back positive.  

Karl insisted that he and the flashlight be in the picture. 

Karl:

      He is becoming very independent and has started getting himself ready in the morning.  I have been letting him pick out his shirts, pants, and shoes.  Twice, recently, I didn't monitor him and told him to "get ready to go" and he came out looking like this:

Karl loves craft time and we spend a lot of time during the day doing hands on activities.  For 30-45 minutes in the morning we go through Pre-school books where Karl has been learning to cut, color, paste, and write letters/numbers.  He can now recognize numbers up to 10 and can trace all the letters in the Alphabet pretty well. 

 Erik spends a lot of time reading to Karl and has taken over most bed time duties. I feel thankful that I get to be with Karl all day long and I know that Erik feels like he doesn't get enough time with Karl when he gets home at 6:30 or 7pm (Karl goes to bed by 8p).

Karl is *very* excited for Halloween this year.  We have many Halloween books and he decided early this summer that he wanted to be a frog for Halloween.  We introduced him to Kermit and he has agreed to be Kermit the frog instead of a regular frog.  I'm dressing up as Miss Piggy, Erik will be The Swedish Chef and Charlie will be Fozzi Bear.  I've started work on the base of Karl's costume. 

Erik:

    Mr. Sax recently won a "spot" award at work for outstanding service to his project.  He has been working really hard to get certain things done and is often the 'go-to' guy for problems.   We were very proud of him! 

He has also started biking again and I can tell that he feels better about getting regular fun exercise. It's too bad that he works so far from home and can't commute via bike, but he has been able to check out some local trails on the weekends and some weekday evenings.