...and her name is...

Maggie Lee Hamric!

IT'S A GIRL!!!

My original intention was to get a good "between the legs" shot and post it along with another poll for all of you to vote boy or girl based on what you thought you saw in the picture...however, the picture we ended up with is not so easy to decipher. I'm unsure of what I'm looking at and I was there!

Our baby girl is developing perfectly and is right 'on schedule'. Here are a few pictures from our ultrasound...I guess they look just like any other ultrasound pictures, though!!

In this one her mouth is wide open...already hungry!

This is her entire leg stretched out. She won't be able to do this for very long!!!

This is her profile. I think she has Emma's nose and cheeks...but I know it's too early to tell that...just looks like it in this picture!

We got 3D ultrasound images of Emma and plan on doing that again with this baby as well. Those are much better pictures!

This is Emma at, I think, 28 weeks:



Speaking of Emma, she's mastering her letters and numbers. She still has her unique way of saying the numbers 3, 4 and 7 (wewen), though. My mom got video of her counting by herself yesterday, but as soon as I pull my camera out she gets bashful. Today I got a quick video of her counting while on the phone with my mom. I missed her saying 1, and she just decided she didn't feel like saying 10!




A lot of times when she's counting by herself, she keeps going and going and going because she gets so much praise after she reaches 10. Sometimes she even cheats and says "8, 9, 10" but we don't allow that! No cheating! Start at 1 and earn your praise fair and square!! hahaha!


That's all for now....next time I post will probably be after we return from our week's vacation to Fort Myers Beach. We leave a week from today! I cannot wait!!!

Easy as 1, 2, 3...

This post is just a quick note to brag, once again, about Emma ;) of course! She knows her numbers 1 through 10 now, too!! We've been practicing her letters a lot since my last post. This past Saturday night while playing at her Nana and Papa's she counted 7, 8, 9, 10 all by herself and just out of the blue! She has a set of stacking blocks over there that have numbers on them, and along with her ABC toys, she's got plenty 123 toys as well! So I added number flashcards to her daily activities and prior to adding this post she read all 10 numbers without a problem! Well, she does say "4" in her own weird way, but it's 4 to her!

Side note: When Emma was saying "ba-mmm" for cat (don't even ask me where she got that from) I asked her doctor if it counted as a word and she said as long as "ba-mmm" was consistently "cat" and not some random sound, it counted!!!

Anyways, again, it just amazes me what she's learning. She's surprising me daily!!!

And don't forget, Thursday's the big "reveal day" so stop back to find out if Em's going to have a baby brother or baby sister!!!

Baby Genius!! (if I may say so myself)

I know, it's been almost a month since my last post! I guess there's been enough going on worth sharing, but finding the time in a day to sit down and actually write is a different story. Especially lately with the warmer weather giving us a tease. We've been outside playing a lot. Emma LOVES it outside and it's quite a chore to get her back into the house sometimes...shoot, all the time!













We took Emma to a nearby playground. She loves going down the slides! Although she looks a little apprehensive on the "swirly" slide!

Anyways, let's get to the point of my heading "Baby Genius"!!!! For the past week or so I've been practicing the alphabet with Emma. So far I've just been working on getting her to say her letters by repeating after me. I have to say aside from a few of her own pronunciations of some of the letters (she "gasps" when saying F and H), she does really really good. Here is a video taken earlier today. In this video, though, she stops at "J" to take a drink, and I lose her:

A couple times I've written letters down on her "Dora MagnaDoodle" and have shown them to her as I say them. Again, only a couple times; however, she's got a gazillion (give or take) toys that sing, say, show, play the ABCs. Apparently, she's been picking up a lot more than we thought because today when I wrote letters on her Dora MagnaDoodle, she identified all but five of them!!

At first I thought, "Maybe she just knows what's coming next," since I was writing them in order. NO!! Later on in the day I wrote random letters and asked what they were. She identified every letter I wrote for her!!! Then we went to the fridge and I showed her random magnet letters. Again, she identified all of them!! So I made her some flashcards so we can practice!

I am just so shocked and amazed!! Above all, I'm so proud!! A few months shy of two years old, and knowing her ABCs -- of course I had to share!!

In other news, I had an appointment with my midwife and all is well. In two weeks we get to (hopefully) find out if we're having a girl baby or boy baby!! That guarantees a post in less than a month this time!! "Stay tuned!"

Bring it on, chicken pox!!

No, no one in the family has chicken pox. I just found out yesterday at my midwife's appointment that I am immuned to them. YES! I had never had chicken pox and was really really worried about the day Emma (or baby #2) would come home from school with itchy bumps all over. I was so relieved to find out about my immunity, it just made my day! Well, that and being able to hear our baby's heartbeat for the first time, of course!! He or she was moving around all over the place, too! I can't feel it yet, but we heard lots of movement on the doppler before Julie found the heartbeat!

I can't wait to feel those first movements! I always concentrate when I'm sitting on the couch to feel for those wee little flutters, but nothing yet.

As for my last weather-related post, it did get a little warmer...Ryan's truck said 56 on the way home, although I saw 48 on the way home from my midwife. I did have my window opened a crack, and I left our front door open for some sunlight. Today, however, it is rainy and gloomy. That's okay, better than a blizzard any day!!

Oh, the weather outside is frightful....

....but not for too much longer. All the incredible snow that pounded us yesterday is now soon to melt with the warmer temperatures that are "supposedly" on their way. Northeast Ohio is the "I'll believe it when I see it" region for weather, though. So for now, I just have to keep my fingers crossed. Yesterday was crazy with all the snowfall.

This was taken Sunday morning.

That's my in-laws' house, and my father-in-law had just plowed Saturday morning!! Seems like a waste of time!

Looking out Emma's bedroom window, there's a HUGE drift on our porch roof.

Ryan opened the window and we thought it'd be fun if Emma were able to play in the snow from her bedroom. And it was, until we thought it was enough...Emma was having too much fun and threw quite the substantial fit. She was, however, able to play with the little bit of snow that was on her floor, so that eventually settled her. Outside of that unhappiness, it was cool.

That's all the updating I have for now. Nothing exciting is happening. Oh, I haven't gotten sick in over a week, so hopefully the first trimester "any-time-of-the-day" sickness has passed. I have an appointment this Thursday with my midwife. I'll write more then.

What'd she say??

I've been waiting for this time for so long...well, a good 18, 19 months anyways...when Emma starts to rattle off new words -- or her close variations. She's got a short attention span like her mother (or like any toddler, I guess) and it's hard to get her to concentrate for very long, but when she does, I try to cram in as many new words as possible while practicing the words she already knows. She's got this great word book that has soooo many different words with pictures, but the girl's so smart that she can identify things that I draw out on a piece of paper!

Anyways, I wanted to share a couple of the really cute words that she's recently picked up. I'll write her version of the word next to it...

Of course, there's mama and dada, that's a given. She'll say nana either for her nana (Ryan's mom) or if she wants a banana (which is her addiction lately). She also says Papa (papo). We call our dog, Rocky, "Puppa" so sometimes that's close to Papa...you just have to pay attention to context! And she also has "Poppy" which she'll say sometimes, too. Her Grammy is just a difficult word so far, so we're still working on that!!!!

Thanks to one of her Baby Einstein books, one of the first words she learned was "cheese." She says it pretty good, too...as long as she's not being silly. Now, if you ask her to smile, she says "cheeeese" it's so cute!

She gives a quick wave and a simple "bye" when leaving somewhere. No "buh-bye" for her!

Here are a couple other good ones:

Please = pyaps
Grapes = byapes
Elmo = malmo (words don't start with vowels in her world)
eat = dit, eesh, or sometimes it actually comes out "eat" she's been using that one for a while so she's had time to refine it!
train = shoo shoo (really high pitch and her lips as puckered as puckered gets)
cup = bup
table = baybo
chair = cho
Pooh = bapoobapoobapoo
and when she's thirsty, she does this weird sound with her throat that can best be typed like, "gngngngn" i don't have any idea how that came to mean thirsty or drink, but it does.

She can make the sounds of a cow, monkey, chicken, and somewhat of a donkey, but lately if you ask her, "what does a (any animal) say?" she does a cow...i think it's her way of being funny.

There's a lot more that I'm not thinking of, I'm sure, but for now those are the words I think are super cute! The cutest, however, is when she says "I love you" and since I can't type that, here is a video from earlier today: