Any Day Now

    My due date is getting very close, so the baby could be coming any day now.  My doctor seems to feel it will be sooner rather than later and I hope she is right!  We are all so excited to finally meet this little baby and finally find out if it is a boy or girl.  We have been working on name ideas.  I am pretty sure we have a boy's name picked out.  We are having a much tougher time with girl's names.  Every name I suggest, Joey and Ashlyn shoot down.  Ashlyn loves the names Rosalina and Lilly.  While both are nice names, they are not names I am going to use.  If this baby is a girl, we are going to have a much harder time coming up with a name. 
      I am still working and it is becoming harder and harder each week.  We are in the midst of grueling state testing.  My goal is to make it through our state tests.  At the most I have two more weeks left of work.  I'm really hoping I don't last two more weeks though.  By Friday night, I am literally dead to the world.  I am so lucky to have Joey for a husband.  Every Friday when I come home, he has cleaned the house from top to bottom.  It's like having a maid, but better because it doesn't cost anything.  He also does an awesome job cooking dinner and helping with the kids so I can rest. 
      I was doing an awesome job keeping up with my running and workouts and still getting in about 20 miles a week.  Two Sundays ago, I did my usual run and felt great.  About two hours later, I started getting some pretty regular contractions.  I was just getting ready to head to the hospital, when the abruptly stopped thank God! I went to the doctor that week, and she checked me and I was already 2 cm dilated.  She told me that I needed to not workout and take it very easy for the next couple of weeks.  While I miss my runs, I will do anything that keeps this baby healthy and safe.  I am going to start up my runs again Monday.  I am now hoping it will better prep my body for labor and maybe get labor going. 
    We are all set for this little one's arrival.  While I am not wanting my pregnancy to end, I am just so very ready to meet this baby.  The room is almost complete and everything is prepared.  Our bags our packed and we are just waiting for hospital time.  I will spend the next two weeks trying to get in as much time with Dawson and Ashlyn before our lives get a lot more chaotic.  I am also going to enjoy my last few nights have sleeping with out waking up multiple times. 
    Everyone keeps asking me if the kids are excited.  Dawson has an awareness that I have a baby in my stomach, but I don't think he really knows what this entails. He doesn't really talk too much about it.  Ashlyn on the other hand, is over the moon excited.  She can't wait to be a big, big sister.  She will often just sit in the baby's room.  She has told me that she will be in charge of cuddling the baby.  I will be in charge of the baby when he or she is crying.  The other day she drew this sweet card for the baby.  I think this definitely shows her excitement:

  
Here are some shots of the nursery.  We are so lucky to have 4 bedrooms upstairs in our new house.  Each kid gets their own room.  Decorating a gender neutral nursery was a lot easier than I thought.  I decided to go with gray and yellow.  I am absolutely loving gray these days.  The paint color turned out wonderful.  I went with some chevron patterns to add some more to the room.  Our "theme" was "You are my sunshine" since I love that song and sing it to the kids all the time.  I am very happy with the way it turned out.  We didn't do a whole lot, and I will update it to be more feminine or masculine as the baby gets older. 

We bought this frame at Ikea.  My mom came up with the idea of having Ashlyn paint a picture inside of it.  She wrote the "You are my sunshine" and I painted over it to make it pop some more.  I am really pleased with the way it turned out and love that Ashlyn helped make it. 

The same crib that all the kids have used.  I really like this bible verse, so I knew I wanted to use it in the room. 

This is the same dresser that all the kids have used too.  I really like this elephant print and thought it was perfect for the room.

This is my sister's rocker that she happened to have in yellow.  It's very comfortable and I look forward to rocking the baby in it.