Christmas tree lights

Drew is fascinated by our Christmas tree lights. He looks at the Christmas tree sadly when the lights are not on, so a week or so ago I showed him how to flip the switch to turn them on (I've got them plugged into an outlet that's controlled by a wall switch). Now, every day when we get home from work Drew marches into the living room and turns on the lights for us! Of course, when I decided to get a video of him in action he decided to toy with the switch for a while, but if you're patient, he eventually gets the lights on. Then he gets stuck on top of his toy chest and says, "I'm stuck!" However, he manages to get down on his own, which prompts him to say "I got it!"

Living room fun

Last week Jana and I went out one night and while Jana took our babysitter home, I decided to peek my head in Drew's room to check on him. I was surprised to find that he was wearing no clothes! Drew was sound asleep on his stomach and not cold at all, but wasn't wearing his pajamas (you can see them by his feet). I was fascinated by his lack of clothes, so I picked up his pajamas and found that his footed pajamas were zipped all the way up! We don't know how he managed to get out of his pajamas and then get thim zipped all the way back up, but that seems to be what he did. I put his pajamas back on, Drew immediately went back to sleep, and he slept the rest of the night with his clothes on. Here are some pictures of Drew having fun in our living room with Jana. She was cracking him up!

Drew loves playing with this ball. He likes the texture and he likes to bounce it up and down from one of the rubber strands.

Obviously, Jana was being silly and Drew couldn't stop grinning!

This is a plant stand that Drew loves to play with. He carries it around the house. He turns it over and sits on it. He puts toys on it. Who would have thought that a plant stand could be so much fun?

Jana and Drew are playing "monster" here. Doesn't Drew look scared? :)

This is what happens when Drew gets caught: he has to endure some tickling from his mom!

He also gets thrown up in the air and tickled some more. Jana needs to take breaks every once in a while so that Drew can catch his breath!

Drew's latest thing is that he loves to sit on the couch with me, but he needs to have a blanket on his lap. He seems to have mixed his two parents up because I love to sit on the couch, but NEVER use a blanket. Jana is more all over the place in our house, but she ALWAYS uses a blanket when she sits. Here I am helping Drew get situated on the couch with his blanket. He likes to look up at me to make sure he's doing the same thing I am. I love it!

Here we are hanging out together on the couch with our blankets. It's pretty tough to have to sit on the couch with Drew under each of our blankets on a cold day!

Drew even sits on the couch when we're not with him. He plopped down on the couch the other day and pulled his blanket up with him. The one bad thing about this picture is that the next thing he said was "TV!" and he started looking for the remote control!

Omega baby is a . . .

This morning Jana and I had an ultrasound for Omega baby. We have been looking forward to the ultrasound to find out what the sex of the baby is. Also, we were excited about getting a peek at the baby to see how everything was developing. Jana is now over half way through this pregnancy; it seems like time is flying!



As soon as the ultrasound technician got the baby on the screen we knew what it was! Apparently, Jana and I are a lot better at reading an ultrasound than we were for Drew. As with our first time though, the technician didn't confirm the sex for us until the end of all measurements and pictures. Therefore, I'm going to make you wait too!



The baby is developing well, and all the things like the heart, brain, kidneys, bones, etc. look normal. In fact, the leg measurement of the femur showed that our baby is a little longer than normal. Not too surprising! The baby weighs 14 oz. at this point, and based on the sizes measured our due date of April 25 is very accurate. Here's a picture of the baby in profile. It's reclining on its back and you can see the nose jutting out. You can also see the hole for the eye socket and the upper and lower jaw.


In this picture you can see the baby looking at us. The technician was nice enough to label this one, so if you're not an expert at reading ultrasound pictures, you can still figure out what you're seeing. Just above the word "chin" the left arm is visible. A lot of the time the baby had a hand up by its face.

I won't make you wait any longer . . . it's a GIRL!! The picture below might not be the greatest one ever, but it was VERY clear on the ultrasound that it's a girl. As I said before, even Jana and I recognized it on our own. The picture below shows the three lines that are characteristic of girls. The first picture clearly showed that it was a girl, but Jana also had an internal ultrasound to check the condition of her cervix (it was completely closed). With the other ultrasound the technician was able to zoom in and get great photographic evidence that we're having a girl. Our technician described what we were seeing as "two hamburger buns," which is a description I found amusing. Just as it was clear that Drew was a boy, it's very clear that this baby is a girl.

Jana and I are thrilled to be having a little girl. We have thoroughly enjoyed being parents to Drew, and we're looking forward to adding a girl to our family. After having gone through the whole baby process with a boy, it makes it fresh and new to prepare for a girl this time around. We've been preparing for either sex for a long time, so we've already got our girl's name picked out: Katherine Lynn Aupperlee! We are going to call her Kate.

Christmas tree helper

After getting our Christmas tree home, we had Drew help us put on the ornaments. I brought the tree into the house and put the lights on it while Drew was taking a nap. He was quite excited when he got up and there was a Christmas tree in our living room! We developed a system where Drew got an ornament from Jana, walked across the room with it, and then I put it on the tree. We wanted him to be able to handle the ornaments, but not get the idea that he might be able to touch them on the tree! Here is Drew on his way to the tree (and me) with an ornament in hand.

Drew is getting ready for another ornament. He LOVED helping out with decorating the tree!

Drew was very careful with the ornaments and taking them out of the box. He got all excited as each one was unwrapped!

This ornament was one of Drew's favorites: a cable car from San Francisco. He calls it a train and says "Chug, chug, woo, woo!"

Drew hasn't been able to take his eyes off the Christmas tree. He loves going and looking at it in our living room.

Here he is at it again! He loves naming the ornaments on the tree and he learned a new word from the ornaments: "snowman!"

This video is just for fun from the other night. Drew and I were eating our night time snack together and for some reason every time I looked at Drew funny he would crack up. Usually, I am not this amusing!

Christmas tree

This morning we went out to cut down a Christmas tree! We got ready by putting Drew in his new boots and his snow pants. It was a balmy 25 degrees Fahrenheit outside when we left. Drew was VERY excited about having his snow pants and snow boots on (as you can see!). As I was getting Drew ready he looked up at me most of the time with a grin on his face!

Jana couldn't let me be the only one getting all Drew's attention, so she grabbed him for getting on his coat. Our whole family was excited about going outside and getting a tree.Here we are at Tannenbaum Farms, which is in Mason about 15 miles from our house. Without Drew, we've made it from our house to the tree farm, picked out a tree, and been back home within 45 minutes. We know what we want and we get it!
I needed my picture taken with Drew too before we headed out to find our tree. Drew and I matched in our dark green coats!

We started out by riding on a wagon pulled by a tractor. Drew LOVED seeing the tractor and getting a ride from it. Look at that face of serious concentration!

Drew loved waddling around all the trees. We headed straight over to the Frasier Fir section and let Drew run among the rows of trees. It took him a couple feet to get used to all the clothes he was wearing!

As I said, Jana and I are fast to find a tree, so after about 5-10 minutes we had settled on a nice little one for our nice little house. Drew and I paused for a picture during the tree's last few moments before being cut down.

This is what Drew was doing while I was cutting down the tree. He was more interested in running around than cutting the tree down. Jana was excited as the tree fell to the ground, but Drew was off exploring!

A lot of our snow has been melting, but Drew still found some pockets of snow and had fun tromping through those areas as we brought our tree back to the car.

Now we just need to get the tree inside the house and trimmed. We'll keep you posted on what Drew thinks about that process!