At Whitten's End

Over the last few months since I added magnet locks to the majority of my cabinets, Emma has loved to play in my plastic-ware cabinets that are magnet-free, with her favorite cabinet being the one where our cups are stored. In the last couple of weeks, she realized that she can crawl inside and close the door behind her (like I used to do in our cereal cabinets, mom!). Whether she's playing by herself (she takes toys inside with her!) or is playing peekaboo with me, she loves playing inside. I was surprised a few days ago to hear noises of panic instead of delight coming from inside the cabinet. I opened the door to find her stuck (in her perception, anyway!) on the SECOND shelf! I grabbed the camera and captured a quick photo... There is NEVER a dull moment when Emma is around!

Kayla's dinosaur webkinz licks on Emma! Emma enjoying doodling on her new Doodle Pro Daddy with his girls admiring his new Harley calendar from Kayla! Kayla karaoke-ing to her new Little Mermaid CD Princess Emma emerging from her new castle! She wanted little to do with her gifts as she was too busy playing in her tent! I woke up just before 6am to get breakfast in the oven. When I came 45 minutes later to take it out of the oven, I heard the pitter patter of 7 y.o. feet behind me! So much for getting more sleep! We then woke Brad and Emma and enjoyed our time of seeing what Santa brought, going through our stockings, and opening presents. Santa brought Kayla a karaoke machine & a Webkinz dinosaur. He brought Emma a 2-person princess play tent and a play microphone. We were all very blessed this season with...

On December 18th, Brad and I had a rare opportunity to have a 3d/4d glimpse at our unborn son. In spite of all my best efforts, he wasn't willing to change positions very much and never even gave us a glimpse at his face... which was down to his chest and covered by not only his hands but also- the majority of the time- covered by his legs. We will be returning for a complimentary session on Jan 2nd and hope to see what his face looks like on that visit! Oh, they did see that he already has a significant amount of hair on his head! Here he is in the best photograph the sonographer was able to capture: That same day, my newest sister-in-law, Laura (& David!) had their 20 week ultrasound and found out that they're having a GIRL!! They've decided to name her Elizabeth Jeanette and she's due- ironically- on May 8th (which is my other niece, Elizabeth's birthday!) Congratulations, David & Laura!

On December 22nd, we ventured out on a very cold night (for NC!) so that we could establish a new family tradition of attending Burlington's Christmas in the Park. They had a live Nativity, Horse "sleigh" rides, carousel & train rides, and free hot cocoa & cookies! Not to mention Santa who roamed throughout the park! We enjoyed feeding the animals at the Nativity and- if not for the cold- had a fabulous evening. We look forward to doing this again next year! (I regret that Brad was the carrier of the camera, so he wasn't captured in any of our photos... thanks for all the photographs sweety!)

We have been working diligently for the last year+ on completing Kayla's first AWANA Sparky book. On December 10th, she said the entire 23rd Psalm and completed her first book. She worked so hard to complete this goal and we're so proud of her!

We headed to Illinois for the week of Thanksgiving. We spent the first half of the week with my family in Rock Island, then we headed to Forsyth on Thanksgiving Day to spend the second half with Brad's family. Sadly, Grandpa Ahlrich passed away that week, so we also had a funeral while in Forsyth. Grandma Whitten turned 90 during that weekend as well. A few pics taken in Rock Island: A few pics taken in Forsyth:

We had our first snow here in NC one morning a week or so before Thanksgiving. As always, it melted within hours of sunrise, but my girls enjoyed it while it lasted. Here they are playing before Kayla went to school that morning...

The nursery is slowly but surely coming together.... actually it's painted, furnitured, decorated, and now only needs the changing pad attached to the changing table and the baby's name letters put up on the wall (oh, and it needs cleaned out!) Here's a Colts corkboard project that I completed using some of the flannel blankets that compliment my nursery set. Each board is 1ftx1ft to give you an idea of dimension. Also, the horseshoe is a real horseshoe that I painted and the COLTS letters are wooden letters that I painted! Thanks to my friend, Stephanie, for her insight and inspiration! As an aside for my fellow Colts fanatics... I realize that I'm missing Anthony Gonzalez's and Jeff Saturday's numbers. I lost (temporarily) one of my iron-on "1"s and didn't want the numbers to be uneven, so I have yet to put their numbers up on the board after the 1 was located!

It has been such a long time since I posted. This last month and a half has been a bit looney! I have uploaded a number of pics and hope to get some posted here soon!

Emma's got something to say! Emma will "say" something now and again, but on this particular night (11/2) she was just blabbing away at me and seemed to have something important to share, so I got out my camera and pressed record. I got a goldmine of talk time!

One of Kayla's best friends- Katie Fox- who was also her classmate and neighbor moved to Iowa City last week. It was one of those moments where I felt completely helpless as a parent. She was so heartbroken and to watch her hug her friend and say goodbye in our front yard-ugh- terrible! What made it harder is that her mom is also a good friend of mine, so in addition to trying to comfort Kayla, I had to try to keep my own emotions in check so that hers wouldn't spiral even more out of control. Saying goodbye is so hard!! Here is one of a few pics Jolene managed to snap of Kayla with friends Bella and Katie just minutes before Kayla said goodbye to her friend: I looked up a pregnancy week-by-week page a few minutes ago and realized that our baby boy is now around 11 inches long and 1 lb. When Kayla asked me earlier tonight how big our baby was, I used my hand to form something the size of a mouse... obviously, I haven't been as well-read this go round as I have in the past. ...

Sorry it's taken me a while to get around to posting Halloween pics! Life really doesn't ever seem to slow down for me to catch my breath lately. Daddy had to work Halloween as well as the night before, so Kayla and I worked on the pumpkins together on the 30th, then we went out in the neighborhood where we live on the 31st. Kayla went as a Veterinarian and Emma went as Little Red Riding Hood. We had plans of going to the fair at a local church, but even our little neighborhood took us about 2 hours and going around with a toddler who insisted on walking up and down steep hills she couldn't quite handle while I pushed the Graco and tried to keep up with Kayla was quite physically and emotionally exhausting. After Emma got worked up because I wouldn't let her stay with a male stranger handing out candy on his porch or let her chase a stray cat, I was ready to be done for the night!! Thank God for Skittles! Kayla had a great night and got alot of candy. She'd also d...

Unlike no other time in my life, time has seemed to become absolutely relative lately... I mean, one day blurs into the next and I'm doing good to know what day it is, let alone what the date is or what I have going on. My calendar/scheduler tries to keep me balanced, but some days are better than others! Halloween's approach (tomorrow!) has been no exception! When it was time for Alamance Mommy's annual trunk-or-treat, I found myself sewing Kayla's costume together the night before. Fortunately, Emma's needed little work other than to try it on and find leggings and a long-sleeved onesie to wear with it. Kayla has had the opportunity to participate in THREE trunk or treat events, a local communities Fall festival, a Boo at the Zoo (which she will go to again with school tomorrow!), with Trick or Treating and possibly a local church's Fall festival tomorrow! Since my calendar was empty today and Kayla only had a half-day of school, I decided that I was running o...

Okay, so they aren't exactly -isms as Emma's not quite at the talking stage other than the few names that she can say, but Emma has been pulling some funnies that I thought I'd pass along. First of all, she loves to drink from a real cup, often voicing loud, demanding sounds when she sees us sipping on something. She also has access to the cabinet where we keep our plastic cups. Last week I looked up while working in the kitchen and found Emma in the following pose: She didn't know that I was looking at her, so I can only assume that she thought that she could fill her cup at the water spout all by herself! So I proceeded to fill her cup up with about an inch of water and she gladly took the cup and drank from it like a big girl- kind of. Big girls don't typically wear half of it down their front or stop to laugh after every gulp... just seeing her do this brings a smile to my face in spite of the fact that her whole front was covered in water! (now we always put o...

Okay, there's quite a few things I need to get posted, but I wanted to make sure that I took the time to update you on how David Millspaugh is doing. Yesterday he underwent his long-awaited surgery to remove the area in his abdomen where the initial tumor was located. Today he is home and Brad is on his way over to play some video games with David. He states that he's sore but that he's doing pretty well. The doctor said that the area that he removed contained a small tumor and that the three lymph nodes that he removed all appeared clean under the microscope!! PRAISE GOD!! They are sending them away for definative testing, but I am expecting nothing less than a good report! If the plan goes as originally laid out, there are still many more months of chemo that remain and David continues to need all the prayer support that you can muster. Thanks again for your love and support!

Here I am at 20 weeks, 2 days. I only put this shirt on to take the picture so that it could be compared to the one posted last month. I don't think I'll even be able to get it to fit next month, so I'm not counting on it. It is non-maternity, so it's no wonder! Not a great photo but at least you get the jist that our little boy is growing and me right along with him!

It's almost bitter sweet knowing that my third and final pregnancy is at the halfway mark today, but I can almost bet on the fact that the half way point will trully lie somewhere in the this next week as my girls were both overdue and had to be encouraged to come out! Overall, I'm feeling great and have little to complain about, though I keep myself so occupied with the girls and projects around the house that I frequently have to remind myself that I'm even pregnant. I'm hoping to make some headway in the nursery this next week or two as I collect the items that I'm needed to make the spare room into our little boy's bedroom! Can't wait! Now to start feeling our little man move around a bit more in the weeks ahead! Also: sorry no more belly pics... I am almost 100% sure that I'm smaller now than I was at my 15 week picture thanks to changes in my body as I've been more active and have actually had less of an appetite the further away from the f...

The fence staining project that was started by Brad's pro-active go-gettiveness on July 6th finally was completed yesterday afternoon!! Originally, I looked out at our smallish back yard surrounded by this not-overly-impressive 4 foot fence and made a mental note that we'd be able to finish it in about a week. HA! What did I know! I obviously didn't know that I was early in my first trimester of pregnancy at that point and that there was no way on God's green earth that I was going to be able to have the energy to go out and paint in 90+ degree weather. Nor did we know that the fence absorbed the stain like there was no tomorrow and that we'd have to use about 3 times the amount of cans we had estimated. We also didn't factor in that it'd rain almost every day that Brad had off in spite of a moderate drought in the region! After a while it became a not-so-funny joke that the forecast called for rain when it was painting day! That being said, I was finally ab...

I kept forgetting to get a picture of our van while it was in the driveway & daylight. Emma's room is over the garage door, so we try very hard not to open the garage door while she's sleeping as it rumbles her room quite a bit. A few weeks ago we got a steal of a deal on a 2008 Honda Odyssey with about 20 miles on it. We always swore we'd never buy new, but when the price was better on the 2008 due to about $10,000 being slashed from the price and the interest rate being promotional on those models, it was a better option than purchasing the 2007 with almost 15,000 miles on it. Brad had been driving the Dodge Caravan to and from work and I'd been taxiing the girls in the Hyundai Sonata, but when little man arrives, we won't all fit in the car and the van was- quite frankly- scary after the transmission overhaul last year. I'd be lying if I didn't say that I cried as I took the girls' car seats out of the Dodge, though, as that is the van that we bou...

We went in for our "18 week ultrasound" today, though we're technically only 17 weeks and 3 days along. The tech scanned me for a few minutes getting all her needed measurements before she allowed Brad and Kayla back in the room and also before she let me see the monitor. She knew immediately that it was a boy when she was scanning for her own information, but suddenly the little one decided to shy away from the wand for about 10 minutes while we were viewing the monitor, anxiously waiting to find out what we were having. The baby measured 2 days ahead of schedule, had a "perfect" 4 chamber heart, appeared to have a 3 vessel cord, a perfectly intact spine, my placenta out of the way of delivery, and super long legs. The legs just looked out of place because I've always had my mid-pregnancy u/s at the 20 week mark and this little guy decided to extend his legs straight out in front of him... something that's harder for a 20+ week baby to do. We are very ...

On Wednesday, we stopped by Lowe's to buy a few shelves for the garage as I've really been itching to get the left hand side of the garage organized and under control. As you may or may not recall, we were able to finally get our car in the right side after our July garage sale, but this just meant that the garage sale items were gone, not that the items on the other side were organized. So, we get home with a few storage items/shelves and I realize that I don't want to makeover the garage with organization and keep the unfinished drywall exposed. I knew that once shelves went up, we'd never have any initiative to take them down or work around them to paint, so we decided to paint. We got the entire garage- minus the ceiling- painted on Wednesday! Thursday I installed the shelves, yard tool organizer, ladder holder, and started to rummage through the items we had clumped in the middle of the garage while painting. Friday, in addition to spending close to an hour at Lowe...