good clean fun

bath time is fun...

especially when aunt kasey fills the tub to the brim with bubbles!

in which i waited too long to take photos...

i totally waited too long to take any sort of maternity photos. i thought about it around 28 weeks - you know, when i was showing, but not too much and not swollen. unfortunately it was a fleeting thought and i found myself at thanksgiving without having any family photos with madison in the womb. mom & kasey took a few for me.

there's a reason you're not seeing my face in any of them. :)

thankful

i didn't jump on the 30 days of thankfulness bandwagon this year (although i love the idea of intentionally being thankful for a whole month), but we have MUCH to be thankful for in the reece house. here are the top ten reasons we have to be thankful:

1. our children. mason (and soon-to-be madison) are the biggest blessings we could ever have.
2. God's perfect timing. see #1.
3. our health. 2011 has been an exceptionally healthy year for us. i think we've seriously been to the dr. 4 times this year, including the well check-up!
4. our work. both of us are abundantly blessed by doing what we love with people who make the work fun.
5. our home. we responded to God's prompting to put our house for sale and move this year and have been blessed with sweet neighbors and a home that we are slowly making our own. not to say we don't miss our old house, but we are right where we need to be.
6. our families. between the reeces and the nasses there is plenty of love to go around. 
7. our friends. old and new, near and far. we may not get to spend as much time with them as we'd like, but they bring us joy and sanity into this crazy world!
8. each other. they say opposites attract and judging by the two of us, i'd say that's pretty accurate. we may be different, but there's no one i'd rather spend my life with than brad.
9. our freedom. with friends and family serving our country in so many ways, we are thankful for the sacrifices they are making to protect our freedom.
10. our God. from whom all blessings flow. there is none like Him.

new digs: dining room edition

it's been a while since we posted house photos. the dining room has actually been "done" for ages, but i only recently took photos of it. we're filming a new safety video at work and one of the scenes we needed was a family dinner. i supplied the dining room and mauren from my team provided the family (hers is quite large!)

the after photos are courtesy of the pre-planning for the video shoot. whatever it takes, right?!

before:

after:

this room was a less dramatic make-over than some of the other rooms. just new floors, paint, drapes, and our existing dining room furniture. the rug was in the living room at our old house, but it fit better in the dining room. one day we might actually finish this house! :)

(still) grumpy but grateful

one of the best features of keeping a blog (keeping is a loose term these days) is that you can revisit the past and be reminded of how you felt at a certain point in time.

it's also interesting to see how easy it is to slip back into similar mindsets...

the circumstances might be slightly different, but the sentiment is still the same... i am grumpy but grateful.

yep, i needed that perspective check today. we've officially entered into what i call the "low self esteem point" of the pregnancy. i feel absolutely enormous, nothing fits, the weight gain continues, and these feet of mine look and feel like they belong to elephants. there is also a ginormous stack of projects to finish on my desk, the ever-persistent backorder of furniture and bedding preventing me from finishing mason and madison's respective rooms, and a husband's work schedule that has consisted of a week spent out of town and the rest of the month full of night shifts.

definitely grumpy.

but it only takes a few seconds of clarity to also realize that our lives are about to change forever. that this (often painful) wiggling in my belly is a constant reminder of the miracle i am hosting. that the (temper-tantrum-throwing) three year old glows with love and excitement when he talks about his baby sister. that all of these aggravations are just temporary. that we are blessed beyond measure.

"so we fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen, since what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal" - 2 corinthians 4:17-18

30 days!

the countdown is on for when we meet our little girl! i wish we could say we are totally prepared for her, but that would be a significant overstatement. mason's big boy furniture is STILL on backorder (we ordered it in august and it was supposed to arrive sept. 10! yesterday's update indicated that it is scheduled to arrive in mid-november.) and little bit's bedding is also on backorder (the latest update said it would ship on nov. 14).

last time around we were running behind due to the great flood of 2008; this time, we're just busy! we've made progress this week, though, so we can still pull it off! my sweet team at work threw me a gorgeous baby shower and madison loaded up on necessities and girl stuff that we've learned we can't live without (tutus and cardigans, anyone?!) we also completed 90% of the stripe we're painting in madison's room and i was blessed with 2 hours yesterday to paint the new artwork for mason's room (thank you mason for taking a super long nap!)

regardless of whether we finish up the material side of things, little bit is on her way and we're getting pretty excited about the whole thing. my belly (and pretty much the rest of me) is huge and my newly swelling hands and feet remind me that we are officially in the home stretch. dec. 6 here we come!