More Pictures

Just in case you can't get enough of Life with the Leivas here's a link to some pictures I just posted on Shutterfly....
share.shutterfly.com/action/welcome?sid=1AcNWTRm5ZsWHO

Just when you think you know what's going on....

everything changes! One of the most challenging things about being married to someone in the military is that the only thing that ever stays the same is that nothing ever stays the same. Change is the only constant.
In my current state of nesting/uberorganizing I really wish that I could control every aspect of everything going on in our lives. Today was just another reminder that I am absolutely not the one in control and I should just let go and let God. Why is this lesson so hard for me to remember!
I know I'm being way overdramatic here, Mike just found out he's staying with his current unit a bit longer than expected. He had been thinking he'd move to a different unit around the end of the year, now he found out it's more like the end of next year. In the grand scheme of things this really isn't a big deal (at least he's home) but when you'd been looking forward to something and it doesn't happen it's always a little disapointing. Now that I've complained about it I can get over it!

Pizza

We recently discovered that Olivia loves pizza. We don't eat pizza all that often, her first taste of pizza wasn't until her first trip to Chuck E. Cheese a few months ago. This past weekend we had dinner at a local pizza parlor and were reminded how much Olivia really does like pizza. She likes it so much she even says pizza, except she pronounces it "pizas", if only she liked broccoli as much!

Nesting

The countdown has officially begun. I have just 14 days until my due date and my nesting instincts have officially begun. I'm amazed that I can be so tired yet I'm completely unable to rest until I finish these projects. It's compulsive! I can't stop myself. I'm only working 3 and a half days a week at this point so that "rest" but really I'm spending that time doing all the things that MUST be done before the baby arrives.....like re-arrange the living room furniture. Here's a quick rundown of some of the projects that I completed over the last week:

• Rearrange the living room furniture
• Switch the coffee tables in the living room and the upstairs family room (fortunately Mike did this one as one of the coffee tables is really heavy)
• Rearrange all the family pictures hanging upstairs in the family room
• Take digital pictures of Olivia's artwork then photoshop them into posters to be hung in her room (see picture #1 below)
• Scan all the random family pictures that Mike and I have, edit them and frame them (see picture #2 below)
• Clean out and organize the pantry (look for more on that in another blog post later)
• Pack my bag for the hospital
• Make 50 hand-made baby announcements to be sent after Baby Leiva's arrival
• Get Baby Leiva's room ready to go: involved 3 loads of laundry, folding, hanging, major cleaning and re-organization
• Uploaded hundreds of photos that we've taken over the last several months (expect a separate blog posting about that later on as well)
• Took everything out of the linen closet, washed and re-folded it

This list may sound a little ridiculous to you and I am aware that it is ridiculous. The point is for the most part our house is pretty clean. We are only a family of 3 and since we both work and Olivia is at school the house is empty from 7am to 5pm Monday through Friday. We don't have any pets so it doesn't really have that much time to get dirty.

This is a terrible picture but at least you get the idea. I took digital pictures of all of Olivia's artwork then I uploaded them to Shutterfly. I created two 20 x 30 collage posters of some of my favorite pieces.

Again, another terrible picture. We have tons of random pictures of Mike and I growing up and of Mike's family in Guatemala. I scanned them all and did some photo editing so that they now all have similar color tones.

So Tired...

When I was pregnant with Olivia I remember being tired towards the end of my pregnancy. In some ways I was secretly happy that Mike was busy in Iraq and all I had to do when I got home from work was lay on the couch and fall asleep for a couple hours, then go up to bed and go back to sleep. I could have peanut butter and crackers for dinner and no one cared.

I thought that I was tired at the beginning of this pregnancy and there were times that I was exhausted but now I only have a few weeks to go......26 days to be exact my exhaustion has reached a new level. Last night after I got home from work, I played with Olivia for a bit and cooked dinner and unpacked my purchases from a lunch shopping trip to babies 'r us. After dinner I was done, I sat down on the couch and I was so exhausted I could barely move. Mike had to force me to go upstairs and lay down and I was too tired to even argue with him. The weird part is that while my body is exhausted I just can't sleep. I can't get comfortable, I have to go to the bathroom constantly and no matter what I do I just keep thinking of these lists of things that need to be done before Baby Leiva arrives or before Mike's parents arrive, or before Christmas, etc. I really wish I could just crawl under my desk and take a nap, I wonder if anyone would notice?

Pumpkins

This past weekend we made our second annual family visit to the pumpkin patch. This year we went right around nap time which was poor planning on our part but we still had a great time. We went to the same pumpkin patch this time last year and I can't believe how much has changed! For starters I wasn't pregnant last year, Olivia was much more content to ride in the wagon last year and this year she enjoyed running around in the pumpkin patch and trying to push the wagon. She also picked her very own pumpkin and carried it all the way to the wagon to take home.

Noodles

I knew that I hadn't posted in a while but I didn't realize that it had been over a week! We've had a busy week but what's new about that, we're always busy.

This past weekend I took Friday off of work and enjoyed getting a manicure and pedicure with a girlfriend. Mike and I had a date night that evening when we went to his battalion formal. As far as formal military functions go it wasn't the most exciting ball we've been to but we enjoyed spending time out without Olivia. The guest speaker, Dana Bowman, was actually a motivational speaker so that was an interesting change. He's retired US Army who was injured in a skydiving accident. We met him in the receiving line and he asked if we knew if Baby Leiva was a boy or a girl. I told him we didn't know and were looking forward to finding out. When he went to shake Mike's hand he pulled him aside and assured him that it was a boy. Hmmmm.......we'll soon find out!

Over the weekend we spent time decorating for Halloween and going to the Steilacoom Apple Squeeze. This year we didn't squeeze our own cider but we did enjoy a couple glasses!

Over the weekend Olivia also decided that she does like noodles after all. I realize that many parents complain that all their child will eat is noodles but we've been trying to get Olivia to give noodles a try for over a year now. They seem like they'd be the perfect toddler food, they're easy to pick up, they're relatively bland. I've tried many different kinds of noodles: elbow macaroni, shells, bowtie pasta, penne, zitti, corkscrews, egg noodles, etc. I've tried different colored noodles and noodles with sauce and without. But Olivia has wanted nothing to do with any of them. Until now, she's finally decided that she was ready to eat a noodle and she loved it. Of course it's just my luck that after trying every brand of noodle on the market Olivia went for plain ol' spaghetti.