No Christmas Baby :) 38 weeks, going on 39!

Happy Holidays!

No baby yet! I am almost 39 weeks and feeling pretty good. I am starting to get really tired and I have had alot of cramping and a few mild contractions. I have a doctors appointment today. The official due date is January 6th. If she does not come on her own, they will induce me on January 10th. Hopefully she doesn't wait to much longer, we are anxiously awaiting her arrival. The room is all set up and ready to go for her and all the baby equipment is put together. The hardest part was getting her car seat into the car!

The time is flying by with the holidays. We had a nice Thanksgiving. We spent the day with Scott and Jess and the kids (Brian's brother and sister-in-law). We ate alot of good food and spent the day watching football and then hit up a couple stores that were open on Thanksgiving night to buy some early Christmas gifts!

I can't believe Christmas is over. My family came down for the week. We did a ton of shopping and ate alot of food. I for sure thought with all the walking that the baby would have came this week! We received so many nice gifts for ourselves and the baby! I know this baby will be one spoiled little girl :) She already has way more clothes than I do!

I will continue to update and hopefully we will have some good news soon!!

Happy New Year to everyone!!

Love,
Beep & Mandie

32 Weeks!

Hi All,

Yes, that's me in those pictures! Haha I am getting bigger by the day and so is she:) I don't think I have anymore room in there!

I am now 32 weeks and will be 33 weeks on Thursday. It's been great! We are just counting down the weeks for her to get here! Our baby check list is quickly becoming complete. The last few things we have left to do:

We begin our birthing classes tonight at Shawnee Mission Medical Center, which is where I will also deliver the baby. We will attend every Monday night for 5 weeks, from 7-9pm. Can't wait!

We will meet with our daycare lady next Sunday to finalize all the paper work and make sure she is the best person to take care of our baby girl!

Over Thanksgiving break we will complete our baby nursery. We received the bedding in the mail last week and now will just put together the finishing touches. I will post pictures next time after it is complete.

Then on November 29th we will meet with the Maternity Care Coordinator at the hospital. At this appointment she will give us a tour of the hospital's birthing unit and explain how our experience will go when we arrive.

Over the weekend my friends from work threw me a baby shower. We received alot of nice gifts to get us ready for her arrival!

Have a great day everyone and Happy Thanksgiving!

Love,
Beep & Mandie

Beginning of the Third Trimester!

Hello Friends & Family!



Sorry it's been a while since I've sent an update! The baby is doing great. I started my 28th week on Thursday. According to my books, she is probably around 2 1/2-3 lbs. now, but she feels like 8lbs. to me! I am still feeling very well and have not had really anything to complain about. Let's see how the third trimester goes!

Some exciting things that have happened in the past month. We bought a new car! Kirk, Paulette, & Sid (Brian's dad, mom, & uncle) came to visit us and treated us to two Royals games. We had alot of fun! We flew home on the week of October 8th. We celebrated Beep's 30th Birthday (real birthday is Oct.21st). And my sister and cousin hosted a baby shower for me. We received so many wonderful gifts! I can't wait to see her wear all the outfits we got. We are not done yet! This weekend we are headed to Rochester, MN for Beep's friends wedding. With so much going on it makes this pregnancy go fast!

My next doctors appointment is tomorrow. Now I will start visiting my doctor every two weeks. We will soon be registering for a birthing class. Which I'm very excited about because at this moment I feel alitte unprepared for the birth of this baby :)

Take care and we will talk to you soon!

Love,
Beep & Mandie

P.S. I will post pictures soon!

23 Weeks and Football Season!

Hello friends & family,

Football season is underway! So far KU has had two home games. The first game was at 6pm but we started tailgating around 2:30 which made for a long day by the time the game was over. I don't know how much longer I am going to be able to sit on bleachers for 3 hours! Scott, Jess and the kids are at the games so it's a lot of fun to see them every weekend. Football games are where we spend most of our Saturday's. I look at it this way by the time college football season is over our baby will be here so it keeps us occupied for now!

This week I am 23 weeks going on 24. The baby is moving around a lot lately. Most of the time I can pull my shirt up and Brian can watch her kick and move around. It's a lot of fun to see the movement. According to my books she is a little over a pound and is about 8 inches long. Our next appointment is September 22nd. Everything is going so fast!

We have narrowed down our daycare list and we think we've found the one we like. We will do final interviews next month and make a final decision. The process of choosing a daycare has been alot harder than I thought. You become very picky when it comes to where your baby will be growing up.

We hope you all have a great week and we will talk to you soon!

Take care!

Love,
Beep & Mandie

Shopping for the baby!

Hi everyone,

We hope you had a great weekend. Whitney came to visit us this weekend. We did some shopping for the baby. We found some really cute summer outfits that were on clearance for when she's about 6 months old and also stocked up on some onesies. It is so easy to shop for a baby, everything is so darn cute!

I have been feeling really good lately. The only thing that bothers me is my feet hurt alot more when I am standing for a long time. And Brian says that I have become a slow walker :) Haha. We have started thinking of some names for the baby but have decided to keep the name we choose a secret until she comes. We want something to be a surprise (sorry mom:)!

Below is a picture of a gift we received from our friends Erick and Brittany. The outfits are so soft, I can't wait to see her wear them.

I have also attached pictures from our companies summer party. They show a little about the set up of the party and some of the attractions we had.

Have a great day!

Love,
Mandie & Beep

It's a Girl!!

We had a wonderful doctors appointment yesterday. We found out the baby is a girl. She is doing great. The doctor said she is growing and looks very healthy. She now weighs 14oz. and is soooo cute. She was stubborn right away and didn't want us to see what gender she was by having her knees close together. So the doctor had to poke at her awhile:) It is amazing what a sonogram can show. Although Brian is very happy with the baby girl he had his heart set on a boy but maybe next time!

On Saturday our company had our annual summer block party. All employees and family members are invited. We had about 700 adults and 400 kids show up. Since my job includes coordinating company events I spent the whole day setting up for that. We have several different activities for children. This year we had pony rides, a petting zoo, carnival rides, character artists, and other entertainment. It was an exhausting day but so fun! Can't wait until next summer when we can bring our little girl to the party.

We have a busy next couple of months ahead of us with family coming to town and football season just around the corner. We have season tickets to KU football games. Starting Sept. 4th we will spend most of our Saturdays in Lawrence. It will be a different experience tailgating for me this year while pregnant :) But we are very excited to see our tailgating friends again!

That's it for now. Hope everyone has a great rest of the week!

Love,
Beep & Mandie

Feeling the baby kick!

Happy Monday!

19 1/2 weeks along now and everything is going along smoothly:) I am starting to feel the baby move around and kick alittle bit. It is such a crazy feeling to feel something moving around inside of you. It makes us more anxious to meet him/her.

I am starting to get a bigger belly now and it has become very obvious at work :) My close friends at work have known about the pregnancy for a while. From others I still am getting the funny looks of "did she gain weight or is she pregnant"? Nobody ever wants to ask so they usually just look at me funny and then go ask someone else :) I work for the executive's in our building and my boss jokes with the guy executives about becoming "grandpa's" (haha). They are all so excited for us! My boss is alittle stressed wondering what she will do without me for a couple months. So she jokes that we will just build a baby room right next to our offices so I will never have to be out:) I wish that could happen!

As I said in my last post Brian and I volunteered at the Susan Koman Race for the Cure at a water station last Saturday. Wow, that was not what I expected at all! It was crazy, there were 30,000 runner/walkers and it was hot so everyone was thirsty. We poured water for a solid 2 hours. Brian worked harder than I did:) One of the pictures shows the hill that the walkers were coming down and every time we looked up to see if we were close to the finish thousands more were coming! But it was a great experience for a great cause and we had a great time!

Whitney my sister turns 21 next Monday, Aug.23, happy birthday! She is also coming to visit us next Wednesday the day after we find out the gender of the baby. So we are going to go shopping for a few items for the baby room. I've got some ideas of what I want to do!

I look forward to the next post which I will reveal if the baby is a boy or a girl!

Have a great week. Take care everyone!

Love,
Beep & Mandie

18 Weeks!

Good morning!

Brian and I celebrated our 2nd wedding anniversary on Monday. To celebrate we went out on Sunday to eat at Olive Garden and then went shopping at the Legends shopping center for some more maternity clothes. No more trying to squeeze into my own pants anymore:) This baby is growing and so is my belly! Wow how our lives have changed, shopping and lunch, that's it!

Today I am 18 weeks and according to my books the baby is the size of a bell pepper (5inches). We met with the doctor on Tuesday and everything is going great. This was Brian's first time hearing the heart beat, I love hearing that sound! The doctor told us our next appointment we will be able to find out the gender of the baby, August 24th! Can't wait! I have not felt any movement by the baby yet, but hopefully soon:)

It has been extremely hot and humid down here which is making life miserable...And looking ahead the temperature does not look like it's going to go down at all. This Sunday Brian and I are volunteering at the Susan G. Koman walk/race to work at a water station. Should be fun, but we have to be there by 6:15Am so that will make for an early Sunday morning.

Well have a wonderful rest of the week everyone!

Love,
Beep & Mandie

Trip home to ND

Hello All,

One week in and the 2nd Trimester has been a good one so far. It seems like it's going by so fast.

Brian and I flew home last week to visit our family. Although our trip was short and the days flew by we had a great time! We got into Bismarck around 12:45PM on Thursday, we stopped at the mall and then headed to Dickinson. Thursday night we had dinner with my family at Applebees. We spent Friday in New England. We visited with grandparents, Kirk made an excellent steak dinner and then we sat outside on the porch and visited with our friends Levi, Dani, & Franko. It was great to see our friends again! Saturday we went golfing at Bully Pull Pit in Medora, gosh that course is absolutely beautiful. Sunday morning we got to stop out at Brian's uncle Randy and aunt Kristi's house for a short visit and then off to Bismarck we went.

We even received our first baby gift on this trip! My sister Whitney got us the cutest bibs and robe for the baby:) Next appointment is August 3rd!

Take care everyone!

Love,
Beep & Mandie

Our Baby Journey!

Hello friends & family,

About 6 weeks ago our lives changed! We found out we are having a baby! Although we are very nervous we are also over joyed with excitement:) The timing really couldn't be more perfect. We just bought our first home in April. Brian and I are still employed at Perceptive Software, which we absolutely love and couldn't ask for a better employer. And Brian is about to turn 30 (he'll probably kill me for writing that), and I just turned 27, so we aren't getting any younger:) This blog will give us a chance to share our first baby experience with our friends and family as most of you are either in ND or scattered over the country.

Today my first trimester is officially over! But all in all it really hasn't been that bad. I'm excited to start getting my energy back and start working out and cleaning my house! Brian and I are busy reading baby books and researching daycare providers. Wow, I think I should have went into the daycare business because they charge alot:) But well worth it when it comes to your child!

We had a great Fourth of July weekend. We got to relax and just spend time with each other and great friends and had some great BBQ. We were hoping to watch a firework show but unfortunately the rain canceled those plans.

Brian and I are headed back to ND in about a week and a half. The days can't go by fast enough, we always miss home and love going to visit. This time will be extra special because we will get to spread the exciting news with all of our family & friends.

Take care everyone, we'll talk to you soon!

Love,
Beep & Mandie