Wednesday, March 30, 2016

Official Gender Reveal and Baby Update

As most of you know by now, our little trio is expecting the welcome addition of a little boy this summer. We announced our pregnancy to most of our family and friends at Christmas with this photo of Ellie. If you can't read her shirt, it says "Merry Christmas to me  because I am a big sister to be!"


We "officially" announced it was a boy today by posting this photo of our shoes with brown little boy moccasins next to Ellie's hot pink moccasins. Here's the photo if you missed it on Facebook or Instagram!


This pregnancy has been much easier than my pregnancy with Ellie. This time, my nausea abated in the second trimester and that has allowed me to actually get some much needed housework done. While we are far from ready for this little one right now, I have high hopes of being well prepared by the time he decides to make an appearance!

With Ellie I was able to get into a doctor very quickly and had a (very!) early ultrasound. This was great because it turned out she was much younger than we had originally thought! With this little guy we had the hardest time getting to our initial appointment. We had to attend an orientation meeting before we could schedule an appointment. The first time we were scheduled for orientation all three of us came down with a nasty flu virus. The second time we were about three miles from the hospital when our car completely broke down. It was almost funny. We finally made it to orientation and our first appointment at about 16 weeks.

This would have been just fine except that at our first ultrasound the baby was measuring twelve days late. We weren't too worried because Ellie was younger and we assumed this baby was too. Several ultrasounds later and he's growing well in almost every area other than his abdomen measures small. They think it's a condition called Intrauterine Growth Restriction or IUGR. Basically, they don't know what's wrong but they want to monitor him every week to make sure he's getting enough blood flow and nutrients. They aren't really worried and we aren't really worried, but we all feel like it's better to take precautions as IUGR can be serious or even fatal for the baby.

The upside of this is that we get to see our baby every week :) Ellie was very excited to see her little brother on the monitor last time. I can't wait to see her reaction when she actually gets to see him in person and hold him! She's going to make a great big sister!

Saturday, March 26, 2016

Dallas World Aquarium

Ellie and I went to Fort Worth back in October to visit Katie and Brice. During our visit, Ellie got to visit the Dallas World Aquarium for the first time. If you haven't been, you should definitely go!

Okay, embarrassing story here...I finally upgraded my camera awhile ago and I thought I had read all the pertinent directions. Looking at my photos in post processing, I kept thinking "I know this camera can do amazing things, so what am I not doing correctly? Why aren't these coming out better?!". I decided I needed to put in extra time practicing, but I could never nail the lighting. Well, it was definitely user error. Apparently the button that I thought was the f-stop was NOT the f-stop button but the exposure compensation button. In simple terms, I was adjusting the brightness by brute force instead of using the correct formulas and letting the camera settings do the work for me.

These photos (and quite a few to follow since I'm not necessarily posting chronologically) will be photos that I shot using the wrong settings, but I am really hoping that this new knowledge will allow me to start taking better photos!

Here are a few pictures from our trip!

Ellie and I enjoyed watching the river otters!

This otter kept swimming back and forth. Ellie loved it!

A flamingo peeks over from the flamingo enclosure. What a creeper ^_^

Aunt Katie and Uncle Brice

Checking out the fish :D

In front of the waterfall!