Sweet Home Chicago

A week ago, we got back from our 10 day trip back home to Chicagoland. It was a wonderful visit! We drove (a 15 1/2 hour car ride at 6 1/2 months pregnant...not the most comfortable day of my life!) and it was a long ride. The first couple days of the trip were spent visiting family and friends and indulging in some of the home cooking and restaurants we missed! It was great just to have time to hang out with people. We stayed at our friends, Jonathan and Christina Jackson's house, which was really fun and it was so nice of them to let us crash there for the week!

Once Wednesday hit, the week got really busy! Wednesday afternoon we met up with our friends Jen and Adrian to go see Lion King downtown Chicago. It was a rude reminder of Chicago traffic as it took us 3 and a half hours to go about 40 miles. We were getting a little worried that we'd miss the show! But we made it with about 10 minutes to spare. Lion King was awesome! It was so good! It was also great to hang out with Jen and Adrian. We both miss them a lot and I'm so glad we got to see them.

Thursday was Thanksgiving and we spent the day at my mom's house. There was TONS of great food (of course) and my sister Carrie, Kirk and I kept our tradition of watching the dog show and White Christmas on Thanksgiving day. We also celebrated my youngest sister Christy's 21st birthday.

Friday we had Thanksgiving with my Dad at Jill's house. It was a fun afternoon. I think our baby likes Thanksgiving food because she was moving around like crazy!

Saturday was a really fun day. Our friends Matt and Sarah got married! It was a beautiful wedding! The ceremony was really sweet and the reception was fun and a great party! There were tons of people we knew there so it was fun to see everyone and celebrate Matt and Sarah. I've know both of them since about 4th grade and we all went through youth group together. We took a picture of all the old youth group people that were at the wedding.

Matt, Kate, Me, Sarah, Erin, Lauren. Ben, Kelly & Sherri

Sunday was our baby shower. My mom, aunts, grandma and sisters hosted it. It was so special to have so many friends and family together. The decorations were so pretty (we kept them to use in the baby's room) and the food was delicious! People were so generous and so excited for us. It was so nice to see so many people after being gone for 6 months. Here are some pictures from the shower.

The sweet quilt Katie made

The cute mobile my sister Christy made

**see the next blog post for more shower pictures...I'm having some formatting issues! :o) ***

We left to come back to North Carolina really early Monday morning. It was a looonnnngggg drive back. We had no extra room in the car because of all the baby gifts as well as our Christmas presents. It was hard to leave Illinois and I would have loved to have some more time there. It was strange to realize that the next time we're back there, we'll have a 3 month old baby! (We're going back in May for my sister Stacy's wedding).

Since we've been back, I've been fighting a cold that I can't seem to get rid of. I'm also hoping to really start working on the nursery this next week. I'd like to get everything from the showers put away and start figuring out what we still need and getting it all set up. I think we're going to come back from Christmas and realize we only have about 7 weeks until our due date and I don't want to be scrambling at the end!

We went to the doctor last Tuesday and everything looks good still. The nurse was using the wand thing to hear the heartbeat and baby girl kept kicking it off! It took her 4 tries to get the heartbeat recorded since the baby wouldn't cooperate! Apparently she's feisty! :o) Since we are now in the third trimester, we start going to the doctor every two weeks now! That's a sign that we're getting close to the end!