'Tis the Season... to be Thankful

We had a wondderful non-stop weekend full of family and friends! My side of the family celebrated Thanksgiving on Saturday with a big feast at a lodge on Lake Wedington. It was a great time! We ate until we burst and spent time talking with everyone until our nieces decided to put on a magic show in front of the lodge fireplace... it was pretty cute! Here is a group picture that Kim took:

Afterwards, Jamie and I went with our friend, Gloria, to the lighting of the Fayetteville sqaure and we watched the parade of Christmas floats and even waved at Santa. I love this time of year!

Tonight we finished up the weekend with (more food) and had a big group of family and friends over to our house to break in Jamie's new grill.

Tomorrow morning I get to take my sister, Carolyn, and her husband, Darren, and adorable little boy, Rumi, to the airport at 5am to catch their flight back to Hawaii. Here is a beautiful picture Kim took of them this weekend:

So much to be thankful for this time of year... Happy Thanksgiving!

Showers of Blessings

This weekend was our first baby shower- thrown by our amazing friends- and there was cuteness everywhere!! ("Blush and Bashful" don't even begin to describe the amount of pink!) The hostesses put a lot of love into this beautiful shower! The neatest part was to see all the people coming in the door who are so happy for Jamie and I and our first little baby. So many wonderful friends and family and coworkers, my sister from Hawaii (ok, she's here for Thanksgiving, but it was nice to have her there!) and even the lady who I did my student teaching with 8 years ago came, too! Jamie and I stayed up late that night putting all the adorable gifts away in the nursery. Audrie is definitely coming into a nursery full of wonderful things, but even more importantly she's coming into a world full of people who are so excited to meet her!

(photo by Kim)

Special Memories

A few weekends ago the girls in my family all got together for a girl's night at a cabin on the lake near Branson. We were celebrating my Grandma Allamon's birthday and spent time looking through old photos and jewelry she left us when she passed away this spring. It was alot of fun to just take a break from the fast pace of life and relax with all the girls. We ate way too much food, stayed up too late, and played a pretty hilarious game of Cranium.

I came home with a couple of really neat pieces of jewelry of my Grandma's, but my favorite was a beautiful Italian cameo pendant that her husband bought during WWII when he was stationed in Italy. I researched a little about it and found alot of neat information about these pieces (ranging in price from $300-$2,000). I had it polished and strung on a dainty chain. I love wearing it and hope I can pass it on for generations to come.

And here are some of my favorite pictures of my Grandma's:

(This is from 1933 at the World's Fair- my Grandma, Eileen, was 14 years old.)

(This is of Eileen and Charlie Cummings as newlyweds.)

(I love this picture because my Grandma is about 6 months pregnant in this photo... and is still classy in her heels and pearls- I love the 40's!)

(And this one is neat because my mom, on the left, and her mom and sister are all wearing different stages of heels. My mom explained how special it was to finally be old enough to wear pumps or heels for the first time.)

Daddy's Little Girl

I've always known that Jamie would be a wonderful daddy, but last night I realized even more how blessed our little girl will be to have him. We went out with some friends who also happen to be expecting their first babies, too- Jenny and Rhonald are having a little boy in January (three weeks before us) and Jim and Emily are expecting (what I think is a girl!) at the end of May. After dinner we all decided to go for a group ultrasound to see our babies and it was so fun! When we got to see Audrie (it's been almost two months since we've seen her) she was SO big- we couldn't see all of her on the screen anymore- Jamie just had to scroll around and look at her face and legs and sections of her separately. (We did get confirmation once again that she is indeed a girl!) At one point we were looking at her face and she was staring at her hand and started opening and closing it and twisting her hand around to look at all her little fingers and Jamie just thought that was the neatest thing ever. He started going on about how cute she was and we needed to enter her in a beauty pageant right now because she was already so darn cute!! I think our little girl is going to have him wrapped around those little fingers very quickly...!

Me, Emily and Jenny with "Audrie, Burrow, Jr and Cole"!

Milk Chocolate & Peanut...

So this is what Jamie decided we were going to be for Halloween...

His office had dressed up that day as a whole bag of crazies, so Jamie wanted to share the joy with me and put a big "m" on my shirt when he got home from work.



We passed out candy for several hours last night to the steady stream of pirates, monsters and princesses who rang our doorbell. It was fun to see all their costumes and several of them were my former and current students. So cute!

Babies, Band, and the Beach

We had our monthly doctor visit today to check the vitals and the baby and I are still doing great. Her heartbeat was 157 today- when the doctor was trying to listen to the heartbeat the baby kept kicking the monitor. The doctor said she was "fiesty". Is that a bad sign??

Now our doctors visits will be every two weeks for the next 8 weeks and then in the last month we'll go every week til she arrives! I think it's slowly starting to sink in that our baby will be here very soon...!

This is one of my favorite pictures of me as a little girl at the beach. Makes me excited to see what our little girl is going to look more like- me or her good lookin' daddy.

In other news, I went to Melanie's first band concert of the season tonight and it was so adorable! I can't believe she can get those kids to all play so good after two months of school. She's my hero. Too bad "it's just band".

I'm not fat, I'm pregnant.

My belly is definitely out and proud these days. At least now I finally look pregnant and not just like I'm getting chubby in the middle. It's such a strange emotion to continue to get bigger and bigger and gain more and more weight. I've never been a strict dieter or fanatic about exercising all the time, but I've always tried to keep my weight under control so that my clothes fit right and I feel healthy. So it's been hard to tell myself that all this growing huger is just the baby and that I won't feel like a blimp forever. I've still been able to continue exercising regularly but I am starving all the time. I eat constantly (which is acutally kind of fun).

I'm just about 26 weeks now (14 more to go!). I get a weekly email with updates about the baby and this is the picture I got this week saying our baby is probably about 14 inches long and 1.5 pounds now.

I've still been able to wear my regular clothes for the most part, but I am starting to wear more maternity clothes because they are SO comfortable. I think I may wear pants with the big stretchy belly forever..! Here is a maternity outfit I wore this week that Erin helped me pick out. (I told Mel that I feel like I'm wearing pajamas to work because everything is so stretchy and soft.)

Carving, Chili and Children's Choirs

So I played hooky today. We woke up and it was cold, rainy and a perfect day to stay in bed. And Jamie was already feeling pretty bad so he convinced me to call in sick with him and we made pancakes and then slept til noon. Made me glad we don't have any kids... :)

But this weekend was great- we went to a friends house for a pumpkin carving party and ate alot of chili and had a good time. I let Jamie do all the carving (I'm not really into scraping goo out of the innards of pumpkins).

Then Sunday was our first Bentonville Children's Choir concert of the season. It went smoothly-we have a really good group of kids this year!

We finished up the weekend at Jim and Emily's house. The boys cooked us dinner while Emily and I watched Sleepless in Seattle. Rough life, I know.

(Jamie at work on his masterpiece.)

(This is Josh and Carrie's little boy, Collin- future singer in the BCC!)

(Jamie's masterpiece completed...)

It's all in a day.

6 months down... Three more to go. It's going so fast! Jim pointed out last night that technically if I were to have the baby now that she could survive (with months in the hospital) but still it was weird to think about our baby being so "real". She's been kicking like crazy the past few weeks- so much that I start to worry when she goes a few hours without "saying hey". The other night I actually noticed my belly moving from all her Tae-bo she's doing in there. It was pretty neat to watch my stomach as she kicked and punched away.

My students at school are excited about me having a baby and ask me alot of questions. My favorite so far is when this shy sixth grade boy didn't really know how to word his question and pointed at my belly and asked me "how long has that been in there?". They are all a little worried about who will be taking my place while I'm on maternity leave. I do love my students and will miss them... but I can't wait to stay home with our baby (at least until school starts again in the Fall).

Here are a bunch of random photos I took in my classroom this week:

Tennis Addiction

When Jamie is not playing tennis, he's watching tennis (on the 24 hour Tennis Channel). And when he's not watching tennis he's reading about tennis. But at least he has a healthy hobby and I love watching him play! He had another tournament this weekend and made it to the semi-finals (where he lost in a close match). It's fun watching him doing something he loves so much!

(I got a little Photoshop happy on this one, but I liked how his shadow turned out in this picture.)

Here's a short clip of Jamie's sweet tennis skills!

"Audrie Diana Cornett"

Audrie has a middle name now and I love it! Diana is my mother's name and it fits so nicely (the whole name together has a sort of musical rhythm to it). I did call Jamie's mom to ask her if she was going to write us out the will for not using her name for our baby. She loved the middle name we chose and said she would be ok as long as we name the next five babies after her...!

Look out Martha Stewart!

Decorating the nursery is so fun! (It's like scrapbooking a whole room.) I realized right away that is was going to be pretty expensive to buy all the adorable things I wanted, so I decided to be a little thrifty and make some of my own decorations.

For a few dollars I bought some wooden letters at Hobby Lobby and painted them for the wall.

And I found a lamp I wanted but it was $200....! So I made this one from an old gold lamp I already had.

So the nursery is starting to come together. My mom is making some curtains and I am looking for a cute rug, but it's so fun to work on!

With all this money I'm saving we should be able to afford a live-in nanny, right?!

"We Are Family"

Jamie and I drove down to Drasco, AR (near Mtn. View) for the annual Cornett Family Reunion. The four hour drive (one way) is not the highlight of our year, but it means so much to Donna and Jamie's dad's family that we are there- so we made the trek down again this weekend. Plus, it gave Jamie and I some "quality time" in the car and we have officially decided on a first name for our little girl. "Audrie" will be her first name (spelled with an "ie" like Jamie's name). We're still finalizing the middle name, but we have four months so no rush.

Hugging Jamie's mom, Donna, (you can see my baby belly poking out).

It's a... girl!

Boy or Girl??

We had another doctor visit today- just a check-up to hear the baby's heartbeat and my vitals (it's amazing how I can gain more on a one week cruise than I have in four and half months of pregnancy). But we scheduled our official 20 week sonogram, so we'll find out next week if we are having a little Jamie...

or a little Rachel...

Baby Got Back

At least I know the baby is mine...!

What's in a name?

We now have a crib and a dresser in the baby's room! Jamie spent a long time putting it all together early this week and it looks great! All we need now is a rocker... and a baby. We did get to see the baby again tonight and it's amazing how fast it has grown. Jim said he's still pretty sure it's a girl, but determining gender is not really his forte so we'll wait patiently for the official sonogram in a few weeks. After dinner and an ultrasound (big night with the Burrow's) we all sat at Starbucks til way too late trying to come up with a name for Dr. Jim's medical clinic he is building. It was kind of fun tossing out all the crazy name ideas, but we didn't really get anywhere. The best we could come up with was "Preferred Family Care". So if you have any good ideas for clinic names, email Jim- he wants to hear suggestions!

"Baby Beulah"

I've started to feel the baby move!!! It was Sunday during church that it started. We had a special singing group at church and they sang all old time Southern Gospel style music. (The main singer of this group, Squire Parsons, is known for writing the song "Sweet Beulah Land".) Well, right in the middle of this hoedown gospel singing I started feeling a very faint kicking! I whispered to Jamie in the pew that I thought the baby must like this style of music because it was keeping the beat. (Or mabye the baby was kicking to say "make this crazy music stop!") Either way, it was pretty neat to finally start feeling the baby. It's been happening more since this weekend, but I can only feel it when I'm sitting really still and focusing on feeling it. And since school has started I haven't had time to sit still so only when I'm in bed at night can I really feel anything. I know soon I will feel the movements more strongly and get tired of the kicking, but for right now it's exciting!

We're still discussing baby name options (with some help from our friends, Mel and Gloria, here), but for now I'm calling the baby "Beulah" since that is obviously his/her favorite music!

"I love tickets."

This is how amazing my husband is. I've been working one or two nights a week at Banana Republic (for the employee discount) and occasionally Jamie comes up and eats dinner with me when I have a break. So, last weekend we were sitting down to eat in the food court and he said he had a present for me. I was pretty excited because last time he brought me a present at work, he gave me my new wedding bands.... I thought he would have trouble topping that. This time he handed me airline tickets to New York City and told me we are going to spend a week in NYC over Thanksgiving break!! I didn't know whether to cry or scream. Our friends, Jason and Samanthe, will be living in NYC and we are going to stay with them, go to the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, see Broadway shows, and shop and eat and... I can't wait. We will miss Thanksgiving with our families, but both our mom's said they understood. :) I've been to NYC twice, but Jamie has never been. It's going to be so wonderful. I can't wait to see what the next present is that Jamie brings me at work...

(This is last time I was in NYC- February of 2003.)

"So you're saying there's a chance...?"

Dr. Jim was so kind as to let us do another ultrasound! It's so exciting each time just knowing we're about to see the baby again. We had all just gone out for a big dinner so I was afraid we wouldn't be able to see the baby through all the food...! But the baby was kicking and moving much more now. We could see it turning around in my belly and doing slow summersaults. Jamie did some more ultrasounding again and he got some great images of the baby.


In this picture the baby had turned completely upside down and seemed to be having a great time in there!Jim was able to make a "guesstimation" about the gender based on some interesting images he pointed out to us. He said he felt about "%70 sure he was correct" and that's all the hope I needed to hear!!!! Pink might be my new favorite color...! (I think Jamie is still holding out for the "real" doctor's verdict at our 20 week sonogram.)