DRUMROLL PLEASE...

IT'S A....

i made up these buttons last night for the boys to wear after our ultrasound today (along with blue ones that said "oh BOY here we go again!")




jaxon and boomer were so good for the appointment. we had an extremely talkative tech today, which was a blessing and a curse all at the same time. she did a 3D ultrasound for us, and i'm thinking maybe she wasn't really supposed to. so we lucked out on that, but we were there for over an hour, which made both my mom and jason late for work, and the boys overly antsy towards the end.

boys' first photo with baby sister





i can't even begin to express my emotion when i was certain that we are having a daughter. of course i would have been thrilled to have a healthy baby boy, but knowing that we will have a little girl makes me feel like our family is complete. and she's not even here yet! i say "when i was certain" because within the first minute of the exam,before she even looked at the baby's plumbing, i was paranoid and thought i saw a penis. which made the tech second guess herself, so when she finally did go there, she had to double check herself. at first she said she didn't want to tell me what she thought because she was worried i'd get my hopes up. then she said it's a girl after she double checked. i still didn't believe her so i made her go back and check once more. that time when she told us, i believed it and was flooded with emotion. tears streamed down my cheeks and i had to try my dangdest not to sob too hard and make it hard for her to work. we got really amazing 3D pics. i've never had one with the boys, so it was bizarre to see our baby so real looking!

3D pic of our baby girl. isn't she cute?! here's she's saying "i may be #3, but i'm still #1!!"





this afternoon jason and i decided that our rule about not announcing baby's name doesn't really apply in this case. it's not a name we feel like people will turn their noses up at (which we really don't care so much about, anyway), it's not a common enough name for people to say "i hated a girl with that name once", we are 100% certain we ARE naming her this name so it's not like there's any chance of us changing it at the last minute, and we aren't so paranoid about people "stealing" our name once they hear it and make our kid go to school with 5 other girls with the same name. so without further ado........


Ellison Anne Dahlstrom

(ellie)

Jax's first M's game

As part of my wonderful Father's Day weekend, I got to take Jax to his first Mariners game yesterday. I won the tickets on the radio, so that was a bonus to not have to pay. We made our pre-trip stop at the supermarket to buy peanuts and crackerjacks, the necessities. We hit some pretty bad traffic that slowed us down just enough to miss out on the bobblehead giveaways. We got in, got some hot dogs and found our seats. The radio station has season tickets in a pretty good spot. Right behind home plate in the 3rd level, great place to explain the game to a new fan.

After we ate our hot dogs I realized that we had forgotten the sign that Crystal made for us and the peanuts in the car. Luckily the game was 20 minutes from first pitch, and we were just parked in the Safeco garage, so we hi-tailed it back to the car. When we came back in one of the ticket takers told us to go up to guest services and show them our sign. I thought maybe they'd take note of where we were sitting so we'd get on the Jumbotron. Nope, even better. Jax got a certificate for coming to his first game and baseball cards. He lit up! He even got a baseball card of the Mariner Moose. There were so many people talking to him about his first game, and he was talking ALL of them up right back. I guess I should point out that his sign said "My First Game" on it, and that was drawing the attention. He was so happy to be at the stadium, but I still didn't know how the 9 innings would go.

We had some great people sitting around us and plenty of space for him to be a 5 year old kid. Peanuts made for a pretty good re-focus tool when he started to get too hyper. He did SO GREAT with all the cheers the crowd was doing, and I didn't even have to get him to do it. His favorite was of course I-CHI-RO, I-CHI-RO, I-CHI-RO. Between every inning he would jump on his chair and stand up and wave his sign trying to get on TV so "grandpa could see me and laugh at my funny faces." We never did get on TV, but he tried for the whole game.

About the second inning he saw the cotton candy guy about 4 sections away, and decided that he had to have some cotton candy when that guy got over to us. He never showed up, so we had to go for the alternative. Shishkaberrries. It blew his mind to see strawberries covered in chocolate..........ON A STICK! That was about the 6th inning, and we still hadn't had a single fit, or tantrum or anything. Pleasantly surprised was I. The 7th inning rolled around and I was swelling with pride as we belted out "Take me out to the ballgame" Jax had been saying the whole time that when the game was over we had to go down to the field to give the Mariners high fives. So the game ended and we headed down to the good seats to try to get some attention, to no avail. Then he decided all the Mariners were at a party celebrating their win, and we HAD to find the party.

All in all it was as perfect of a ballgame experience as I could have imagined, and a great start to a promising weekend.

BABY UPDATE

i started to feel this little one fluttering around on wednesday night. i was a bit nervous that i wouldn't be able to see it and feel it at the same time next week at our ultrasound. it seems like i felt it earlier with the boys. i'm getting really anxious now about finding out the sex on friday. i'm trying to prep myself for disappointment. it sounds cruel to say you could be disappointed, right. it's not that i'll be disappointed if this baby is a boy. i'll be thrilled, actually. i just know that if this baby is a boy, then i'll be sad and disappointed about having to let go of my dream of having a girl. this is probably our last child, and the thought of never having a daughter brings tears to my eyes.
i'm totally stoked about having a baby around. we were just talking about how it's going to be so neat to have a whole new personality in our family. it hasn't really been all that long since boomer was a a baby, but it feels like a lifetime ago! it's really neat having the boys be old enough to really get what's going on and being excited with us. jax was under 2 years old when we had boomer, so he was totally oblivious.

i'm FINALLY feeling pregnant and not just fat. which i'm totally happy about! anyone who knows me knows i love me a prego belly!! so... my first prego photo with baby #3 at 18w/4d.

RANDOMNESS

LEGOS
the boys have really been into building "inventions" with legos lately. finally they are old enought to play with the fun ones. you know, the tiny ones that have really cool pieces and fun sets. they pretty much don't go anywhere without taking an "invention" with them. it's really neat to see their little imaginations come to fruition, especially jax. he has an engineer's brain FOR SURE! he loves to take things apart to see how they work and then put them back together. which is why i appreciate the legos so much, before legos it was breaking apart toys or the back off the remote!

MOTHER'S DAY
for mother's day this year jason and the boys made me a picnic table. they stained it white and engraved each of our names in it (with room enough for newbaby, too) it was really sweet. i'm not sure i like that the boys are being taught really young to keep secrets from mama, who knows how great they'll be at it by the time they're teenagers!! but i do appreciate surprises and they've never spoiled one for me so far!!



GARDEN/YARD
our garden is surprisingly THRIVING!! i never would've guessed that we could even keep it all alive. the peas are almost to the top of the fence and the lettuce is gigantic! we need to plant new radishes now since we planted 4 rows at once and they're all gone already! boomer chokes down lettuce now because he's proud he grew it! which is the biggest reason for me to have a garden! the yard needs a whole lot of work, the grass is very weedy and dead-ish in places, but we have some plans to help it out, so we'll see how that goes.

a few weeks ago my mom found a huge frog near her house. we took it home to set it free in the pond out back. the boys named him hoppy.

TeeBall 2010

wow... teeball season is over already and i haven't blogged at all about it! the boys really liked it, i think boomer more than jax. maybe because we went sometimes a week or more without a practice or game because of the weather, jax had a hard time jumping back into the swing of things. but he had a TERRIFIC coach that was really patient with him and never got tired of motivating him (which he seemed to need lots of).

GO PURPLE DRAGONS!!
boomer had a great time. his little ladies' man side came through very often since he had 2 pretty girls for coaches. he was always tackling or snuggling one of them on the field during games. they both learned a lot this year and it was a great experience for all of us.

GO BUMBLEBEES!!
off to the birthcenter to get some blood drawn with BOTH BOYS in tow!! wish me luck. i'll blog later today about what else we've been up to!!