craigslist

can i just say how much i absolutely LOVE craigslist right now?! i'm totally kicking myself for being too lazy to post nearly ALL our baby gear that we just got sick of moving around and dropped off at goodwill!! luckily, we were smart enough to save our big ticket items to sell when we wanted to "deal" with haggling and "thousands" of phone calls.

in the last 2 days we have made $330 for stuff that's been collecting dust in our garage for a year! sold our double jogger, double stroller and our coffee table. and it was SUPER easy, no haggling at all!! now we can use that money to RE-BUY all that baby gear we so stupidly rid ourselves of ;)

we are looking to buy a gently used, great condition girly or black or gray travel system, a papasan bouncy/vibrating seat, and a papasan or cute swing. so if anyone knows anyone who'd like to be rid of those things, we are in the market!

i'm well on my way to clearing our ellie's room so we can start thinking about paint and stuff, and collecting the things we'll need for it. i'm desperately trying to NOT have a garage sale. i REALLY hate having garage sales. but it's looking like we will end up doing one next month, with all the little stuff we have hanging around.

SERIOUSLY?!

i feel like a hoarder!!

2 double strollers and a travel system, 10 shopping bags of clothes and one box of shoes (not including the stuff we figured we'd pass to ellie and girl stuff i had bought when i learned i was prego w/boomer or a few things i set aside for the boys' boys)

we knew we weren't done having babies, but come on. really? what was i thinking? we could clothe and stroll a whole baby army here! and it's only up to 3T, plus i only ever saved the non stained/ super cute stuff!!

anyone ever sold anything through consignment? is it easier to just have a garage sale (please don't answer yes to that one) or sell them in craigslist lots? i plan on selling the strollers on craigslist, but i don't think i'd ever buy a lot of clothes b/c what are the chances you'd actually like everything in the lot? feedback on this would be great!

craft projects and baby loot

for the last 6 months or so, i think since christmas, i haven't felt any kind of intrest in any type of crafting. until we found out we were having a girl, that is. my creative gears are constantly spinning now and i have a LONG list of stuff i want to do.

so far i've made a new boppy cover...



a baby girl can't be nursed on a blue and green construction themed boppy!

i bought this cute giant E for her wall. okay so maybe it's not cute yet, but it will be!



and now that i've finished her quilt (and a matching pillow for the glider rocker) i can get started on figuring out a wall color and decorating that E!



also on the list... hopefully finding and refinishing a dresser in the shabby chic style, tissue poms in place of a mobile, modpodged puzzle blocks with her name, and much more that i just can't remember right now. i'm also inspired to finally make some kind of artwork for the boys' walls, and for christmas i REALLY want to make a play kitchen out of an old entertainment center for them. (it'll make a great hand-me-down, too!) PHEW... i better get movin'!!

i've been REALLY good about not going all out buying girly stuff. the few things i have bought were sale stuff or clearance and must haves. c'mon, what little girl doesn't need at least one tutu or pettiskirt in every size?! the socks are for baby legs that i'm going to make for her. she'll probably have them in every color to match every outfit she'll have!

THE FOURTH

jason was on-call this year for the fourth of july weekend. it turned out fine, though. he was able to participate in all aspects of the weekend, and we really had an overall good time. saturday night we went to the little firework stand at haggen and the boys each got to spend $10. that much money doesn't go very far for fireworks anymore! i remember my grandpa taking me out to the res. when i was little and him haggling like a madman and us making away like bandits with $20 worth!!

all my boys went out to the cul-de-sac and within a few minutes some of the neighbor boys wanted to watch the "show". they were entertained, though and didn't seem to care that the biggest one was a tiny little fountain.



we didn't have enough sparklers for all the neighbor kids, so we took the boys out to the backyard to do them after bathtime.

"airplane traffic director jax"


"boomer potter"



sunday was the big show down by the bay. it's a tradition with our friends to go down to maritime heritage park to watch the show. that park offers a really good view without the traffic getting out aferward. we've been going there for something like 7 years. last year i started thinking about maybe wanting to gather up our crew and find a new venue. it seems like every year gets a little worse with the bums. but this year was the straw that broke the camel's back for me. long story short, there was a whole slew of drunk bums just across from us. we arrived around 7 and they were already loopy. the show started at 10, and in that time, we saw 2 people fall down (one stayed down), "chanting" in the bushes, a makeout session, 2 men swapping shirts, the girl from the bushes came out from the bushes and slapped a man in the face and started cussing at him, a gangbanger hiding his backpack in the bushes just behind us, and boomer found some unmarked pill capsules on the ground. needless to say, we are NOT going back next year!!!

the show was good and thankfully we were surrounded (on our side) by great friends. it only decided to sprinkle on us for the last 10 minutes or so. but luckily it was light and short-lived.


HAPPY BIRTHDAY AMERICA!!

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.