Summer!

I've been neglecting this blog again, and for that I'm sorry. I've just been so distracted by... well... life.

I've started working out a few times a week at a beautiful new women's gym just a few minutes from my house (score!), plus a couple times a week here at home. I love this gym; it's such a great fit for me. Thanks to my friend Alison for introducing it to me!

My niece/goddaughter has also been in town for the past month, and she's been staying with us the majority of the time. (The rest of the time she stays with Grandma and Grandpa.) Em and I enjoy having her here. It's nice having someone to play Mario Kart with and to accompany Em outside when I have other stuff to attend to! And she's just a fun person to be around, period. :-)

Now I'm also preparing for my sister's arrival on Thursday... and Friday is my parents' 49th(!) wedding anniversary. Then, of course, Saturday is the 4th of July (which we'll be celebrating at my beloved alma mater, USD)... and we have a birthday party to attend on Sunday. We might have a dinner party to attend next Tuesday... and I also want to sign us up for a Family Campout that the City is hosting on the weekend of the 18th. I'm also hoping to get us back to Legoland at the end of July, because Em *loved* the water area and we just didn't have enough time there when we went a couple weeks ago. We need to go on the rides we missed, check out the really cool-looking Aquarium, and spend a nice chunk of time in the water (this time with bathing suits!). And then, we have a few of our nieces and nephews on the Lawless side coming to stay with us the first weekend of August. They'll be in town for a friend's wedding, and we're really looking forward to seeing them all. We're especially eager to meet and see baby Anna. I'm so glad I'll be able to get a new baby fix!! ;-) And THEN, of course, Stephen is going to visit his family in Oklahoma the second week of August. Actually, everyone will be there except for me and the girls; it's going to be a Lawless reunion. I'm sad we won't be able to attend. :-( Hopefully, Stephen, the girls and I will be able to go out there together in a couple years (perhaps spring of 2011?). We won't be able to go next year because we'll have too much going on (and therefore too much expense!): my parents' 50th anniversary (next July)... and our 10th (next October)!

So anyway, as you can see, we've got a lot going on, just like we do every summer. I really wish I could be disciplined and post updates every time something significant happens. Instead, though, I envision a very lengthy all-in-one post in August, detailing all of our summer adventures. I guess it's better than nothing.

I also want to take this opportunity to express my profound sadness over Michael Jackson's tragic and untimely death. I hate that he had to suffer such horrendous abuse at the hands of his father. I hate that he was such a pained soul who had to endure, in Lisa Marie Presley's words, the "awful vampires and leeches". I hate that in life, he was so insecure that he never felt the immense love so many of us had for him. I've always loved him, his music, his talent and his genius. Whenever I see a clip of him dancing on TV, I stop dead in my tracks and watch in awe. No one will ever match his talent. He's a legend, he's one-of-a-kind, and I will forever miss him.

MIA

I know I've been MIA lately. I apologize. There are a couple reasons why I've been away from the computer:

1) The girls and I got pretty sick, and between the three of us, the illness spanned a couple weeks. It was a yucky bug. Not as nasty as the one I got two years ago when I felt like I wanted to die (my sister and I caught it from our nieces and nephew who were in town from out-of-state, and hers progressed to pneumonia), but still no fun.
2) I've been trying to focus my energy into getting back into an exercise routine. I've also been trying to get out and enjoy the outdoors more, which has been really nice.
Like I told Stephen yesterday, though, there just aren't enough hours in the day to do everything I need and want to do, like sleep, cook, bake, eat, work out, shower, care for and play with my kids, read, blog, surf the 'Net, run errands, keep my house tidy, go for walks, watch my favorite TV shows, etc., etc., etc. I know most people feel the way I do. It's frustrating, isn't it?

There have been SO many things I've wanted to blog about lately, but with everything else going on, I just haven't made time to sit down and write it all out. Here are some topics that have been stewing around in my silly little head:

-- rants & raves
-- the reprehensible Sheriff Joe Arpaio
-- a ton of Emmyisms
-- our being sick (including home video)
-- Em's dentist appointment (including pictures)
-- Leah's birthday celebration (including home video)


Let's see if I can somehow nip at least one of these in the bud today. Happy first day of spring!

Test

I'm just testing my KlipFolio program. I don't think it represented my new posts from the other day, so I want to see if this one shows up.

Baby Lawless

Gee, I realized I never officially announced that we're expecting Baby Lawless #2! We of course alluded to the fact here, but I believe a formal announcement is in order.

So here goes...

We're pregnant!!!

I am currently 17 weeks along; Baby Lawless #2 is due the first week of March, 2008. Emily will be about three years and two months older than her baby brother or sister.




And now for a little photo essay of our pregnancy journeys...

[Click on images to enlarge.]



This was when we found out Baby Lawless #1 (also known as Emily Grace) was on her way. This picture was taken May 8, 2004, which was the day before Mother's Day. I can't imagine a better gift!





I love this picture of the positive digital home pregnancy test. This was from my pregnancy with Em. We unfortunately weren't able to get a picture of the positive digital test from this current pregnancy (the darn screen went blank before we even got the chance), so we'll just let this image represent both. :-)





This picture was taken July 4, 2007, which was a couple weeks after we found out Baby Lawless #2 is on the way. Again, we weren't able to get pictures on The Day (which was June 25, 2007 -- already three months ago, wow!), so this will have to do. Personally, I think it's a pretty good "fake". ;-)





Here are the first printed images we have of Baby Lawless #1 (at 6 weeks gestation). At our first prenatal appointment, due to a mix-up in dates, we were told I would probably miscarry her. I was devastated. This ultrasound was taken at my second appointment, about a week later. Here she was, trying to tell Mommy she was there and wasn't going anywhere!! (By this time, I had had bloodwork done and the doctor said that the dates/measurements indicated by the ultrasound and my levels all matched up. We breathed a huge sigh of relief. :-)




Here she was again, this time at 10 weeks gestation. What a difference four weeks made!





And now at 13 weeks. This one's kind of hard to make out. The bottom portion of the image is better, but still tough. One can definitely make out a difference between this and the last one, though!





These are the pictures from Emily's "Level II" (detailed) ultrasound at 19 weeks. This is when they check the baby's spine and organs to make sure everything looks okay. Usually the parents can find out the sex of the baby, but Em wasn't cooperating this particular day. (I guess the fact that we couldn't see "anything" should've been a pretty good clue. ;-) We didn't find out we were having a girl until over a month later, on September 30, 2004.








And now for Baby Lawless #2. Here he/she was at 9 weeks gestation*. I don't know if it's the quality of the image, but to me, this baby looks much more "baby-like" than Emily did at 10 weeks! I'm sure it probably has to do with the angle, too. Em's 10-week picture was taken from the side; this baby's 9-week picture's taken head-on. Their shapes just look very different to me. Emily still looked like a lima bean, whereas this child looked more like a very tiny baby. And to think, this was seven weeks ago. Imagine how different he/she looks now!



* I unfortunately misplaced Baby Lawless #2's first ultrasound picture, taken at 6 weeks (when we first saw the heartbeat!). I'm pretty ticked about that. I'm sure I'll find it around here one of these days, and when I do, I'll scan it and put it up. I was just really hoping to compare BL #1 and BL #2's pictures taken at around the same age! Oh, well.


I have a routine appointment with my OB tomorrow. I don't know if we'll have an ultrasound done (I doubt it), but that's when we'll schedule "The Big One" (the Level II). I can't WAIT to find out the sex of this baby. For some reason, I'm really eager to know what it is. I don't remember being so impatient when I was pregnant with Em, but I probably was. Memory's a funny thing that way. Anyway, I hope to be able to find out if Em's going to have a baby brother or a baby sister within the next couple weeks, before we go to Boston. Otherwise we'll have to wait another month or so (which would kill me! ;-). Once we do find out the sex, I was thinking of posting the ultrasound pictures here, but certain people (who shall remain nameless) don't want to know, so I guess I'll have to refrain. Maybe I'll just put them up on Flickr and mark them private.(?)


So there they are -- Baby Lawless #1 and Baby Lawless #2. This is such an amazing journey. (More on the pregnancy another time, perhaps. Who knows, maybe I'll actually get some belly shots up, too! Okay, yeah right. Let's get real.) It'll be so interesting and so much fun to see how these two children of ours are alike and unalike. Now this I do remember: when I was pregnant with Em, I was so eager to see her face, to see what she looked like. I don't feel quite that same way with this one, although I am of course looking forward to it. I'll be so neat to see how/if the siblings resemble each other. Emily looks so much like me now, it's uncanny. Maybe #2 will look more like his/her daddy. :-)


By the way, today marks two years since I began this blog! (It began with a very insignificant post, but hey, it still counts.) I know I don't post often, and that's something I always hope to change (maybe one of these days I actually will), but I love this journal and am so glad I started it. My only wish is that more people would check in, and if they actually do, I wish they'd leave comments. Thank you to those of you who do check in (and make your presence known!). It makes me feel good to know you're interested.


And a Happy 2nd Blogiversary to me!

Back in Business!

YAY!!!

I never realized how much I love this blog. I was SO SAD when it disappeared. I feared it would be gone forever!

See what happened was, I tried to switch to Blogger in Beta, and *poof!* my blog vanished. Now that it's returned, I'm blogging in beta, so that's pretty cool. I had to REALLY bug Blogger to get it back, though. I wrote them an e-mail and posted tons of messages on a Blogger-Help message board.

I have some things I've been aching to post, but it's late and I'm too tired to do so right now.

Maybe early next week.

YAY!!!

Word Cloud

I saw this on someone's blog way back when, and decided to try it myself. I never posted it, though. I had SnapShirts generate another one for me today (I guess yesterday, technically) so that I'd have a more updated version. I think it's kinda cool. :-)

By the way, have I been blog-happy this weekend or what?

Ditchin' the Rules

I have a text file on my desktop which lists all the things I'd like to blog about. (Whenever something comes to mind, I just open up the file and add the topic.) There are about 10 topics listed in there right now, and it's funny, but I always thought, "Well, I don't want to write more than a couple posts in one day, because I don't ever want to run out of things to write about. It would be better to just write one or two a day than to write a whole bunch at once and then go a long time without writing at all." This makes sense to me, but the thing is, I usually end up going about a week between postings anyway. Ideally I would write something every day, but much of the time, I'm just not motivated to do so. This is sad, too, because I actually really enjoy blogging. It's a minor hobby which suits me very well. I think it's good for me to force myself to write, even if it's about "nothing" and even if it's just a little bit every once in a while.

Now that I've realized that my little rule isn't working out too well, I've decided to just blog whenever I feel like it, and if I feel like writing a bunch of posts at once, then so be it. Like today. Emily's doing a pretty good job of entertaining herself (more on that later), so I'm trying to take advantage. Hence, the multiple posts between yesterday and today.

The last couple of posts were on fresh topics. This next one, however, is one I'm pulling out of my file, so it's actually sort of old by now.

And I'll try to post as much as I can, even though you, dear readers, hardly ever comment! And I know you do visit, because sometimes I even hear you refer to something I've written! Come on now, say something!! ;-)

Kountry Kitchen

[Click on image to enlarge.]


I decided to switch over. FYI: I hate how stupid spammers come on here and post comments! I don't know how they find my blog, but they do.

Emily's 9 months old today. Every month on the 9th, Stephen & I take her picture, but we plum forgot today, reason being we spent the whole day in Ramona. Dad Lawless and the San Diego Lawless families met at the Kountry Kitchen to celebrate Dad's last weekend in town. Mom Lawless comes from Duluth on Tuesday, and then Daniel comes on Friday to help them pack and load 'em up. Daniel leaves next Monday (the 17th), and then Mom & Dad Lawless head for Duluth on Tuesday (the 18th). It will be sad to see them go.

Mom (Rivera) & I are taking Em to get more shots tomorrow, poor baby. :-( I'm not looking forward it. Does any mom ever look forward to taking her baby to get poked and prodded? I think not!

Sorry for the boring post -- I just wanted to write something (anything!) tonight. Now that I have plain old lawlesses.blogspot.com, I don't want thelawlesses.blogspot.com, but the former is under a user ID that I don't particularly like, and I'd like to switch it to the user ID that the latter's under. Not sure I can do that. The only way I can think of is if I delete the blog from the ID that I don't like, and then pick it up under the other ID, but I don't know what would happen to the name of the blog in the meantime. Would it take months to get it back or would I be able to get it back right away? Could someone else snatch it up (even though I doubt they would)? I would hate to delete it and then not be able to pick it up again. That would be a real bummer.

Okay, I'll say goodnight now. I ate too much and my tummy doesn't feel well. I think I need to close out the day and start fresh tomorrow.

I can't believe my baby's 3/4 of a year old! It goes way too fast!!! :-(

Switch?

I'm thinking about switching over to this blog and ditching my original one.

Whaddaya think??