Calling It In... + New BB Pic (28 Weeks)

Well, it's been a relatively quiet couple of months as far as first quarters go in the Bailey household.  Which is not to say that we haven't been busy, just that it hasn't been particularly noteworthy.  The busyness has been largely due to the fact that our Sunday afternoons are completely consumed with LTC practice.  On a typical Sunday we all leave the house to go to church at 9:00 in the morning, and Jamie and I do not come back until about 9:00 that evening (Denine gets to go home with the other two briefly between lunch and when she picks me up for lifegroup).  We have had our niece's birthday (ice cream themed) one weekend, which is always fun-yet-hectic.  We had my birthday dinner at Olive Garden with my 'rents a couple Fridays ago, although my birthday actually landed on a Sunday this year, so I got to spend it sitting at the church.  We are now in the brief two-month period during which Denine gets to tease me about being an old man before her birthday hits and we're the same age again.  Other than, our weekends have been mostly eaten up by yard work and errands and other "ho-humeries" of life.

The biggest news lately - at least if you were to ask the kids - is that I decided to buy them (and myself) the Skylanders video game with tax return money this year.  For anyone unaware, this is a video game with the brilliantly evil marketing scheme of selling the characters you can play as in the game as separate figures, excluding the three that come with the starter set.  To play them, you place them on a "portal" that hooks up to your game console and they show up in the game.  Which is pretty cool because the characters' levels and abilities are saved on the actual figure, so you can theoretically take them into anyone's game and it's still your character, exactly how you last played them.  The hook is that, as you play the game, you'll encounter areas that require a certain element to unlock, and you only get three of the eight elements in the starter.  You also collect "Soul Gems" that unlock a special move for a specific character throughout the game, and are then shown a trailer for that character.  At the outset my plan was to buy the starter set and enough characters that we'd have at least one of each element between us, so we could access everything.  There were two things I failed to factor into this plan.  The first, which I was unaware of at the time, was the fact that each of the thirty-two characters in the game actually plays differently, so it's a lot of fun to play the different characters; I was expecting something more like, say, a Lego game where there are a handful of character types, but each character of that type plays almost identically (i.e. all the Jedi play the same, all the shooters play the same, etc).  The second thing I overlooked at the time is my tendency toward being an OCD-fueled completionist; unfortunately, these things are selling like hotcakes and are almost impossible to find in brick-and-mortar stores without a large degree of planning or luck.  So, several hours of ebay later, we now possess all of the characters that are currently out (excluding the exclusive that comes with the 3DS bundle, which Jamie plans on buying).  Now I just have to keep my eyes open for the last two sets of characters that are supposed to come out later this year.  Oh, and then it'll start all over again when they release the next game in the fall...

Jamie is officially on his new seizure medication and things seem to be going pretty well.  We're still stepping him down off the old stuff but so far, so good.  I think.  It had gotten to a point that he was having one or two seizures a week, but they were usually in the morning before school.  They were causing a minimum of disruption, thus I wasn't finding out about them until much later.  They seem to have stopped now that he's on his new meds, though, excluding one staring spell at church last week.  So hopefully this will work out better for us. 

Denine still thinks she's bigger this time around; again, for comparison see 26 weeks & 29 weeks.  It's hard to tell with that particular top, though...

Apparently, the difference in posting on a second pregnancy blog in comparison to your first pregnancy blog is similar to the typical disparity between the number of pictures taken of the first and second child (of course, we had a digital camera with our second and not with our first, so that didn't really apply to us, but I digress).  This pregnancy has been much more low-key than the last, owing primarily to the fact that most of the stuff that we had to get done before the baby got here has already been done already.  Unfortunately, this has caused us to be a little lax in getting the few things that did need to be done, done.  Now here we are at twenty-nine weeks, having barely even thought about crib bedding or nursery decor for Gracey - we know we're doing another rag quilt for which we have bought about a third of the required fabric, and focusing on doll-themed Americana to coordinate with what's already there, but that's about it.  Our procrastination has actually paid off to an extent, though:  we've managed to get a hand-me-down crib and small chest-of-drawers from some friends that were phasing out their nursery furniture, and to get a used double stroller that would have cost us $150 new for $60 from someone at work.  Now, however, it is time to kick things into high gear.  The baby-centric to-do list is as follows:
- buy a bassinet
- refinish chest (painting it blue, to contrast the red dresser)
- finish selecting quilt fabric

Okay, that doesn't looks so bad after all.  I must be leaving something (or several things) out....