Half Way!

I can't believe I am already 20 weeks along! 5 months! I will actually be 20 weeks in a couple days but oh well I'm calling it 20. I'm half way there and I know the second half won't be anything like the first half but I'm excited!

I started feeling the baby at 16 weeks! It was about 3:00 in the morning and I was half asleep when I felt it and I couldn't go back to sleep for about an hour I was too excited. The first few times I felt it, it was for sure a kick. I had no idea it would be so strong and it would scare me everytime! But now I feel mostly the little flutters and twisting around in there. It is so awesome. Billy was able to feel it kick last night for the first time. I don't think he was expecting it to be as strong as it was and was very surprised. He yelled, "IT'S ALIVE!" haha. Ever since I started feeling it I fall sleep with my hand on my stomach so I can feel it. It just makes it all seem so much more real now.

We get to find out what we are having a week from Tuesday! The 24th is when I'm scheduled. I will actually be 21 weeks because Billy couldn't come if it was this week. He is at a clinical all week long. I can't even tell you how excited I am to find out! It's been fun to see the votes on what people think it will be. If you haven't voted please do!

So far I love being pregnant. The sickness is over and I am very glad for that. I have a very strong sweet tooth. (But only for candy, not for desserts. Kinda strange) I have been very surprised at how much my back and hips hurt already. I've been told a few times that I already walk like I'm 9 months along. Then I turn around and have this tiny belly. Yikes. It all started hurting around 11 weeks. Not looking forward to what it will feel like when I'm really 9 months.
Here are just a couple pics of the last few weeks.

17 Weeks

20 weeks. (Today after church) People are starting to notice! :)

Baby Shower

Yesterday I drove to Laramie to go to my best friends baby shower. It's crazy that me and Josie were married a day apart and now are having babies a few months apart. They chose not to find out what they are having, so I am anxious to know. I don't know how they do it. She is due on December 21st and is such a cute prego lady! I'm really glad I got to drive down to see her again before she has the baby. She had a good turn out to her shower and got lots of fun gifts. And as usually we played all the baby games. For once I tied for first in three of the games! That's definetly a first I'm usually terrible at those games.

Sarah, Me, Josie and Alicia were all there together and we had a great time catching up. I love that we are still best friends even though we don't see each other much.

A Zombie and A Fairy

Our Halloween costumes never really correlate. They are always last minute things we do so this year Billy was a Zombie and I was a Fairy. Next year hopefully we can think of something early enough so people actually know we are together. Billy had a project to promote the Occupational Therapy program, so I tagged a long and we went to a Halloween carnival at the college. Along with candy we slipped an OT pamphlet into their bags so the parents would see it. They had buckets of peeled grapes for eyeballs, noodles for brains, pretzals for bones, and cherries in jelly for blood. And they had to guess what each one really was. It was fun to see all the 200 kids that came through the carnival.

I think my favorite was a little girl dressed up as Cruela DeVille. She had the black and white wig, the fur coat and everything. Before the kids stuck their hands in the buckets we had them put on hand sanitizer. NO germs! And this little girl held out her hands and said, "Hold my rings!" So I took them off for her and gave her the germ X. We all giggled at her a little and she looked at us and said all smugly "Please don't laugh at me," and went on her way. Talk about playing your halloween character!

I did Billy's makeup and if I do say so myself, he looked pretty creepy.

How would you like to see this in your rearview mirror at night?!

A Zombie wearing a seatbelt... :)

I thought it was fun to wear the eyelashes. I've always wanted to try them. Although they almost drove me insane!...they were pretty fun. Although I think the glue that came with it was close to super glue...not fun to yank off.

I don't know if you can see this video very well, but at the carnival they had a fog bubble machine! It was the coolest thing I've ever seen. It was a regular fog machine but along with the fog were these big gray bubbles. I thought they were large ping pong balls at first. But then they pop when you touch them. I had to get a video so you can see how cool it is. I could have played with this all night.

Halloween Crafties!

I love decorating for holidays. It was one of my favorites things growing up. Changing decorations to fit the occasion is always exciting to me. I love the fall and decided I needed a few more Halloween decorations. And since Billy was gone all last week on a clinical I decided to put my lonely time to use and make something. I found a pattern for this cute little swag on the internet and thought I would give it a try. They had a pattern for the shapes you could print out and everything. It was a pretty simple project but very very time consuming. You have to cut out all the little shapes (even the eyes for the ghosts) and then sew them together and stitch around the edge of everything with different colors. It took me quite a while but I think it was worth it. It turned out so cute! If anyone wants to make the attempt here's the web site:

www.holiday-crafts-and-creations.com/homemade-halloween-decorations.html

A close up. The decoration on the internet only had two pumpkins and three candy corn but I thought the pumpkins were cute so I did three of them. But I realized that they are the hardest to put together so that's probably why they only made two.

The complete project

Then I also bought these thin cardboard

letters and bought some halloween scrap paper

and ribbons and voila! another decoration!

And what's halloween without carving pumpkins?
Johnny, Callie and Mandy came over for the annual carving.

Billy's and my pumpkin all lit up. Mine's the dopey one.

We all decided that Johnny won the best pumpkin award with his elk bugling. Even though I gave him the idea, he still gets all the credit. Pretty cool huh? I couldn't get a good pic of it in the dark with a candle because it didn't show bright enough in the picture.

Great News!......

WE ARE PREGNANT! No beating around the bush here. We are now expecting and could not be happier. I am due April 7th so I am 3 months along now and everything is going great this time. A couple weeks after we found out we decided we couldn't wait till my first doctor's appointment so I went and had an ultrasound done by a lady who does it for free cuz she needs so many sessions for some kind of certification. So we were able to see the tiny little babe in there! And we were able to see the little flicker of the heartbeat inside. It was so awesome. And such a relief to be able to see that. This made me not so anxious for my first doctor's appointment. Billy took a little video of the heart beating on his phone:

So my first appointment went great and she said everything looked fine. My second appointment was last Wednessday. And this time I got to hear the heartbeat. It was amazing. I will look forward to hearing it again next time.

Now being almost 13 weeks I will be glad when the sickness starts to wear off. It hasn't been to bad cuz I've still been able to go to work, but at the same time hasn't been any fun at all. Everything still makes me gag. But being sick is such a good sign.

So we just wanted to get our good news out there! And we can't wait until November when we can find out if we are having a baby boy or girl! AH!! SO HAPPY!

Lately...

I have a little bit of catching up to do. First of all, a couple weeks ago we had our first ever Mckell Allred family reunion. It takes callin it a "family reunion" to get everyone together now I guess. This was the first time we were all together at the same time since Billy and I were married. We all drove to Oxbow Oregon where Kory and his family live. For once they didn't have to go anywhere and we came to them! We all drove/flew a total of 8,890 miles to be together. But oh it is so worth it! We all caravaned it from Boise to Oxbow and all arrived there at the same time to invade Kory and Lisa. Here's what we did for the weekend...

• Went on a tour of Hells Canyon Dam
• Went to the Visitors Center
• Made felt hats that the kids decorated
• Played with the Kittens
• The guys went shooting
• Had races
• Played badmitten
• Went for a hike
• Picked Blackberries
• Swam in the river
• Painted pet rocks
• Had a manicure/pedicure for the girls
• Had a water ballon toss
• Finger painting
• And took tons of pictures and laughed and ate in between everything

It's always so sad that wonderful times like this can only last the weekend. But we will take what we get! And Monday morning we all left for our long long drives home. Here is the new family picture we got (which will be out dated in October when baby Daxton arrives).

Couldn't leave this unblogged (hope you can enlarge it)

Then the next weekend Clay and Joni and there two little girls came for the weekend. We went camping by Alcova on Friday night. And to our surprise didn't even get wet! We left after a rainstorm, decided to go anyway, and were lucky and came home just before another one hit. We got to go on a little hike Saturday morning.

Macy and I were pooped by the time we got to the top

Summer seems to have gone by so so fast. As it always does. Billy will be hitting the books hard again starting on Tuesday and won't be stopping till he is completely done. He has had a good break for the summer though and is ready to get going again. Well I think thats the latest with us. Hope everyone is great!

The Wild, the Wet, and the Wonderful!

Wow, what a weekend. Mom and Dad came down since they wouldn't be having any company for the 4th this year. We are so glad that they came. We had a blast! We definitely made some long lasting memories thats for sure. They came Thursday night. Billy had to work for a few hours Friday morning so while he was gone mom, dad and I went on a little walk on the river. This is Mom at the edge of the water.

cute cute

Then after lunch and a nice nap we went miniature golfing. Miniature golfing is a perfect activity because it doesn't matter your age or how skilled you are at golf it is always fun.

Billy and his lucky blue ball.....notice the clouds....hmm

Dad pointing at his ball which has somehow ended up in the water. Thats wierd.

Mom and I both got a hole in one on the same hole. Fun!

I like this picture. Again notice the threatening clouds. We had a few more holes to go and it started to rain so we ran inside to take our clubs back. Then it started raining harder and harder so we waited inside for it to quit. The building we were in was flooding. Water was coming through the tops of the doors and through the bottom of the doors and was creeping along the floor everywhere.

So when the rain died down just a little,we decided to make a run for it. Billy ran to get the car and we came after him. We couldn't BELIEVE the HUGE puddles there were already!

This was one of the holes that was completely filled with water. We had quite the crazy drive home. We tried going one way but there was so much water going under the interstate that we couldn't get through. We turned around and tried a different route.

We were in downtown Casper and the drainage in the streets couldn't keep up with all the water. It was insaine. Never been in a flash flood before.

Tons and Tons of water. At one point that water was coming up over the hood of the car. Thats when it got a little scary. But our car made it through. Some others we not so lucky. While we were going really slow at a light a guy in an avalanche came zooming right by us and his wake covered our car and scared me and mom to death.

So that was quit the adventure but it turned out all right cuz since we hadn't finished golfing they gave us rain checks and we went back the next day for free! :)

If you go to http://tribtown.trib.com/post/Groups/WyoWeather/blog/flash_flooding_in_casper.html

there is a slide show of other pictures taken of the flooding in casper.

Day 2 and mini golf. Billy won the first day and Mom won the second day. Ya Mom!

A cool tree outside the golf course.

Then after lunch and another nice nap we went to the park and while me and mom read, Billy and Dad played catch.

Saturday night we went to the minor league game. Casper Ghosts against the Ogden Raptors.

Dad was just like a little kid in a candy store. He loved it! Then we drove to a good spot and watched the fireworks before another rainstorm came with warnings of a flash flood. What a fun and enjoyable weekend we had with them! We just did whatever we wanted, when we wanted. And if we wanted to take a nap then thats just what we did!

Love you Mom and Dad!