A lovely Saturday

Yesterday while I was waiting for our laundry to finish up in the dryers I drove around our neighborhood a little bit to figure out exactly where the parks were near us (so that I can go there in a couple months with Baby and take walks).  I decided that instead of doing basically nothing today (Saturday), I would bribe Tucker to go on a walk with me at a trail near our apartment by first going on a picnic.  Now, for most people, a picnic is probably not really much of a bribe, but to Tucker, picnic = KFC.  I guess that's the only time that he ever really had it as a kid--and as an adult, as well, I suppose. 

Back before we were married, we tried to have a KFC picnic once at Rock Canyon Park (I think that's what it's called... the park behind the Provo Temple), but it was totally crashed by bees, and I'm pretty sure I made Tucker pack everything up and we ate at his apartment.  Bee free's the way to be!

Anywho, the weather was perfect, the area was beautiful, and there weren't any bees!  Most excellent picnic.  I even remembered to take some pictures while we were there.

The delicious spread.

The colossal 'jug' of lemonade.

Aw, so cute!

Yeah.........

And I thought the lemonade container was colossal, haha!

Our picnic spot.  See?!  Totally beautiful.

Apparently I was wrong

If you'll think back a few posts, I related my story of the tornado that went through Raleigh.  I mentioned that while Tucker and I were hiding out in our hallway I took a few pictures but deleted them because they were gross looking.  Remember?  Yeah, found out that that's not entirely true just a few minutes ago while I was uploading some other pictures.  They are definitely gross looking (at least the portion of the pictures that is me are), but what the heck, I'll post them anyway.

 Notice the grossness.... please disregard.

 The little radio that was our lifeline to the outside world.

There ya have it.  Just thought I'd share.

What's in a name?

Picking the name that a person is going to be called the rest of their life is just kind of a daunting task.  I can understand how some people pick their child's name before they're born because they like a name (or whatever), and I've got a list of names that I like, but every time I think I'm getting closer to pinning down one that I like "the best" I completely change my mind.

What if I get sick of the name a few years down the road?  It's happened before with me.  There were names that I absolutely loved in high school and was positive that I would someday use for my children, but I can't stand them now.  Also, what if the name we chose isn't easy to scold with, or call from across the house, or some such thing?  Seriously stressful.

I'm posting about this because my little name poll has closed, and the obvious winner was 'Charlotte'.  But I can already tell you we don't know if this will be her name.  We're not even sure anymore if we're going to use the names that were on our original "short list".  So there.

We just can't bring ourselves to name little Baby before we meet her.  After all, she has to look like a Charlotte, or an Emmeline, or whatever, if we're going to name her that and we have yet to see her.  Maybe we'll just use the nickname my parents have given her--Roscoe.

Very frustrating.

Bored again

I don't know about the rest of you bloggers out there, but I kind of really enjoy playing with how my blog looks (even though I don't post all that often) and seem to be changing it constantly.  My apologies.  It entertains me when I have nothing else to do. 

Also, I'm noticing lately that I'm short of breath, like, all the time.  I've also found that I hold my breath, thus making my shortness of breath problem even more annoying.  Huzzah for having a person inside of you squishing your lungs!

Holy Moley it's May

It's kind of hard to believe that after all the waiting and daydreaming, May has finally arrived.  I know this probably sounds fairly stupid, but I still don't think it's fully hit me exactly how drastically my life will be changing in a few short weeks.  It's still hard to believe that there's actually a baby inside of me right now even though she moves all the time to make her presence known.  What if I'm not ready for this?

Ha.  Funny that after 9 months of feeling confident that I could totally handle whatever was coming my way with this I'm finally starting to have worries and doubts.  It's only natural though, I suppose.  Still... I'm nervous. 

People have asked me throughout the whole pregnancy if I was worried about labor and such, and honestly, I really wasn't.  I've known for quite some time that I was going to be getting an epidural.  I have no false ideas about me being a pansy when it comes to pain.  Certainly if it came down to it, I would have little Baby naturally if I needed to, but I really don't want to. :)  But now that I could potentially go into labor any day, I'm feeling anxious about the pain that I'm going to experience before I get the blessed relief of an epidural.  Not only that, but I'm really, really worried about the pain/uncomfortableness that will come after baby is born. 

I know I'll survive it all though, and it's going to be one of the best experiences of my life.  And I'm super grateful that I'll have more than one sister-in-law close by to help me out or give me advice if I need it. 

I guess what it comes down to is: we're ready for you Baby.

Bring it on!

Baby Registry

For those of you that care, here's a link to our baby registry: Baby Girl Smith  or if that doesn't work, the registry number is 46776611 on the Babies R Us website.

I'll be posting a note of facebook too.  Only 6 more weeks till she's here !!! :D

Crazy Ridiculous Storm

Yeah, the title pretty much sums it up.

The storm only last about 20 minutes total, or at least that's how long it took to move through Raleigh.  But I tell you what, it was insane.

We were out and about starting at about noon.  First stop was Babies R Us to do our registry (again), and this wasn't too bad.  Tucker seemed to really enjoy looking at all the baby girl clothes, which is both funny and cute.  He even said that doing the registry made him more excited (this would be one of the very few times that he has vocalized this).  After the registry, we headed across Capital Blvd. to a used book store just to look around.  I don't know what it is about used book stores, but we love them.  After hanging around there for a little while, we decided we would go get some lunch, and conveniently, there was a Golden Corral right next door.  Happy day!

It was when we left that we noticed how windy it was.  We knew that there was supposed to be a storm today, so I turned on the radio when we got into the car and one of the local news stations had 'taken over' the music station.  When we started listening to it, they were listing counties that were currently under a tornado watch.  This didn't mean much to either of us, because unless we're looking at a map, we don't know where anything is in relation to Raleigh.  Anyways, we got home and got on the internet to try and look at what was going on (we lost our free cable this week sadly).  This was when the power started to flicker on and off.  Not a good sign.  Not super concerning, but not a good sign.

It was kind of annoying though, because we were now cut off from any updated information about the storm.  I made a comment about how it would be nice to have a normal radio right now so that we could at least hear updates.  This was when Tucker remembered the 72-hour emergency kit that his parents had given us for Christmas one year.  He was pretty sure that it had a hand-crank powered radio in it.  So I dug around for a little while in the closet and found the kit, and sure enough, there was a radio in it.  Woohoo!

Tucker cranked it up and we started listening to the storm updates.  The weather guys were saying that there was now a tornado warning for Wake county (our county).  Everything that they were saying was about a tornado that was on the ground and moving north-east; towards us.  This is when I started to get a little nervous.  They kept talking about how people near downtown Raleigh needed to get to a safe place immediately because they were in the track of the tornado.  We live only a few miles from downtown.  Yeah.  So we decided that we would head over to the Target near out house because it would be safer than our second story apartment.  I put a few things together in my backpack (72 hour kit, phone charger, 2 water bottles, our important documents folder (thanks for that idea Mom), and a couple jackets).

By the time we had this stuff together and had both gone to the bathroom, the rain was coming down in buckets and the wind was ridiculously strong.  We decided it wouldn't be any safer for us to head out now than it would be to just hunker down at home, so we moved to our little hallway and closed all the doors leading into it.  I'm sure it would have been quite funny to see, but at the time, with the news casters being all negative and stuff, it was kind of scary.  I took a couple pictures of us sitting there in the dark, but they turned out horrible, so they've been deleted.

Anyways, they started to report damage throughout downtown and moving our direction.  They started to mention streets that were only about a mile away from us, but from everything they were saying, we decided that the real danger was off to our east, if only just barely.  A few minutes passed and the radio reported that the tornado was now up in the area that we had been in for our outing earlier (yikes), so we came out of our hiding place.  The rain was still coming down, but the wind had died down a little bit.

In the end, our power was off for about 3 hours, and when we could get back onto the internet, we looked up the news website to look at pictures of what had happened.  Yeah, it was pretty bad.  If you care to look, the website is wral.com.  There was some pretty serious damage.  Not sure if anyone was hurt or killed, I couldn't find anything that talked about that EDIT :: Just checked the website this morning.  There are 10 confirmed deaths, but as many as 24 could be dead.  Very grateful that this missed us., but regardless, it was a crazy-ridiculous storm.