Getting ready...

The last few weeks before Baby Boy Clark arrived, we made ourselves pretty busy :)  Besides the growing pains and aches, we tried to get the house and baby room all ready, and then take a few fun pictures together.  We also did a maternity photo shoot, waiting for those pics, and will put them up later.

Below are a few pics and happenings during July and the beginning of August.  I have to say, we weren't too worried about baby boy coming early, although we did hope so after I began to be dilated around July 13.  But, even with that, we didn't pack our bags until really AFTER the due date got here.  Not sure why because we did lots of shopping and painting and cleaning, but just couldn't get those bags packed easily.

The belly:  I really loved having our little guy inside of me.  I wrote about this already, and only at the very end did I start to understand the uncomfortableness of it all.  But I LOVED feeling him move, hiccup, kick me (ouch!), and just be the active guy we thought may come out of me someday.  I really wasn't ready to have him leave me 24/7, it has been easy to care for him and bring him along and I was just starting to imagine having to lug that car seat around and then protect him when he's not right there with me.

Photos: We tried to do a few fun photos with the 3 of us since mostly it's just been profile shots of me these past 9 months.  These shoes just melt my heart - we have them by our door with our shoes too and they just make me smile every time I come home.

The Room:  It took us all the way to the due date to get his room completely ready, but if I wasn't working 60+ hours a week at the end, it would have been easier and I would have had more time.  Below is David putting together the crib, turned out beautiful.  And also you can see the rocking chair we purchased as well, definitely going to get some use (and I even already have rocked in it before bed hoping it would calm my belly down a bit).  We actually had to return the first rocking chair but the second has been great.

Here's the bed theme, we've now hung this on the wall - final pictures will come soon.

And we also did some painting - shelves and a sign.  I feel pretty crafty.

Nails: David also spoiled me and painted my nails (on my birthday) in preparation for the hospital visit. I picked dark blue - poor D, this was his first painting experience and blue isn't the easiest to paint in the lines.  He did great as I tried to teach him from where I was sitting.

Target:  So we already love Target, but most of Jellybean's items will be coming from Target too.  After the first Braxton hicks contractions July 13, we made our list and headed to the store to get anything we hadn't gotten yet that was essential.  And really, we still didn't know what exactly we needed, but we did pretty well.  We also found his first outfit to bring him home in, awe.

39ish weeks: Here's one of the last good belly pictures before things were too busy and also just a waiting game.  Between monitoring, work and waiting - we were just ready, even if we weren't, we were ready to meet this baby boy and hoping he'd get here before David started dental school.  The pressure was on because of that one for sure.