Mamaw and Papaw

Mamaw and Papaw came to visit for the day yesterday. Ella always makes the most of her time with them, and, of course, they just eat it up! :) I had to work last night, but when I got home this morning, I was cracking up at these pictures Chris took of them cutting a rug!
Nice moves, Papaw! haha!
Yes, Ella is wearing her Halloween bucket on her head. :) She always goes and grabs it when she starts dancing these days.
Looking good, Mamaw! :)

Say cheese!

Awww- I love it!!

Happy Thanksgiving

We didn't get to travel today because of work, so we took the day and filled it with fun, family activities. We wanted the day to be a celebration of things we are so thankful for- namely each other, our precious daughter, and our growing son. We thank God for generously pouring out his goodness on us this year.

I took so much joy in cooking our Thanksgiving feast. We all enjoyed it so much, we decided we should do this dinner more than once a year (probably not so great for our waistlines though!).
Ella was more concerned with the turkeys on the table. While we were eating, she kept saying, "Mommy, they keep looking at me!"
By the way, I loved my "wine", aka sparkling grape juice. Ella thought it was pretty special that she got to have some "big people drink", too. :)

Ella got a special Turkey Day treat- a new Mickey Memory game!! We've lost many of the Dora Memory cards, so she was pretty thrilled. Getting ready for a mean game... After several rounds of Memory (that Chris and I kept losing!), we got to work on our gingerbread train... It's looking great, guys! Showing off the finished product :) The finale to our day...enjoying the Christmas lights Daddy hung today... Chris was really hoping to put lights all along the roof line, but after a couple trips up there, he realized the pitch was a little too steep to be safe. Maybe we'll figure something out later. Anyways, I love it, Baby! And I'm so glad you made it off the roof without breaking a hip! :)

Surprise!! We're having a...

BOY!!!
Our family received some super exciting news yesterday- we're having a BOY!!! We are a little shocked, but absolutely ecstatic. For some reason, we thought for sure we were having another sweet, little girl- we hadn't even entertained the thought of a boy! However, we are thrilled(!!!) with the idea of raising a son. I am so excited! Most importantly though, we were glad to hear that our baby looks big (he's about 14 oz at this point) and healthy and everything is still going great.

Seriously, there is no doubt this is a boy! By the way, these Davidson's aren't at all afraid to let it all hang out! haha!!

Hey, Ella- how do you feel about having a baby brother?!
Looks like she's pretty happy about it! :)

I'm still in shock here...

I wish I could have taken a picture of Chris when they said, "No doubt about it, it's a boy!" The smile on his face was just beautiful!!!

Alright, little guy, just keep growing in there! We'll wait patiently out here, but we can't wait to meet you!!

Ella's "baby"

Ella has been cracking me up these last few days. It seems she thinks that because I have a baby in my tummy, everyone else does, too- including her and Daddy! Anytime Chris and I are talking about my stomach (and how all of a sudden, it is growing by leaps and bounds!), Ella will pull up her shirt and say, "Look at Ella's tummy and the baby sister in there! It's getting SO big!"

She has also heard me say, "Be careful of Mommy's tummy- we don't want to hurt the baby" whenever we're rough housing and I take an elbow or kick to the midsection. So today we were playing with a bouncy ball and the ball bounced up and hit her in the stomach. She spun around and frowned at me and said, "Mommy, be careful of my tummy!! You're going to hurt the baby sister!!" haha!

By the way, we don't know that it's a baby sister- Ella switches every week between that or baby "budder". :)

Wow!

Most of Ella's scribbles, I have to say, I can't quite decipher. Today though, she drew her first "recognizable" smiley face. Check it out!
"One eye, one eye, nose, and mouth!" as she put it...
She also put together her first 24 piece puzzle- all by herself! Way to go, Ella!! You're growing so fast!

The dining room

We have been working hard on the dining room- painting, putting up wainscoting, a chair rail, and crown molding. I am so excited for it to be finished! It's going to be beautiful! I will definitely post some pics of the finished product. Of course, Ella has been in the thick of it all, "helping" to paint, measure and hammer.

"Does this look right, Daddy?"

"Don't worry, guys- I'LL measure it!"
And I have to mention- Ella said one of the sweetest things tonight and just melted my heart. At prayer tonight at dinner, we asked Ella if she wanted to thank Jesus for anything, and she said, "Thank you for the baby in Mommy's tummy and that Mommy's tummy is getting bigger and bigger." So sweet!

Saturday night

We went to a birthday party for Chris' boss last night. While Mom and Dad were busy having adult conversation...

Ella found tons of ways to keep herself busy. She LOVED playing with Danny's dog, Davey Allison.

She made herself right at home with Danny's daughter, Hailey, and her friends. She thought she was really something getting to hang with the big girls...

She also provided some evening entertainment on the piano...

Wow, what a show, Ella!!
We had a fun time and this morning, the first words out of Ella's mouth were, "Can we go back to Danny's house today?"

New best bud

Ella has rediscovered her giant pink elephant. This is her best bud these days- "he" has to be everywhere she is. He's fun for cuddling...
And running and jumping on...
And he's always waiting to greet us when we get home...

When I asked Ella what she wanted to name him, she thought for a minute, then said, "Hippo!" I think that's a perfect name for a giant pink elephant!! :)

A quick, little trip...

...to Kohl's ended up a huge fiasco this morning. Ella woke up a little rambunctious today, and all that extra energy only intensified when we got to the store. My little monkey was hiding under racks, climbing on shelves, and knocking multiple things over. When we finally made it to the checkout counter, I felt pretty grateful nothing more serious had happened. I couldn't wait to get out of there and away from all those "Can't you control your child?!" glares.

Ella was right next to me (I know this, because she was hiding behind my leg because the lady in line behind us was trying to talk to her) and I turned away for a second to hand the cashier my money. That's when I heard the lady gasp and say, "Oh, no!" I turn around and Ella is on the ground on her back with the cart pinned on top of her. Of course she let out a blood curdling scream and one of the other cashiers says, "I'll go get the manager! Do you think we need to call 911?" What? 911?! I scooped Ella up and, even though she was crying, she was already starting to calm a little bit. She wasn't bleeding and seemed more scared than anything. Before I knew it, the manager comes running and tells me an ambulance is on the way (!) and I need to just have a seat. After much discussion, I finally persuaded him to cancel the ambulance and reassured him I'd call the doctor if I needed to. I was thinking 'seriously, I'm not an idiot here' and Ella was not even crying by this point. She was looking at all these people like 'hey, what's the big deal?' Anyways, we had to fill out an accident report and state that I didn't blame Kohl's for my parental negligence (that's not what it said, but that's how I felt). I have never been so glad to get out of a place as I was at that moment!

Once we got in the truck, Ella seemed fine and was asking for a strawberry milkshake "to make my boo-boo feel better". Then, as all mothers do (I think), I started second guessing myself, wondering if maybe she had really gotten hurt and I was ignoring it. Then the ICU nurse in me starts thinking of all the things that could go wrong with closed head injuries and I worked myself into kind of a panic. I tried to call Chris to ask if he thought I should take her to the urgent care center (even though we were just there last week when she dislocated her elbow!), but he didn't answer. So, I ended up driving home to take the watch and wait approach. So far, she seems okay and spent the whole afternoon jumping around here. Of course when she started getting tired at naptime, part of me started questioning whether I should let her go to sleep and ended up keeping her awake an extra hour. Eventually, I figured I would let her sleep just a little bit and then wake her up and make sure she's okay. Do the rest of you moms do this to yourselves, too?!! I'm feel like I'm making myself crazy here. Anyways, that's the story of our day. Needless to say, I don't plan to revisit that particular Kohl's anytime soon.

Cupcakes

Working hard on some cupcakes this morning...
Enjoying the fruits of her labor... yum!

Cracking up

Over dinner tonight, Ella was filling me in on her weekend with Daddy. When she started talking about getting chocolate milkshake in her nose, she started laughing and couldn't stop. She thought it was such a funny story. Chris and I were cracking up because she was laughing so hard. It was pretty cute...

The belly pop :)

Everyone (that I don't see very often) keeps asking if my belly has "popped" yet. Well, it definitely has this week. No sucking it in any longer! I've got the ball belly going on, or as Ella says, "Mommy, you're bumpy!"

Somewhere around 18 weeks... (yes, my mouth is full of food- eating is what we pregnant girls do best! That's okay- Jared said it pretty well yesterday when he said, "I can't wait to see you on Thanksgiving- I figure you'll be huge by then!" haha!)

Fun at the "park"

This weekend was King's Island's last of the season, so we decided to take Ella for one last hoorah at the "park". She talked all day of going to the park to ride the "Diego cars", the "too-too train", the "heli-topters", and the "tarousel" (those are all her favorites). She was pretty excited. We knew the Halloween Haunt was going on, and the website said certain rides in Nickolodeon World would be closed. Well, when we got there, all of Nick World was closed and so was the big carousel! :( Needless to say, there was not much else a two year old could ride, and Chris and I didn't like the idea of one of us going to ride something and leaving the other with Ella with nothing to do (even though there were lots of neat Halloween things going on that would have been perfect for a date night!). Anyways, we decided to play some games and that made Ella pretty happy. Her favorite was skee-ball, even though she could hardly get the ball to the target and kept throwing it into the other lanes. :)

We tried and tried, but could not get that fuzzy Minnie that we wanted so desperately!!

With this game, Ella hit the jackpot and got a ton of tickets!! Yea!! We got to cash them in for all sorts of junk, er... cool stuff! :)

And Ella finally got her light up sword she'd had her eye on all summer. Alright!

Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween, Everybody!! Hope you had as much fun as we did. Even though Ella wasn't quite sure what we meant by trick-or-treating, she was pretty excited to put her "pretty dancing dress" on and get ready.
She thought Daddy's glasses might look good with her costume...

She was hesitant at first and didn't really want to go to anyone else's house. She didn't like the idea of the other kids taking "her candy" from Daddy, either. :)

But after watching the others get lots of candy, it didn't take too long to convince her to give trick-or-treating a try...

I'm pretty sure she was thinking, "Hey, this is easy stuff! Mommy does all the talking and all I have to do is look cute and hold out my bucket and it gets filled up with candy!" :)

We didn't go too many places before she wanted to run home and show Daddy her loot.

She also wanted to make sure "her candy" was still there. haha!
Yummy sucker!

All done with the trick-or-treating. She was ready to hang out with Daddy and chow down on candy!

I headed to work, but Chris said Ella held up for a couple hours, helping to pass out candy and having fun.

They had tons of trick-or-treaters, but lucky for us, we still had some candy left over! Yea! :)