Baby Bump

I don't know about you, but I just love seeing pregnant belly pictures! Everyone's bellies look unique and, even with different pregnancies, never look quite the same twice. When I was pregnant with Madeline I was pretty good about taking belly pics once a week and documenting everything...well, up until the last month or so and then I got lazy. For this pregnancy, I hope to be better about it!

I feel like over the past week or so (I'm now 16 weeks), my belly bump has really made its appearance. It's probably not as easy to tell from the front...


but from the side it's (hopefully) pretty obvious that there's a baby in there! :-)


For the sake of comparison, here are photos of me at 16 weeks with Nicholas (one of the only photos I took). I felt much bigger at that stage and I was carrying him really high, whereas this baby seems to be lower, like Madeline was. Hmmm...does that hint at a girl, perhaps? I'm still guessing boy, but I guess we'll know for sure in about a month! :-)

(August 2007)

Baby Hats

A couple of months ago, I was sitting next to my best friend Allison's sister-in-law, Kim (aka: AWESOME photographer--photosbykimberly.com) during the worship & message before Bible Study. She was busy knitting away on this plastic circle loom. Now, I gave "real knitting" a shot a couple years ago...and got a 3-inch scarf out of it...before I got too frustrated and gave up. But I watched her and it seemed so easy...loop yarn around each peg in the circle, push it down, do another set of loops all the way around, take the hook and pull the bottom loop over the top and start over--voile! Baby hat! So I ran out to the craft store, got a $4.00 loom and some inexpensive yarn (plus some "fancy" yarn I had left over from my failed knitting attempt) and bam--I made a baby hat in about an hour! What a fun new hobby! (This will especially come in handy if, God forbid, I ever have to be on bedrest with this pregnancy!!) I'm going to keep making them when I have the time & donate them to an organization called Stitches From the Heart (stitchesfromtheheart.org), who donates homemade baby hats, sweaters and booties to preemies and newborns in over 1000 hospitals across the country.

Here's my handiwork so far! :-)

Tulip Splendor

To celebrate the awesome weather we've been having, my mom and I took Maddie to the Wooden Shoe Tulip Farm in Woodburn, OR today. Talk about a perfect day--80 degrees and not a cloud in the sky! We thought the visit was all about the flowers (which are stunning--a rainbow of color as far as you can see!), but soon discovered there's a ton of fun for kids!

They had tire swings, food booths, inflatable slide, bouncy-house, a trampoline-harness jumping ride, two tractor-train rides, hay bale climbing structure and a toy ducky water race.

Nana & Maddie lucked out with the last car on the cow train. (My mom said I really "lucked out" by not going...I missed all the bumps and dust in their faces!)

Cool horse-shaped tire swings.

Maddie was in love with this playhouse, decked out with a kid-size picnic table, chairs, kitchenette with sink, and tons of play food.

But the pony rides topped everything! I was actually surprised when Maddie asked to go on them...I thought she'd be scared! (I figured she'd inherited that fear from her mother, even though my dad and sister owned horses, so I was around them a lot growing up.) She hopped right on, grinning all the way, waving and saying, "Yee-haw! Giddee-up horsey!" :-)

A beautiful end to a wonderful day! :-)

Happy Easter & a surprise!

We had a wonderful Easter weekend filled with friends and family! We attended a Good Friday service at Village Baptist with my parents and Bonnie & Greg Knopf (family friends for the last 33+ years, with whom we spend every Easter). Saturday night was a pizza feed at my parents' house with my cousin Thane, his wife Amy and their kids Ethan, Avery and Hadley, who had traveled down from Seattle. Since Sunday was supposed to be typical Oregon Easter weather (rain and more rain), we decided to do our egg hunt outside on Saturday night. My parents' house has a million places to hide eggs outside, so the kids were loving it!

"cousin" Hadley (age 1) at the egg hunt

"cousins" Ethan & Avery searching for eggs

Sunday was church at Radiant (a start-up church in Gresham) and one of the speakers was actually the author of the popular Christian book The Shack, which was pretty cool! (I'd just started the book last week.) Then off to Nana and Papa's house for lunch with the Knopf's & their son Brent, Jason & Cheryl Newell and their daughter Lucy, Thane & Amy and their kids...so 16 of us in all! A full house! As always, amazing food flowed freely...roasted shrimp w/cocktail sauce, skewers of cantaloupe/honeydew/fresh mozzarella/prosciutto with a basil marinade, spiral glazed ham, sweet potatoes, gratin potatoes, roasted asparagus, roasted carrots, corn pudding, tomato/asparagus/goat cheese salad, and fresh breads. Good thing I wore a forgiving dress so that I could fit it all in!


Actually, if you look closely at our family picture, you might notice my tummy looks a bit "poochier" than normal. Yes, I did eat a lot that day, but there's actually another reason for it--THAT'S A BABY BUMP!! That's right folks, we are praying that all goes well so that we can welcome another Little One into the Frank family in mid-October! So far everything has been going well, the baby is growing on schedule and has a strong heartbeat. I'm now about 14.5 weeks along and very glad to be in my 2nd trimester (I'd never had morning sickness before, but I sure was introduced to it this time around!). The next big news will be finding out whether it's a boy or girl (my gut is leaning towards boy at this point) in late May! Can't wait! :-)

Lucy Newell (age 1)

Thane, Amy, Ethan, Avery & Hadley

It's so hard to be ladylike when you're playing!

Little artist

Here is a video of Madeline drawing on the chalkboard and narrating as she draws. :-)

Easter eggs

Maddie and I had a great time decorating Easter eggs today. She'd been eyeing the dye color cups for the past two weeks, so I'd finally just hid them in my closet until today. :-) I saw a cool idea on Martha Stewart's website to use a clear wax crayon (luckily already included in my Paas color kit) to write a name on each egg before the dye, so we created egg "placecards" for our Easter dinner on Sunday. Such fun! Maddie was very careful and did a wonderful job "helping"...she just wished we could keep coloring more eggs all day! :-)

Horray for Spring & All Things New!

So now that it actually feels like Spring around here, my camera has decided to come out of hibernation. It's pretty sad when you realize that you have ZERO pictures from the month of February and like 6 pictures from the month of March. Was our life really that boring?! :-)

Maddie has been totally in her element during these past few days of sunshine. She's always been an outdoor girl and she'd be perfectly happy out there all day. We've had to pry her off the front lawn after the sun's gone down and the street lights have come on! We spent most of Saturday working in the yard and doing a spring cleaning on the cars, inside and out. Maddie helped Keith wash the truck and could've cared less that she got soaked from head to toe...that's half the fun! As she scooped bubbles from the bucket and ran to wash the truck time and again, she'd yell, "Look at me go, Mommy! Look at me go!" :-)




So these pictures will serve as the "before" shots for what's to come. Ever since she was an infant, Maddie has been obsessed with twirling her hair. She does it when she's tired, when she's watching a show, when she's chillin' out. The problem is that she does the same spot over and over until it's a hopelessly tangled rat's nest and the only way to get rid of it is to cut it out! Lately she's been pulling the knots out herself, and at least once a day she'll hand me a big wad of her pretty blonde hair. I keep telling her to stop or else she's going to be bald! So to help remedy the situation, the only thing I could think of was a haircut. She's never had a "real" one before and I got tired of her hair perpetually looking like she just rolled out of bed. So today was the big day!

We headed over to a great kids haircut place called Little Clippers in Clackamas. It's like a kids' dreamland in there! Toys, climbing structures, cool cars instead of boring chairs! They get to pick out a movie/show to watch during their haircut, pick any car to sit in, and at the end they get a certificate with their lock of hair, a balloon and a lollipop! Maddie's going to be begging me to take her there all the time now. :-) Here's our cutie pie...





When I look at this picture, it really hits me--my "baby" is not a baby anymore! She'll be 2 1/2 next month and she's really a big girl now, all grown up. I'm totally loving this age with her--her independence, curiosity about the world, love of learning, being a total chatterbox (she narrates her every move, all day long!) and how her adorable personality shines through in everything she does. :-)