I'd just like to advance this notion on behalf of women who are "great with child" everywhere. Do NOT ask somoene close to her due date if she is "still pregnant". We don't like it. The closer we get to our due dates the less we like it. Once we're past our due date it makes us think violent thoughts about you and due to pregnancy hormones there are no promises that these urges will be met with restraint. Besides, if you are standing there talking to us it should be fairly obvious whether we are pregnant or not. If you're far-flung family on good terms with us the chances are that we're not going to forget to tell you about the birth of a child.

So, that's that. Moving on.

Since my last post things have improved. I don't know exactly what happened, I guess the baby moved farther down, but I am exponentially more comfortable than I have been for weeks. It's been about a week now that I've felt so much more comfortable that I c ...

It doesn't seem possible, but I am more pregnant every day. I do NOT remember being this uncomfortable for so long with Benjamin. I know I was uncomfortable toward the end, I just don't remember it starting so soon and being so disruptive to my life. I think part of it might have been the fact that I didn't really *have* to do anything last time. I wasn't working and it was just me and Andrew so I guess I could sleep when I was tired, be lazy when I ached and seriously do nothing all day without any kind of major disruption. Two year olds, as it turns out, are not really very into sleeping, lazing, and doing nothing so I don't get to do very much of it. At least I don't have a job though. I can't imagine having to get up and go to work everyday. I try not to think about still being pregnant at Christmas, or New Year's...Yikes!

Now, all that said, it's really all a matter of perspective. As much as I complain about being uncomfortable and impatient I'm not really as bad as I sound. ...

Last night we were all sitting in the living room playing cars when I noticed that it was raining just a little. The military has a habit of stationing us in place without real weather and so I try to draw Ben's attention to it when we have some. Plus, on a personal level I love the rain, mostly storms, but I'll take what I can get.

Anyway, this was just a nice drizzle of rain....you know, *drip, drip, drip, drip*

I say: "Ben, what do you hear?"

He stops driving his car and listens for a minute then says, "COFFEE!"

Yes, that's right. Instead of hearing soothing nature sounds my son thinks that it's the sound of coffee brewing...

The other day I went upstairs to get Ben up from his nap when he started banging on his wall. So, I was in there and we were talking.

I said, "Were you whacking your wall?"

Ben: "No."

Me: "What were you doing?"

Ben: "Making music."

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We were reading the magazine that Matt & Laura brought for him. One of the pages has pictures of words and you're supposed to pick out which ones rhyme. I was trying to show him how the words sound the same so I was just saying the rhyming words:

Me: Saying each word as I point to the picture "Log, frog, hog".

Ben: "That's a pig."

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Ben had his two year check up today. We were standing at the reception desk filling out forms when an elderly, plump, bearded man walked in. Ben looked him up and down and immediately started calling him "Santa Claus"... :) I'm pretty sure he didn't hear him. If so, he graciously ignored him. :)

Overall today, Ben was actually a bit more of a pistol and not so much "sweetness", but I guess that happens from time to time.

At one point though he was playing with this Fisher Price Little People "Christmas Train" that we bought for him last year and just pulled out of the closet. It has three train cars, an engine, an animal pen, and then the caboose, which features an oven with a working door and baking gingerbread cookies. It also has a Santa Claus, a Mrs. Claus who is holding a cookie, and a reindeer.

As Ben was setting it up and playing he first noticed that Mrs. Claus was holding a gingerbread cookie in her hand. This made him very excited as he just learned about gingerbread cookies while Matt & Laura were here. He calls them "cookie men". So first things first he pretended to eat the cookie man out of her hand.

At that point he lost interest in Mrs. Claus and picked up ...

We had a very fun Thanksgiving at the Hatter house. I am a firm believer in the fact that Thanksgiving is one of those holidays that goes best with lots of people. Family is generally best, but I'm pretty sure that we haven't been at either of our homes for Thanksgiving since we joined the military. So we do the next best thing and celebrate with other poor military suckers who can't go home either.

I observed my own personal moment of silence during Thanksgiving preparation and celebration for the Busby family who due to geographical differences were not with us this year. We've co-hosted Thanksgiving with them every year since joining the Air Force and they were greatly missed this year!

This was the first year that I had cooked a turkey though and so I decided to get a nice turkey to at least get me off to a good start. We got a Trader Joe's fresh-never-frozen-no-pesticides-vegetarian-fed-salt-brined turkey at a respectable 16 pounds.

The ...

I am 37 weeks pregnant. This is not hard for me to believe because I'm huge, barely sleeping, and ready to have a baby! I'm still having lots of contractions though nothing that is evidently putting me into labor. While I would dearly love to have this baby out of me I am of course happy for every day that he gets a little bigger and healtheir inside. I'm also still not sure I'm ready to have two! :)

Our house is a lot more ready now though. We powered through most of my to-do list over the course of a weekend and few days. The clothes and blankets have been washed, oohed over, folded and put away. The bassinet is out of the closet (though not yet assembled). The baby carseat is freshly cleaned and the baby bundler is inside of it to keep the tiny little guy warm.

The coming home outfit has arrived although I haven't sent back the first one that was way too big. Our current one is adorable and actually the right size (and since I'm writing this after the fact a ...

Nothing earth shattering today, minus the fact that I'm actually blogging, just a few minor points of interest from our day today.

My goals for the day were to do the weekly cleaning, laundry, and get the guest room to a point where it's not hazardous to visitors. I'm going to consider the day a success, judging by the standards of a mom. Meaning that we got a late start because Ben decided that he needed held more than I needed to get anything done. Then once we were actually started we got a slow start because Ben decided he needed to "be a helper". Charming, but inefficient. So we bumbled our way through a few things, but mostly got no where fast. There was a moving box on our table this morning from where I had Andrew get my sewing machine down for me last night. Ben saw it this morning and asked me, "What's in this big box?"

The high point of the morning was when Ben accidentally peed on the patio. He thought the resulta ...

My Ben is two years old today. I cannot believe. Just to start my blog with a cliche, it's really true it's amazing "how fast they grow up" and "just yesterday he was a baby" and all those other teary-eyed little sayings. (We had his "birthday party" tonight. I'll do a separate birthday party blog, but this blog will probably end up being way too sentimental to include our day's festivities.)

This is not (intentionally) going to be a brag-on-everything-that-he-knows entry. But just to get that out of the way let me say that Benjamin Mark is everything I could want in a toddler. He's hysterical, too smart for my own good, and perfectly bad. But really, my goal here is more of a character sketch of the Ben that I know, see, and love on a daily basis.

He inherited his dad's musical genes/genius as opposed to me faking my way through marching band.... At church on Sunday after each song fast or slow he would cla ...