For my brother, who doesn't believe in Facebook....

Burt,

This is what what modern day cloth diapers look like. No safety pins involved! The last one is one that I made for Sam for Halloween!
























Also, here are my most recent pregnant pictures. This is in response to Burt saying, "You're due in 10 days. You must be HUGE." See for yourself, little brother.

Getting Excited (in more ways than one)

Today I am about 38 weeks and 4 days pregnant. I'm not anywhere close to giving birth, which is fine with me because I really want to go to the Navy Ball on Saturday night. I bought a dress at Ross in Salinas back in February, right after I found out that I was pregnant. It still fits! Now, I just have to decide on which shoes to wear (which is hard when there are 50+ pair of 3-4 inch heels in my closet). Yesterday, my doctor told me to consider wearing flat shoes. Oh, he doesn't even know.

Since we are on the subject of my doctor...I'm so glad that I'm almost done having to see him on a regular basis! This is going to sound totally wrong, but he is a good looking guy, and he is really friendly and nice. I hate that! I wish he was ugly. It just makes me feel uncomfortable to have him check me for dilation. The military assigns you a PCM (primary Care Manager) who becomes the default every time you make an appointment. The last few times I've made appointments, the person asks me, "with Dr. Smith?" and I want to say, "no". But, I would have no clue what to say if they asked me why. "Uh, can I see another doctor please, because I think Dr. Smith is cute and I don't want him touching me, especially in the pink parts. Please assign me to a lady doctor, or at least an ugly doctor. Thanks." I figured that I was going to have to get checked at my appointment yesterday, even though I knew I wasn't even close to dilated. Brad worked from midnight to noon, so he was home. I really wanted him to come with me, but he wanted to sleep (understandably). He's probably going to want to come to the next one after reading this!!!

Anyway, the reason for the title of this blog is not because of my doctor. It's because I'm excited to get dressed up for the Navy Ball and go out and enjoy myself with my Husband before Samuel arrives. And, of course, I'm excited about the impending arrival of Sam!!!! This might be TMI, but I haven't let Brad touch me over the past couple weeks for fear that any hanky panky might bring Samuel into the world early, messing up our Navy Ball plans. So, of course, Saturday night all the Hanky Panky that we can handle will be allowed. Perhaps Sam will even be born on Stacey's birthday (13OCT), though I think Joseph's birthday (21OCT) is much more likely.

You might be thinking that I should not be so obsessed with going to the Navy ball, but you must understand that I love getting dressed up, I love wearing tall shoes, I love making my hair look fancy, I cannot wait to see Brad in his NEW fancy Chief dress whites (you should be excited about this, too), we already paid $120 for the tickets and have FREE childcare for Jocelyn. Plus, we've decided that we are going to win the grand prize that evening -- a 52" HD LCD Flat Screen TV. I'm tired of arranging our living room around having to put our current TV in a corner because if we put up against a wall it sticks out 4 1/2 feet! It's a monster. I think it weighs about 900 pounds. The movers packed it on top of our dresser on the way here from Japan, and then had to buy us a new dresser.

This blog is a bunch of randomness about being excited, but the next one will most likely be super duper excited due to Sam being here. So, come back and check it out if you are interested in all the gory details of him coming into the world!

Fly Bys

Well, I have not posted a blog in nearly 5 months. This might seem kind of odd because I have been in front of the computer quite a bit, and have had a lot to share. I think the problem is that I have discovered Facebook. I update people in little 1-3 sentence blogs twice a day and that makes me feel as though it is unnecessary for me to post longer blogs here. Plus, I don't think anyone reads this anyway.

The last time I published a blog was, 2 days before we left Japan for good. Here are some things that have happened since then:

* Team Hayes spent a month in Nebraska with Brad's family.
* We moved to Hawaii, got a house, and got semi-settled in with Amanda and her two boys living with us for the first 2 months
* We took a trip to California to spread my Dad's ashes and also to celebrate being a part of the Tjerrild family at Bass Lake
* Brad got promoted to Chief Petty Officer (BIG deal)
* I have had 3 very uneventful OB appointments. Yes, 3 appointments in 5 months. I sometimes forget that I am even pregnant.
* I have spent hundreds of dollars on cloth diapers for Jocelyn and Samuel, that will in turn save me thousands....I'm sure of it.
* I have made some great new friends and enjoyed plenty of time at the beach.

There is lots more that has happened, but that seems to cover the main points. Five months is a really long time to try to look back and write about all the experiences that I've had in that period of time...but it has just flown by! I can't believe that I am going to have a new little baby boy in a couple of weeks!

I'm going to try to update this blog more often. I will also aim for it not to be about a bunch of stuff that everyone already knows. We'll see how this goes. :)

It's about time...

Lonely

Most of the other wives on base right now are lonely because their husbands are leaving for a while...but I am lonely because my stuff is leaving and I probably won't see it for at least 2 months. So sad. Who needs a husband when you don't have a bed?

Craziness

This blog has the potential to be very long, but I will keep it as concise as I can.

To start off, exactly one week after I posted my last blog, my father died. It was completely unexpected. Though it has been over six weeks since it happened, and I have been able to make it through most days without crying over it, the sadness still feels so new. I don't know how long it will take me to get over the shock, but I feel like I will never be used to the fact that he is gone.

Brad, Jocelyn and I flew back to California for his memorial. Though the circumstances were pretty much the saddest ones that I could imagine, it was nice to get to see all of my siblings, their significant others, and their children. My sister, Amanda, prepared an amazing slide show of photographs from my Dad's life. It can be viewed at the website for her new slide show making business www.slideshowdvds.com . Below is a short slide show of pictures form our trip.

When we got back to Japan, things weren't going so peachy for me. I had started planning Jocelyn's birthday party, but decided to postpone it. I had to take three final exams for school. I couldn't really eat much and was feeling really sickly thanks to baby number two. I really needed to start getting the house organized for our move, but every time I tried to figure out where to start, I just got so overwhelmed that I cried and did nothing (that doesn't work). I decided to take this term off of school just because my anxiety levels were too high and I wasn't handling life as well as normal. We will be leaving Japan for good on the 16th of May. We will then spend over three weeks in Nebraska and head to Hawaii on the 9th of June. I think that I will be fine as soon as we get settled in Hawaii. Going to Bass Lake in July is going to be a nice break and then hopefully life will just get back to normal after that...well, normal for me anyway!

Baby number two, Samuel or Caelyn/Carolyn/Marilyn/Jaquelyn, is due on October 17th. I already have our family Halloween costumes planned out. Boy or girl, the new baby will be Yoda. Jocelyn will be Leia, and Brad and I will Anakin and Amidala.
















Of course, I will not be spending $160+ on these actual costumes. I will make them myself. Look forward to how adorable our photos will be!

Jocelyn had fun on her first Easter. We didn't decorate/hide eggs or anything. But, we did give her an Easter basket with a white chocolate bunny and she loved playing with the pink plastic grass that was in it. She looked so cute in her dress.

Brad has been working A LOT. Two weeks ago he had duty Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday all in the same week (duty is when he has to stay aboard the ship on watch over night from 5 pm to 7 am). He is so happy that he doesn't have to be deployed with the USS George Washington again this summer. He is really looking forward to being on shore duty (no deployments) for the next four years. We are considering coming back to Japan next summer so that we can climb Mt. Fuji. Climbing season is from June through August and he has been underway all summer for the last three years.

I flew to Hawaii last week because I found a minivan online that I really wanted. I searched Cars.com and found 57 dealerships on the island of Oahu. Out of 57 dealerships, I could only find 5 used minivans under $10,000! There was only one that I actually liked so I bought a plane ticket to go buy it before someone else did. After I bought the ticket, Brad did a Carfax vehicle history report online and discovered that the van had been sitting on the lot since October. Oh well. I got to see Melynda for a couple days. I got a really good deal on the van and an added 4 year 48,000 bumper to bumper warranty.


On Jocelyn's actual birthday (March 29th) we gave her some gifts and a cupcake. These are the pictures from that day.

On the day of Jocelyn's birthday party (April 26th) she was not feeling well. She had a fever and didn't want to eat anything. She pushed all of her gifts away and was just a big grump. She slept for most of the party. These are the photos from that day.

The day after her birthday party, we gave her another piece of birthday cake to let her try again. She ate the entire thing, with a fork, and didn't get a stitch of frosting on herself (not even her bib. However, she did get some frosting on the tray of her high chair that she wasn't going to let go untasted....
















Well, that just about covers it for now. It might be a while before I get the chance to update again because the movers are coming a week from today to take the computer...and who knows when I will see it again.

It's been three months!!!

I really do not have a good explanation as to why I have not posted any updates over the past 90 days. It does seem as though I have been spending most of my time in front of the computer. I think that, perhaps, by the time I am done with my homework, I am just sick of sitting at the computer and do not feel like typing up a blog after typing up so many other things. Ughhh. This term has been one of the hardest so far with the traveling I did last month. Also, one of my instructors thinks that her students do not have lives, jobs, kids, or other classes to attend to. I like to read, but this woman is making me despise it, assigning up to 300 pages per week. Gag. There is a reason I am taking classes online...because I have other stuff to do!!!

Anyway, our first Christmas with Jocelyn was great. We had some friends over for Christmas Eve dinner. I got a crock pot, a jacket, a fancy passport holder and new straightening iron. Brad got a video camera, a Wii and a new golf bag. We also went to Tokyo Disney the week before Christmas to experience all of the decorations. It was so pretty and we had a fun time even though we didn't get to go on any grown-up rides.




























We celebrated our third wedding anniversary on New Year's Eve. We went up to the New Sanno Hotel in Tokyo with our friends Jaymes and Hillary for a party that was being hosted up there. It was themed: New Year in Venice....I think. It was decorated like the canals during Carnivale and we wore silly feathered masks and had a blast.















January was pretty boring. Brad was studying for his Chief test and I was studying for my finals for term 2 and registering for classes for term 3 (which was quite difficult because the three classes that I wanted to take were not being offered online this term. Ughhh).

We discussed taking a vacation of sorts at the end of January. We considered flying up to the Sapporo Snow festival, taking a trip to Beijing and checking out the great wall, or even hopping down to Singapore. In the end, we decided to go back to Nebraska for Brad's best friend's 30th birthday party. Brad took leave and we waited for a flight to Travis, but they kept getting delayed. Mount Osama erupted covering the Yokota flight line with ash, causing it to shutdown for almost two days. That didn't help our chances of getting out of here. After a week of no flights, Brad gave up, but I still wanted to get on a plane. So, Jocelyn and I hopped back to California, hung out with Jodi, Dean and the twins for a few days then drove up to Oregon to see my mom. We drove back down to California and spent a night with Kylie, and a night with my Dad. We got to see cousin Jane and cousin Joseph, as well as future cousins Madison and Griffin. Jocelyn had a blast visiting Uncle Burt and playing with his two cats. After getting to see everyone, and putting 1000 miles on the rental car, we started to miss Daddy. We stopped by Stockton to pick up my friend Hillary and her daughter Madisyn, then we headed to Travis AFB to wait for a flight home to Japan.















The four of us stayed in the terminal at Travis for two nights then we boarded a flight to Hawaii, hoping that we'd have better chances of getting to Japan from there. We didn't. There were no flights. But, we got to spend six days with Gabe and Melynda! Hillary got to see Hawaii for the first time and we had a great time, despite the stress of trying to get home. I cannot wait to move there in two months!!!

























Hillary and I both made it back to Japan this past weekend, safe and sound with our little girls. Jocelyn and I were both excited to see Daddy. We are happy to be home. Now I just have to do lots of homework. Boo.

Oh, I forgot to mention that I found out on Valentine's Day that Brad and I will be having another baby in October. We are so excited!

I will leave you with a slide show of adorable Jocelyn photos and a video of Jocelyn bouncing in her bouncy seat...so cute!