Nate's News

For those of you who don't know - Mark and I have started a bit of a tradition with my side of the family. It started with Shelly. We knew we were pregnant and I'm not the type who likes to announce my own news to everyone I know (not sure why that is, it's just hard for me) so we decided that it would be fun for the missionary to be the first to know (they're never the first to know anything!) and also let them be the ones to figure out how/when to announce it. It seemed like a perfect win-win! About the only downfall with Shelly was that she happened to be born while my folks were off in Paraguay picking William up from his mission. We thought it had been so much fun that we did the same thing when we found out about Jason (turned out it was closer to the exact same thing than we thought - he was born the night before my folks left to pick up Matt from his mission). Well when Nate left he made it quite well known he had pretty high expectations. There was going to be more than 2 years between the kids if we had to wait all the way until he got home though! I didn't think I wanted to wait that long. I was thinking that maybe we could have 2 by then (yeah, right!). Well the week before Christmas Nate got his wish (even mostly as good as his expectations). We e-mailed him to tell him we were expecting out third and let him decide when/how to tell everyone. He decided to wait until the phone call home the next week and it was almost the last thing he said before he got off the phone. It was quite shocking. I was in the family room listening on mute over the speaker with most of the family while my mom was in her bedroom doing the actual talking to Nate. I'm not certain that everyone in the room believed him when he first said 'Oh, by the way, Rachel's pregnant!' Then add to it that I was due around the time he was supposed to be coming home... We really didn't plan to have it work out quite that well - I promise! We'd been off birth control for over 6 months, it just happened to work out... It's kind of fun to have a running tally of how long everyone's been home though... Just figure out how old one of our kids are, and you've got it. The only exception is Robby who got home before I was even married, so that doesn't count - but he got married pretty much one year after he got home, so he should be able to do that math all on his own... :-)

Well, here's some pictures from my first doctors appointment. They've decided my due date is July 9th or 10th (which about 2 weeks before Nate will likely be released - so it's close but not quite). I had thought it might be later since I have a history of going over (any my mother went 2 weeks over with all of her kids) but it seems I might not have to suffer quite so long. I still might tell everyone it's not due until late July or even August just so they'll leave me alone about not having a kid yet! ;-)


If you can tell what these are of, I'm impressed! I can mostly make out the second one, but the first might as well be a child drawing with black and white chalk... :-) We've decided to not deal with the stress of telling the kids yet (they won't get it, or if they do get it they won't understand being patient, and they have other things to worry about), but Shelly and Jason were there when they took these pictures and Shelly looks at those and says 'those are pictures of Mommy's belly!' It's kind of cute...