A short note of sunny encouragement.

I feel like I've dropped off the face of the earth. I hear that's okay when you're nine months pregnant. I don't feel like blogging a lot because I feel like all I will do is complain. Because this is the fun part. Speaking of which, can I just say I hate false labor? I never really had it with the girls so it's a new and fun experience. While not really physically painful, it's driving me batty. Also I'm probably going to have a nervous breakdown. Stupid contractions. Also, our furnace broke and our house is cold. That is definitely helping my emotional well-being. Also, Jessie is starting a new job next week. This is a good thing but for some reason it seemed prudent to put it in the middle of my list of awesome things. So you can see why blogging is at the top of my list of priorities. Just one of many things being left on the wayside as I travel into irrational hormonal hermitage. Other things include dishes, laundry, cleaning, entertaining my children, cooking, church, and Words with Friends. So you see, this is getting serious. I'll let you know if the governor declares a state of emergency. Until then, direct all inquiries through our disaster management guru Jessie, who manages to maintain a happy demeanor by being amused at my eccentricities. Thank goodness for long-suffering spouses. Until next time, I'll be on the couch timing contractions and strategizing baby eviction plans.

All about pregnancy and me and pregnancy and babies.

I have a little bit of a one track mind lately. Can you blame me? When your every move feels like a freight train, you start to get a little obsessed with your stomach. And if it will ever return to normal proportions. We have five weeks until the due date, which sounds really close but not nearly close enough. Today we got a little crazy, and since Madeline is still obsessed with chains from Christmas, we combined our obsessions and created this:

It's a little hard to see, but you should be impressed. This is our Ali Baba countdown. It's highly complex and amazing. We have two more weeks of white chains. Then we move into yellow, which means CAUTION! FULL TERM! 10% chance of baby or maybe snow! But based on past experience, this is a depressing phase in which I will hopefully wonder every day if maybe today is the day, but nothing will happen except an excess of walking and drinking pineapple juice. My birthday has a special chain with balloons and birthday cake, because Madeline has expressed great concern that there is birthday cake this month. Then on Valentine's Day we have the special green link in honor of my due date. Green for go time, obviously. Not that we'll have a baby by then. Then we move into red territory. Red meaning danger: Cami is liable to be extremely hormonal and dangerous and ready to consume castor oil. Red meaning: We love you Ali Baba, but you're late and if you know what's good for you you will exit the premises immediately. Then, at the top, a handmade visual depiction of our new little man on the 22nd, which is my induction date. This was not my choice. I have no qualms with being induced the second I hit my due date. I also love epidurals and other medical interventions. I'm probably on some dangerous mother list somewhere. But back to induction: My doctor is out of town the week of my due date, so it was early induction or waiting it out. Woe is me. I'm going to be an unhappy blimp by the 22nd. Speaking of which:

I feel like I'm bursting. I know, other women have been bigger. But I feel like this is the biggest I've ever been pregnant, and I can't look away from my slow descent into rotundity.

Anyway. You've probably been thoroughly inundated with pregnancy updates now, so we'll give you a break. Thanks for sticking through. I promise that in a month there will be a reward for your patience. And mine. I have been assured that no women has ever been pregnant forever.

Happy New Year. Check.

Ha. Did I say I was working on a New Year's post? I'm only about four days late. Blame it on the fun we're having trying to get two girls to sleep in the same room. On the bright side, they've been sleeping in a little bit later than usual, which has the unintended side effect of proving to me I can be functional at seven if I don't have to wake up an hour before that. But I have thought about some New Year's goals. Mostly they are pretty short term. Survive until I have this baby. Try not to let my kids run wild. Try to keep my house in some semblance of order. Huge goals like that. I've decided to keep my sanity by not trying to make huge goals right now. So in honor of New Year's, I will instead give you a list of goals we've already accomplished this year, because we are awesome. Because that's much more fun than coming up with more things you have to do.

1. Move girls into the same room. Check. We won't mention the fact that we're still miles away from smooth napping and bedtimes. But their beds are in the same physical space. Score.

2. Get ready for baby. Check. Crib, car seat, bassinet, clothes, hospital registration, diapers, binkis, etc. Jessie got motivated and now all systems are go. The only problem is we've still got six weeks until D-day. Drat it all. And we haven't settled on a name yet. But babies don't need names. Just diapers. So we can totally cross this off.

(Random belly picture to show you how hard we are working on this baby thing. We take our goals very seriously.)

3. Put away Christmas. Check. We have successfully killed the Christmas spirit. All cheery decor has been safely stowed and hidden away. The front room is back to normal and Christmas treats were consumed and converted to fat. The piles of toys all over our house with no home are a different story. We don't talk about that.

4. Party like it's 2012. Check. We are fun machines. We've attended New year's parties, played Jessie's new Ticket to Ride game, attended a Jazz game/girls night, eaten eclairs, made cookies, and basically just been awesome. We're exhausted. But awesome.

5. Fulfill public speaking duties. Check. Jessie was supposed to give a talk in church on Sunday, but didn't have to because he spoke after a returned missionary who kindly used the whole meeting and got Jessie off the hook. Jessie knew this would probably happen, so he wasn't broken up about it, and I feel like this has probably gotten him off the hook for talking for another year. And more importantly, gets me off the hook to have to talk with him. Score.

That seems like a good list. Suddenly I feel very accomplished and productive. For the first time this year. I love revisionist histories. I feel like you all should go set New Year's goals to be as awesome as us. Hope your year is a ball of fun so far.

The post Christmas lull

Hello world, are you alive? Glad to hear you survived the Christmas holidays. We did too. Mostly. Christmas Day was awesome, but Christmas Eve night was even better because Madeline decided to be awake for most of it. In desperation we let her sleep in our bed for the first time since she was counting her age in months. In return for this generous gesture, she kicked us a lot. So no one got much sleep. Well, Kimberly did. So she woke us up at like 5:30. Silly girls. But other than the lack of sleep, Christmas was great. The girls got everything they wanted and a lot of things they didn't know they wanted. Kimberly was super excited and just bounced up and down for an hour going "wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow wow!" Madeline kept trying to open all the gifts she bought for other people because she thought they were for her. Jessie finally got to open his belt, and for good measure, contracted an awesome cold. Good times were had by all.

Because we were all sick and tired this week, we decided it was a good time to turn the girls world upside down and traumatize them, so we switched them into new beds. Actually, we've planning to do this for a while because I knew both girls were getting new bed sets and so we set Christmas as the deadline. Otherwise I'd still be procrastinating it in a year and poor Ali Baba would be sleeping in a bassinet until he was three. Surprisingly, they have handled the transition well, and Madeline is now in a twin bed and Kimberly is in a toddler bed. I thought Madeline would start a mutiny at any disruption in her routine and that moving a thirteen month old into a bed would result in a lot of escaping, but neither doomsday scenario came to pass, and both girls have been sleeping better than they have in weeks. Go figure. The next step is moving them into the same room, but I feel leery that our good luck can continue, so Jessie will be engineering that adventure. I'm just in charge of manufacturing a baby for the now vacant crib. Lucky me.

Well, we'll leave you with that until our highly anticipated New Year's post, for which I have to think of some new year's goals. I'm thinking lose twenty pounds by the end of February. And/or get more sleep. Too ambitious? Yeah, I thought so too.

Merry Christmas, and to all, some more sleep

Merry Christmas everybody. I know, I'm a bit early, but let's face it: I'm in no way going to blog on Christmas. Or even tomorrow. So you all get your bit of Christmas cheer now. We've been done with the shopping and baking (ha! baking! we're pretending there was some of that going on this year) and all the decorating and whatnot for a while now, because I didn't want to fight crowds or be stressed or forget anything. Only now it's two days until Christmas and we have nothing we need to do, which feels a little weird, and a little stressful, and I'm almost tempted to go get something meaningless from the store just to fight crowds and feel like I'm being productive. The house is mostly clean, thanks to a couple Christmas parties I was forced to clean for, the presents are wrapped, and the kids are sufficiently cranky and sleep deprived to guarantee barrels of fun. It's okay, because it's giving me lots of practice waiting impatiently for something to happen which I'm sure will come in handy in February.

We are excited for Christmas though. I'm ridiculously excited about the presents we have for the girls, and I hope they get excited too. Kimberly has gotten some practice opening presents so I think she has the idea this year, as long as she's opening someone else's present before the actual day. Madeline, of course, gets it completely, and knows exactly which presents under the tree are for her, how many chains she has to take off before Christmas morning, and how many chocolates she is allowed to consume every day. The only thing she doesn't get is the idea of a secret. Two seconds after we wrapped Jessie's gift she was yelling across the house, "Daddy! We have a secret surprise belt present for you! It's a surprise! It might be a belt...?" So I'm glad I didn't let her help wrap many presents. All of our ornaments are on the top half of our tree because Kimberly has a problem staying away from shiny round objects. And our Christmas lights get turned on and off twenty times a day, so if you drive by our house, we're not signaling for help with Morse code. Just celebrating, the Warner way. Hope you all have such a Merry Christmas. I wouldn't have it any other way. Well, I wouldn't say no to having the holiday involve a little more sleep. But other than that. Just perfect.

This too is supposed to pass.

So I realized I spelled adios incorrectly in my last post. It's been bothering me for a week, but not enough to go fix it. Embarrassing. I crave your forgiveness for not being a native Spanish speaker. A poor excuse, but there you go.

I know you missed us. Don't mind my long absence. We were just celebrating our monthly week of sickness. This time it was stomach flu. The joy and excitement we experienced were abundant. The girls got it first, and then myself, and then Jessie. Odds are pretty good you've had the pleasure of making its acquaintance recently if you live near us, so there's no need to explain all the fun details. But at our house it was a nasty bugger that put you in constant misery for about 6-8 hours and then left you wiped out for a day or so are that. Good times. Anyway, that's pretty much dominated our week and left little time and motivation for fun things like blogging, cleaning the house, or living. We did, however, manage to pull off a family white elephant party in the aftermath, which was fun, and included such gems as a pet rock and a shave and play Barbie. You are totally jealous right now.

Before/during/after the stomach flu, we had anther fun plague called Attack of the Tantrum, which mostly involved Madeline losing all sense of reason, independence, and sanity. Temper tantrums over everything, waking up twelve times a night to throw more temper tantrums, tears and hitting and defiance, needing help and supervision for every menial task and activity, and did I mention the tantrums? Our house is a little short on sleep, patience, sanity, and peanut butter. One of those is not Madeline's fault. As for the rest, we're at wit's end on how to restore our child to the rambunctious but lovable and manageable child she once was. We're guessing it has something to do with her father and insecurity about her status as queen of the world, but we'll let you know when Freud gives us a definitive diagnosis. In the meantime, pray for our eardrums and our neighbor's eardrums.

I throw my hands up in the air sometimes.

Hey ho. I feel like it's time for an update on life, but there's also nothing really specifically important I have to say either. We've been busy, but most of it is non-blog material. I know, I blog about pregnancy and potty training, so my readers must have strong constitutions. But even I have my limits, and I feel our secret practices to join the Russian tightrope specialists are best left out of the public eye. I don't want to disappoint though, so let's see what Warner hijinks we can release to the press, shall we?

Madeline continues to be a delight, in that she alternates between making me laugh hysterically and testing my patience to the utmost limit. She has become master in procrastination, and is finally starting to skip naps regularly. At the most opportune time, as per her history, because just as she's eliminating one nap a day, I'm looking into adding a few, and this results in a real scheduling conflict. In her defense, it can't be easy getting stuck in the house a lot because your mother's energy levels are about on par with a sloth. We're exploring new realms of mother daughter fighting, bonding, and sumo wrestling. All in good fun.

Kimberly has decided to be grown up. I routinely forget that she barely turned one, because she wants to do everything Madeline and I do and is pretty good at most of it. She still only says a few words, but she repeats a lot of sounds and tones and makes herself understood pretty well. She runs, climbs, wrestles, gets her own snacks from the pantry just like her sister, and pretty much rules the roost. Either I've forgotten what Madeline knew at that age, or it's true that the second child benefits from an older sibling's example, because she just constantly amazes me with what she understands and can do. I'm thinking of selling her to the circus.

Anyway, there's some crumbs for you. We'll just be hanging around, waiting for Christmas and attempting to better ourselves with fine literature and gourmet ice cream. Audios.