Memorial Day Weekend & 26 Weeks

Let's smash a few posts all into one, shall we. p.s. I'm halfway through writing this and it's long... I am SO sorry... I will add pictures, I promise!

Memorial Day weekend! To a military family there are few words that bring more happiness than "Ninety-Six"meaning a 96 hour weekend or 4-day weekend... I mean obviously leave, liberty, homecoming all top it. But few others ignite the same excitement as this one. This will be our last 96 together for a while so we wanted to make sure it was lived to the fullest. I went into work on the Monday before and just thought I would double check and make sure that I ACTUALLY had that Friday off work. I normally only work Mon-Thurs, but with events and other things at work, it seems like at least 2-3 Fridays a month I end up working for some reason. My boss informed me that we had a staff meeting that day at like noon, so I would need to come in just for a bit. There are only 4 girls total in my office, and we all get along great so I have no problem with staff meetings. I was just a little bummed that I had to work while Riley would be off.

Friday morning arrived and I had my long weekend to-do list ready to go! I was accounting for an hour- 1 1/2 TOPS for the meeting and had a list a mile long of things that had to get done with Rye getting ready to leave so soon. We went out and got breakfast and then headed back home to get started. Riley asked (very nicely I might add) that we spend a little time that morning trying to organize the garage. See when we moved in, Riley left the next day. I did not want to live with boxes surrounding me, so I gladly left everything that was not an essential out in the garage to wait for his return. We started a little after 9 with pandora blaring through the house from my phone hooked up to our sound system. Propped the inside garage door open so Deezul could wander in and out, and got to work. I let Rye know that I HAD to stop at 11 to shower for my work meeting. We powered through for 2 hours, 11 o'clock hit... I tried to quit and go shower, but somehow Rye convinced me to just go a few minutes longer, cause we were almost at a good stopping point. 11:20 hit and I started stressing and told him we were done and had to shower. I hurried and showered, got dressed, and then sat and waited on the couch for Rye to get dressed to drive me to my meeting. He took his sweet time.. as usual. The entire drive over I was probably telling him how late I was and how I said I would be there at 11:30 and I really hope they weren't irritated with me... bla. bla. bla.

He dropped me off with a kiss and said he'd see me in an hour, and I headed inside.

Little did I know that the girls in my office had planned a surprise baby shower and invited all of my preschooler's and their mama's to it. Since I teach a "mommy and me" preschool, I know all the mom's very well. we have all become pretty good friends over the past year. Almost all of them are moving to new duty stations over the summer and I am EXTREMELY sad about this. After preschool graduation, chances are slim that I will ever see them again. It was so sweet of these girls to want to come together and celebrate with me. A lot of them have known me since pregnancy number 1. And one of them has known me since right before the fertility treatment started. She shared in my anxiousness of the testing, The joy of knowing that we were both "normal enough to procreate", The excitement of getting pregnant... The tragedy of losing that baby, and then returning the next week to a classroom full of small kids. She stood there when mom's would make ignorant comments about how I shouldn't try for kids, and I should be grateful I didn't have any yet... and then she would quietly "tell them off" in the most polite way, and make it very clear that was not a subject that should be discussed in preschool. I am going to miss her.

Wow, sorry I got a little side tracked. Any-who, The baby shower was amazing. I seriously have some amazing people in my life. It's nice to be reminded occasionally that people actually DO care about me more than I think they do. I found out that Riley had been in on this whole thing and had been secretly texting one of the girls at my work all week about it. I never caught on!

After that we headed over to the barracks to pick up 2 of the guys before going to check out some deals at pearl harbor. If you remember right, I worked enough overtime hours while Riley was in California to get me a mac (to replace my 2nd or 3rd broken laptop in 2 years, seriously I am convinced that pc's are not made to last.) I also worked enough to be able to get Rye a tablet. We had been discussing a few different brands, but when I went to purchase my mac the guy was selling us on all the cool ways you can "share" with an iPad and mac... We both then decided that an iPad would be best, but Rye wanted to wait until memorial day to see if they had any good deals. I gave him crap ALL month saying that it's apple and wouldn't have a big "sale"... He shut me right up. The iPad 3 was recently released. Which means that the iPad 2 is MUCH cheaper than it was just a few weeks ago when I wanted to make the purchase. While at pearl harbor we checked them out and ended up getting him one for $100 cheaper than it had been a week prior. It felt good to finally make a long awaited and planned out purchase... but it was still hard swiping the card for that amount of money. So now we are both cool kids with Apple products :)

Saturday- I told Rye we HAD to complete some of our to-do list that was neglected due to a super long baby shower I had not planned on when making our weekend schedule. Our good friend Jon joined us that day for our adventure of registering for a baby. We first stopped at a running store for Riley to pick up his packet for his half marathon. Then hurried over to babies-R-us to get registering over with. 2 1/2 hours later we were just about done. That store is intimidating. Being a first time mom, you may have an idea of what you think you need... but let's get real here... I don't know what I'm doing (Shhh don't tell anyone). While at BRU we were looking through the strollers and realized that they had brought in a shipment of the Bob strollers. They usually only sell them online, I got an e-mail earlier in the week that they were having a blowout sale on "last year's model" seriously they were more than $100 off. I was ECSTATIC! usually you have to order online and HOPE they ship to Hawaii.. I told Rye that we might be making yet another big purchase cause it was just to great to pass up! He then gave me the whole "we JUST spent a lot of money last night, maybe if we hadn't bought the iPad we could get that". So at that point I'm feeling like a terrible mother for spending money before seeing this awesome deal. He tells me he thinks they will have them all weekend and we will think about it and most likely be coming back for one before the weekend is over. We head home where I work on extracting music and pictures from my broken laptops hard drive and move them to an external hard drive. Rye leaves to go with one of the guys to get a car part, and leaves me with Jon at the house... telling me he'll only be gone for a little bit.

3 hours later I'm starting to worry just a bit. I text him, and get a reply that the boys wanted food and that he would be home in just a min. An hour later I'm in the kitchen doing dishes and in rolls a Bob stroller with 3 of the guys with it. Apparently they had been planning on going in together and buying me this stroller for months and Rye tipped them off about the sale. I was completely stunned and shocked. I'm not a screeching girl when it comes to surprises... I mostly feel humbled when I am surprised by something like this. I turn bright red and usually just stand there in complete awe of the situation. Wondering what I have done to deserve such amazing people in my life. So I hope the boys were not disappointed in my reaction. It seriously was the most unexpected and possibly one of the sweetest things anyone has ever done for me in my life. Grateful is the only word I can use to describe my feelings on the entire thing!

Sunday morning 3:30 am, I get out of bed and make breakfast for Rye who I let sleep in till 4. We were on the road by 4:20 and parked in Honolulu by 4:50. Race was set to start at 5:30 Rye did a quick warm up and right before heading over to the start line told me that breakfast was a bad idea... and he should not have eaten what he did... I felt awful hoping that he would still hit his goal of a new personal record.

The lights of the lead car starting out.

Rye in the first group of the pack, This included half marathon, 10k and 5 mile runners. So some took off faster than others.

And here he comes!

Kind of an awkward picture. But him just after he finished.

 So Riley had a goal of shaving over 12 minutes off his previous best time. He didn't hit that, however he DID shave nearly 5 minutes off (which is still amazing!) He began telling me how he did everything wrong. He changed up his entire routine, from dinner the night before (normally a pizza carb load) to breakfast the morning of (usually we have something light, like a smoothie... NOT a massive egg sandwich) This next picture is his "I'm really disappointed that I didn't hit my goal" face... He at first wanted me to delete this picture... but it says too much about the post race "regret" that can happen after you have a race that just didn't go right.

 Don't feel sorry for him. If you zoom in on this picture you will see that he still placed number 53 overall for the half marathon, out of 850-something runners. Poor Rye. 6 months ago his only goal was to be in the top 100, He destroyed that! He told me later that he had been fighting "The Wall" the ENTIRE race. Anyone that is a runner knows how dreaded "the wall" is, and can imagine how bad it would suck to run 13.1 miles while fighting the wall the entire time. Not fun.

So we then went home, I at this point was feeling like I was coming down with something. It felt like the flu, with the body aches and the stuffiness. I was PRAYING it was not the flu. But decided to play it safe and let the girl in nursery with me know that I would not be at church. I seriously spent the entire day doing nothing but pretty much sleeping.

And by Monday morning I felt fine! I am not sure if it was a small version of the flu that has been going around, OR if it was just from a complete lack of sleep.. either way I was glad to be back to normal!

Monday we decided we were head up to north shore, and then stop by Costco on our way home for some more bottled water. We went to Waimea Bay beach, got in the water and not a minute later Riley had already spotted a huge sea turtle only a few feet away from us feeding on the coral. After a good hour in the water we made our way back into shore. Not more than 3 minutes after hitting shore did we hear a couple talking about the dolphins. We looked out and spotted (MAYBE 20 feet from where we had just been swimming) 20 spinner dolphins playing and jumping. We spent the next hour just simply enjoying the show of these amazing creatures "playing". For lunch we drove into Halewia for some mexican food at the only decent Mexican place on the island. Cholo's. By this time, Rye (who turned down my 50spf sunscreen at the beach) was pretty red! We decided it was time to start back towards home. Only to find out that costco is closed on Memorial day, So stopping there was a complete waste of time!

And that was pretty much our entire 96 in a nutshell... I'm getting freaking tired so I am going to hurry and wrap this up with my 26 week update!

I am no longer sick..well maybe 2 days out of 2 weeks, which is a HUGE improvement! like I said before I would gladly throw up everyday for the whole nine months for this kiddo. However I am grateful that I may get some relief for the last 3 months.

He kicks constantly, which I love... grow baby grow!

I'm knocking things over with my belly now, even though I feel huge I don't feel THAT big... whoops.

back pain is getting worse by the day.

I believe I am up 1 lb from my starting weight! but after my insatiable appetite today, It's probably a bit higher. Overall I am still doing ok gaining wise, and am trying to make the healthiest choices when possible.

So here is my 26 week picture! This is one of my new maternity dresses that I ordered. I think they are both adorable and I'm in love! I feel huge but don't know if I look much bigger than I did 2 weeks ago... Who knows. However this is the first picture I have taken in the morning time. I'm usually quite a lot bigger by the evening.