The Stephensons!: March 2013

All I feel lately is grateful. Well.... also tired and bloated and huge and Baby. I feel Baby a lot. But anyways.... I've been reminded many times lately of how blessed I am.

-Blessed to have a hunk of a husband who works all day long (often times out of town) and rushes home to "feel his son" and talks to him while laying his head on my belly saying things like "We love you" and "We're excited to see you" and sometimes silly things like "Trucks. Dirt. Cars. Sports." so that Baby Boy will come out liking boy things.

-Blessed to start this new journey with him. I'm so excited to begin parenthood, and experiment with trial and error and figure things out along the way together. I feel grateful to have the opportunity to become a mother, especially to a little boy who seems to be growing at a perfect rate and is healthy and strong. It amazes me that of SO many things that could go wrong, it appears that everything is on the right track. Somehow we are creating a human who has 10 fingers and 10 toes and is developing just like he should. It's amazing.

-Blessed to have an amazing job which encourages me to solve problems and increase leadership skills and get to know people with all types of different lifestyles and personalities. I love it. And I'm so grateful that I'm able to continue on with my career even after becoming a mother as I work from home. Seriously, it's such a blessing.

-Blessed to have such awesome families. Luke and I love both our families so much. I always hear of horror stories of how people can't get along with their in-laws. Gosh, we lucked out. I love Luke's family and he loves mine. So thankful!

Speaking of families... Luke's family came to visit this weekend. Such a blast! All 13 of us were jam-packed in our house and it was perfect. The 3 little kiddos did awesome and were SO much fun to play with. Connor did great with his volleyball tournaments. And everyone else just had such a great time hanging out.

To my surprise they had multiple reasons of visiting this weekend. The one reason I knew about was Connor's tournament. The one I did NOT know about was a super-secret-surprise baby shower. I had no idea! I thought nothing of the fact that Chelsea, Jamie, Shaun and the kids left church early to put the kids down for a nap-- a totally normal thing to do when on vacation and the kids are in a new place and need to sleep. I didn't even think anything of it when I walked into the house after church and the first thing I saw was Jamie taking a picture of me as I walked in. Still didn't register until one second later when I saw everyone else lined up yelling "Surprise!" and saw all the blue balloons, cake, candies, adorable airplane streamers... and then it all clicked.

And so the party began with some delicious tortilla soup which my MIL made. Yum! And then we played some super fun games which included putting a diaper on a balloon in record time, Baby Memory, and baby food taste-testing. Somehow I (the pregnant girl) became the baby food eater while my partner (Luke) was the feeder. We should have thought about that before the game started because I nearly puked after tasting two or three of the baby foods. Poor babies have to eat nasty stuff!

We got some adorable outfits for Baby Boy, plenty of cuddly blankets, books, and other necessities. Chelsea even reached out to some of my girlfriends from college/ high school and I was able to open some gifts from them too! So thoughtful! How grateful we are for families and friends. Thank you to all who contributed to making it such a special surprise!

And here are some pic updates: