The WORST April Fool's Joke EVER!

I'm getting excitingly close to having this baby. I've been doing everything in my power to get her here - I'm serious, all the wives tale stuff (with the exception of castor oil - I just can't seem to go there) but so far nothing is working. I have been contracting for days though so I'm hopeful that things will happen soon. However, Clayton would have been late (I was induced on my due date) and Noah was only three days early. So past experience tells me that I've still got about a week before I should start getting too excited about going into labor.

Wednesday though (April 1st) I was contracting like crazy! Around 6:00 I started timing them because they were getting pretty hard. They were coming pretty consistently about 6 minutes apart. Once I determined that they were staying pretty consistent, I jumped on the treadmill to try to speed things along. After about an hour of that I got bored/it started to get too hard to walk and contract at the same time. So then I started doing housework - vaccuming, laundry, sweeping, dusting, etc. all in an effort to get things going. The contractions stayed 6 minutes apart but they did start to get harder. Justin and I were sure that I was going to have that baby that night! We called the people who were going to come and stay with the boys and told them to be prepared for a middle of the night phone call, packed my hospital bag, and got the car seat ready to go. Finally, around midnight, I told Justin that I was going to go and try to lay down and 'rest' through some of my contractions. Bad idea. I fell asleep. When I woke up a few hours later I noticed - much to my horror - that, while my contractions hadn't gone away, they had become irregular and less painful. Bummer. It was the worst April Fool's joke ever. My body thinks it's SOOOO funny. It's not. So now, two days later, I'm still contracting, but it's nothing promising.

So, here we are. Playing the waiting game. I do not care for this game. I'm trying to keep my days packed so that they seem to go faster. I feel like we are SO ready for this baby to come. I just need to get her here!

Here are a few more of the pictures that Vanessa took. I love how they turned out!
I just love this one. Clayton was so cooperative during the photo shoot. I wish that Noah would have been equally cooperative (stinkin' two year olds).

This was about as good as we could get with Noah. It's a good one though!
Compared with Clayton's head, my stomach looks HUGE (although, it looks huge anyway).
I just love this picture of Clayton. So handsome!
I thought this was cute of Noah, very typical of him. I've had two thumb-suckers, I wonder what the odds are that this one will suck her thumb too.
Vanessa did so many things, we ended up taking over 500 pictures! I never thought I'd ever want to do a maternity shoot but Vanessa made me feel so comfortable and I am so glad I did it! I love how these pictures turned out!



Now, we did take a few that were a little more "risky". Those ones actually ended up being some of my favorites. They look very artsy and cool (but you don't actually see anything - so they aren't anything I would feel too weird about my kids seeing someday). I think we are going to take the pictures and put them in a little photo album that my kids can see one day, if they want to. Perhaps in another post I'll post a few of them. They really are awesome!

Thanks Vanessa for taking these awesome pictures! I love how they turned out!