BumpDate: 22 Weeks

Holy cow - it's been four weeks since I last updated the blog! It's been a crazy-busy four weeks as well - two weeks ago in particular was quite possibly the busiest and best week of my life. Not only did I reach the half way mark, but we found out the gender of Baby Ripke AND moved into our new house - within two days of each other. This mama was exhausted by the end of it all, but man, what awesome milestones.

First, an updated belly picture for you. I didn't do my fancy photoshopping to this picture like I had been doing - I had to take it on my cellphone as my nice dSLR is MIA since the move. (I also absolutely hate the look of my face in this picture, but by the third take, Bryan was tired of taking my picture.)

I took this picture on Saturday (and today is Monday) and I swear to God, my belly is bigger already - is that even possible?? The last four weeks have been good - Baby Ripke is moving around a ton and I love every minute of it. I still get tired pretty easily, but I can at least get through the work day now without feeling like I am going to pass out. 

On to the news you've been waiting for (if you don't follow me on Facebook) - our gender reveal! We found out the gender of Baby Ripke four days before Easter, so I went to Target and found a couple of cheap Easter baskets and filled them with that fake grass and plastic eggs. In each egg, I put a mini-snickers and after the ultrasound, I put one ultrasound picture in each egg - including the one that revealed the gender. 

We went over to each set of our parents house and told them they would have to open the eggs to figure out the gender. I was counting on two things:

1. I carefully thought out which color of egg to put it in and chose orange. I am fairly stereotypical when it comes to genders and both sets of our parents immediately went for the pink thinking if it was a girl, I'd put it in the pink. When that didn't work, they went straight for the blue. For both sets of parents, orange was one of the last eggs, drawing out the game. 
2. Even when they came across the gender picture, neither sets are experienced with genders and would not even know what they were looking at or for (even though the tech labeled the gender on the picture.) When this happened, our plan was to make them go back through the pictures until they figured it out. 

My plan worked on Bryan's parents, but Bryan blew the surprise on my parents. Well...

That's right - Baby Ripke is a HE! We are both so excited (as we would have been with a girl as well). I already have his nursery all planned out - all I need to do now is shop! 

Well, for nursery stuff anyway, I found some pretty cute hats at Von Maur this weekend I couldn't pass up...

Bryan loves super-heros, Star Wars and video games. He is so excited to pass these interests onto our son, so I got a jump-start for him with these - which is LOVES by the way. 

Hopefully now that I have located my computer cord, I can get back to posting regular updates for you all. Hope your week is off to a great start!