She’s been taking classes for about 5 months, at the Curtis Dance School, which is only a block away.  Max has been my awesome go-to-guy; he walks her there and then goes to get her and walk her home.  This has been very helpful in recent months, when the idea of me walking even a block is hard.

Lucy did so well in her recital; she had seemed quite nervous about it, but she was one of the most energetic ones in her class during the show.  Lots of smiles, big kicks and movement – quite the beginning little ‘ham’ (wonder where she gets that from?).  She also totally loved wearing blush and lipgloss.

We called her the beautiful yellow banana girl!

With best friend Emma – super fun that they are in the same class.

My Carpinteria Blockbuster (which we parked in front of today) had a huge window poster up for the video game called ‘Kick A**’.  I was very disturbed at this, and walked calmly into the store and talked to the 2 twenty-something guys working.  I said (I tried to be nice and non-abrasive), "I have young kids, and this poster here really offends me, you guys.  We’re trying to teach them to have clean speech, and this really makes my job harder.  Would you please consider taking it down?"  And they said yes, and removed it right in front of me. 
So yea! one small victory for decency.  And here’s hoping they didn’t put it back up when I drove away…

So, because we had our nice church clothes on, and Mommy didn’t look like a train wreck, we used the timer on our camera and took lots of pictures.  Yes we had to take 800 to get a few decent ones, as there are goofy children who like to make goofy faces.  Here’s some of the best:

Well, never a dull moment in this pregnancy, huh?!  It turns out that the pain I was experiencing was not actual pre-labor contractions, but possibly kidney related.  I had blood in my urine, and so my doc says the pain could have been a small kidney stone that may or may not have passed.  So, I have meds for further pain, and drank more water today than should be humanly possible, to ‘flush me out.’ 

Baby is fine and hopefully will stay cooking inside me for several more weeks.  I feel blessed to have such a helpful hubby, and our good friends the Allens who watched our kids from 2:30 am on, and the sweet nurse Sherry, and that we were in and out of the ER in about 2 hours. 

It is 4:20a, and I am sitting in the Labor and Delivery ward of Cottage Hospital, waiting for Dr. Green to answer his page.

Toby woke me up at 2:10a this morning, saying, ‘come on, we’re going to the hospital.’
She has been having a lot of cramping for about a month, but it has been increasing in intensity in the last few days. Last night, it got to the point where she thought that it might be early labor.
So we got dressed and woke up the kids. Toby had me stuff a slanket, a regular pillow, and a big ‘body’ pillow into a garbage bag. She wanted to be prepared.
We dropped the kids off at our friends, the Allens. (I really appreciate their enthusiatic willingness to be the middle of the night go-to guys for the kids)
We arrived at the ER and had the van valet parked (thanks to a shortage of parking due to construction)
Once in the ward, Toby hasn’t shown any signs of labor, so we are headed home. She will call back later today to get the results of some lab work.