28 Weeks

Yesterday we had a prenatal. We're at 28 weeks, and baby girl is looking great. Her heart rate has been in the 140s to 160s and she is very active.

While we were sitting in the waiting room (our Dr. was running almost half an hour behind schedule) Mark closed his eyes for a minute. Ella looked over at him, then looked over at me, then said in a very concerned voice, "Daddy sleeping in Dr. Seger's house!" I told her it's not where Dr. Seger lives, it's where she works, and daddy wasn't sleeping, he was just resting his eyes for a minute. That didn't seem to make her feel much better, because then she said, "Daddy sleeping in the hospital!"

Afterwards we had Christmas with Mark's side of our family. We hadn't been able to do it earlier because of all the bad weather.

I have to tell you there were lots of great gifts, but the one I got from two of my nieces was crazy good. My amazingly artsy nieces gave me a painting. An unbelievably good painting. It's not finished, but when it is you will be getting pictures of this masterpiece. Thank you to my sweet and very thoughtful nieces.

I also got fudge. A whole pan of fudge. Chime in if you have an answer to the question I've been asking myself since it came home with me last night, "How many pieces of fudge is too many to eat in one day?"

Needless to say, our kids were tired last night. When we got them to bed at about 10:30 last night (although they had both fallen asleep at some point during our almost two hour drive home), it was just a typical night. But strange things came to pass.

I got up to go to the bathroom and when I opened our bedroom door I stumbled upon Ella just standing in our living room. She wasn't crying or doing anything, just standing there. Weird. I hadn't heard her out there and she hadn't come into our room. I assumed she'd just gotten there and was about to make her way into our room, so I carried her back upstairs. She didn't really pitch a fit, she just went back to bed.

Twice Gracie came down and woke me up. Once to get a drink and once to have me pray for her because she'd had a bad dream, something about a dragon eating her her. Very common, her waking me up at night, not the dream about the dragon eating her. She didn't mention that anything was out of place.

Then when I got up at 7 this morning, there was Ella sleeping on the couch. I went back to bed and she and Gracie both slept until 8. When Gracie came into the kitchen she heard Mark and me talking about how strange it was that Ella had been sleeping on the couch. She pipes in, "Yeah, when I came down last night to get a drink, she was sleeping on the rug in the kitchen, then when I came down later I saw her on the couch."

Me: "Did she wake up when you opened the fridge?"

Gracie: "Yeah, cause the light is bright!"

Me: "So what happened?"

Gracie: "I tried to take her back to her bed, but then when I got her to her room she was yelling at me that she wanted to pray."

Me: "So what did you do?"

Gracie: "I ran back to my room."

Me: "So why didn't you tell me that she was sleeping in the kitchen?"

Gracie: "I thought you knew she was there?"

Me: "Why would I let Ella sleep on the kitchen floor?"

Gracie: "I don't have no idea."

What is even stranger is that I slept through all of this. I mean, Ella even has a monitor in her room, and it was turned on.

When I asked Ella why she was sleeping in the kitchen/living room she said it was "cause there a monster in [her] room." Well, there you have it. The monster made her do it.

This is what Ella looks like today...

Gracie's story is that she was trying to make Ella look like Superman. Sadly, she used my scrap booking markers instead of washable Crayola markers for this masterpiece. She will look really pretty for church tomorrow.