Yesterday was my niece Brooke's baptism and, appropriately enough, I think she looked like an angel:

Could she be any more precious??

And, to boot, she behaves like an angel.  She did not make a peep the whole day.  My sister said she sometimes scrunches her face up like she's going to cry and then she rethinks it and is fine (I saw her do this once yesterday at lunch, and that was it).  It's amazing what a contrast she is to TJ, who has never hesitated to let you know exactly how he's feeling every moment of the day.

Although, appearance-wise, I am continually struck by how much they look alike.  (Okay, okay, I know - they're siblings - but they just look SO much alike and genetics is utterly fascinating to me.)  This is TJ at his baptism a year and a half ago:

At the same age (both about 3 months in each photo), they look like twins to me. And, just for good measure, this is TJ now (well, yesterday) with my dad:

That picture makes me melt.  TJ loves his Pop-Pop, who loves him back even more.  We're having a bit of tough times in my family right now - nothing I can really ever write about here (which, for me, makes it even harder because this is where I come to process things a lot of the time) - but TJ is the constant shining light of joy in all of our lives.

Okay . . . *wipes tears* So anyway...

As I look at TJ and Brooke and they so clearly look like the other kids in our family, I can't help but wonder what our child will look like.

The hubby, me, and Brooke
(And, no, I don't know what that face is I'm making; I'm probably talking.  I'm always talking.)

Naturally, the talk of the day yesterday was babies.  Brooke wasn't the only baby in attendance and there were a lot of other kids around, mostly under the age of six.  This was also the first time I've seen a lot of family friends since I've been pregnant (I wasn't kidding when I said I didn't get to see friends that often) so there was a lot of "How are you feeling?"

A LOT of "How are you feeling?" Like, I think every single person in attendance asked me that.  Before I was pregnant, I don't think I realized that that's "the thing" to ask pregnant women, but I suppose it is.

So it was a lot of, "I feel great!  No, really, great!  Yeah, never any morning sickness.  No, not really many aches or pains.  Yeah, basically my nose is kind of stuffy - so, yeah, I feel great!" I kind of felt bad about it after a while, like people were looking for something worse.  Especially when they'd say, "Well, it is still early, you have a while to go" and I'd say, "Yeah, four months to go!"  And their face would blink a smidge and they'd say, "Four months?  Really?  Wow, that went fast!" and then, inevitably, they'd look down to my stomach.

Seriously?  I had to laugh about it and am even chuckling about it right now.  (Ah, yes, a good blog post brings both tears and laughter.)  And, I am happy to announce that I had my first "uninvited tummy touching" yesterday!  We showed up to church and my aunt promptly put her hand on my belly and asked - you guessed it - how I was feeling.  The funny thing is I didn't even realize it at the time and, in truth, it didn't bother me!  I always, always thought I'd be one of those, "Please do NOT touch me" pregnant women because I'm not a very touchy-feely person at all - but now that it happened, it didn't even faze me.  So, go figure, yet another prediction I had about my own pregnancy that ended up being completely and utterly wrong.  I clearly have no idea what I'm talking about.

One of R.E.M.'s most famous songs is, of course, "It's the End of the World as We Know It (and I feel fine)."  When they perform this in concert, Stipe really yells the "And I feel fine" part at the second and third choruses... so, of course, so do I (because, at R.E.M. concerts I sing along as if I think I'm auditioning for co-lead singer).  Once I yelled it so loudly and with such force that I almost passed out because I totally winded myself.  I think I actually expelled 97% of the air that was in my lungs.  But, after a few seconds - wait for it - I felt fine.  (Har, har.)

So when someone asks me how I feel, that's what I think of now.  I FEEL FIIIIIIIIIINE!  Let's hope it stays that way.

Note: all photos by my friend Kate, who is basically our official family photographer

I'm with Brittany at MommyWords in that the New Year really feels like it starts today.  We're really conditioned to begin things anew on Mondays: jobs, diets (yech), exercise plans, schedules.  When was the last time you started a whole new routine on a day other than Monday?  It doesn't happen too often.  I even started my 101 in 1001 list on a Monday.

So I felt little motivation to think about New Year's resolutions before yesterday, as I began to ponder the new week (and, really, new year) ahead.  I have tended to make New Year's resolutions in the past and, like many other people's, they usually include behaviors or goals that fall in the "life-betterment" category, like: eating no fast food, quitting soda, exercising more, spending more time outside, and so on.  But a lot of those things are already on my 101 in 1001 list, so I don't have the usual resolutions this year.  It's a big year of big changes coming up, so what would I resolve to do?  Be the best mom I can be?  Well, duh, clearly I'm going to do that; I don't need a resolution to remind me.

But there is one thing I want to dedicate significant time and attention to this year: making our house into our home.

We rent the first floor of a house, so in a way we have both an apartment and/or a house, terminology-wise, and we've lived here for almost a year.  However, there are only two pictures hanging up, both in the living room.  The rest are either unframed, not yet printed or not yet hung.  (Getting that done is one of my new 101 in 1001 changes.)  When someone walks in, I don't think there's much that says, "Hey, Tom and Candice live here" (other than the stacks of schoolbooks, multiple stacks of school papers, and growing stacks of Mustang 5.0 magazines; guess which of these items isn't mine).  So the whole home-making idea is going to go beyond just hanging things, but that'll be a part of it.

The first impetus for this is, of course, The Force (and, just to note, dictionary.com defines "impetus" as "a moving force," so there you go).  We're changing the "office" into the nursery and I have some very definite developing ideas about how that room is going to look.  I want the rest of the apartment to have that same purposeful feel - that it was designed specifically with the inhabitant(s) in mind.

The second impetus for this is:

Is that not the cutest pupper face ever?

Meet Buster, the half Yorkie/half Cairn puppy that my parents bought my husband for his birthday.  My parents just picked him up on Saturday (Buster will be two months old this Wednesday) and he is currently residing at my parents' house since my mom isn't working and can watch/feed/play with him all day.  He's little and young so he needs someone around to make sure he gets his mid-day meal, gets to do his business on the newspaper (he's already trained!), and gets to play.

Going nose-to-nose with my mom . . . look how wee tiny he is!

We're going to see how he progresses, grows, eats, et cetera, and determine when he'll move over to our house full-time when it seems like he is (and we are) ready.  Before that, though, we need to cover up our outlets (apparently puppies like to lick outlets), shampoo the carpets, and make sure anything dangerous is out of his reach (which, admittedly you can see, is not that high - lol).  But we need to do a bit of baby-proofing anyway, so this kind of blends with impetus #1.

(And, yes, it is relatively crazy to get a puppy when you're expecting a baby.  This isn't news to me, but he was a gift so what could I say.  Actually, I'll tell you what I will say - this is the hubby's dog primarily so if the time comes that he's an issue, it's the hubby's issue to handle.)

So there are those two little wee ones.  Then there's me.  I hate being in a home that feels like it's without character, without organization, without peace, and with clutter.  I hate it.  I also hate that if you look around, the ratio of my stuff to the hubby's is about 9:1.  I have, admittedly, run the place over with my things (err, mainly my books), so I'm setting out to give my closets and dressers a serious going-over (charity donation coming up) and I'm also going to pack up a bunch of books that I don't foresee needing for school or teaching (those will go in the basement). 

I've only ever had my own room (well, since I was a teenager) or my own apartment, so it's new to me to blend my belongings with someone else.  Not unlike learning to blend our finances, this is taking time but I finally feel ready to take it on.  It's not easy to pack up items you're attached to or used to seeing regularly.  My books feel like friends, honestly, and so do some of my clothes.  When I pack them up, I actually tend to say good-bye (or bye for now) to them.  (Am I the only cuckoo one that does this?  I'm kind of scared to even know.) 

But perhaps the pregnancy is helping me move along with this.  My life and home, in large part, are clearly going to belong to someone new now.  They'll be mine, but ours - and that "ours" is all three of us, so I'd like our home to at least accurately reflect the current two - yours truly and the hubby - before we two become a three.  I don't expect to finish this resolution before my due date (May 19), but maybe the nesting will kick in and I'll be in super-future-Mom mode in April and get more done than I anticipate.  If I don't, that's okay.  I'm giving myself the year for this.  I hope it takes less than a year, but it's okay if the year is what we need.