Quiet times with ice cream

Quiet. Our house is too quiet. My girls have been in Florida with my parents and sisters for the past week and our house just seems so empty. While Erik has been sleeping in until 10am every day, I've been missing them terribly. Usually when they spend time with Grandparents it is because I have meetings or one of us is traveling - not because we are just at home while they are having fun. It's been hard!

Even so, we've managed to get a lot of things together before the baby comes. Erik stained the deck, I've done some cleaning and organizing, and we got some things fixed (like our Taurus which was a $1113 bill!!!). Unfortunately, our air conditioner broke but Erik fixed it himself by putting a new circuit breaker in. And our external hard drive we use to back up our data overheated but Erik was able to pull the data off of it. I love having a mechanically handy husband as well as a computer genius husband! He truly is a renaissance man!

In addition to getting things ready for baby, we have eaten ice cream every day. In fact, we have made a mind-blowing discovery of tremendous proportions. I found a new favorite ice cream place! Jenis ice cream in Dublin. They have flavors like rhubarb rose, lemon blueberry, salty caramel, etc. The dark chocolate ice cream paired with the salty caramel ice cream is one of the greatest treasures on earth. At least it is to my pregnant craving body :).

Speaking of pregnant body. I have taken pictures of me wearing the same shirt at different points in my pregnancy all three times. I'm considerably bigger this time but at least I can fit in the same shirt!

It looks like we've decided on a girls name for this baby:

Rachel Marie

However we have not decided on the boys middle name. We like both:

Matthew Joseph

and

Matthew Nathan

I like Joseph because it is a family name on my side. However our girls have middle names that start with N and have 6 letters. So Nathan would add some continuity. So I need to decide on family name or weird pattern (I'm a little crazy about patterns). Actually our girls names both have 5 letters in them and if I could convince Erik then I would pick a boys name with 5 letters too. I actually suggested Mateo to Erik because it is a form of Matthew but then I had to pick him up off of the floor because he was laughing so much. Also our girls both have an "a" sound at the end of their name (like the name Laura) but Erik likes Rachel better. I'm just a little weird about continuity.

56 points today on Quiddler!