Sensational Summer, Crazy Clara, Baby Boy, and Life!

Good Morning!! It's been forever since I created my last Botbylstyle blogpost, and due to the fact that I've been extremely overwhelmed with the amount of material I have to share, It's taken me a considerably long time to creatively organize it in my noggin and transfer it all into a blogpost about summer, Clara, my 3rd trimester of pregnancy, our latest home decorating projects/updates, you name it!

However, here I am, Thursday morning, less than 5 weeks remaining until baby boy is due, sitting somewhat comfortably in the only thing I can wear to bed at this point, my husband's green boxers, and a stretched out baby tee...my precious kitty by my side as always (more so since I've been pregnant), just an unpredictable matter of time before Clara wakes up and is calling for her "mommy"then falls back asleep after tossing a turning a few times (I know what that's like), which will probably happen about 5 more times within a half an hour.

Let's get into it - Summer has been fabulous so far! This passed school year has been trying to say the least, which helps me to appreciate a little R and R. For the passed 4 weeks, I've been working part time with helping to run the summer band program, for which we just had our concert at the Deptford mall last Thursday. It went exceedingly well and my continuous nightmares about my water breaking during the cadet band performance have subsided, since it's finally occurred to my brain that the concert has come and gone, and I still have yet to go into labor, Thank Goodness. Call me crazy! Call my paranoid! Call me whatever you want but I'm so much more cautious and completely "on-my-toes" this time around, after experiencing delivering our 1st child between 5 and 6 weeks early, and not having what I consider to be a typical birth story, although I've come to find out that no birth story is quite typical, and some more insanely painful, unexpected, wild, and unique than ours, and that's ok.
I'm thankful for how smooth our experience actually did go the 1st time, and I'm looking exceedingly forward to going through it again, just differently, and hopefully (fingers crossed) much much closer to our due date, September 3rd. At this point, I'm already passed the day equivalent to when my water broke with Clara! Well, since I'm already on the subject of pregnancy, let's continue with that. The 3rd trimester has been a little rough compared to the 2nd, which was somewhat smooth sailing. I feel that the belly is bigger this time than it was with Clara, and I've gained a little more weight this time - Just a couple more lbs, not too many. Here's a photo of me taken this passed Sunday, and believe me, I'm not taking advantage of too many photo opps. However, it's nice to have some!

Here I was with Clara around the same time (courtesy of Kelly Lynd). In fact this was taken the day before we gave birth to Clara (little did we know at the time)The photo after that was taken a week before, and yes I'm wearing the same shirt, which my awesome husband bought me! Doesn't he have great taste with maternity clothes? He should experience being a pregnant woman and model them!

Totally different season and clothing style so it's hard to tell but I just feel like I'm carrying further forward this time if that makes any sense. Overall, things have been going quite well, although I feel like the baby has been literally beating me up, which surprises me because I have an anterior placenta, which usually shields you from feeling as many punches, kicks, rolls, quick tantrums of insanity from psycho botbyl baby in belly, whatever you wanna call it, but no, as of week 20ish I began feeling everything, for which I'm extremely grateful since I had been disappointed that I may not experience all his little kicks and punches!

I've been having a little anxiety lately, just thinking about having another child. Things are just so uncertain right now, as far as when he's planning to make his grand entrance, how in the world is Clara going to react when he finally does, what is our routine going to be like? Am I going to be able to handle working full time, teaching lessons, keeping our house sparkling clean manageable, while cooking wonderful dinners for my family...oh yeah, I've never done than before, so that won't be expected...there's also many other commitments Jon and I have made that require so much time and energy...Will something have to go? The fact that I'm ultra organized to the point of paranoia definitely helps keep clutter at an all time low...Everything will be fine and I know that, but it doesn't keep you from worrying, and wondering.

Onto Clara, who's the happiest-go-luckiest kid in the world, she's been enjoying wonderful activities every day either with daddy while I've been working, or with pop-pop and mom-mom, or with Jon and me...Here's a couple of photos of Clara enjoying July! One of my goals is to enhance and develop over 1,000 pics of her from the summer...as of now, these are the ones I posted of Facebook, which I've had a chance to enhance and brighten a little. Like I said, I'm don't enjoy being in many pictures right now. Here they are in no particular order :

 

Well I hope you enjoyed my little "Catch-up" blog post! Thank you so much for stopping by & God Bless! Enjoy the rest of your week! Stay tuned for my next post about home renovating and a couple new exciting updating/decorating projects around the Botbyl home!

A Happie, Healthy Mother's Day to all, Highlights from the Botbyl family's Fun festive Easter Festivities, and our Ultrasound results!!

HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY!!! Hope everyone out there has a fabulous, enjoyable, and extremely memorable mother's day, whether it's your 1st, 2nd, or 45th!!

 

 The rest of the contents in this particular post are way passed due, but I'm exceedingly excited to share our lovely Easter and spring break festivities, for which it has taken me a while to gather my thoughts and photos in order to create this post! This is all about Easter weekend!

 Fine Dining

We enthusiastically celebrated our 1st evening of spring break at Friday's, where we enjoyed some wonderful food, as you can see from Clara's wonderful one-of-a-kind chocolate goat-tee!

Egg-stra Egg-citing Egg Dying and Decorating

We thought it'd be egg-stra fun to dye eggs this year for several reasons. This is a tradition that I always loved as a child, and now that Clara is egg-stremely curious about discovering every aspect of the world around her, we knew she would find this awesome activity egg-xilarating, memorable, fun, and quite creative! Last but not least, we figured that dedicating these fun festive artistic eggs to each member of our family including baby #2 was a perfectly cute way to celebrate our family and to work on a cute Holiday craft together! Here is the wonderful footage we've gathered of our Fabulous Easter Eggies!!

A wonderful afternoon with Jon's family, including an awesome Easter Egg Hunt and meeting a new adorably precious family member was a fabulous way to spend our Saturday before Easter! Jon’s parents have a beautiful home in Bethlehem PA, so of course I took advantage of the opportunity to hide eggs everywhere, which was enjoyable!! It was also extremely fun to see Clara attempting to play monkey in the middle with her cousins who are at least twice as tall as her, but she didn’t notice, or mind for that matter, just kept at it, running around the room, focused, arms above her head trying to catch the ball. That’s my girl! (Jenn, we missed you guys, & just wanted to give you a quick shout out!)

It was absolutely fabulous meeting little John Spurlock! What a cuuutie!!!!! So adorable!

On Easter Sunday, We enjoyed Easter Brunch at Bogey's with Mom-mom and Pop-pop...and a gigantic fluffy fun-loving, but mysterious rabbit, who Clara was OBSESSED with!

Last, but certainly not least :

 Anatomy Scan

Also, several weeks ago, Jon and I received some egg-citing news! Ok, I’ll say goodbye to the “Egg-puns”, or at least put them away till next year. On to the exciting news : Baby #2 is a…BOY and will carry on the “Botbyl” name, and I would love to say that Clara is excited, which she seems to be, but honestly adding a gender to the mix has been extremely confusing for her. It’s taken about a month for her to routinely point to my belly and say “Bay”, meaning “Baby”, but attempting to explain to her that there’s a little boy in there completely throws her for a loop, to which she responds by staring at me, blankly and baffled, which is absolutely ok for now, because I know I’ll have tons of explaining to do when she actually meets this little guy and slowly comes to terms with the fact that our world now revolves around 2, not just her – a frightening realization for any toddler I imagine! This passed Friday, she just started announcing "BABY!" and is so proud that she can pronounce the word so well, along with a few other 2-syllable words. As for now, Jon and I are stretching out our time with just her for as long as we possibly can, and just yesterday, made mention of the fact that this will be her last and technically only summer without a sibling, which is unbelievable to me…how exceedingly fast time flies by! I feel like I was literally just pregnant with Clara, and she’s almost 16 months old – where has the time gone?! Well, all we can do is cherish every moment we have and try to live our lives to the fullest! Here are a couple of photos of Clara in training, as well as Me & the precious little guy!! (these were taken about a month ago, so little baby boy has grown since then, and is a tad bigger than in the picture...so has momma, and is attempting to keep these pounds off which is a post for another day!)

Back to Baby Boy Botbyl, Jon and I are both extremely excited to be having one of each. The only aspect of having a boy that overwhelms me big time is clothing! We have barely any boy clothes although I do have a couple of neutral outfits that should definitely do the trick! I’m gonna hafta examine what I have and make the most of whatever I can, while sadly organizing and boxing up all Clara’s adorable little outfits, and I’ve been uber emotional lately, so I’m sure I’ll literally be sobbing while doing so. As far as our large items are concerned, we were practical enough, when pregnant with Clara, to aim to purchase (or put on Clara’s baby registry) neutral stuff from the beginning, so that if we were ever to have a boy, it would be an extremely smooth transition, in terms of car seat/stroller, highchair, and even our vintage antique style nursery, which baby boy should easily be able to move right in to. For those items, I’m extremely thankful – We’ll be using EVERYTHING again! Also people have been gracious and amazing with lending/giving us items that have been awesomely useful and wonderful, and we’re truly grateful for that as well.

Now, on to the name choosing, something that Jon and I always butt heads on! He claims that he needs to literally see the baby and the perfect name will pop into his head! Right…after several hours of labor (not that he’ll be in labor…but it will definitely be laborious for both parties involved) the baby name fairy will just show up and plant the perfect name in his head! Really Jon?? I think we can plan a little more wisely than that! I will keep working on him with names throughout the summer and we’ll see if we can agree on something besides the 100 names that he already vetoed without so much as a second mentioning.

It’s all part of this amazing journey! We are over-the-moon thankful for such wonderful and incredible blessings, and witness God working in our lives every single day, giving us such tremendous gifts! Thank you so much for stopping by, and God Bless! Have a terrific week!

 HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY!!

A glimpse into Clara's future big girl room in progress : A chic mix of old and new!

Good Evening!! And Welcome to Clara's Big girl room...(come next fall.)

This particular space has been in progress for some time now; It originally began as our bright and fun guest room, shortly after doubling as the cat's #1 choice for a comfortable relaxing place of rest - under the bed, that is. Now, with baby #2 enthusiastically on his/her way, we've decided to turn it into Clara's big girl room, for which we selected a beautiful white crib that of course converts into several levels of a toddler bed, so it will definitely grow with her as the years go on, which was exceedingly important to us. As you can see, she's already settling in, and was overwhelmingly excited to jump right in the moment Jon has finished assembling the adorable piece of furniture! We are of course, moving the new baby into Clara's nursery, which is definitely gender neutral enough to easily accommodate a little he or a little she. 

 

Yes! Can't wait to move in to my new girly space!!

Thanks so much for stopping by this evening and stay tuned for our Gender Reveal results next week!! God Bless! Hoppy Easter!!

Here comes Clara Cotton-tail, hoppin' down the bunny trail with egg-citing news!!

Easter, which marks an egg-citing commencement of spring, is such an inspiring, uplifting, and creative time of year! I love love love Easter! The beautiful comforting warmth and ambiance of spring is finally upon us. With strength and hope, spring pulls us from the doldrums of these cold winter months and offers us feelings of lightness and airiness, gorgeous pastels and brightness of sunny days to come – a fresh start, a new beginning, new life emerging!

Speaking of the emergence of new life, Clara has an egg-citing announcement to make and she's been waiting extremely patiently! She has been egg-stra careful not to spill the jelly beans, but now that this meaningful and wonderful holiday is fast approaching, we decided that it's time to let the rabbit out of the bag and share our egg-citing news! So, here it is :

 

Just in case you missed the "Egg Sign" in the 1st photo, I decided to include a 2nd...and a 3rd to make sure it was self-explanatory! Then a little creative Easter egg picture as well as an adorable photo of Clara enthusiastically looking at a family scrapbook, just for fun!! Also, she's so cute in her little spring dress from target, how could I resist?! So...YES! We are "egg-specting" our 2nd child in September - How egg-citing is that? We will be going for the baby's anatomy scan in a couple weeks, and can hardly wait to find out the gender of this child. Having a little girl already definitely makes the whole suspenseful process of finding out way more interesting in my opinion! I mean, there's an added level of suspense this time - Will Clara have an awesome little brother or will she have an amazing little sister?! It's not just like "What are we having, a boy of a girl?" If we are pregnant with another girl, we feel more prepared and pretty much ready to go, but if it's a little boy, I feel that we'll have a little more legwork to do in order to prepare ourselves for the arrival of a little man! Either way, it's all overwhelmingly egg-citing!! We will definitely keep updating "Botbylsmile" and Facebook with results of anatomy scan for those of you who may be interested in finding out the gender of our 2nd baby as well.

While reflecting over the last year of our lives, I can't help but to picture this itsy bitsy little baby in a comfy soft bunny suit! I absolutely can not fathom how insanely fast one year has flown by. Here are a couple egg-stra special photos of Miss Clara from last Easter!

 

She is going to be an amazing BIG SISTER and a gigantic help to mommy, that's for sure!

Hope everyone is having a wonderful time preparing for this awesome spring and the lovely holiday to come! Please check in with us for my next post which will be all about Clara's Big Girl room. Have a terrific week and God Bless! Thanks so much for visiting with us today!!