So here's a little bit about what's been going on in my life.

I had my weekly doctor's appointment last Tuesday. It was more of the same. I was measuring 28 weeks one day before I would be 28 weeks, so baby has "caught up" again, and his/her heartrate was up into the 150's again. That was a bit of a surprise. The heartrate has been hanging out in the upper 130's to mid 140's for the last 7 or 8 weeks. I think it's because the baby was having an active morning. :) My blood pressure, which the week before started out way high, was back to normal. That made everyone happy. I have my next regular weekly appt. tomorrow and we have our appt. at U of M on Wednesday.

Here's one more benefit to my having lost 60 pounds last year. I haven't gotten rid of all my "fat" clothes yet and I've got some long sleeve shirts that are proving to make great maternity shirts. We've been operating under the assumption that this pregnancy will end at any time, so I don't want to shell out a lot of money for clothes I may not need next week, though I did buy one pair of jeans (which I hate) because I needed something to wear out in public that weren't dress pants or capris. So these shirts, and my x-large sweats, are coming in real handy.

I am continually amazed at my daughter's memory. I know that she is nowhere near doing any actual reading...she's still hit and miss in recognizing most of her letters...but the other night she "read" me an entire book. "The Big Red Tub" has been her favorite book since we checked it out of the library a couple weeks ago. She has gotten to the point where she can tell the story, with very few mistakes, just by looking at the pictures. Last night she did the same thing with parts of "Stellaluna."

Alison and I watch Blue's Clues in the morning, while she is drinking her milk. As I was changing her from her pull up back to her underwear after her nap the other day, she pointed to her underwear and said "A clue! A clue!" At first, it looked to me like she was pointing to one of the flowers on her kitty underwear. When she moved her finger a little bit, I saw that she was, in fact, pointing to a paw print. It was pink instead of blue, but to her it was still a "clue." Kevin wore one of his college sweatshirts over the weekend and it had a big paw print on it (Hampden-Sydney Tigers) and she told him he was wearing a clue. It's so funny to me how her mind works sometimes.

Last night we picked out a Halloween costume for Alison. I went through the racks and picked out all the ones that I thought she might like and that we could put extra clothes under so she wouldn't freeze to death if it happens to be cold on Halloween night. I had about 5 costumes....two different witches, two different angels, and a '50's chick. Of course, she wanted them all. We finally got it narrowed down to one of the witches and one of the angels. Then she picked the witch. We tried the costume on her, because it looked a little big, but found that it would be just right. I hung everything else back up and we prepared to go. Then she changed her mind and said she wanted to be the angel. So we tried that costume on her. Unfortunately, cute thought it was, it was a little too small. There wouldn't have been room under it for extra clothes. Fortunately, we were able to talk her back into the witch costume. It has a hat, so she's excited about that. Yesterday afternoon she and Kevin put up our outside decorations. There's a couple of fake pumpkins sitting on the porch and some stuffed plastic (bag) ghosts and pumpkins hanging from the apple tree. She is so excited about her decorations. We still have some window clings to put up and some other inside decorations. I don't know if how she'll contain her excitement when we get around to those! Today she brought home a real pumpkin from the neighbors. It's a nice one, too. It will be great for carving, when the time comes.