Deborah's 4th Birthday, etc.

It's been a little while since I updated here, so figured it was time for a blog post! And for once, this one has rather less photos than usual - guess my camera has been a bit neglected lately!

Yesterday was Deborah's birthday - hard to believe she's already 4 years old! She was hoping the baby might arrive on her birthday, but that didn't happen! ;-)  I made her a cake on Saturday, as I knew I would be out on Monday for monitoring at the hospital. At least making the cake a couple of days early meant she wouldn't miss out on cake for her birthday! But it was rather thrown together in a hurry and looked messy. At least children don't notice the mistakes as much as I do!

I think she looks pleased with it! :-)

Smiling at her daddy singing Happy Birthday to her! :-D

And then on Monday morning - presents!

She had requested a baby doll, and I was very pleased when I discovered half price Cabbage Patch dolls this past summer, so bought in advance for her birthday! ;-) I loved my Cabbage Patch dolls as a child, so it was exciting to get one for Deborah - and Abigail got one too! ;-)

Elijah loves Lego - and he *loves* cars and trucks, so Duplo cars to mix & match was *just* the thing for him! He impressed me today when he was "reading his instructions" and picking out all the correct pieces to make the car he wanted! :-)

More presents

Pleased with her doll!

Busy with his Duplo

Clement putting his Lego together

And some Lego for Benjamin too, of course! Yes, they ALL love Lego!

A big case of Crayola markers in every possible colour made Deborah very happy indeed! She told me the other day that she's going to be an artist when she's a lady! ;-) She is *always* drawing pictures!

Right now we're enjoying a couple of weeks of October "school holidays", but in recent weeks we were learning about Christopher Colombus in history. It was the perfect opportunity to make some model ships! :-)

And some simple ships for the younger ones

Reading books together

Elijah wishes his cousins didn't live so far away! :-( I've printed out lots of photos and put them in magnetic frames on the fridge so the children can see their far away family! And the other night when I was doing dishes, Elijah told me "I've got my cousins on the couch with me!" This is what I found - I thought it was sooooo sweet! :-)

This was last week at the park in Inverness, after our homeschool group. The sun came out and it was very warm, after some chilly days recently. It's quite cold again right now, but this was a lovely day. The photo quality is rather poor, as I used my mobile phone to capture the moment of 4 of them in a swing together! :-)

They wanted me to see their tongues! I told them if they let me take a nice one of them (the previous one) then I'd get a silly one! LOL :-)

So, hopefully my next blog post will be news of the arrival of #6! :-) It can't be long now. My original due date was yesterday, though according to the dating scan at 12 weeks, I'm due on Monday the 20th. But either way, it will be soon. My blood pressure hasn't been behaving the past 3+ weeks now. I've always had low blood pressure all my life, but in the final weeks of my pregnancy with Elijah it started getting a bit higher than normal, and then went high enough during labour that I had to transfer to hospital by ambulance when in labour with him! :-p That wasn't fun, so I've decided this time to have a *planned* hospital birth. I wasn't sure if the blood pressure would be a problem again, so kept an open mind about the place of birth. But once the BP went up a few weeks ago, I figured that is reason enough to start out in hospital this time. Also, I've had quite a few spells of feeling rather unwell when I get the blood pressure spikes, so I wouldn't want to be 40 miles from hospital when things aren't quite right. So far there are no signs of pre-eclampsia, which is good! :-) So it seems that it's just "pregnancy induced hypertension", but they're keeping a close eye on me to make sure it doesn't get worse or turn into pre-eclampsia. This means *lots* of frequent blood tests and monitoring, etc. Thankfully I've been able to go to a small "partial" hospital twice for the monitoring, which is only 15 miles away and a lot more convenient. But yesterday I had to go all the way to Inverness instead, which meant I was out for 7 hours of the day! That was quite exhausting, but at least I was able to get there & back by bus, so the kids could stay home with Peter. It would have been worse to drag everyone out! :-) And I took along some crochet to keep me busy, so it wasn't all bad. But I do hope baby comes before too many more similar outings are needed!