34 weeks

Your great aunt and uncle Chuck sent you a play gym this week and Daddy and I couldn’t WAIT to set it up!  We opened it up as soon as it arrived and started assembling it in the living room. Yes, we hopefully still have a few weeks before you even arrive and even longer before you can actually use this thing, but we just couldn’t wait! We also did some puppy training in the process, teaching Shadow not to touch your toys. We can’t have half-chewed pacifiers, drooled-on stuffed animals, and missing toys that are lost to the dog. So we’re starting him off early to make sure he knows which toys are his and which are not. So far, he’s doing pretty good! The other day his ball rolled onto your play gym and he just stood next to it and looked at us like “Hey guys, I need some help over here.” He’s the best.

Mommy and Daddy also had what may be our very last Mommy Dinner (with the Dads, too). We invited Heba, Brent, Blair, and Ty to enjoy a home cooked meal on our deck and celebrate the soon-to-be arrival of our babies with one last hurrah. Daddy cooked of course and dinner was delicious! It was also great to get together with the other couples and talk baby, as always.

In this photo: Heba with Braydon at 31 weeks, Mommy with you at 34 weeks, and Blair with Alexis at 39 weeks. And if you didn’t already know that Blair is usually stick-thin you would hardly even be able to tell she was pregnant in this photo.

On Friday, Daddy surprised with a whole date day planned from the start!  I had a prenatal massage scheduled for the morning, which was AMAZING as always. Then on my way home Blake kept texting me “Hurry up! Hurry up!” When I walked in the door he had our beach chairs out, a cooler packed full of food and drinks, the dog toys in the beach bag, and all of the essentials for a day at the beach. I raced upstairs to put my suit on and we were off to a day of fun at First Landing State Park. It was so nice to be able to take Shadow with us because he’s no longer allowed on the beach at the oceanfront and it’s been too cold to get him in the water since we brought him home in January, so we really haven’t had the chance to get him in water to swim.  Well, if we learned one thing during our beach day, we learned that our dog LOVES the water. We left him off his leash (shame on us) the entire day and he would just run back and forth from the ocean to our chairs all day. He dug in the sand – the only place he’s allowed to dig, and made friends with some of the other dogs nearby. And whenever people asked how old he was, we would tell him 6 months and they would always reply with how well trained he is. That’s cause we’re on him like white on rice. ALL THE TIME. People in the neighborhood probably think we’re terrible puppy parents. But hey, training pays off.

After our day in the sun, we went back to the house to get showered up and ready for dinner at Plaza Azteca… always a favorite. And then on our way home as Blake was telling me “ok, that’s all the surprises I have for the day” we were driving down Laskin Road toward the beach and all of a sudden  he yelled out “OH! I just forgot!” and made a sharp squealing right turn into Beach Movie Bistro movie theater. We were going to see The Fault In Our Stars on opening night!

Yes, there’s been a TON of buzz about this movie. People compare it to Titanic and Casablanca. Yes, I was excited to go see a sappy love story, but what most people may not know is that the director of this movie (Josh Boone) is someone I’ve known literally my ENTIRE LIFE.  His mom and my mom met when he and my older brother were still in the whom, so it’s safe to say that they’ve been life-long friends. Josh and his siblings, Carson and Chelsea, grew up down the street from us in Kempsville and the two older brothers (Josh and my brother Knate) were constantly running around the house and the neighborhood with our oversized video cameras shooting movies. And every family was cast as some role in their movies. We did Back to the Future, Batman, and Spiderman spin-offs, kidnappings, missing persons, psycho babysitter killers, and the list goes on and on. While most kids were reading books, coloring, and playing on the swing set, our brothers were drilling us on our lines while our moms were coming up with costumes for the latest thriller they were working on. Looking back, I didn’t realize that every other family didn’t have the same weekend fun that we did. It was just the norm for us.

So Josh and Knate remained best friends all the way through school and into adulthood and now they both live in LA and have been pursuing their dreams of writing scripts and directing movies. And funny enough, both of them have had the opportunities to do what they love this last year. Josh wrote and directed “Stuck in Love” which was released last year, directed “The Fault in our Stars”, and is also working on Steven King’s “The Stand” as his next project. In the meantime, my brother is in the editing process for his movie “Cardboard Boxer”. It’s crazy to think that life brought them both so far in this industry where so very few ever get the opportunity to run the show, and here they are both charging ahead as “Director”.

So not only did we get to see Josh’s movie this weekend but we actually also got to see Josh! After a whirlwind few weeks of touring, doing interviews, screenings, and premiers, he flew into Virginia Beach to attend his sister’s wedding on Saturday afternoon which we also attended. The wedding was very similar to ours in that it was at the same church, the same reception space, with the same band, and the same caterer (her mom apparently had so much fun at our wedding that she told Chelsea all about it and Chelsea was taking notes!) so it was fun to have that experience as a guest this time around.

We ended the weekend with some surprise visitors!  Cameron and Whitney surprised both sets of parents with an impromptu trip to Virginia so we got to see them on Sunday afternoon, went out on the boat for dinner, and really enjoyed getting to see them one last time before Brantley arrives… that is, if he actually shows up somewhere around his due date. If not, they’ll just have to come back to Virginia Beach for another visit. 🙂