Our little princess!

Well, to be quite honest, I didn't really have any intentions of waking up early to watch all of the royal wedding festivities. Not that I am really a cynic, I just appreciate every moment of sleep these days! However, since Anna Kate decided that 5:45 would be a good hour to wake up, I figured we could have some good princess time and watch the ceremony (which I thought turned out to be very beautiful, actually!). Anna Kate couldn't just watch the royal wedding in her jammies though, so we played a little princess dress-up! Girls are too much fun!

She was really excited to see horses in this picture!

She also thought her wand was pretty cool...

Practicing her princess wave...

Just like Kate!

And just to keep it real...princesses don't have to be prim and proper ALL the time...sometimes it's ok to get yogurt and strawberries all over your face!

15 weeks!

15 weeks already! First trimester down, 2 to go!

We had a great doctor's appointment yesterday and everything looks great. Baby moved around a lot for us on the ultrasound, we got to see a great heartbeat, and we even got a good idea as to whether we're having a boy or a girl...but we're going wait until we get some definite news at our 20 week ultrasound in a month to share it on the blog! Here is a picture of baby at 15 weeks.


I am feeling a lot better than I was from week 6 to week 14, but I still have an occasional bout of sickness (in the middle of the terminal in the Dallas airport, e.g.). Overall, though, I think things are looking up!

The most exciting thing here lately is that I can feel the baby move! I was pretty sure I could feel something last week, but yesterday it was definite! In fact, it was so pronounced that even Luke could feel it with his hand on my belly. I think maybe it was all the Easter candy I ate...haha!

Anyway, here's a picture of me taken today at 15 weeks and 2 days.


Here's what I looked like at 16 weeks with Anna Kate. I think it's true that you show earlier with your second, what do you think??


P.S. Make sure you scroll down to see my previous two posts done late last night and this morning. I've been doing a lot of blog catch-up!

He is Risen!

We had a wonderful Easter Sunday celebrating our Savior's resurrection with our church family! Anna Kate and I arrived back in South Carolina on Saturday night, so getting up for our 7:30am sunrise service was a little difficult (being 4:30am Pacific Time!), but we made it and were so glad we did! It was a beautiful service followed by a fantastic breakfast on the grounds at church, and then our regular Bible study and worship hours. Here is a picture of our little family at church on Sunday morning.


And then of course a few shots of just our sweet girl. I didn't get any one picture that I just loved, so here are a bunch!

He is risen, indeed!

Trip to Oregon!

It's hard to even know where to begin! Anna Kate and I just spent an absolutely wonderful week out in Oregon with all of my extended family. I grew up in Oregon and have quite a large (and ever-growing!) extended family who still lives out there. None of them had met Anna Kate (or Cooper, my sister's youngest), so Sarah and I packed up all three kids and headed west...on separate flights...sorry Sarah. Check her blog for her airplane story...I'm sure it will be told! Anna Kate's first airplane trip was much easier than I expected. She did a lot of sleeping, a lot of reading stories, and a lot of looking out the window. And she LOVED the bump for each touchdown! Once we landed in Oregon it was go go go for an entire week and we had a blast!

There is so much that could be said about our amazing time, but I'm going to let the pictures do most of the talking.

One of the first things Anna Kate's great-grandpa wanted to do when we got there was to read her "Goldie"-my favorite book growing up!

Cooper and Anna Kate (and Wesley!) spent every morning lounging in their jammies and crawling around the little rocking chairs and the hearth at Grandma and Grandpa's

On Sunday we had all of the cousins over for a family reunion/birthday party for my cousin April. We had 9 out of my grandparents' 10 great-grandchildren all together at the same time...amazing! We sure missed Leah though!

From left to right we have Emery (5 months), Lane (3), Gabriel (2), Blake (11 months), Sarah (4 months), Mayson (6), Wesley (3), Anna Kate (1), and Cooper (1).

For some reason Uncle Gary thought it would be ok to tell the kids they could dig into April's birthday cake before it was time! They didn't have to be told twice!

Anna Kate had to get in on the fun too!


Happy birthday, April!

We let the big kids go outside, but told the little ones they had to wait for their mommies. They were so pathetic looking out the window!

Wesley and Lane were two peas in a pod! Here they are climbing the little tree in Grandma and Grandpa's front yard.

And a sweet shot of just Lane

Cousins playing together

Here's a picture of Anna Kate on the tractor my dad received for his 5th birthday from his own grandpa. Three generations of Burgin children have LOVED this tractor!

Cooper and Anna Kate ready to go to the park!

After a wonderful 5 days in Portland, we headed to the Burgin family beach house in Ocean Park, Washington, on the Long Beach Peninsula. Here are all three kids loaded up in the backseat of Grandpa's Lincoln!

We made it...to the most beautiful place on earth!

Here's a picture I shot one morning of a rainbow out over the ocean after a storm

One of the highlights of our time at the beach was digging clams. Even Wesley helped! It was a great clam tide and we all got the limit (15 each) both days!


Here's Grandpa teaching Wesley how to clean and prepare the clams for dinner. For the record, Anna Kate even ate some!

One afternoon Grandma and Grandpa said they would watch all three kids (mind you, they were sleeping!) so Sarah, Aunt Patty and I could go out for a little bit. We had to go over to Oysterville to get some smoked oysters for my brother. Here's a picture of us overlooking the Willapa Bay on the other side of the peninsula.

Aunt Patty brought her dog Lucy-doodle to the beach to meet the kids. They loved her!


Anna Kate really liked her bed, too!


Out for a walk


And our last morning at the beach. Always sad to say goodbye.

Great-Grandma with Anna Kate

Sweet girl and mommy (can you see the baby bump?)

We'll come back, I promise!

A day at the races!

The horse races, that is!

Apparently our little town of Camden, SC, becomes quite the place to be every year on the first Saturday in April. Each year we host the Carolina Cup, a horse race on the national steeplechase tour. Camden has been known as horse country for quite some time, as Northerners used to (and still do) bring their horses down here for a more mild winter so they could continue training. Anyway, somewhere around 70,000 people show up every year for the Carolina Cup (population of Camden is 7000, fyi), and we were told we had to go and experience it at least once! For those of you who can't picture what a horse race in the South is like, think fancy sundresses and big hats for the ladies, bowties and seersucker pants for the men, and some serious tailgating! We have some good friends who invited us to go with them and we had a great time. We got there around 10am and stayed until 5! The races run every half hour or so, and in between we just headed back to our tailgate and enjoyed some good food and good conversation. Anna Kate did fantastic, too, and thought the horses were just about the coolest thing ever (although she did think they were big dogs)! She even took an hour and a half nap in her stroller with all the noise going on around her...everyone has been telling us that there's no way baby #2 will be so easy!

Ok, enough talk...here are some pictures of our fun day. Unfortunately I was too busy having fun and chasing around a 14 month old to take a lot of pictures, but I did get a few!

Anna Kate and her daddy...excited about the races!



For a couple of the races, we got up in the back of the truck so we could have an aerial view! Anna Kate had just woken up from her nap, hence the paci and the dazed look on her face...and sorry about the crazy windblown hair shot, Christa! It was a beautiful day, but it was definitely windy!


Like I said, somewhere around 70,000 people show up for this thing, including two of my freshman college roommates! So fun to see Mary Katherine and Mary Margaret and to introduce them to another double-named Southern belle...Anna Kate!



And just so you can get a glimpse of a race...here's a video! You can see just how close we were to these horses...and just how fast they were going!



We definitely had a fun day at the races!

Moms' Week at the Beach!

Well, moms and kids, that is!

Anna Kate and I just got back from a wonderful 4 days at the beach...and her first time seeing the ocean!

My good friend Kelly invited AK and I, along with a few other families from their church in Tennessee, to spend the week at her parents' beach house in Pawley's Island, SC (south of Myrtle Beach). It was so fun to see Kelly and her boys and to meet a lot of new friends! The weather wasn't super fantastic (a little chilly and rainy), but we had just enough sunshine to play on the beach a little bit, and the rest of the time we spent playing games and doing some shopping! Here are some pictures of our week!

First time on the beach...and she's off!

One of the ladies who came with us had a really nice camera and got some great shots of Anna Kate...notice the sand in her mouth...


Looking for ducks with Seth and Levi at Broadway at the Beach...it was cold!

We tried to get a group shot of the three of them on the slide, but this was the best we got!


Aren't they sweet?


One of the days we were there we toured an old Spanish-style mansion...pretty cool!


Here are some of the kids sitting in the window!

Last day on the beach...AK's favorite thing to do was collect sand and sticks!


Kelly and Anna Kate


Thanks for a great time!