Picture with Santa

Christmas details for the girls...

As requested by my mom, I'm just letting everyone know via this blog what sizes the girls are in and what Constance likes right now.

Constance is wearing 24 month or 2T clothing right now (right on schedule for her age), and Lucca is in 3-6 month clothes (she'll be 3 months old on December 1- she's a big girl). Constance is in size 5.5 toddler shoes, and Lucca doesn't have any shoes, so I have no idea what size she wears. Haha!

Also, Constance really likes books (especially books that have dance moves in them), horses, birds, and Curious George. She is very much into animals. And markers... but we're limiting the use of markers, since she's a little young, and is trying to destroy our walls with pencil. And like many little girls, she really likes jewelry, hair bows, and purses.

Lucca doesn't really play with anything yet, so she doesn't need any toys, but we don't really have any rattles or teething rings for her, which will probably come in handy in the next few months when she starts to get teeth.

Mike and I like wine and massages, so you can send us a live-in masseuse with a bottle of wine, and that would be great. ;)

We opened the Christmas show on Thanksgiving, and Lucca made her stage debut as baby Jesus, just like Constance did last year. So evenings are busy for us, but we're having fun. Both girls are really great, and they have the same mid-day naptime, which is quite a blessing for us. It gives us time to shower and clean up the house. We will try to send some Christmas cards soon, but if we don't get them out, expect them in the form of an email blog like this one.

Halloween and an Election!!!

Hello!!! Photos will be at the bottom of this post.

Since my last post, Lucca has had her 2 month appointment. She is 23.5 inches long, and 13 lbs 7 oz. That puts her in the 90% of babies her age! She is much bigger than Constance was at this same age (By comparison, Constance was 10 lbs 12 oz, and 22 inches long). Both girls are so much fun right now. Lucca has started smiling and laughing, and Constance wants to help with things like cooking. And they both take nice long naps! :)

Other than that, we have had Halloween, and the girls both dressed as garden gnomes. Actually, they were costumes we picked up from Petsmart. Yes, they were dog costumes. Haha!

Also, my dad Josh, or "Pappo" as Constance calls him, has been in town this week, and has been helping us out and playing with the kids. Not to mention he also helped us pull the weeds out of our front lawn! It looks much better.

And yesterday was the election. We had a poker and politics party at our house, and we pulled the Model A (that Mike's grandad completely restored) out of the garage and put a sign on it that said "Vote Zaller 2012". He did not get elected president, so our sign didn't work, but the party was a success. :)

In other family-related news: Mike's mom Betty has been visiting Tennessee and Nebraska this past week, making the rounds to visit the other kids (Rhonda and Dawn) and grandkids (Jordan, Jonathan, and Jackson). My mom and her husband Michael are weighing their options with American Airlines, and will know soon if they will have to move again, or if they will be staying in Tulsa. And my grandma, Beverly, is helping with the hurricane victims as she is working with FEMA, and will be gone from home for a while, so pray for her to have peace and comfort to those affected.

Now, for the photos:

A pic of the babies in bed...

One month!

Today we went to Lucca's one month checkup. And, although she started out smaller than Constance did, she has grown leaps and bounds in just 4 weeks.

She is now 10 and a half pounds and 22 inches. For those of you counting, that is 2 full inches longer and 3 pounds heavier than her birth weight.

Anyway, I have a photo of Lucca at one week, and her at one month, with each of her grandmothers that I am sharing here. :) And also a picture of Constance, who is doing really great with the new baby.

New pictures

Lucca Helen

On Saturday, September 1st, at 12:37 am, Lucca Helen Zaller was born. She was 7 lbs 6 oz, and 20 inches long.

So far, she is a very sweet baby, and Constance is a very good big sister already. And this delivery was very smooth and relatively easier than the first one. She was born after only 10 minutes of pushing.

Here are a couple of photos of the baby.

Our last Italy post

I finally finished our Italian honeymoon blog, and if you'd like to check it out, it's at

www.shortphotographer.com.

It's our trip to Rome. Enjoy!

Gearing up for #2

We are enjoying our last few moments with just the 3 of us, before life gets too crazy with another little one around, but today we took a few photos of our full-term pregnancy. We didn't really do any pregnancy photos this time around (with Constance, we took our "nice" pictures at about 34 weeks, this week we will be a full-term 40 week pregnancy, so quite a bit later).

For now it's just a waiting game. Constance wasn't born tip almost 42 weeks, so we theoretically have up to 2 more weeks, but we could also have the baby at any moment, and it should be perfectly healthy.

Anyway, enjoy our family photos. We took them in our back yard- you can see our amazing oak trees.

A photo of the last trimester

Just because I haven't really taken any this time around, I thought I should get at least one picture and I am sure that some of the family members are curious anyway as to what I look like. This is 37.5 weeks pregnant. Officially, the baby is full-term, but the midwives will make us wait until at least this Thursday to deliver, if I go into labor, just in case of complications. Though, if this baby goes by Constance's watch, we might not have a little one until September!!!  Luckily, I've gained a little less weight this time around (so far…) by about 5 lbs. It's probably because there were not major food holidays during this pregnancy!!! Thank goodness, anyhow!

We still don't know if it's a boy or a girl, so we haven't picked names, but we'll let you know as soon as it comes out!

Constance's 18 month checkup

We had her 18 month appointment today, and she is measuring 22 lbs and 33.5 inches, which is 25th and 50th percentile, respectively. She's exactly on track, and as normal as a toddler can be. She is sometimes going to her potty, and she is always trying to be involved in what we are doing. She really likes to eat eggs, peaches, and pulled pork bbq. Haha. What a Georgia girl.

She can also recognize the words "baby", "dog", "cat", "hi", and "arms up". And she likes to watch videos of herself on my cell phone. And she still loves that cat.

We are now 37 weeks pregnant (pregnancy usually lasts about 40 weeks), so this is the home stretch for baby #2. We still don't know the gender yet, so we are having a hard time picking out names. Still, we aren't worried, since babies don't really need names straight away. Everyone has a different feeling on if it's a boy or a girl, and everyone is almost right. Haha! We are still planning on delivering at the midwife birth center like we did with Constance, as long as everything goes right. But I'm feeling just fine, just a little bit of heartburn, but no stretch marks or severe swelling or anything so far. I've gained just over 20 lbs, which is normal, and I'm allowed to gain up to 35 lbs by the end of the pregnancy (which could be anywhere between 1 and 5 weeks from today).

Tonight is also the 10th year anniversary of this group of singers performing at the Savannah Theatre, so there is a big celebration and the 50's show will be playing. It should be fun!

As requested… a video!

… of the cat with the baby. He really has a very high tolerance for her antics.

Click Here to View This Video on Youtube

Vocabulary Lesson

First of all, today is Mike's birthday, so happy birthday to him, and congrats to Betty for fitting those shoulders out.

I wanted to write down what Constance's current vocabulary is for people who might be coming down in the next month or so, so that you can understand her:

datty= Daddy
dah-ddy= thank you
mama= Mommy
dat= cat
dot= dog
dite= light, bite
bubbo= bubbles
gnnn= bottle
maow= meow
huff huff= woof woof
wiyss= horse
buh poh= bird, nipple, belly button, Becca
bup= cup, bear, book
dotch= crotch
ba bo= baby
AYssss= ice, eyes
mo= mouth
wish= fish
dye dye= bye bye, night night

That's all that I can think of for now. I'm sure she has a few more that we can't understand yet, but these are the ones that we "get". :)

Family Update

Today Constance had her 15 month checkup.

I don't have all of the stats with me right now (Mike saved them to his phone, if you come and check this blog- the actual blog, not just this email: thezallers.blogspot.com ) in a few hours, I'll have added the stats to the bottom of the blog page.

Off hand, the only thing I could remember was that she is 20.4 lbs, which is still normal for her age, but on the small normal side.

We went to the beach for the first time this year this week. The water already feels nice, so for those of you that are coming here this summer, you'll like the warm weather. I'm not so sure that I like the warm weather, but it was nice to go out on a mild day that was less than 100 degrees.

Still waiting to hear if our loan was approved for the new house, but we're not too worried about it, everything else seems to be falling into place.

Our friends Matt and Michelle had their third baby today- Maryn Elizabeth. So we'll have another baby just a few months behind theirs! The official due date for us is August 30, but we're not counting our chickens. I'm fully anticipating a September baby, as Constance was due on January 30 and wasn't born til February 10. But I won't complain if it comes on time. We aren't finding out til it's born whether we are having a boy or a girl, since we thought the anticipation (and the wrong guesses) were so fun last time.

Here is our beach picture from this past week. Check back later for Constance's 15 month stats!

A New House!!!

After a lot of deliberation, we decided it was time to look for houses. We really love our downtown life, but we wanted to look around and see what was out there. We have been casually looking for over a year now, but we were surprised that we found a house that was in our favorite neighborhood and within our price range that we could call home for the next few decades.

It's in a little community called Autumn Lake (still in Savannah). The sign entering the community says "Population 216, including dogs and cats". So it's a small community, still being built, but everything looks like Nantucket- kids playing in the street, white picket fences, a community pool, and a small lake that always has geese and ducks in the middle of it.

Our house has 5 bedrooms (so come on and visit us!), and a bonus room, split staircase, a beautiful Charleston style wrap-around porch, and a mosquito netted back porch that overlooks four 100+ year old oak trees.

We close next month on the 11th!!! If you want to see larger versions of the photos, just click on the picture.

Another Italy blog, and Constance misses her Daddy

Thought I'd post 2 things today.

First is part 6 of our honeymoon (I should have at least 7 when I am finished), this one is about Positano in southern Italy. Click on the link below for the blog.

 Positano Honeymoon Blog

 The second is a video of Constance from last night. She was really missing Mike (he was at the show), and wouldn't go to bed without him. After a long time of her crying for him, I decided to video her for about 30 seconds and ask her what was wrong. She's really cute in this video.

 

Baby Zaller #2

We got our final ultrasound today (unless we have any complications that arise between now and August), and everything looks to be right on track. Constance never would pose for any of her ultrasound pictures, but this one doesn't seem to mind as much. We got to see it yawning, which was really cool. I'm putting a picture of it, but in case you're really bad at figuring out ultrasounds, I'm also including my drawing over the photo, so that you can see exactly what we were looking at. You can see the heart in the photo as well. I'm officially out of the show at this point, so now I need to work on getting all of my photography tasks caught up. Constance is walking now! She learned at Clint and Luisa's house at Easter, and now it's fun. We're grateful, as we don't have to carry her everywhere now. Time for a leash! :)

She can CLIMB!

The Park

Today we went to Forsyth Park for a picnic and to play on the swingset. In the first picture, she is playing with her bubbles, but she is actually standing up on her own, without any support.

The refrigerator

Recently, Constance has decided she likes to sit in the fridge while I grab ingredients out of it for meals.

Quick update

I'm horrid at updating. But I figured this one deserved a mini-post of it's own.

So Mike and I decided a while back that we are going to attempt to do what the rest of the world (minus America) does and potty train as early as we can. When we started researching it, we realized that the US is the latest country to potty train, with the average age being 3, but in 90 percent of the world, most children are potty trained by 1. Yes, you read that right. They are potty trained by ONE YEAR OLD.

Apparently, that was also the case in America until about 60 years ago.

We decided that it's not that children have gotten dumber, it's that parents have probably gotten lazier with the advent of disposable diapers. And we don't want Constance to be okay with sitting in her own pee and poop.

So a few months back, we bought her a potty chair. No, she still isn't walking on her own yet, but we thought that it's never too early to introduce it. And every time we go to the toilet, we sit her down next to us (we don't always remove the diaper- we just want her to get the idea), and before she gets to take a bath (her favorite thing in the world), she has to sit on the toilet for a minute.

She's actually peed a few times on the toilet, though we realize we probably need to teach her some baby sign language for when she needs to go. But yesterday she actually pooped on the toilet. She was really confused. We noticed she was about to go (oh, you can tell!), and brought her to the chair and she finished going there! She got lots of hugs and clapping for it, and though I'm not sure she knew what was going on, she was very proud of herself.

Respectfully, I did not photograph that particular event. That's too weird, even for me. But I thought I should document it here, and share with you guys. We haven't done "diapers off" yet, but we are waiting until she can walk on her own. Until then, we are proud that she has thus far lived up to every bar we have set for her, and she is still a very happy, silly little girl.

One year old!

So Constance had her first birthday and her one year checkup this week.

 She is 18.5 lbs and about 28 inches. We think. We forgot the measurement for her height. So 14th percentile for her weight, and 40th for her height.

 For her birthday, she got lots of cards and gifts from family, and even had a few family visitors make it down to Savannah: Pappo and Mammo (Josh and Elisa), Nani (Betty), and Uncle Clint and Aunt Luisa. I made her a "smash cake" so that she could play with it. She actually hates to get messy, so she didn't smash it, so much as squeeze it with her hand. So Mike and I decided to see if she'd feed us the cake, which she happily did. I must say, it was really good cake. And pretty (it was pink and purple). Haha.

 I'll put up the video soon, but for now, enjoy these photos.

Constance and the diaper pail

One post...

Sorry, I haven't had a phone, so putting pics up has been at a standstill lately.

However, I emailed this photo to myself from Mike's phone. Constance has been chewing on her crib lately, like she's a beaver. Enjoy.