Baby Chapman... How We Found Out

If you saw yesterday's post then you know our big announcement. Zac and I are expecting our first baby in just a few weeks. Tomorrow I will officially be 37 weeks pregnant. We're in the home stretch and we can't wait to meet our baby.

As it's been a while since I've posted regularly, this information is all news to my blogging buddies so I thought that I would catch you all up on all things baby. First things first: how we found out.

Zac and I had been talking baby long before we were married. While planning our wedding, we were also planning our timeline for baby and we decided that we wanted to start trying right after our honeymoon. It was three months after our wedding that the positive results popped up on the tests. (Yes I took four)

We had a stash of pregnancy tests in our bathroom and from time to time I would take one just to see. On Thursday, September 6 after Zac went to work I decided to take one. I had taken one just a few days before and it was negative so I wasn't really expecting anything. After taking the test and leaving it in our bathroom upstairs, I went downstairs to make myself dinner. To be honest, I had forgotten about it for a little bit. When I finally remembered a few minutes later, I ran upstairs to check it and was blown away when I saw a faint pink line. I've read that leaving tests for longer than 5 minutes can result in a false positive so I didn't take it too seriously. Still, a part of me was hopeful. I decided that I would wait to take another one until first thing the next morning.

Friday morning I woke up early to get ready for work and rushed to the bathroom to take the test before doing anything else. Zac was still blissfully sleeping as I sat on the bathroom floor with wide eyes staring at the very clear pink line on the test.

I decided not to wake Zac. I knew that if I told him right then I would just want to spend the whole rest of the day with him celebrating our amazing news. Unfortunately, that wasn't a possibility as I needed to hurry up and get ready for work. So I rushed out the door without waking him and opted to get another box of tests on my way home....just to be sure. By the time I got home from work that evening, Zac had already gone to work so I was able to take the tests on my own. I got the Clearblue digital ones this time. There was something about seeing the word 'pregnant' that madeit more official...more real.

Now that it had started to settle in, I brainstormed ways to tell Zac about our baby news. That evening I went to dinner with a friend at a restaurant right next to the mall. After our meal and catch up session I headed into Mainland and purchased a pair of baby Toms in gray. Zac and I always have Sundays off together so I thought this would be the perfect time to tell him. I planned on making him a big breakfast and spilling the beans first thing in the morning.

Waiting until Sunday meant that I had to keep this secret for a few days. This was an unbelievably difficult task that had me dodging my poor husband as I was SURE that I would let it slip. Zac worked on Saturday afternoon so I only had to keep the secret for the evening. It was still difficult and I ended up telling him that I was super tired at around 8:00pm and I went to bed.

On Sunday morning I banished Zac to our bedroom and ran downstairs to start breakfast.

On Friday night, after I got home from the mall I had set to work drawing up a fun menu for our Sunday breakfast. I used one of the chalkboard menus that Zad had built for our wedding and wrote out the following: Chateau de Chapman Specials Mommy & Daddy to be Breakfast Baby Chapman arriving May 2013.

I set up the shoes that I purchased just a few days before and the second positive test I had taken in a pastry dish with a dome. I set this in the center of the table next to a vase of flowers.

Once breakfast was all made I put on some music and called Zac down to eat. I am not a cook and making a meal is a rare thing for me so Zac was quite excited that I had prepared something this morning. His already smiling face was priceless once he spotted the pastry dish and the tiny shoes on the table. (He didn't even notice the giant chalkboard until halfway through the meal!) We shared an emotional moment and a tight hug before sitting down to eat and discuss our excitement.

Next came telling our family and friends....

1 Year Anniversary

January 14th was the one year anniversary of the day that Zac proposed. I can't believe that a year has gone by so quickly. Zac and I definitely wanted to celebrate the occasion, so we headed out for a champagne breakfast that morning before I had to go to work.

While I was at work, Zac and I texted one another and discussed what we thought we should do to celebrate. We decided that it would only be fitting to get P.F. Changs takeout and have a candle lit dinner like we had done that same day just one year earlier.

After I got off work, I came home and had a chance to relax. Zac told me to hang out in our room because he was preparing a surprise downstairs and he didn't want me to see it just yet. After a while we headed out to pick up dinner and dessert.

When we got home, Zac had me wait in the car for a few minutes so he could finish setting up the surprise. When I was finally allowed to come into the house, I was greeted by candles and a beautifully set dining room table.

As beautiful as the table was, I had no idea that it wasn't the real surprise. In reality it turned out to be a decoy dinner table. Zac started to get the food plated and as we were about to sit down to dinner we headed into the garage instead. There in the same place that Zac got down on one knee was a table set for two. The floor of the garage was covered in white balloons and there were candles everywhere.

Zac had soft music playing in the background and the room was decorated with our wedding colors. It was the sweetest thing!

It was the most perfect way to spend our proposal anniversary together.

I Love You, Too!

I checked the mail this morning and was pleasantly surprised by an adorable card from Kim!

Thank you Miss Kimmie! I love you, too!

Good Morning!

Having a difficult time sleeping last night (I oddly had second thoughts about the shoes I was choosing for the girls.....more details on that another day) I stayed in bed a little longer this morning. Somewhere around 8:00 Zac came running into our bedroom and yelled:

"There's a hot air balloon crashing on our front lawn! I gotta go!"

Before I had a chance to ask any questions he was already bounding down the stairs and running out the front door, Jim hot on his trail. Since this is our sense of humor with one another, at first I thought he was just messing around and trying to get me out of bed. Realizing that he had actually run outside I decided it didn't matter if he was joking or not, I was curious to see what was going on. Plus, it wouldn't be the first time we've seen hot air balloons floating above our neighborhood. (We don't live too far from Valley Children's Hospital which is where the balloons take off from.) You might remember a post  from earlier this summer (found here) in which Zac and I climbed up on the roof of our back patio one morning to watch about five hot air balloons float along on their journey.

So I jumped out of bed and followed Zac outside and this is what I saw:

It hadn't crashed and it wasn't on our front lawn (what can I say, my Zac knows how to spin a story!) but a hot air balloon really had landed safely on our block just two houses away! It certainly isn't a sight you see every morning and our neighbors came spilling out of their homes to check out the balloon. The cutest spectators were three little children still in their pjs, who were very excited to see the balloon and eager to talk to the people in the balloon's basket. Zac said it reminded him of when he was little and his parents took him and his siblings to Valley Children's Hospital very early in the morning to watch the hot air balloons get ready and take off into the sky.

Just like the last time we saw hot air balloons there were several of them in the air. (If you look closely at the photo above you can see another one in the distance to the left of the balloon just under the streetlamp.) We didn't get the full story on why/how this balloon found it's way onto our street, but we figured that perhaps the balloon had been thrown off course by the morning breeze. Several vehicles eventually showed up on our street, including a van from the hot air balloon company (of which Zac and I can't remember the name...we'd be horrible eye witnesses) that came to take the balloon away.

The people started to lay out a giant orange sheet (it reminded me of the parachutes we used in P.E. in elementary school). The children who were watching were excited to hear that they could help lay out the sheet to prepare of the balloon to be deflated. Once it was all spread out on the street everyone backed up and they brought the balloon down.

Here they are bringing down the beast:

I've never seen a hot air balloon deflated in person and I was amazed that something that big could be taken down on a neighborhood street without any worries of getting stuck in a tree or landing on a parked car. It was also the first time that I had seen a hot air balloon in person at all and let me tell you that Zac and I were amped to go for a ride. We've decided to look up the cost for a hot air balloon excursion...it might be our next adventure....after the wedding of course.

So that was how I woke up this morning! Hope everyone has a fantastic Saturday!

It's A Bird....It's A Plane..

..No! It's a hot air balloon!

Zac and I awoke early this morning. We opened the back door to let Jim out and let the cool morning air in and to our surprise saw a hot air balloon sailing away in the distance.

We have no idea where the balloon came from or where it was going but we were so pleasantly surprised to see it that we didn't care about the details. As we moved outside to get a closer look we saw another appear close by.

Zac grabbed the ladder (which was still hanging out in the backyard after we used it for our tree light project) and we climbed up to the patio roof to catch a better view of these balloons. It was up on the roof that we saw there were actually five balloons floating above Fresno this morning. These were the last two we were able to catch a glimpse of before they all drifted away.

This is certainly not something we see everyday and it was a great way to start our morning!