It's a GIRL!!!

Ok, so I think most of you probably know already that we're having a girl.  For those of you who haven't heard the news yet...SURPRISE!!!  Baby Girl Smith is expected to arrive on May 5th (Cinco de Mayo) and we couldn't be more excited to welcome her into the world and into our family.  Jody's doing well.  I swear her baby bump grows everyday, which tells me that our little girl is growing more and more everyday.  She's been really moving around and kicking a lot lately.  In fact, momma isn't getting much sleep because baby has been so active.  I guess the little one is just preparing us for the lack of sleep that's coming our way soon.  I'm not looking forward to that aspect of becoming a parent!

To reveal the gender of the baby to our family we decided to have Rebecca (Jody's sister) bake one of her amazing cakes and color the filling with either blue (boy) or pink (girl).  It was suppose to be a secret, outside of telling Rebecca ahead of time so she could make the cake.  However, between the sneakiness of Jody's sisters and Jody's inability to call the baby "it" instead of "her" when talking with our friends and family, nearly everyone pretty well knew that we were expecting a girl when we carved into the cake.  Nevertheless, we had a good time with the family and this was a different twist on "the big reveal".  Perhaps we'll try a different approach next time.

Here are a few pics of the big reveal, followed by some of the ultrasound pics where we learned that we were having a girl.

This one is a bit fuzzy, as I had to use a scanner to copy the pic, but it's a 3D ultrasound.  Again, not the best quality but it is pretty wild to see you baby in 3D.

Anniversary in NYC

On Dec 17th, 2011 Jody and I celebrated our 7th year of marriage to each other.  It has been a glorious 7 years together and I look forward to so many more years and memories to come with my wife.  For our anniversary we decided to head into NYC for the weekend to experience the "New York" style Christmas.  We booked a night in a boutique hotel downtown and bought tickets to the Rockettes Christmas show at Radio City Music Hall.

Here are a few pics before we went into the theater...

                                         

                        

Before heading in to the show we stopped by Rockefeller Center to check out the infamous tree.  It's hard to tell from the pictures but the tree was enormous!!  

     

      

You can almost get a good perspective on the size of the tree in this picture.

      

The Rockette's show was amazing!  I highly recommend it to anyone coming to NYC at Christmas time.  They ended the show with their Nativity spectacular, which was really beautiful.  It's nice to see at least one thing in today's world that celebrates the true meaning of Christmas...the birth of Jesus Christ.

                   

Although the evening was a lot of fun I made one costly mistake - not making dinner reservations.  I actually had two places in mind but we couldn't decide before we drove into the city.  Bad move on my part because literally every restaurant was packed by the time we wanted to eat dinner.  After walking around for a least an hour or more we decided on a Mexican restaurant near our hotel.  The food was decent but we paid typical NYC prices...$60 for something that would have cost $15 back in Arkansas!  Lesson learned.