Thoughts for Thursday + Giveaway Winner

Share your thoughts with Natalie and I today for another round of Thoughts for Thursday.  You can write about anything, link back to our blogs and link-up with us below. 

+ I don't think I mentioned this earlier, but we cut Brody off the pacifier a little over a month ago.  It was right after we got back from our trip to Colorado over the 4th of July.   We decided to just throw all the pacifiers away and when he asked about them, tell him that pacifiers were for babies and he was a big boy now.  He didn't need the paci anymore.  He mostly was only using the paci at nap and bedtime, but we were noticing that he was wanting it more often throughout the day as well.  How has it gone so far??  It really hasn't been a problem at all, but I will say that I think it has effected our ease for putting him down at nap time and bedtime.  We literally used to just plop him in the crib at the appropriate time and he went right to sleep without a whimper.  Now, it seems like his stall tactics are out of control and both nap and bedtime are a bit more of a fight.  He sleeps great once he's down, but it just takes him a lot longer to get settled.  I'm still happy with our decision to eliminate it, but wanted to share our experience :)  Did you find that it changed your nap and bedtimes when you dropped the paci??

Do you see his huge monkey paci that he was obsessed with?? Now he gets to keep the monkey but the paci has been removed from it!

+ Brody has been in ISR (infant swimming resource) swim lessons for the past month.  We are currently in our 5th and final week of lessons right now.  I've mentioned it before in another post, but I want to mention it again now that we are at the end.  This has truly been an amazing experience!!  They teach kids in a one-on-one environment, in a 10 minute swim lesson, 5 days a week, how to survive/swim in a pool if they were to fall in.  They take kids ranging from 6 months to 6 years old.    Brody started at 2 and I will probably start baby #2 next summer at less than 1 year old.  Watch the video below to see his progress.  If you have any questions about this program, please don't hesitate to ask.

+ This week we went to a birthday party on this awesome Pirate Ship!  If you live in Pensacola, you should definitely check them out here.  It was a sunset cruise with tons of activities for the kids.  The kids ages ranged from approx. 2-5 years old.   They entertained the kids with water canons, mini mops, treasure chests, limbo, water guns and other fun things.   You can bring your own food, drinks and cake on board and it's a great time for both the kids and the parents.  How brilliant is that???

+ I had my 34 week Doctor's appointment this week and everything looked great and baby appears to be head down.  This was a pretty quick appointment, but what's crazy is that we scheduled the rest of my appointments until my due date!  At 36 weeks you start going to the doctor every week and it was pretty surreal planning out the rest of the appointments.  With Brody, I was so excited for every doctors appointment that we had.  This baby, the doctors appointments aren't as exciting which sounds terrible.   But now I'm pretty excited from here on out!! I'll keep you posted on how things progress :)

this is old from 33 weeks!

+  Thank you to everyone that entered the giveaway from last week with Owen of Davis Duo.  I hope you enjoyed getting to know her more just as much as I did!!  She gave away this gorgeous necklace to one lucky winner!  Congratulations to Michelle.  You will receive an email today regarding shipping information.

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