Last Friday, Dan’s team at his company invited Mio and I over to their office for a lunch. Dan had just been told that it was a lunch to treat us in honor of the upcoming arrival — we were surprised to find upon arrival that they had decorated the conference room and prepared many thoughtful and generous gifts for the baby. His fellow team members had planned a beautiful baby shower for us!
Mio was so excited to visit Daddy at work!
They catered a delicious Italian lunch from Merone’s.
Mio was of course chowing down!
She also loved helping opening the gifts and cards.
Dan’s team members had even prepared gifts for Mio, including “Big Sister” scrubs she could wear to visit baby in the hospital!
A “Big Sister” book to prepare Mio to be a helpful older sibling.
They also presented us with a diaper/wipe caddy for the car embroidered with our last name, as well as a photo album full of generous gift cards from Target, Babies R Us, Baby Gap, B&H Photo, grocery stores… we were floored!
Mio especially loved this stuffed giraffe. She loved being a part of the celebration!
The baby shower lunch was such a warm and thoughtful gesture from Dan’s team, and we were reminded of how blessed we are to have so much support in both our personal and professional lives. With only a couple weeks to go until the due date, we’re finally feeling ready (or as ready as we’ll ever be) to welcome our much-anticipated addition to our family. (Even Mio has been pointing to herself and saying “Big Eester” — because she can’t quite say “sister” — non-stop, both at home and to her teachers and classmates at preschool. The other day, she came up to my belly and said, “Baby, hurry up!!!” lol.) We can’t wait to meet her!
(Special thanks to Dan’s coworker Melissa for taking these photos and sending them to us!)
A couple weekends ago, a couple of my dearest friends threw me the most beautiful baby shower for our second baby. After all the baby shower love we had received when we were expecting Mio, I really didn’t expect any sort of shower or celebration this time around, and I’d even read that it’s bad form to have a baby shower for subsequent babies beyond your first child. But my best friend Debbie insisted that she wanted to plan an intimate get-together on a small scale to celebrate the arrival of baby #2, especially since she wasn’t able to plan one for Mio’s birth (since we were in California at the time). She enlisted the help of one of my other closest friends, Hanna, and together they threw me a truly lovely storybook-themed baby shower! Everything was so beautiful and had so much detail and thought put into it, but at the same time the pace and tone of the shower was really cozy and relaxed, which I loved. Here are some snapshots from the celebration!
Beautiful flowers and storybooks as decorations for the shower.
Hanna, who I became close friends with while we were both studying graphic design in college, designed the lovely invitations and the printed decorations/labels for the shower.
 The front of the folded invitation: I love the detail in it, like “Misono’s Recipes” and “Mio’s Schoolbox” incorporated into the books and boxes of the design.
Back of the folded invitation
The inside of the baby shower invitation… Gorgeous!
A lovely bookmark to accompany the invitation.
There was no shortage of delicious food! Both Debbie and Hanna are amazing in the kitchen, and the refreshments and desserts they prepared were both beautiful and mouthwatering…
An amazing spread of delicious food!
All the food was labeled/named with children’s book references — it was so cute!
Strega Nona’s Chicken Alfredo Pasta and Cloudy with a Chance of BBQ Meatballs!
Charlie and the Chocolate Green Tea Cupcakes
If You Give a Mouse a Chocolate Chip Cookie with Miso Buttercream Frosting
The dessert table with the chocolate cupcakes with green tea frosting, and chocolate chip cookies.
Debbie is amazing at making homemade jam and preserves. She prepared these jars of orange cranberry preserves with grand marnier for the guests to take home as favors. Hanna designed the tags to match the invitation and the rest of the decor of the shower!
Catching up over delicious refreshments
Supplies for onesie and bib crafts! My friends know me so well. This is just the kind of activity I love to do!
Working on handmade onesies and bibs for the baby.
The bib I worked on.
Elisa’s adorable strawberry bib
With Pat. So glad she could make time to come to the shower, even as a busy mama of two! I have much to learn from her as I prepare for our own second baby.
Showing off our creations.
Hanna, Debbie, and I with our completed bibs. Loved Hanna’s sushi bib and Debbie’s giraffe bib! So creative. 🙂
After the crafting fun, it was time to open gifts! Dan and I really didn’t need anything this time around, since we already have most of our baby gear and all the baby clothes from Mio (especially since we’re having another girl — the perks of having children of the same gender!), and knowing this, my girlfriends gifted us books for the baby. Such a great idea, since you can never have enough books! I love that we now have so many more books to add to the girls’ library.
Reading everyone’s thoughtful cards and opening presents.
Thank you everyone for the thoughtful gifts! The ladies also all chipped in to buy me a beautiful baby mobile that I had been looking at on Etsy.
A group picture together. Thank you everyone for coming!
The beautiful tassel garland that Debbie made! It’s definitely going in the baby’s nursery.
Can’t thank these girls enough for all that they do for me!
Thank you Debbie and Hanna for planning and hosting such a beautiful baby shower! I’ll remember it always. Our second baby is so lucky that she got to have such a lovely celebration of her own to welcome her into the world. I’m so blessed to have friends like you in my life, along with all the ladies that attended the shower. (Special thanks to Dan, too, for staying home and watching Mio so that I could have a relaxing time at the party!)
The day after our routine ultrasound, we gathered a bunch of the family members and had a mini gender reveal party on Saturday afternoon, so that everyone could find out whether our second baby is a boy or a girl. (Some of my siblings had ongoing bets since the beginning of the pregnancy on what gender this baby would be, and they were eager to cash in!) We had some delicious cupcakes ordered from Georgetown Cupcake, filled with either blue or pink buttercream to show what the gender of the baby was! Mio was tasked with revealing the inside filling by biting into a cupcake.
Here’s a video of the gender reveal fun!
Delicious cupcakes from Georgetown Cupcake!
Topped with fondant ducks, they were filled with butterecream colored either blue or pink to reveal the gender of the baby.
Pink filling, which means… It’s a girl! ♥
So there it is! We’re thrilled to announce that we’re having a girl! Mio will have a little sister, who she will grow up to (hopefully) be best friends with. I cherish my own relationship with my younger sister, and so I’ve always hoped that Mio would get to experience the same joys of sisterhood. I’m sure they won’t be without their moments of competition and occasional jealousy, but it will be so beautiful to watch them grow up together. As for me, I’m elated to be a mother of two sweet daughters — I’ve always imagined myself a mother of daughters, and I look forward to the bond we’ll share as the ladies in the family. 🙂 Dan is very happy, too; Mio has been more attached to Dan lately and is growing into a total Daddy’s girl, which melts his heart! He’s very doting and protective over his little girl, and I know he’ll be like that with our second baby girl, too. ♥
On Friday, we went in for our routine ultrasound to see how baby’s growing, and to hopefully find out the gender! When I was pregnant with Mio, I had a few ultrasounds early on (I think at 11 weeks, 14 weeks, and then 20 weeks) for dating the due date and nuchal translucency testing, etc. This time around, they’ve only been checking the heartbeat at each appointment and told me they wouldn’t to do an ultrasound until we passed the 20 week mark, unless there were problems that arose (like not being able to detect a heartbeat, etc.). We’ve been waiting so long to actually see the baby, so it was so great to finally be able to “meet” our little one! Baby #2 measured how they should at this time, was moving around a lot, and is very healthy. There was so much movement that it was at first hard to get a good look at those telltale body parts, but we were able to get a very clear reading at the end!
Here are some of the pictures from the ultrasound…
The side profile of the baby.
Another view of the side profile.
Little feet!
Finding out the gender… can you tell whether it’s a boy or girl? 😉
Looking right at us!
The first half of the pregnancy has been pretty rough, and while the nausea is slightly better these days, it’s still very much there, and I find that I’m still constantly exhausted and needing to nap a lot. I’ve accepted that the remainder of the pregnancy probably won’t be much different. I guess pregnancy is just not meant to be a very enjoyable experience physically for me! At least we have the baby to look forward to at the end of all of this. We can’t wait to meet our precious little one. 🙂
We’re thrilled to announce that we’re expecting our second child, due to arrive in January! Our little family of three is growing into a family of four in the new year.
Mio expresses our feelings exactly about this upcoming big change in our lives…
A lot of times, we’re full of excitement and anticipation…
…but we are not without those moments of fear and uncertainty.
“What have we gotten ourselves into?! Can we handle this?!”
But yes, for the most part… we’re just super excited.
And while Mio may not exactly understand yet how her life is about to drastically change…
…we can be sure she’s going to be an awesome big sister!
It’s been hard keeping it a secret, and while we were trying to keep it to ourselves just a little longer, it’s proved impossible by the fact that my belly’s been getting noticeable a lot earlier this time around (I swear I already look like I’m 5 months along), it’s been difficult to explain my seemingly constant state of nausea and the frequent dashes to the bathroom, and the fact that my mother in her unbridled excitement spilled the news to half the people she talked to at my brother’s wedding this past weekend (“Please be understanding if my oldest daughter pukes during the ceremony… she’s PREGNANT!” Thanks, mom.) Baby #2 certainly hasn’t made it easy for me so far, as I believe my morning sickness is actually worse this time around (while I was nauseous all 9 months while pregnant with Mio, I mostly suffered from gagging and dry heaving, and only actually threw up a handful of times — this time I’ve been losing my dinner almost every night), and being pregnant while taking care of a toddler seems to triple the first trimester exhaustion… but we’re very thankful for this opportunity to be creating a nurturing yet another human life.
We’re very touched and grateful for the support and enthusiasm of everyone as we’ve announced this happy news. I know I say this often, but I feel like I can never stress enough how lucky we are to have all of your in our lives — it’s thanks to you that our family’s lives are so enriched.
