WHAT A WEEK: BABY'S GENDER & CONCERT IN CHICAGO

Last Saturday night, I looked at Samuel and said, "It's been a really big week."

And it was. We found out the gender of baby #2 and went to a long-awaited concert in Chicago!

20 WEEK ANATOMY SCAN
I'll start with the baby gender because, oh my!!!!!!





Ready for it....

IT'S  A  GIRL!

Surprise!! surprise!! surprise!!! We were so shocked and thrilled to find out that baby number two is a little girl!

We were both kind of thinking it was another boy, to be honest, just because this pregnancy hasn't been drastically different from my first pregnancy. But this is the second time I have been completely wrong on predicting the gender. I was so confident that Charlie was a girl. I'm 0 and 2 on that!

The ultrasound technician started out checking the heartbeat and trying to wake the baby up. :) I told her I had been feeling a lot of movement, but mostly at night. Just a few minutes later, the baby woke up and stayed moving around the entire time (very unlike big brother's anatomy scan. he stayed rolled into a ball the whole time and didn't even let us finish the whole checklist at that appointment!). Then the nurse said, "It's looking like a girl!" and I said, "What! Are you serious?"And sure enough, she could see very clearly that it was a GIRL. Samuel and I were thrilled by this happy news!

All of her measurements and photos during the scan looked great. We are so thankful for her health thus far. Her heart rate is now around 144 bpm.

Crazy enough, I did have a dream that it was girl a few months ago! My dream was that we had arrived home from the hospital with a baby girl and I could remember NOTHING about the delivery or even being at the hospital. So I guess you could say, I had a gender prediction dream! But let's hope that last part doesn't happen in real life.

Over the course of the day we found out, we called and texted family and shared our gender reveal photos above with them. Our family was just as surprised (and happy) as we were! I had several close friends who guessed girl, but most of our immediate family was also thinking it would be a boy. But it goes without saying that everyone, especially Samuel and I, was over the moon thrilled to hear that we are having a little girl. We are so thankful for her precious life and cannot wait to meet our new baby girl sometime near the end of February.

BEN RECTOR CONCERT
Samuel and I also went to a really special concert in Chicago last week!

For my birthday back in August, my wonderful + amazing + sweet + thoughtful + husband got me surprise tickets to see Ben Rector in Chicago!! The concert was at the Chicago Theatre and we were pumped. It was our first time going to Chicago alone, too, soo we were really up for an adventure!

We only live 25 miles from Chicago according to the map, buuuuttttt it definitely takes over an hour to get there. Always. It took us about an hour and a half to get to the concert venue, but thankfully we left about 2 hours prior to the concert start time.

The show was so good, y'all. He sang all my favorite songs from the new album and there were a lot of really special surprises in it too. And we loved being inside the Chicago Theatre! It's so beautiful.

October is off to a really fun start. We have family coming in next weekend and Halloween right around the corner (one of my personal favorites, as you may or may not know).

In the mean time, I'll just be sitting here letting it sink in that we are having a baby G I R L.
I can't believe it.

Emily

WORSHIP + READING PLAYLIST

I can't read in silence. I'm one of those people that needs noise to make me tune my mind to what I'm reading. Not only does it help me focus, but it has always been how I enjoyed to read most. I can remember this being true all the way back to high school and especially in college.  I would listen to my iPod with headphones whenever I had to study at school or in the super quiet library. Another one of my favorite things to do is to listen to music when I read on road trips. Just thinking about reading with my headphones in the warm car makes me want to travel right now. ;) It's always been the best way for me to enjoy reading even more.

It has even been so true that I have a couple of albums I associate directly with books I was reading when I listened for the first time. Isn't that funny?! Is anyone else like this too or is my mind just so music associative? I remember listening to the new (at the time) Adele album as I was reading Water for Elephants. I was flying to Florida with my parents and sister for vacation and now whenever I hear that album it always makes me think of that book, those sandy beaches, and the sunny balcony I spent so much time reading on during our summer vacation.

If you are like me when it comes to reading with music, yay I'm not alone in this! And this post is especially for you. If you think I'm weird and crazy and could never imagine reading AND listening to music at the same time, first of all, try it sometime and second of all, this playlist is still for you. Today I'm sharing the Spotify playlist I recently made for doing my Bible reading plan, and even if you don't want to listen while you read, these are songs you'll still want to add to your Jesus music repertoire. It's not a finished list in the least, but I've been loving it so far this year.

Just to name a few of the artists on the playlist:
Sovereign Grace Music
Audrey Assad
Bart Millard
Andrew Peterson
Shane & Shane

Some of my top favorites you will hear are "All Creatures of Our God and King," "All Glory Be to Christ," "O Praise the Name," "Prayer," and "Grace That Is Greater." So if nothing else, listen to those first.



This playlist will continue to grow and change throughout the year I'm sure. I would love to know your favorites right now too, so please drop them below in the comments.

Happy reading AND listening! 😊
-Emily

"BIG REPUTATION, BIG REPUTATION" REVIEW + OTHER THOUGHTS

I broke down and got Taylor Swift's new album Reputation last weekend. I honestly didn't think I would want it because I didn't like the first single she released, but as the album release got closer I just flat out changed my mind. I love owning physical copies of music, so we headed to Target on Saturday morning to pick it up. Husband went along with it, thankfully. He's the best. ;)

Y'all are probably going to laugh about this post and think I'm silly. But I just feel like writing about it and going down memory lane, if you will.

It's fun to have one thing you've loved for a long time, that you keep coming back to year after year. For some people it's a certain book or a movie series. In a lot of ways, music has always been that for me. Taylor Swift is at the top of the list probably.

I remember the first time I saw her in concert with my mom and middle school friend in 2008. She was on tour with Rascal Flatts who I was really more interested in at the time. (And by interested, I really mean absolutely obsessed but that's probably for another nostalgic post. 😂) Taylor had just released "Love Story" on the radio and I remember being SO hopeful that she would sing it at the concert and she did. I'm not joking when I say that it gave me chills when she started playing it just because I was so full of excitement and that kind of special feeling you get when you hear a favorite song. I wish I had pictures to share, but that was almost 10 years ago so who knows where they are now! 

The second time I saw Taylor Swift perform was on the RED tour in 2013 with my little sister, Rachel. Ed Sheeran was on tour with Taylor and it was pretty stinkin' great. I was blown away because she changed outfits like 20 times. It was the first concert I drove and went to without an "adult" - I was the adult now haha. Enjoy this extra blurry picture of our good sister memory.

Here we are years later. I'm 2.5 years married, have a 15 month old son, and I'm still listening and getting excited about her new music. 

Reputation is not my favorite album of hers and I doubt it ever will be. It doesn't have that cohesive feeling or emotion like I normally get from her other albums. Overall I would say the album has fewer genuinely sweet love songs than I would like, she does a lot more talk-singing in a monotone voice, and some of the songs are little too vengeful for my taste. Ha! So I definitely have some issues with it. However, there are a few great ones on there too. I'll list my favorites at the end, so keep reading.

I'm still glad I decided to pick it up. She's changed as an artist over the years, that is for sure. I've changed too. I think change is a normal and good thing for an artist to do. I'm not going to be one of those people that complain about how Taylor Swift went from country to pop. But I think it's interesting that there's something that still remains that brings all those familiar emotions back up to the surface.

I know I'm not the only one who has that one thing they'll probably just love because it holds a special place in their growing up years. Doesn't matter if it gets a bad reputation. (See what I did there?) Or if it changes over the years. Or if it seems a little childish. Or outdated. It might be a "guilty pleasure," something that makes you feel nostalgic, something that makes you remember. That's how I feel about Reputation.

If you haven't listened to Taylor Swift's new album yet, I would recommend these favorites to you: 

Delicate 

Dancing With Our Hands Tied

Call It What You Want

Getaway Car

King of My Heart

New Years Day

Happy listening! Xo Emily



Hold on to the memories they will hold on to you. And I will hold on to you.

COLDPLAY// A Head Full of Dreams Tour

We saw Coldplay in concert last night!! I still can't believe it. Talk about the BEST pre-baby date night ever!

Nothing like a concert at 39 weeks + 2 days!

Back when it was first announced that their tour was coming to Louisville, I thought there was no way we would get to go since it was five days before my due date. I mean, we could potentially have had a baby by then! Even two days before the concert and Baby was still cozy and seemingly content in my belly, I was trying not to get my hopes up. See, I'm the concert junkie in this household, but Samuel has loved Coldplay since he was in middle school and had NEVER had the chance to see them live. We have talked about seeing them "one day" so many times. So I knew thought I might be able to convince him to get last minute tickets. Husband and I talked about it and he admitted he would be a nervous wreck the whole time hoping I wouldn't go into labor AT the concert and him have to figure out what to do with me then. Which is totally fair haha. But luckily my weekly doctor's appointment fell the day before the concert giving me the perfect chance to ask her if she thought it would be wise or not. To my delight - she gave me the green light on it being perfectly safe for Baby and said that if I was feeling up to it, we could go!

And boy are we glad we did. Little Baby did fine, just a normal amount of wiggling ;) , and we lost our minds at how amazing Coldplay is live. It will definitely go down in the books as possibly the best concert ever. Samuel was the first person to introduce me to the band so long ago. He bought me my first Coldplay CD, and left another one on my doorstep one time on as a surprise because he had a crush on me (and wanted me to like his favorite band). So it was pretty special to finally get to see them together, married, and pregnant! We're thankful that Baby cooperated and stayed put for the night too.

Now that we've checked that off the list, we are REALLY super ready to meet our son now!

We ate at our current favorite sandwich place, Potbelly, on 4th Street in Downtown Louisville before the concert.

 

The band gave out light up bands to everyone and they coordinated with the music! 

Thanks for an amazing show, Coldplay!