Go go go...

Here are a complete summers-worth of activities packed into 3 weeks and condensed into 1 blog post. Max and I spent most of our summer working endless hours with internship stuff. So once graduation came around it was time to live up the last little bit of summer...hence the blogging hiatus (and the lack of internet in our house). Our summer began with some endings...Max graduated from his paramedic program while I graduated from BYU. I was unable to attend max's graduation due to the strict schedule of student teaching. So here is a picture that was taken at his graduation. Yeah Max!! He worked so hard all summer and his hard work paid off!Then came the end of student teaching and the BYU graduation. I was happy to have my mom and little brothers come to stay with us and I was thrilled to be a college graduate.

This picture makes me laugh...they were trying to figure out my mom's camera phone.

My favorite part of the graduation ceremony part-one was when the BYU president had all the graduates stand up and he announced that we were all eligible blah blah something about degrees. Just then, our little boy jumped for joy inside of me. It made me excited that he can have an educated mother.


We just had to take a moment to run in the lovely grass.
They were waiting for graduation part 2 to start so they were...well I don't know what they were doing...
I had to sit on the stand so I could say the opening prayer...nerve wracking
I finally made it...7 years after high school graduation!
My fan club!!

While my family was in town, we were able to schedule a 3-D ultra sound with my friend. It was so exciting to see our baby boy's little features.

Here, his legs are crossed, just relaxing. His second toe is longer than his big toe just like his daddy.
Here is his beautiful face, he already had chubby cheeks then so they may be extra chubby by birth (these were taken at 28 weeks)
Our last day we decided we would hike the Y. I wasn't planning on going because I thought there would be no way I could make it, seeing as I currently huff and puff when climbing a stair case. But after Max woke up and was getting ready with my brothers and mom, I figured I would really regret it if I didn't go and that I would just hike as far as I could. I ended up going.

At the beginning...
I wanted to stop and go back down many times. we would often ask hikers if we were getting close and their response was usually, "no you have a long ways to go, you are only about a third of the way there." Not very encouraging, but Max, with his extreme patience stayed and hiked with me the whole way up, nice and slow and we made it! A third trimester victory!

Later that day two of my wonderful mission companions, Anna and Kenzi, threw me a little Baby shower while we were still in Utah. It was exciting to see them one more time before we left. Kenzi's very talented sister created this fire engine cake. I took about a million pictures. It not only looked good but tasted amazing too!

And there were poopy diaper games. Just slightly weird.
Right before we moved we harvested our mini carrots growimg in a pot by our front door.
My family was such a big help in packing up our house and cleaning. We also were so grateful for all the space in their van. We packed every nook and cranny of the cars and still had to leave a couple things behind (sorry Joe and Lindsay) We traveled home and were extremely excited to get back into the great Northwest!

Within 24 hours of being back we left on a family rafting trip. We didn't think we would be back in time but it turned out that the trip may not happen if max didn't go because they needed at least one more rower. We were excited to go. I got my doctor's permission. I got to have all the fun and do a very limited amount of work. hehe, Max made sure of it.
Observing the sand bowling competition...Lisa and I were champions!


Here is my rugged and dreamy river guide.
The jumping rock, the water water was freezing so I was too lame to jump!
Max went on a hike with his little brother. I opted out of this one.
We had the honeymoon suite camping spot. It was in a forest with private river access.
And here I am with a huge stomach...and there is Mum-z's toilet on our boat...classy
And the group photo...Brayden took good care of my stomach and enjoyed tickling his cousin
A day after the rafting trip was the Baertlein family reunion out in Tillamook Oregon. We made a day trip of it for the picnic.

My sweet nephew August seems to love yard decorations.

After the picnic, Max and I decided to stop by the beach as it was only a couple miles down the road and we hadn't seen the ocean in over 2 years.

Here is our first family picture at the beach.

Max got to play with his little brother

We then had to spend several days being serious and unpacking our house and cleaning too. We are living in Max's uncle Jay's house while he is away working in central Oregon. We are happy to be in a house and Jay is happy to have us take care of it. Jay hasn't been there is awhile so we have been cleaning and organizing like crazy. Of course we want to make it extra clean for our baby boy!

After a couple days of hard work we were ready for another vacation and we desperately needed to meet my brand new niece so we ventured up to Tacoma to visit my brother's family who we usually only see around Christmas time.

It was wonderful to see how much Gwenevere has grown up. She is brilliant and always smiling. I especially like her knock knock jokes. The usually went something like this...

Me; Knock Knock

Gwen: Who's there?

Me: Boo

Gwen: Laughing really hard while covering her mouth.

At least she thinks i'm funny...we took turns telling jokes.

She also had fun getting Max ready to go to the zoo.
James and Elizabeth were very brave and took their first trip as a family of four to the zoo.And here he have baby Grace! Sleeping through her first zoo experience!

The Roemhildt family of 4.

I loved seeing my nieces together. I loved how Gwenevere would stop in the middle of her playing and say "I need to kiss my baby" then walk over and try to kiss Grace while she was in the swing. Gwenevere is an excellent big sister and Grace is proving to be an excellent little sister.

And here are some more cure pictures of Grace.

So, that is what we've been up to. We still have plenty of cleaning to do and the end of unpacking may be in sight. Then we can start some projects to fix up the house a little bit then soon enough baby boy will be here! That's all I can think of writing right now so bless you if you made it this far. Life is good and we're so excited to be starting the next part or our lives.

In the last several weeks I graduated College, we went on a big hike, moved to Portland, went white water rafting, saw our baby's face, and have been cleaning and unpacking tons. So we are a wee bit busy but pictures and details will come soon. Life is good!

A babymoon week

I love having this time off...Life is good and I got to spend a whole lot of time with my other half which hasn't happened since...maybe last summer's rafting trip?
This summer has been filled with intership stuff for both of us, while we are excited to be finishing our education, we have also been the busiest we've ever been which will not change much with the coming of our little boy and max starting work as a firefighter paramedic.
We decided to take a trip for just the two of us, we usually get to go on a week long rafting trip with Max's family every summer but this year it didn't work out with our busy school schedules so we took our own camping trip...This also became our babymoon, our last couple's vacation before we are a solid family of three.

We went on a Wednesday so we pretty much had the whole forest to ourselves!

We have both grown up going on several camping trips a year but we had never gone a trip with just us and there was something incredibly fun about getting up whenever we felt like and not worrying about missing breakfast or getting up early enough to feed the others and making the camp fire when we were ready etc.

We got to spend hours in the hammock!!
The weather was perfect...we even got a mini thunder/lightning storm


We went on a mini-hike...it was more like a nature-walk with the purpose of finding good sticks to make Harry Potter wands for the premier we went to later in the week.

we ate great "camping food"

We took a garbage bag full of school papers that were no longer needed and burned them...it felt kind of good.

Then, on our way home we stopped at a park in the canyon to play volleyball...we took pictures to prove to our little boy that a) his father is super strong and b) his mother is doing some sort of sport while he's in the womb.

after camping for 3 days we came home but our vacation was not over...we continued it by cleaning up then heading to See's candy to redeem our Christmas gift certificate from Red Grandma...Yum!

In the meantime, I am 24 weeks pregnant and we recieve weekly e-mails on the progress of our baby's development. This week it informed us that my uterus is the size of a soccer ball. What?? that seemed huge so we got out our soccer ball for a photo shoot.

24 weeks and growing like crazy

But there was more...the next day we went to see the final Harry Potter movie. We were too cheap to do a mid-night showing so we went to an early bird showing on Saturday morning. Using the remnants of two gift cards...we only spent $2.75 for our movie tickets so it was just about as good as going to the dollar theater. We didn't completely dress up but Max widdled some incredible magic wands for us and our group. We went with our good friends Joe and Lindsay and Anna and Buck. Max made a wand for everyone...he's so crafty. Sadly I didn't take any pictures. Then, after the amazing movie we went home and took a long nap. we have missed the summer-time afternoon naps.

So all in all...it was an amzing week that I got to spend with my favorite person . It just reminds me of how much I love that man I married and how perfect he is for me. Today he is back to work and I start back up with student teaching on Wednesday so it is back to our busy lives. But the end is in sight...Max graduates on July 29th from the paramedic program and I graduate from BYU on August 11. Then we are back to Oregon!!

names

So, we had another ultrasound on Tuesday and found out that we are still expecting a baby boy! We were actually disappointed with this appointment. The doctor was running over an hour late so somehow this translated into a two minute ultrasound. He didn't really point anything out to us and I'm pretty sure he didn't check all the organs he is supposed to. We were lucky to have my friend do the early ultrasound 6 weeks ago. Oh well, we are having healthy baby boy as far as we know!

On another note...we are discussing names and we have some ideas but we are asking for some thoughts and opinions.

First off..our baby boy's "womb name" is Barnebus...this is what Max is constantly calling him. I'm hoping this name won't stick but it is fun to have a name before we have a final decision.

Here are some real ideas.

Choice #1 Isaac Gorden Baertlein

Choice #2 Charles (Charlie) Gorden Baertlein

That's all we got so far. The name (and spelling) Gorden has been passed down for many generations in Max's family and we want to keep that going...(it's max's middle name if you didn't know)

I've always liked the name Isaac for no apparent reason

My youngest brother, Danny, has two middle names one of which is Charles. Ever since he was named this I planned on calling him Charlie but it never stuck. He has always been my Danny monkey. I have still always loved the name.

So, if you were choosing our child's name which would it be? Isaac or Charlie? Just curious. i want to hear your vote, if you can't leave a comment send me a text.

In other news, baby boy is kicking more each day. Max started feeling it recently which made him ever so joyful! Which in turn made me excited to see how much he loves our little boy already!

Life is good!

Here comes the belly picture...

I finally decided to post a belly picture, I wanted to wait until it was obvious that there was a baby there and not just chub so here is our son in all his glory. He has been growing like crazy over the last couple of days.
This was the best picture I could get because Max is working right now.

22.5 weeks or 5 months

We get to have an ultrasound done by our doctor on Tuesday to confirm that I am indeed having a boy and to check all the organs and what-not. I'm so excited to see him wiggling around in there again.

In other news, Year round school is out for 2.5 weeks so that means I get a break for the next 2.5 weeks. It will be heavenly. I go back to start a new school year at the end of July and only teach 3 more weeks before graduation. So this means that I will be a college graduate in 5.5 weeks. It still seems so unreal to me. I'm as happy as a clam...Oh yeah, I also found out that I passed my huge capstone project (see a couple posts below) with a flying colors score of 96%. Needless to say life is good and I'm incredibly happy! Over the next couple of weeks I get to look forward to a romantic trip with my husband ( either a hotel or camping) and the last Harry Potter movie coming out along with a lot of restful vacation time that I will fill with enjoyable projects!