A while ago I signed up to receive a free toy through Ebeanstalk if I would blog about it. It arrived at a busy time to test it out with Hannah, so I waited to use it with her and then life has continued to be busy. I guess that’s the life of a mom huh?

Ebeanstalk is a website dedicated to selecting great baby toys and toddler toys. They rely on the opinions and feedback of bloggers and moms around the country to continue selecting great toys to sell. Their team of child experts also helps them pick out learning toys to make sure your child gets the most out of his or her playtime!

I was so excited to receive Hannah’s free toy in the mail. I opened it immediately and let her play a little with it before we headed out of town. Here are some of my initial thoughts on the Home Sweet Home Book:

This is a very cute book style pop up house.

The colors are bright and very inviting.

I like how the house opens all the way into a circle and even includes a little floor for each room of the house (living room, bathroom, and bedroom).

There are fun little objects in each room to tuck away into the story plot. And they’re attached to a string so you can’t loose them!

Then Hannah started to play with the Home Sweet Home Book:

First thing I noticed is that this isn’t a great toy for Hannah at this time. She can’t crawl yet, so she sits stationary and tries to play with the house like it is a book, so the floors in the room got in her way of trying to play with the objects she could remove from their pockets in their rooms. Most of the time while Hannah sat and played she could only see the bottoms of the floors and hardly anything of the adorable rooms in the house.

Then I noticed Hannah got a little frustrated trying to look at the different objects (she loves the bright yellow ducky in the bathtub) since the strings keeping them attached are pretty short. When she would try to bring the toy close to her the whole book came with it and got in the way of her little fingers trying to learn how to work.

The Home Sweet Home Book is geared towards 6 month olds.  Maybe if I tuck this away and bring it out when she is more mobile she will enjoy playing with it more and can leave the house open and move to each room.

My last suggestion I would add to the book would be to add velcro on the other side of the tab that keeps the house closed, and make it so it can also keep the house open. It stays open well on it’s own sitting there, but I could see when a child is playing with the objects that it could end up closing a room or two.

I just had to share some cute pictures of Hannah!

I’ve been trying to help Hannah start to figure out how to crawl. She still gets stuck on her tummy with her arms in the air and legs kicking. Today she let me put her in the crawling position and she actually held it long enough for me to take some pictures!

We spent Saturday down at Tim’s brother Dan’s house while Glory and Michael were in town helping Dan and Maggie install new floors. Hannah had a great time hanging out with her oldest cousin Ruby. It is so cute to watch these two play!

When Hannah and I were down in Texas for vacation and Tim was in Haiti, her G’ma and G’pa Wayman took her shopping in the church book store. Hannah got 2 tutus with 2 matching headbands. Tim wasn’t too thrilled to find out when he got home, but she sure is cute!

In previous years Tim and I always saw couples bringing their babies to conferences and we kind of day dreamed about getting to do that one day and how fun it would be. However, it didn’t end up being as ideal as we thought it would be. Hannah is a great baby and we had lots of help from our team of youth workers that came to the conference with us, but I still got stressed.

Before we had Hannah I would go to everything. With Hannah at the conference I took my time in the mornings, missing the general sessions so I wouldn’t have added stress of trying to hurry around in the morning. Of the 6 general sessions I made it to 3. Of the 5 seminar slots I had 2 by myself, which was my favorite part of the weekend. I met 2 wonderful yp wives in the girl’s ministry seminar and had a great time visiting with them. I made the mistake of not getting their contact info to keep in touch with though. Oops! Luckily Alisha found me on facebook, and Jackie, if you read this, please get in touch with me!

Getting around the conference with the stroller wasn’t a problem. The first day we stumbled across an elevator that went all the way to the international level, which I think was mainly a service/handicap elevator, but it was great, and we didn’t get in the big lines for the main elevator!  We also saved money on never taking a taxi anywhere around town because we didn’t bring Hannah’s carseat. Instead we got our exercise and walked to a couple different restaurants. The furthest one was a hair over a mile, which wasn’t bad coming from Minnesota, it was nice to get outside for a walk and enjoy the warmer weather. I didn’t enjoy having to sit in the back of seminars though, in case Hannah started really fussing and I needed to take her out. It was also harder for me to hear the speaker from the back, and Hannah loves to talk so it was hard to keep her quiet, especially since I don’t want to have to contain her all day long, she needs time to talk. I couldn’t explain to her that, yes there is someone else talking, so it would seem like it’s okay for you to talk, but you can’t.

I would love to hear how other people have handled bringing kids to youth conferences. Did it work for you? Did it not work for you? How did it go, and why? Next year we’ve already decided we’re going to try to find a baby sitter for our 2 babies. Anyone want to volunteer to baby sit an 18 month and a 5 month old on March 4-7 2011?

I can’t believe I haven’t blogged the big news yet. Tim beat me to it twice! Last week he came to me saying that he hadn’t posted anything on Life in Student Ministry yet, and I was like, “yeah, you should do that” and then someone commented on his post saying that I hadn’t blogged about Schmoyer Baby #2 yet!

The estimated due date is September 29th. My nausea has gotten better. I never had it too bad, just like with Hannah. Just a constant lingering throughout the day, but nothing I couldn’t handle, just annoying. Pray for my back though. When Tim went to Haiti, Hannah and I went to Texas and spent the week with my side of the family. I hurt my back when lifting luggage. I went to the chiropractor last week and need to go back this week.

So Hannah and her brother or sister will be about 14 months apart. I’m pretty nervous about having 2 little ones to take care of. Hopefully Hannah will be walking around by then, so I don’t have to carry 2 all over the place. We are going to try to find out the gender of our baby on the way. It was fun keeping Hannah a surprise, but I don’t really feel up to getting boy and girl stuff ready for this one. I’d rather know and prep what we need. To make the math easy for you, I am 9 weeks and 6 days along today, so baby should be about 1.5 inches right now.