four of a kind

yup, it's true -- we are expecting another king sometime around the end of august!  while we weren't exactly "planning" on getting pregnant so quickly, we did want our kiddos to be close, so i guess 18 months apart will work!  so far, everything has checked out great with baby number two, and despite some occasional nausea early on and some severe sleepiness this pregnancy has been wonderful.
answers to your other questions:
i found out in mid-december, but waited nearly a week to tell matt for two reasons 1) we had had a false positive around halloween, so i wanted to make sure this wasn't the same thing, and 2) i wanted to tell him in a more special way than just saying "i'm pregnant."
i ended up telling him on wednesday, december 21st.  i had made a special trip to the store the night before to buy him a new monthly planner (yes, we still write things down in a planner and don't use our phones...so what?).  he had been saying he needed one anyway, so i wrote on december 21st "the day you find out you're going to be a daddy again!" and on the week we are due i wrote "baby king two is due!"  of course, when i got home from work the next morning and gave him the planner, he initially just glanced at it, said "thanks" and set it on the counter.  i had to encourage him to look at it to "make sure it was the one he wanted" so he would see my notes.  once he did that, he realized what was going on and was very excited (whew!).  he surprised me a few nights later by bringing home some sparkling cider for us to toast.  we broke out the champagne flutes from our wedding and enjoyed our mini celebration after noah went to bed that night.

after matt knew, we debated about when to tell other people including our families, friends and coworkers.  i'm not a fan of telling people very early on, but matt hates keeping secrets.  we eventually decided that we would tell our immediate families on christmas and everyone else once we reached the second trimester.  so during our christmas celebrations we informed our families that we would be adding another king to the mix and got many surprised and excited reactions.
i had my first OB appointment at the birthing center in january where everything checked out well and they confirmed that i was probably around 10 weeks at that point.  i wasn't 100% sure of my dates this time around, so we went ahead and scheduled a sono to confirm.  normally i wouldn't have been so worried, but since noah was born a week before term (at 36 weeks), i wanted to make sure i knew what our dates were so we would (eventually) know if this second little king was arriving early, late, or right on time.  my subsequent visits went well, also, and our little one always has a strong heartbeat and good measurements.
we had another sono at the end of march to check for other indictions of health: brain, kidneys, bladder, stomach, spine, limbs, placenta, etc -- which all looked perfect.  and, as my husband would say, "because we are planners" we also opted to find out the gender of the baby this time again.  with 85% certainty, the sono tech said we are having...

...a little girl!  

because of the position the baby was in she said she couldn't be much more certain than that, but that we were free to call her up and schedule a "gender check" appointment in another few weeks to confirm.  a couple weeks later (around week 23), i had the sono tech at my work check and she also confirmed that she thought she saw a girl in there!
so now we are debating about girls' names and trying to figure out what actually works with our last name, which is always a challenge, and trying to figure out when to do things like transition noah from his crib, etc.  it's still all very exciting the second time around :)

a pic of my belly at 21 weeks:

and at 24 weeks:

fortunately this pregnancy has been relatively easy, like my first, but i do feel much more tired this time.  i'm not sure if that's because i'm older (although i can't imagine a year would make that much difference!), because of my continued crazy night work schedule, or because i'm chasing a toddler around these days and have less time to rest.  i'm thinking it's probably mostly the last one, but i'm sure all of those things are contributing factors.  check back with us soon for more updates on our little girl!