A New Accomplishment, A Visit, A Roof


Taylor removed the training wheels from his bike last week. He still needs to gain a bit of confidence on starting himself, but he's an excellent little bike rider. He got to use Daddy's tools to remove the training wheels all by himself.


Then we went to the park, where Daddy & Grumpy helped him get going, then sprinted to try to keep up! :-)

Aric enjoyed spinning in circles at the park that day.


Obviously, Grumpy was out for a visit, and so was Grammy. They stayed for about a week and went back to MT on Sunday. We had a wonderful time while they were here! Grammy and I and the boys played a lot and Grumpy and Daddy worked on the house a lot and played a little.

Here we are at the Vista House. The boys hadn't ever gotten to go up on the balcony before, so it was an exciting visit for them.


While in the Columbia Gorge on a beautiful day, who could resist a hike? We walked down to the Bridal Veil Falls viewing platform, where my mom snapped this shot of Taylor looking like himself (no cheesy camera smile).


On another beautiful day, we walked up to an overlook near our apartment where you can see the River, the airport, and a nearby rock quarry. It's a favorite place for my boys with their love of heavy equipment. We could stand there all day watching the giant dump trucks and loaders. Of course, since the boys are "outdoorsmen," we have to be prepared and bring a backpack full of "supplies" (in this case, cupcakes and water bottles). You never know when you might get thirsty on the [very short] trail!


One more hike on one more beautiful day...this time, we even convinced Jeremy to take a breather from work on the house and come with us. We went to Lucia Falls (NE of Battle Ground) and walked around. It's an easy place to get to and there isn't much hiking to be done, but the guys all made their way farther than we've ever gone out onto the rock outcroppings in the middle of the East Fork of the Lewis River. It's a place where the salmon come to spawn, so we're gonna try to revisit it while they're running. It's really neat to be able to stand right over these pools and waterfalls and we hope to show the boys what a salmon run looks like sometime soon.







As you might be able to tell from this picture, Ascha's taking up more and more room in my belly all the time. We are now in the 24th week (out of 40 weeks of pregnancy), so we're nearly done with the second trimester. We are so thankful she seems to be growing healthy and strong, and we can't wait to meet her.


You might have noticed a weather trend in the above pictures -- gorgeous, sunny days. We were so blessed last week to have a dry warm spell. The forecast kept predicting showers, but they never really happened, and our roofer was able to reroof the entire house in dry weather. It was an unexpected blessing and we are so pleased to have a roof that doesn't leak! Here is a picture of the front of the house with the new roof and the gutters.


Here's another sampling of our progress on the inside of the house. This is a new wall we're placing between the formal living room (where I'm standing) and the dining room (where the sliding glass door is). We'll have an 8 foot opening on the lefthand side and a 5.5 foot opening on the righthand side, so it should still be very light and airy, but with a bit more distinction between the different living spaces.


Another exciting project Dad & Jeremy accomplished was the building of a new floor. This section of hallway didn't used to exist and it was all part of a converted garage which had become a sunken family room. The guys built up a new floor so it matches the level of the rest of the house, put in this little desk nook on the left side of the picture, and framed walls around the hallway. You can see the opening to my pantry in the right foreground, and the wider opening where Jeremy is standing is going to be one of the openings into our kitchen area.


Although there is still a long way to go, it's so exciting to see progress every single time I go to the house. I am so thankful for my handy husband and for all the help people are giving us with this project (THANKS, DAD!). Jeremy is upriver this week, and then he'll spend next week tying up some loose ends (two more windows to move, building up the floor in our new bathroom area to match the hallway floor, a bit of framing) and figuring out how to move plumbing in concrete, and then it'll hopefully be time for the electrician to come wire everything. Once that occurs, we'll be ready to insulate and sheetrock the walls. At that point, it will truly seem like a house again, and we're hopefully only a few weeks away!!! I think we'll try to get a bit more than that done before we leave our apartment and move in, but if we chose to, we could move in at that point, given a working bathroom. Unfortunately, our kitchen cabinets aren't going to arrive until April, so we probably won't move in until the end of April, or maybe even May, but still, that's not too far down the road.

A few other tidbits: ~Taylor is starting T-Ball this Saturday in Battle Ground. We're pretty excited about our first foray into "real" organized sports and hope this is a good learning experience and that he can make some new friends in our new town this way.
~We've met a number of our neighbors, and they all seem incredibly nice. We even have close neighbors with kids the same ages as ours, so we're feeling really blessed to have some "built-in" playmates.
~Aric's full of silly sayings, as usual. We drove down to Salem to visit some friends a few weeks ago, and on the way we passed a plant that burns garbage to generate electricity. There's a big red- and white-striped smokestack and the boys always notice it. Aric was excitedly pointing it out, so I thought I'd see what he remembered from our last trip. I asked what was burning in the smokestack, and he said "Garbage." Then I asked him what they turn the garbage into, and without missing a beat, he said "Marshmallows." I think it might have something to do with the whole concept of "Junk Food," but I'm sure thankful the "garbage" we eat is food grade. :-)

New Pictures

Here are a few sample shots of the latest progress. It's hard to tell what's what, but I'll try to explain what we're looking at anyway.



This is our kitchen area. We're going to have the leaking skylights removed along with the huge window directly to your left. The back wall (where our favorite cabinet choice is set up) is going to be the back wall of a pantry. The pantry will span the width of the kitchen, moving the whole kitchen towards the dining area, which is directly behind where I was standing. Jeremy and his weekend helpers (Thanks Adriel & David :-) ended up having to pull up the subfloor in the old kitchen, so he'll have to replace that subfloor. Then he'll move the smaller kitchen window a few feet towards the dining room. He'll frame in the near wall of the pantry and reframe openings on the right for our new hallway entrance. Then he'll just have to put the walls up, replace and move all the plumbing, assemble and install cabinets/countertop/flooring, and the kitchen will be about done. :-)



This shows our master bedroom. I'm standing about where our bed will go looking at our new master closet area / Ascha's nursery. :-) On the left we had two big old sliding glass doors going out to a deck that was not safe. The deck is gone, so we of course needed to fill in the second story doors. We wanted to keep the option of someday being able to add back in a deck and door, so we had the closet stop short of the old doorframe. We put in two square windows for now to let in the morning light without blinding us. We're really happy with the way this room is turning out.




These last two pictures are of our beautiful (or previously beautiful) yard. It's actually not all that bad now that everything's said and done. We have a LOT of mud, but we mostly just have to replant grass - we didn't lose a ton of our landscaping, and Jeremy replanted a number of the plants that ended up getting torn out by all the earthmoving, so hopefully they'll survive and we won't have to replace a lot of trees or bushes. This is the front yard - we had an excavator parked there for about a week as they dug around the basement area, waited for a sunny day, then backfilled over the new drain pipe and gravel after the waterproofing was applied to the foundation. The hard part is that every area of the yard has been affected by the mud, so there's no large, clean, grassy area for the boys to play. Hopefully the grass will grow well this spring and we'll have our yard somewhat rehabilitated by this summer.



Here is our backyard. There is a patch of grass that's big enough to play on here, but it's hard to get to without getting muddy. The mud completely encircles the deck, then goes all the way around the house and takes up the entire yard out by the road (towards the front of this picture).

Challenges and Blessings

As with all of life, our house project has surprised us with many unexpected challenges and road blocks. However, thus far, I'm feeling incredibly thankful for the ways in which they've resolved themselves. We have been so blessed by NOT having a major insect repair job on our hands, by NOT having to deal with some costly code things we were told we would have to deal with, by NOT having to pay as much as we were anticipating for converting our power from overhead to underground, and by NOT having to wait a long time for permits. We were told it would be about 3 weeks of waiting, but as of last Thursday, we have our permits in hand and are able to go forward with the framing in of new walls and the destruction of walls we're removing. The entire upstairs is framed in with the new floorplan in place and the downstairs is partially framed in. The project hasn't quite kept Jeremy's schedule, but he's a very optimistic scheduler and we're nearly on track with his lofty goals (which I think is amazing!). We've been blessed with lots of help from friends and are very grateful for it. All of these blessings aren't things that we NEEDED or even necessarily EXPECTED to have happen, so we are very grateful.

We need to remember this gratefulness and the ways things have been going well as we face our newest sets of challenges. We don't expect or "demand" that things will continue to go as well as they have been, but we ought not get sidetracked and "down" because of other unexpected challenges that pop up. At this moment, those challenges include the surprising fact that most of the grain on the Columbia River has already been sold, so the upriver trips we've been counting on to sustain our income while allowing Jeremy the flexibility to work on the house are no longer available. Our other unexpected challenge has to do with a county road being built right through our backyard in the next 5-15 years. Because the house was a foreclosure, we waived our rights to disclosures about the property, and we obviously didn't do our homework as well as we thought we had. We don't know when this road project will begin to truly affect us, because it doesn't yet have funding, but it will eventually change the entire landscape of our backyard (and the location of our newly placed sewer system pumps). We obviously can't do anything about it at the moment except be aware that it will come at some point in time, but it makes it harder to embrace this project. Jeremy has put it SO many hours and SO much labor (and will put in so much more before all is said and done), and we've really customized the floorplans to our family. It's hard to think about this place as "just a flip" when there has been so much personal investment. I would love to not move our kids during their school years, and I was hoping this would be the place where we'd stay until all the kids completed high school. Knowing there will be a road roaring through what used to be our backyard makes the location a lot less appealing in the long term. As with everything else in our lives, we ought to hold this house with an open hand. In some ways, knowing about this road makes it easier for me to hold it loosely, but it is more like a painful forcing open of my clenched fist than I'd like it to be. :-) I want to be thankful at this moment for the reminder to hold this dream, and all my selfish dreams, more loosely than I am accustomed. In the grand scheme of life, my children's security ought not come from living in one house during the whole of their school years - it ought to come from their position as children loved by Christ and loved by their family.

Anyway, I can tell I'm beginning to ramble (if I haven't already been rambling for a while), so I'm gonna sign off for now.

BTW, anyone keeping up with the lenten challenge? We are trying to keep it up and I'm really enjoying our evening conversations about how we were loving and how we failed to be loving during the course of the day, and most of all, how we're going to change for the better tomorrow. We're trying to be careful not to get too focused on self-help, but rather, to be mindful of the grace of God at work within us as we are intentional about allowing Him to influence our actions and attitudes. Tricky concepts for 3- and 5-year-olds...and 27-year-olds. :-)

An Introduction

We had our 20-week ultrasound today and IT'S A GIRL!!! Ascha Lynn will be arriving in June. We are incredibly thankful for this very healthy-looking baby girl. We are all excited for her to join our family...Aric included. The boys got to see the ultrasound and they each got their own picture to take home. Doesn't she look like a happy girl?



And if that doesn't make you smile, here's another shot at laughter: As Aric informed me yesterday, "Every day, holes just climb into my pants, but I don't make them." Of course, as he was saying this, he had both arms stuck into the (previously much smaller) hole at the knee of his jeans.

House Update and Lenten Challenge

How do you like that odd juxtaposition of mundane/temporal and significant/spiritual? That's how my pregnant brain works these days - everything's all mashed together (if I can remember it at all).

Kami asked for pictures, so here are a few:


Before - looks pretty nice, right? Unfortunately, between damage from the leaky roof, stress cracks in the ceiling, and the fact that everything needs rewired, it all had to go.



After - this is the same view as above, except now our stairs are hidden under debris and our house is "see through." Upstairs and to your left is what will be an office space with our master bedroom behind it. Upstairs on the right is a bathroom, which will be retooled, but will still be a bathroom, and more bedroom/master closet space behind. Downstairs and to your left is what will eventually be two kids' bedrooms. On the right will be a laundry/storage room with a bathroom space behind.



Another picture of downstairs, just for fun. It's amazing how the relatively "minor" project of changing out sheetrock suddenly seems very major, even without considering moving the framed walls around. :-) Have I ever mentioned how thankful I am to have a handy husband? He's a wonderful, wonderful, talented man and I appreciate his hard work very much. (Keep going, Honey! :-)


Nice, huh? It definitely has a ways to go. Unfortunately, we were misinformed about how long we'd have to wait for permits, so we can't start rebuilding walls for a while, after all. We've slowed the pace a bit and we've still got some demolition we can do while we wait, so we're just doing what we can and hoping our permits can slog their way out of the beaurocracy and into our possession sooner rather than later. :-)


In a different vein entirely, I have a challenge for those of you who consider yourselves Christ-followers. Scot McKnight (an emergent church theologian who I really like, but don't always agree with :-) has issued a challenge for the upcoming 40 days of Lent (starting Wednesday, Feb. 6). Instead of giving something up (not something we evangelicals usually do, anyway), let's live out the Gospel for the next 40 days by reciting the Jesus Creed each morning, whenever we're thinking of it throughout the day, and again at night. During the evening recitation, reflect on where you've sinned in relation to the Jesus Creed and confess those sins. I believe what Scot calls the "Jesus Creed" is absolutely foundational to Christian life. It is the first bit of scripture my kids ever memorized, and we talk about it often around here (quite easy to find opportunity in the context of "is it loving your neighbor when you hit/kick/push your brother?" :-) Here is the creed, and I've also attached Scot McKnight's thoughts after it... Definitely a challenge worth considering and a passage worth integrating ever more fully into our daily lives.

"Here it is:

Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One. Love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength. The second is this: Love your neighbor as yourself. There is no commandment greater than these.

What we are discovering — in tune with the wisdom of ancient Israel’s recitation of Shema and the early church’s recitation of the Jesus Creed and the Lord’s Prayer — is that this sacred rhythm works love of God and love of others into the bones and sinews of each day. Who will take this challenge?"

Projects, Projects, Projects

Since we closed on the house last week, Jeremy has spent every spare second gutting the inside. The electrical wiring needs replaced, and we eventually wanted to change the floorplan, so we decided to save money and do it all at once. He's tearing down all the walls & ceilings (the roof has a number of leaks that have damaged the ceilings), then Jeremy is going to frame in new walls where we want them. While everything is still open 2x4s, we'll have an electrician come in and rewire everything. Then we get to put up new sheetrock for new walls and ceilings and go from there. I keep saying I'll be happy just to get electricity and new walls. At that point, if we need to or want to, we can move in and slowly finish each room. I know Jeremy would rather get as much as possible done before we move in, though, so I don't really know when moving day will come.

It's exciting to actually be able to be working toward that goal, because the process of acquiring this house has taken so many months. Our big focal point is just to have it liveable and be settled in before the baby comes. I think (but our plans change on a daily basis, so who knows?) we're planning on just finishing out the "master suite" (except the bathroom - we'll just get the one on the main floor going), so that Jeremy and I can live up there, the kids can be next door in what will eventually be an office space off the master, and the baby's crib will hopefully fit in our master closet. :-) We'll eventually finish out the downstairs so that we have the kids in their own space with bedrooms and a bathroom of their own.

We are very thankful to have had lots of help this first week. Our friend Adriel came up last Saturday and spent a very long wet day in the rain helping Jeremy frame in some windows and doors that we are moving/eliminating and working on siding. A coworker of Jeremy's who used to work in construction has come on board to help us during the weekdays when he's not working on the tugboats, so the two of them have gotten A LOT done this week. By the end of today, we expect them to have the upstairs and downstairs bedrooms completely gutted and new walls framed in and possibly have some of the main level stripped down, too. Next week, in addition to finishing up the gutting and reframing the new walls, Jeremy will be building up a new subfloor to accomodate some of our remodeling plans. Previously, a portion of the garage had been converted to living space, but the living space was all a step down from the rest of the house. To accomodate our new plans, a portion of that garage space must be raised - we will still have a "sunken family room" but we need the main hallway to be level with the adjascent spaces. Jeremy will definitely have had his fill of destruction and construction by the time next week's work is finished. We'll also have an excavation company come in and dig all the way around the basement portion of the house, have a waterproof barrier applied, and then have the dirt backfilled. That will hopefully address the problem of wet, moldy walls and floors in that area and make it a liveable space again. We'll also hopefully get a trench dug and wire laid to convert our overhead power to underground power. Then, we'll just be waiting on the roof and the electrical. Once all the new wiring is in, we'll be stuck waiting for a stretch of decent weather (multiple sunny days are hard to come by in this region in the winter - it rains nearly every day) so we can get a new roof on. Because of the many leaks, we think it would be foolish to put any new sheetrock or insulation in place until the roof problem is addressed.

In addition to the expected issues that we are planning to remedy (50-year-old electrical wiring, mold issues downstairs, roof leaks, etc.), we have discovered a number of unexpected issues since digging into the guts of the house. Jeremy had discovered what he thought were termites in an outside wall and carpenter ants on an inside wall. We were very concerned about the bug issues, but thankfully, a pest guy came out yesterday and told us all the problem areas were old and that none of the damaged wood was caused by termites. We are so relieved and THANKFUL to not have to deal with an active pest population! Jeremy also made some other interesting discoveries related to creatures - there were a number of very large bird nests in the ceilings and there were a number of mouse nests downstairs in the walls. I suppose that in a 50-year-old house, some of that is to be expected, but it's really nice to know we won't have any "skeletons in the closet" when we move in - everything's getting cleaned out and dealt with. Our other major unexpected discovery has to do with the windows. All the windows in the home had been replaced with energy-efficient vinyl in the past few years, so we were thankful not to have to worry about replacing them. However, when Jeremy and Adriel removed one of the windows we're moving, they discovered that it was installed in such a way that water gets trapped behind the trim. The wood around the window they removed was rotten and had to be replaced, so that means we will probably have to replace wood around all the other windows, too. Hopefully, the wood won't be so rotten as this wood was and we will just have to readjust the windows and trim so that water isn't trapped, but it could be another major headache. Time will tell.

All in all, though, the house hasn't been that much worse-off than we expected, and Jeremy and his various helpers are making great progress. It's always an adventure to rehab a house, but we like it. The kids are big enough that they've been able to "help" with some things and they are always so proud of themselves. Now that the electrical is all exposed, we're keeping them away from the house for obvious reasons, but when we move into the next phase, I'm sure we'll have more jobs they can help with.

We'll try to keep you posted on our progress at regular intervals through the blog. We hope you enjoy this adventure with us.

OUR NEW HOME

We have signed papers on our new house! We are almost officially property owners again. The loan should close by Friday, and then we'll get to work in earnest. We are so thankful! :-)

Taylor's Birthday and Christmas

It's been a very long time since I've updated, so here's a long, picture-filled post. Taylor turned 5 on December 9, but we started the celebration while we were in Montana in November and continued it all the way on through the entire month of December. Taylor's first round of partying and presents occurred at Grammy and Grumpy's.

Then, on our way through Idaho, he celebrated with his special friends there. When we came back to Washington we had a small family celebration on the actual day of his birthday.

He had been asking us for months if we could make sure he had a friend birthday party (Aric did not have one and I think that caused Taylor to worry greatly), so a week after his birthday, we celebrated with a bunch of his friends from Oregon. Thankfully, Matthew and Jonah's mommy opened her house to us so we didn't need everyone to travel to Washington. The boys had had fun making an easy gingerbread/graham cracker house the week before, and on the same website where I had discovered "cheater's" instructions (use cardboard for the frame and just stick the crackers to the outside - my kind of craft project :-), we saw an idea for snowman cupcakes. Taylor wanted to try his hand at making them, so we had a snowman-themed party this year. We had so much fun having so many great friends together - it will be a cherished memory for a long time to come.

A week after that party, Jeremy's parents came out to visit and brought more birthday gifts from various family members, so we had yet another party. This time, Grandma made him a gummy worm pie. When all was said and done, Taylor had five separate birthday cakes...in terms of memories (not to mention GIFTS), it was definitely not a bad haul! :-) I think Taylor may have reached the zenith of his birthday career.

Of course, as soon as Grandma Janet and Grandpa Lyn came, Christmas was upon us. It wasn't a "normal" Christmas at our house. Our decorations are packed away at the very back of our storage unit, so we decided to keep things low key and have a Charlie Brown tree (notice it in the first picture below - it's a whopping 18-incher!). The only other decorations we had were what the boys made in Sunday School, but it made life very simple and was actually a nice change.

The New Year celebrations came and went so quickly I didn't find a chance to blog (that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it), and Grandma and Grandpa just returned to Montana this week. They'll be back soon for another brief visit, and then they'll be headed south for a while and then on up to Colorado to be with Jeremy's sister when she delivers her first baby in March. We've had such a fun visit with them and it's been really nice to have family around during the holidays. We haven't been able to celebrate a Christmas in Montana for about 7 years, so it was very special to have a little bit of Montana come to us. I've been thoroughly spoiled by having Grandma help out with cooking and cleaning, and she even babysat the kids all day, every day for about a week (with some help from Daddy and Grandpa) so I could attend a 1-week intensive seminary class. It was a great experience for me to get back to school and I feel so refreshed spiritually and "mommily" from having such a significant break from the kids. The kids, I must admit, weren't so gung-ho about the deal. It was fun for a few days, but by the end, they were asking and telling me not to go back. The sweetest thing was when I arrived home one evening and Aric threw his arms out wide and ran toward me, shouting, "Good morning, Mommy! I missed you!" It doesn't get much better than that!

At the end of Grandma and Grandpa's visit, they treated us (and themselves) to an afternoon at the Rivercity Bluegrass Festival. Taylor and I went for most of the afternoon, because we didn't figure Aric would have the patience or stamina to enjoy 6 hours of live concerts. Jeremy ended up being called to work, though, so about half an hour before things wrapped up, he dropped Aric off at the Convention Center for a perfect 3-year-old's dose of music. Although Taylor was overwhelmed by the end, it was, all in all, a very fun experience. Thanks, Grandma and Grandpa!

In other news, we have been waiting for a month to get one single signature so our house deal could move forward. We finally have that signature and have set a closing date of January 25th. Thank you Lord! It's been a much longer process than we are used to and we've learned a bit about trust and patience along the way. :-)

Jeremy's schedule at work has shifted, as it does every three months, so he's now back to a "normal" weekend schedule instead of always working Saturdays and having Mondays off. He has also moved from day shift to swing shift, so we're enjoying spending our mornings with Daddy. Once we have closed on the house, he'll be spending most mornings up there working away, but it's kinda nice to enjoy this lazy "calm before the storm."

Our newest addition is still doing well. We are now 16.5 weeks along and the baby has advanced in size from lime to plum to lemon to apple to avocado. Although these are obviously not the most accurate descriptions, they keep things exciting for the kids. We have visited YouTube and watched ultrasound videos of babies that are at the same stage as our baby, and Aric always ends up putting his hand on my belly with a look of rapturous anticipation. It always fades quickly, and I don't think he really believes our baby is moving around and kicking like those babies on the movie, because he sure can't feel anything! The boys are both quite opinionated about baby names, and I'm quite sure whatever we pick out won't be satisfactory to them. Taylor started out thinking Lilly was a nice girl's name (which it is, although it's not one of our favorites), but last night he had changed his mind to "Flower." Aric, being the impish 3-year-old he is, has decided the baby ought to be named "Taco Salad." This is less surprising once you know that he's renamed himself "Hot Dog Butterfly" and his Grumpy "Christopher Robin Hot Dog." Did I mention that he happens to be in the middle of a growth spurt where he's hungry all the time?

Taylor always amazes and surprises me with his sweetness and creativity, and he's been on an especially creative tangent lately. I would love to scan in and share all of his artwork, but that would take days. Here are two of my favorites selected from his recent (as in, the voluminous crop he cranked out just yesterday) artistic endeavors. He's also reading up a storm, which is so fun for all of us, and he's getting better at writing and math all the time. He is largely self-directed in his pursuits, and it's so fun to see such a voracious appetite for learning different things each day.

(This one is for Daddy and it makes me laugh every time I see it. Daddy has a pot on his head (obviously) and Mommy is wearing a night cap. His newest development is to give his "people" hands instead of having their fingers stick out of their arms. I love it!)

(This one is for Mommy. You can see he's written "Mom" and "Tay" all over one side of it, and there are lots of worms in the ground to help this flower grow well and be happy.)

I'll close with one movie of the boys opening a few presents. I think every Christmas since having kids has gotten more fun, and this year was no exception. We are so thankful for the joy and life they bring to our home.

An Announcement...

We are very happily expecting a baby around June 25, 2008. I am 12.5 weeks along and feeling mostly normal again. For awhile, I was fairly miserable with morning sickness and terrible headaches, but thankfully, they've subsided. At about 6 weeks, when I'd already been experiencing some sickness, I suddenly got MUCH worse. I was sleeping almost all the time, it seemed, and I felt hot and cold, and I could barely stomach the thought of food. After about three horrible days of feeling this way, I was pretty sure the next 6 weeks were going to be pure misery... Then Taylor got the stomach flu. I have never been more thankful for a flu bug in my life! I was so relieved to know this was going to be over in a few days instead of lasting for over a month! :-) :-) I had to laugh at myself for never even thinking it might be possible that I'd come down with anything besides morning sickness.

The boys are mostly excited about having a new baby. Taylor is elated and can't wait for a sister, whereas Aric was excited about a brother. I say "was" because as the idea has taken hold in his mind, he has gotten more and more unhappy about losing his position as the youngest. We have had fun telling the boys the size of the baby each week as it relates to food. When we first found out, the baby was the size of a sesame seed. A few weeks later, it was the size of a blueberry, then a kidney bean, then a grape, then a kumquat, and now a lime. Here is a picture of the baby at "kidney bean stage." Jeremy asked when I brought the pictures home if they were actual size. They weren't intended to be, but at 8 weeks, they did happen to show the baby as being exactly the size of a kidney bean. :-) The baby looked like a kidney bean, then, too. Now the length of a lime, I'm sure the baby looks a lot more like a baby. :-)

Thanksgiving in Montana

We had so much fun sledding at Great-Gramma and Great-Papa's house.

The boys also had fun on the teeter-totter that Mom played on when she was a little girl!

At Grammy and Grumpy's house we had fun building a snowman...

...and having a snowball fight.

Jumping off Grumpy's new deck!

Nothing like the blind trust of a child!

Rough-housing with Grumpy

An early birthday party for Taylor with our great friends in Idaho

Silly kids!

An early "Merry Christmas" to everyone!