Week of Feb 17

Happy week 14 friends!  (Oh, you aren't keeping track of my pregnancy weeks like I am?)

Very good week for me and my babe.  I only got nauseous once!  Woohoo!

Sunday
The Lord has really blessed us while living here.  Sunday was another example of this. We had some sweet friends, Don and Jan, come over for dinner on Sunday night.  She insisted on cooking the main meal since she knew what it was like to cook while being pregnant...it always tastes better when someone else cooks!  They brought over some delicious pasta and a salad and we sat around and visited with them for awhile.  Jan even insisted on doing the dishes for me.  :-)  I felt like a guest in my own home, but she insisted.  I couldn't argue with her for too long.  :-)

Monday
I mentioned to my co-worker, Sharon, that I was really craving a cherry sprite.  I can't even remember the last time I had one, but I reallllly wanted one.  While she was out at lunch, she stopped by the gas station and bought me one!  I'm blessed to work with some really sweet people, especially those that understand pregnancy cravings (and don't mind the smell of syrup anytime of the day).

Tuesday
Oh Tuesday.  So I was getting ready to leave work and I always grab my keys before heading out the door.  I went to grab them and...yep, they weren't in my purse.  I knew I had them at lunch time because I went out to my car at lunch.  Turns out, they were hiding under a blanket in my front seat.  So I called Caleb, who was sleeping, and he ever so graciously came and rescued me.  That's the good thing about working 10 minutes away from home, and having a husband who rocks my socks.

Wednesday
I'm sure this day consisted of me going to bed at a time I would have fought my mom over at the age of 8.  Nothing else really happened.

Thursday
It's seminary wives day, but we had a front moving through that was bringing some freezing rain with it.  My Hannibal and St Louis friends were all buried under several inches of snow, but all we got was some freezing rain.  The worst of it was predicted to fall right around the time I would be leaving to come home that night.  Since our little "mishap" over New Years weekend and my awful experience of driving home from seminary 3 weeks prior, I decided that me and my unborn baby were going to play it safe at home that night.  I'm really glad I did because that night we could hear ice pellets hitting the window.  When Caleb left to go to work he said it wasn't bad at all.  At that time the temp was rising and there wasn't as much threat of ice on the roads.

Friday
I was looking forward to this day all week.  I love going out to eat with my man, especially if we have a gift certificate for somewhere.  But hold on, there was some more excitement before we left to go eat.

We got a box of goodies from Caleb's parents!  How fun is that?  At first glance for some reason I thought the box might have been from Hawaii, but turns out it was from Lewistown, MO.  :-)

Caleb couldn't wait to open it!

There were all sorts of goodies like jerky, dove chocolates, mnms, a peanuts calendar, Phineas and Ferb fruit snacks, mail that still gets delivered to their house for us, a gift card to go out to eat, and some small pieces of paper that can be exchanged for currency at an institution that transacts financial business..

Oh yeah, and this.  Caleb got excited and said "IT'S AMISH CONNECT FOUR!"  :-) It was all a fun surprise to come home to. 

Back about 6 months ago I bought a gift certificate through work for a $50 gift certificate to 60 West Bistro & Martini Bar for only $15.  Not a bad deal, eh?  They expire after 6 months and that date was coming up this Sunday.  We had talked about going to this place for a long time, but it just never happened yet.  I made reservations for Friday night since I didn't know how busy of a place they usually were.  It was a pretty nice place, not super duper fancy, but they had cloth napkins so I'm calling it fancy.  It was certainly more upscale than our normal "nice" places to go out to eat like Cheddars or Applebees. I think our waitress probably thought we were nuts for not ordering anything alcoholic, but I did end up ordering a Shirley Temple.  Mmmm...  So on to the food.  I've been craving burgers, but only good burgers.  Not fake ones from McDonalds or BK.  They had a burger that was locally raised ground beef (not that I'm all about local stuff, except when it comes to honey, but it makes it sound healthier) so I ordered that.  Also it was one of the few things I knew all the ingredients of on the menu.  (One of their salads had quail egg on it.  Is that weird? Or am I just not sophisticated enough to find that normal?)

Caleb ordered a Caribbean Jerk Chicken.  Maybe. I can't remember the exact name. Something expensive sounding. Anyway, he said he was afraid to touch his food for fear of messing it up.  Don't worry, he did.

One of his pieces of chicken was a chicken leg.  So, he picked it up with his hands and started eating it.

I didn't think anything of it until the manager came over to our table and commented to Caleb about it.... 

She said "Now that is the right way to eat a chicken leg!  Most people wouldn't eat it that way!"  Then I got to thinking, oh yeah, I guess this is kind of a fancy restaurant.   Lol, my country boy knows how to eat him a chicken leg!  Proud wife moment.  :-)

Saturday
I meant to get our taxes done today, but sometimes there are just more important things.  Like Maple Syrup Festivaling.  Oh yes.  A co-worker told me about this and I posted a link to it on Caleb's facebook wall.  He agreed that we could go to it.  It was about a half hour away in Salem, Indiana. 

First of all, they had a llama to pet.  Of course I had to stand in line for that!

They also had some goats.  But this one kept eying me weird and I was afraid to pet it.  I did nothing to offend it other than tell it that it looked like a poodle.

They had this really awesome "merry go round".  I didn't ride it.  I'm trying to prevent nausea, not encourage it.

This is Crooked Paw.  Say hi to Crooked Paw.

He did a demonstration of how Indians back in the day got maple sugar out of maple syrup, using a log and some hot granite rocks.

 

 

 

 

Adding the hot rocks to boil the syrup.

Boiling over!

 

 

 

 

The orange is the sugar that they would scoop out using moss.

This is Caleb showing everyone up with the axe throwing.  

Perfection.

Oh, and I had pancakes.  :-)  They had supreme pancakes with all the fixins, but Caleb just bought a ton of strawberries for really cheap at Walmart and so I couldn't justify the price of putting strawberries on my pancakes here.  I really just wanted to try their famous Maple Syrup.  It was good syrup, I just don't know that I would buy any. 

 

There was a vendor there selling some really neat pottery.  I used to always swoon at the pottery at Java Jive in Hannibal, but handmade stuff like that is so expensive.  But, this place at the festival had a clearance table!  This piece was reasonably priced and on top of that, it was half off!  The man who made all of the pottery started trying to reduce some of his high-priced stuff even lower than 50% to try to entice Caleb, but we couldn't justify spending any more money on pottery.  :-)

 

 We are almost out of honey and the farmer's market is closed this time of the year.  Buying local honey is the only way I'll buy it now.  I've read about where store bought honey comes from and, whether or not it's true, I plan on only buying local honey ever again.  Sure, it's more expensive than buying it from a grocery store, but soooo worth it.  We have both quickly fought off many colds over the several months that we've made the switch and it's been wonderful.  My last cold only stayed in that miserable stuffy-nosed-can't-breath-but-constant-running stage for a few hours.  Hours, not days like normal.  And that was even with being pregnant and not being able to take any sort of medicine or immune booster like airborne.  I've been trying to not eat as much homemade yogurt so I don't have to use up what little remaining honey we have in case one of us gets sick, until we could find some more.  Well today was the day.  Yay honey!

  Also, on the drive to and from, we came across Bunker Hill Baptist Church.  This place looked like a castle.  It was crazy!

 

Definitely worth stopping to take a picture.

Now its time for some snuggling with my husband and maybe watching a movie.  :-) He's wearing his "I love my wife" shirt today, so I have to be extra nice to him when he wears it so it will encourage him to wear it more.  That will work, right?

Birthentines Week! (Feb 10-16)

Birthentines week is here!

And week 13 of pregnancy! 

Sunday

My parents and sister went to church with us, followed by lunch at Steak n Shake.  Soooo yummy! Then sadly they had to depart.  Caleb and I spent the rest of the afternoon taking our normal Sunday afternoon nap.

Monday

So I don't like to post much about my job on here just because well, nobody really wants to hear about it, and I wouldn't want to ever post anything that could get me in trouble.  But I'm going to post something just because I found it hilarious.  So a little while back we started using a company for our pinters/copiers who will supply us with all of our toners and will service them if anything goes wrong.  Since I handle most of the supplies for our building, whenever someone uses a toner, I get an email and then place an order through this company.  Long story tried to be made short, someone in another department called this company asking for a drum cartridge for their copier and I emailed the company asking for a drum cartridge for our identical copier on the same day.  I didn't know this other department requested one too.  Well that threw this printer company into confusion.  A tech came out to replace the finance copier cartridge but instead changed the one in the other department and left without changing ours.  Since I had a drum cartridge on hand that they had shipped, they told me they were going to send me instructions on how to replace it myself instead of sending another tech out.  (Isn't that what we are paying them for??)  I wasn't too thrilled about this idea but figured that if I broke anything, it wouldn't be my fault since they wouldn't send out a tech.  So I get these instructions emailed to me.  The man from this company asked if the instructions make sense.  So once I got the drum cartridge changed without a problem, I send the man an email that looks something like this:

Is this normal??

I'm just kidding, I got the cartridge in fine and the copier still works.

Maybe next time they'll send out a tech.  :-)  Someone happened to post that picture on facebook that same day so I thought I could have some fun with it.  I didn't know if this man would have any bit of sense of humor, but it turns out that he did.  Even if he didn't, I got a good chuckle out of it for the rest of the day.

Wednesday:

I got my computer shipped to Gateway for them to fix it.  As of Friday night, they had already received it!  Hopefully I can get it back soon so Caleb doens't have to sacrifice his computer for so long while I write my blogs.  :-)

Thursday:

Birthentines day!

So Wednesday night Caleb informed me that John Piper was speaking in Chapel on Thursday morning.  If I had a bucket list, hearing him speak live would be on it.  And this was happening on my birthday!  What an awesome non-present birthday present!  So Thursday morning I asked my boss if I could take an hour and a half of personal time to go hear him speak and she said no because we were going out for lunch for my birthday.  :-(  But lunch was still delicious.  We went to a place called North End Cafe.  They serve breakfast and lunch all afternoon.  And they had pancakes topped with raspberries.  :-)  yay!  So I got to get pancakes, but some of my coworkers ordered burgers and that got me craving a burger.  My tummy tends to not like to handle greasy horse meat burgers like bk and mcdonalds at the moment, so I wanted a legit burger.  I came across this place online called Bluegrass Burgers.  There meat comes from Kentucky raised grass fed cows/bison.  Bison burgers?  Hello.  And they are down the street from the seminary.  So I texted Caleb and he being his wonderful self went and picked us up some burgers from there and met me at the seminary.  Oh so delicious.  It would have been better if I didn't have to order my burger well done, but still, soooo good.  

Then I had class that night.  The president of the seminary, Dr. Mohler, taught our class and it was wonderful.  The subject of the night was medicine and bioethics, so I was a little leery about how much I was going to get out of the class, but he left us with a lot to think about.  It's so wonderful to have this opportunity to get to learn under such intelligent Godly men.  It would have made my night if he brought along John Piper, but just getting to hear Dr. Mohler was still a blessing.  :-)

Friday

I left work early to go to the doctor to get a thyroid lab done for my cardiologist.  He is trying to see if there could be any other underlying issues to the heart palpitations I have.  I decided to go later in the afternoon so Caleb could tag along since I don't always do so well when I get my blood drawn.  Right as I pulled up to the corner on our street and was waiting for the cross traffic to all pass so I could turn in front of our building to pick Caleb up, Caleb came running down the block, and hopped in my car.  Im sure that didn't look suspicious to the guy in the car behind me, but there wasn't anywhere to park in front of our building so it all worked out perfectly.  Ok maybe you had to be there to appreciate the hilarity of it all.

Once we got home, Caleb had all of my birthentines presents sitting out for me.  Here are some pictures:

For the sake of my future children reading this blog someday, I won't post pictures of the unrated commentary.  :-)

This is bamboo by the way.  I've wanted some for a long time.

So there you have it.  My birthday presents.  :-)

Saturday

Today is shaping up to be another lazy Saturday.  My favorite.

That's all for now!   

Week of Feb 3 - Feb 9

Hi friends!

Are you ready for another update?  If not, feel free to not read this post.  You won't offend me.  :-) 

Sunday, February 3

Beginning of Week 12 of pregnancy.  I felt so much better this week than I have in the past.  I still just can't seem to get enough sleep.  Ever.  Also I eat every meal twice. 


Well this was shaping up to be a better blog than it ended up being.  We had our small group at David and Bethany's house.  That night towards the end the topic of pranks was brought up and we all shared pranks we pulled in college, or camp, or wherever.  That night on the way home Caleb and I reminisced even more about some of the pranks we pulled in college.  I was going to post some of them here and add pictures, but most of the pictures are saved on one of my old phones.  I got the phone out and found all of the pictures but when I went to try to email them today, my touch screen quit working so I can't access anything on the phone.  :-(  BOO.  The pranks aren't nearly as good without pictures.  The only one I could find a pic for was the one of me saran wrapping my roommate to her bed because I had that one saved on facebook. 

Monday-Thursday
I can't remember anything from these days.  My days were probably filled with working, eating, and sleeping. 

Friday
My parental units and my sister came to visit!  My mom even made me a fresh banana cake with cream cheese icing for my birthday.  Deee-lish.  They got me some stuff for our baby and I got lots of maternity clothes.  (Score!) 

Saturday
My family and I went shopping for more maternity clothes.  There is a mall in Louisville that has several stores that sell maternity clothes.  It was such a blessing to be able to get so many new clothes.  It actually made me get excited about getting fat so I can wear all of my new stuff!  Although I will try to hold off for quite awhile since I know that I will get very tired of wearing the same clothes by time I actually have the baby.

Saturday night we also went to Orange Leaf.  Yum!  They just brought back their peanut butter flavor...mix that with brownie batter and oh my goodness I have a new favorite combo.

Week of January 27

Hi friends! 

Well this week has certainly been exciting for us!  We had a pretty low-key start to the week.  My new computer somehow got the operating system wiped off of it so we're back down to one computer.   This technology-saturated world has caused me to get worried that something is going to happen to Caleb's computer while mine is out of commission and he won't have one to do his school stuff on.  How did people live before without computers??

Thursday night we got a snow storm while I was in class.  If I would have realized that it was getting as bad as it was, I would have busted out of there during our break.  The roads were fine until after the last Kentucky exit before the bridge.  Apparently the DOT doesn't see the bridge as being a priority because it's not really Kentucky and not really Indiana.  And since we found out the hard way a few weeks ago about how bridges freeze easily, I was so stinkin nervous driving across the bridge in complete white-out conditions.  My leg was shaking so bad out of fear that it was hard for me to even keep my foot on the gas.  Anyway, with a lot of prayer I was able to make it home by driving about 5-10 mph. 

Then comes Friday.  Oh Friday.  :-)  It was Caleb's birthday and also happened to be a doctor appointment day to hear our baby's heartbeat!  So after two hours of sleep, I woke Caleb up so we could make it to my appointment by 8:30.  When we got to the drs office, they told me that they had called about 20 minutes earlier to let me know that my doctor was in a c-section and wouldn't be there until about 9:15.  When I checked my phone it was really about 10 minutes before and we were probably on our way out the door.  We decided to stick around even though I really needed to get to work but we didn't want to wait much longer to be able to share the news with everyone.  (And we kind of wanted more confirmation that there really was a baby in there, you know?)  So they brough us back to the room and we waited and waited and then around 9 the nurse came in and said it would be at least another 45 minutes.  We had the option of just seeing the nurse practioner and she would check to make sure everything was looking good and we would have to wait another 4 weeks to meet with our doctor.  Good enough for us!  We just wanted to hear that heartbeat!  The heartbeat was 175 bpm and such a cool sound.  It just makes everything seem a little more real. 

Last week Caleb was reading my blog post and I was looking at it over his shoulder to make sure I didn't make any major goofs and I realized just how lazy I sounded.  But now you know, I'm just pregnant! 

So back in December I was late, and there were signs hinting that I might be pregnant.  I didn't want to jump to any conclusions too soon just to be disappointed later, but then one Sunday morning, December 16, while I was sitting at church, my heart started racing.  I felt out of breath and exhausted like I had just ran a marathon.  Since I had been having some more recent heart issues, it was kind of concerning.  We spent the afternoon with our small group at David and Bethany's house, and as we were leaving their house and climbed up the stairs from the basement, I was completely out of breath by time we got to the car.  I told Caleb that I was going to make a doctor's appointment that week because I was getting concerned.  Then I started wondering if it could be linked to being pregnant.  When we got home I got on my computer and googled "elevated heart rate when pregnant" and found a reputable website that mentioned that it was very common and sometimes even the way women find out that they're pregnant.  I went on to read some other common symptoms of first signs of pregnancy and by golly I had most of them!  When Caleb woke up from his nap I told him that I was almost sure that I was pregnant.  I went ahead and took a test, and sure enough that second line showed up!  I opened up the bathroom door and asked Caleb if he wanted to come see it for himself.  He came in and hugged me forever.  :-)  It was actually kind of neat that we found out on December 16 because that was the day that we got engaged 3 years before!  It was really good timing because we were leaving in 6 days to go visit family for Christmas, but we had to find a neat way to tell them.  I decided to get a book called "Grandma, Grandpa, and Me" by Mercer Mayer and put a note on it that said "Please read to me in August 2013, love Baby Smith" and we wrapped those up and gave them to our parents for Christmas. 

We had our first doctor's appointment a couple of weeks later and they projected my due date to be August 17.  So that makes me right around 12 weeks right now.  Hello second trimester!  My nausea has been getting better and better as long as I eat about 6 meals a day (no exaggeration, I really did eat lunch 3 times the other day) and I crave pancakes and waffles alllllll the time.  Fortunately Aldi's frozen waffles frugally curb that craving while I'm at work.  For those that have been wondering, we won't find out what we are having until 20 weeks, and yes, we will find out.  I can't handle waiting another 28 weeks to find out.  I need to have either those bows or superhero attire ready!

So back to Caleb's birthday.  Since he prefers to have something other than cake for his birthday, I make him one of those strawberry jello pretzel deals on Sunday night.  Sunday nights are my nights to catch up on housework and the only time I really have to prepare any sort of food.  Here lately preparing food makes me terribly nauseous.  I can be feeling fine all day but when I step into that kitchen and start cooking, bring over that trash can because I feel like I'm going to need it.  Anyway, I pushed through that icky feeling and got this dessert made.  I didn't surprise him with his "cake" like i have in previous years because, well, I really didn't care this year.  I blame hormones.  Last year I made him an ice cream cake but wouldn't tell him what it was and the year before I hid a no-bake cookie cake in my closet for about a week.  We did dig into it on Monday night because this pregnant mama wanted some!  I can't know that it's sitting in my fridge for 5 days and not eat it.  That's just crazy.  Fortunately Caleb is not a real big birthday celebrator so he didn't care if we dug in early.  Also, this may come as a surprise from my last post but I was going to order him the wii lego batman 2 game (he got the first one for Christmas from his sister and plays it alllll the time, but I must disclaim that he never lets it interrupt our time together in the evenings) and he knew I was going to get it because it's what he asked for.  When I went to order it the price had gone up and he told me that it wasn't worth that price.  I could have been a good wife and told him that the price was fine and he could still get it, but then I thought maybe he would enjoy getting to pick out a knife more since he will enjoy that longer than he would a wii game once he beats it.  I gave him some of my Amazon gift cards from swagbucks (because we are cheap like that sometimes) and told him he could pick out whatever he wanted. He just so happened to already have a knife picked out and in his cart on amazon.  So that was the extent of his birthday.  We had been planning for weeks on going to Winter Jam today (Saturday) to see some awesome bands for only $10, but since you have to wait outside for awhile if you want a decent seat and we have a high in the low 30s today with more snow on the way tonight, I think we are going to stay put at home.  Lame, I know.

I hope you all have a wonderful weekend and enjoy that Soccer Stanley Cup Bowl game tomorrow night, or whatever it is that people are making such a fuss about.  (Go Ravens!)