Week of June 16

Week 31!  I started getting a couple of stretch marks this week.  Goodbye belly as I knew it.

Sunday - We got to get ready for church and drive two blocks!  Such a better drive than the 25 minutes from Mexico.  :-) 

Then since it was Father's day, we went to Perry, MO to meet up with Caleb's family.  We ate at a restaurant there and then went over to a bait store that was close by.  They had this little gem in the back:

Caleb wanted to wrestle it because he said he had been watching plenty of Gator Boys on Discovery since we've been at his aunt's house. 

Monday - We went to my parents' house to collect my turtle and plants.  I had also taken over my hermit crab, but he didn't survive.  My mom gets upset that things happen to my pets when they are at her house.  (Like that one summer I went to youth camp and when I got home my mouse was missing an eyeball.)  Anyway, even though my hermit crab didn't make it, there was another baby fish in the aquarium.  You gain some, you lose some.  However, I must say she did an impecable job taking care of my plants.  My plants never looked so healthy in the two years we lived in Indiana (although the amount of sunlight she gets there compared to what we used to get makes a huge difference, but we'll keep telling my mom it was all her doings) 

He's home!!

Tuesday - after getting to take a day off from upacking to go visit my parents, it was back to the sewing machine for me to finish up our downstairs curtains.  By the end of Tuesday, every window on the first floor and two windows on the second floor had curtains.  Woo hoo!  Caleb made some tie-backs for our kitchen windows:

Wednesday -
So if you keep up with this blog o' mine, you might remember my cricket incident a few weeks ago where I found a cricket in my shirt after I just put it on.  Well I had some of my clothes hanging up to dry on my drying rack and went to grab some capris to wear to church on Wednesday night.  I ironed them and then put them on.  I felt something on the side of my leg, similar to the feeling of the cricket.  I thought there was no way that it was another bug, so I reached my hand down my leg and sure enough there were beatty eyes staring up at me.  I jumped out of my pants as quick as I could and got the bug onto the ground.  It was kind of hobbling around so I whacked it with my shoe.  I took a picture and sent it to Caleb, who was already at church, and told him that I'm never ever hang drying my clothes again (which isn't true, but it's a nice thought).  So since it wasn't dead and I didn't want to crunch the nasty thing to kill it, I got it to grip onto my shoe and I was going to take it outside to die.  I got a better picture of it while it was on my shoe since the bug is brown and our carpet is brown.  I wanted Caleb to see this monster.  So as I'm carrying this beast through the living room to get to the front door, it gets a burst of life and jumps off of my shoe.  This time, I whacked it until I knew there was no way it was still alive.  But then now I'm faced with a dilemma.  This bug is squished into the carpet and I don't want to scrape it up.  So I got a tissue and covered it up for Caleb to deal with when he got home and I went on to church. 

Here's the cockroach on the bottom of my shoe.  I wasn't about to leave that thing long enough to go get my camera so my phone had to suffice.

And here it lies in wait of Caleb's return home.

After I got to church, I showed Caleb the better picture of the nasty varmit and he told me that it was a cockroach.  Another guy from church also agreed that it looked like a cockroach.  THAT THING WAS IN MY PANTS.  I'm not so sure that he appreciated having to get this cockroach out of the carpet after it's guts had dried, but what else was I supposed to do??  You would think I would have learned my lesson about checking my clothes that have been hanging up to dry before I put them on after the first incident, but I guess not. 

Thursday - Caleb's parents came to visit for dinner.  It was good to see them as always.  Caleb had also decided after mowing our grass this week that he wanted a weed eater as well.  The people who sold us the lawnmower also happened to have one for sale and I was able to talk them down on the price a little bit, so Caleb went over there to get it.  We have a pretty purdy lawn now.  :-)

We also HAD to go to Sonic on Thursday since they had half price shakes all day.  Who can pass up something that great?

Friday - I got a text from my sweet friend Lydia asking if I was doing anything that afternoon because she thought she might stop by for a few hours.  So I got my rear in gear and got some cleaning, cooking, and grocery shopping done that morning.  She came by and we got to chit chat for awhile, exchanging more baby-in-utero stories. 

Shortly after she left, some of our new friends from church came by to have dinner with us.  We had planned to have homemade pizzas.  As they were rolling out the dough, I came to the realization that our oven wasn't working.  We could get the broiler to come on, but that was it.  The guys took a look at it for awhile and came to the conclusion that when my mom had cleaned the oven, the two baking knobs had gotten switched.  Once the knobs were on correctly, the oven worked just fine and we finally got to eat dinner.  Crisis averted!  I'm glad we didn't have to call the landlord over that. We had a great time getting to visit with them.  I also made a mulberry crisp out of the mulberries from our backyard.  I must say, it didn't taste terrible.

Saturday - while I was in St Louis on Monday, my mom and I went shopping.  I was trying to find an idea of what to do for bathroom storage.  Even though we have quite a big house, there isn't a lot of storage space on the first floor.  Our bedroom doesn't have a closet and the one in the baby's room is full of my clothes and baby stuff.  So without a bathroom closet, I wasn't sure where to keep everything that I had shoved in our big bathroom closet back in Indiana.  I eventually found a place for everything except towels.  I found this idea on pinterest and decided to try to find some wooden crates that I could use:

When I went to Michael's, the crates were almost $14 a piece, and I wanted 2-3 of them.  Well, if you know me,  you know that I love to shop and hate to spend money all at the same time.  Hence why I like couponing.  There was no way I was going to spend that kind of money on crates for a bathroom that we might only be using for a year.  The thing is, is we have been married for 2 1/2 years and are currently in our third home.  There's no telling where we will live next and what kinds of things I will be able to reuse from one place to the next.  If we had bought this house and planned on living in it for 20+ years, then I wouldn't mind putting out that kind of money. 

So Wednesday morning I woke up with an idea (because apparently I do my best thinking when I'm sleeping) of using plastic crates covered in fabric.  I had several crates that I had stacked up to use as a bookshelf in my dorm in college that I never really used after graduating.  The crates had holes in the bottoms of them that were perfect for screws so I could hang them on the wall.  I had a tub of fabric that my mom had left at the house for me to look through and see if I wanted any of the fabric for curtains.  I pulled out some plain black fabric and then found our old bathroom curtains and cut those apart since we don't have a bathroom window anymore.  After some trial and error, I finally was able to figure out the best way to make covers for these crates. Here's a picture of the finished project, that I finally had time to finish up on Saturday:

It's perfect.  It's exactly what I wanted, the perfect amount of space, and it cost me NOTHING. 

Week of June 9

Week 30.  Only 10 weeks away!  If only I could sleep better these days.  I'm pretty sure my lack of sleep during the past week caused me to get sick this week.  Boo.

I hope you like pictures.  I have lots this week.

Sunday
I like Sundays. 

Monday
MOVING DAY.  The day we have longed for.  We got up and I felt pretty icky.  The day must go on!  We showed up to our new house and there were a couple of people from church along with several of Caleb's family members that were there.  The trailer was unloaded in less than an hour.  Some of the ladies from our church were so sweet to make lunch for everyone.  After lunch we went back to the house and felt a little overwhelmed because we didn't know where to start.  My mother in law helped me get the kitchen cabinets wiped out and all of the kitchen boxes opened up and unpacked. Caleb and the rest of his family were busy getting some of the other rooms put together or at least getting the right boxes in the right room.  By the end of the evening our house actually started looking like a home.  I don't know what we would have done without all of their help.

Getting started

His muscles

 

Waiting ever so patiently for someone to hand him something that he can take inside.

 



Making sure to keep the washer warm with a snuggie.

 

My father-in-law taking a nap.

Tuesday

I woke up still feeling icky.  I had taken a sleeping pill Monday night so that I could at least get a whole night's sleep.  I woke up shortly after Caleb did and after he left to go to work I went back to bed for a couple more hours.  It felt so great to be able to sleep after so many sleepless nights.  Tuesday afternoon we headed to Mexico to get the rest of our stuff from Rachel's house and to go to Wal-Mart.  Don't you just dread those trips to Wal-Mart after a move??  You always end up spending way more than you care to just because there are so many things you need.

Wednesday
More ick.  But Caleb and I were able to get more unpacked.  I also was able to start in on making curtains for our new house.  We have several big windows and no window coverings...not even mini blinds.  It kind of feels awkward at night when you know people can look in on you.  :-/  Also, we got a lawnmower!  I found a really good deal on a nice lawnmower so we went and checked it out.  I love the way God provides for us :-). 

 

Also on Wednesday, the Centralia newspaper came out, and guess who was on the front page?

If you want to read a portion of the article, you can find it here:
http://www.firesideguard.com/?p=4702


Thursday
My parents came to visit!  The morning started out rather rough for them.  They brought my dad's truck and loaded up the back of it with the baby crib, a dresser, a changing table/dresser, outside trash cans, and some other things.  As they were driving down highway 70, my dad saw the crib go flying out of the back of the truck.  He stopped real quick and once they got out, they saw that the crib was on the other side of the highway, the dresser was in pieces all over the highway and the trash cans were gone as well.  A sweet lady pulled over to help them pick up the pieces so traffic could start moving again on 70.  It turns out that one of the bungee cords my dad was using snapped.  :-(  They got pulled over at the next exit and were able to secure everything again, along with reducing their speed the rest of the way to keep anything else from flying out.  Praise the Lord that none of the flying baby furniture hit any other cars or caused any accidents.  The crib has a little bit of damage to it, but nothing that a little sanding a new coat of paint can't fix.  The dresser is indeed in pieces, but Caleb is pretty sure that he can piece it back together pretty easily as long as too many pieces aren't missing.  It will just have more character now.  :-)

Once my parents got here, they started in on helping us around the house.  My dad started working on closing up a hole that is in the roof of our porch.  The wood is starting to rot and there are critters that seem to be making their home up there.  We had one angry bird on our porch for the rest of the day! 

My mom started tackling the pantry.  The pantry is really the ugliest thing in our house.  It had ugly green paint with all sorts of stains all over it.  There was carpet in there that needed to leave with the 60's, and overall it was just blah.  Caleb ripped the carpet up and my mom got the place looking amazing with the help of a can of paint and some contact paper! Also, a family from church gave us some left over peel and stick tile that they had leftover from a home project.

Before:

That's carpet at the bottom, not puke.  I know you might have been confused.

 

And after:

 



And filled with food!:

 

My mom also worked on the stove.  I'm not sure what happened to the stove, but somehow all of the paint was crackled on the top.  The landlord told us we could scrap off the paint if we wanted to.  My mom also asked me if the inside of the oven was clean.  I told her that I wasn't sure because I hadn't opened it.  She opened it and the look on her face was not what I was wanting to see.  The inside of that oven was the nastiest looking oven I've ever seen. It's not a self-cleaning oven but fortunately my mom is awesome and scrubbed the inside of that too so we could at least be able to use it. 

 

Before

 

 

After:

It's not perfect, but I think it definitely looks better.

I got to working on more curtains, and Caleb and my dad also put up a rod and a shelf in a closet for me to use.  What kind of a closet doesn't have a rod or any shelves?  Anyway, those guys are pretty handy to have around.  :-)

 Before:

 After:

Friday
The baby doctor appointment went well.  I did my glucose test but we won't know the results until Monday or Tuesday.  Also, I'm in trouble if this child ever gets too much sugar.  After drinking that glucose drink, he was wiggling all over the place and wouldn't stay still for the nurse to listen to his heart beat.

After the appointment we went to see Caleb's sister and her tots.  Caleb always loves getting to be a super hero.



And be in a band.

 

And love on this little guy...

...who apparently needs three limbs to drink a bottle.

Then we got home and went Mulberry picking!  So last Sunday I discovered these little berries all over our back deck and all through the backyard.  I immediately went and bought a broom so that when everyone unloaded the trailer through the back door they wouldn't be tracking these berries all over the house.  I told Caleb about these "nasty little berries" and how they are really hard to clean up off of the kitchen floor, let alone carpet.  He informed me that these "nasty little berries" are actually mulberries.  I don't really know much about mulberries other than a nursery rhyme song to go along with a bush of them.  I looked up mulberries on pinterest and apparently these little guys are very delicate and don't last long once picked, so most grocery stores don't even carry them.  I read up on how to pick them and such (not that it's rocket science).   So Friday Caleb and I went out and he shook out as many branches as he could reach to get these berries down. 


Shaking the limbs.  He also used our snow shovel to bat at the tree limbs



The harvest

 We brought the bucket inside and filled it with water.  I put on some rubber gloves since they stain really bad and picked out all of the ripe ones.  There were these tiny little brown bugs that were all over the berries and started crawling all over me.  Sick. 

Here's all of the berries soaking in some vinegar water to kill off any more of the little bugs.


 Drying them

 

 

Anyone have any good mulberry recipes??

Oh yeah, Caleb also found a wild strawberry!

Saturday

While I worked on even more curtains (we have a lot of windows!) Caleb pieced the dresser back together that took flight out of my dad's truck.

 

Here's what he had to start with:  (minus the drawers)

Pretty much anything that could have fallen apart did.

 

And here's the finished piece:

Yeah, I know, my husband is awesome.  :-)  There was only one piece missing so because of that the bottom drawer doesn't slide very well.  Since it needs to be painted anyway, I've been trying to come up with a cute way to make it turtley to go with the nursery.  Unfortunately pinterest doesn't seem to have many "turtle dressers", and I have zero creativity without pinterest.

 

We also lost power on Saturday night.  I saw a bright flash of lightning and looked outside to see sparks flying everywhere from the electrical line that crosses the street.  I figured it would be out for quite awhile but it was actually only out for less than an hour.  Caleb looked out and saw a bird sitting up higher on the power line.  He said it was probably the bird from the front porch that caused the power outage just to get revenge.

 

So now I'm going to leave you with some of Caleb's philosophies about life that he has declared to me this week:

 

- If you can cut it with a butter knife, you can cut it with a fork.

- If it's small enough that a Band-Aid will help, I don't need a Band-Aid.

- If you have all of the pieces, I can fix it.

 

I thought I would document these in case he ever gets interviewed by a newspaper again and they ask him what his life philosophy is.

Weeks of May 26 and June 2

This is shaping up to be a long and, on the verge of, a boring one.  Just letting you know.

Week 28 - This kid is getting really good at putting pressure on my organs that don't feel so great.  If he gets any lower his head is going to pop out.

Monday - Aunt Rachel had a family get-together at her house and then we also had a shindig at church.  My sister was able to come to hang out at both and it was good to see her.  My sister brought a cake from my mom. It's like a banana/pineapple cake. It was delicious.  I kept it by my bed and ate it in the middle of the night and for breakfast almost every day until it was gone.  I gave Caleb a bite.  Just one.

Tuesday - Caleb started his office hours at the church.  I, on the other hand, slept in.  :-)

Wednesday - we went and looked at a house that is for rent just a few blocks away from the church.  We filled out an application for it.  It's a lot bigger than what we need, but it's in a good location and it would save us a lot of money in gas from driving back and forth from Mexico every day.

Thursday - I had my first doctor's appointment with my new doctor.  She seems really nice!  And she didn't make me take my glucose test.  :-)  I get to put that off for another 2 weeks.  Also in two weeks we might possibly have another ultrasound if they can't get my ultrasound records from my previous doctor.  I wouldn't mind seeing my tot again.

Friday - Anchorfest kicked off in Centralia.  It's a really big deal around here.  There are all sorts of carnival rides and carnival type food.  There was supposed to be a parade that we went to Centralia to see but there was a lot of rain and lightning so it was cancelled. 

We had to take the long way to Centralia from Mexico because one of the main roads through Mexico was flooded.  Caleb said he heard that the water had risen over 3 feet within an hour.  Then Friday night after we got back to Rachel and Jimmy's house the power went out and was out for almost 7 hours.  I'm very thankful we were able to get it back so quickly and didn't take several days like our Hannibal friends went through a couple of weeks ago.  I'm always up for a good storm, but I'm thinking we could use a nice break from the rain for a few days.

Saturday - we went back to Centralia for Anchorfest and there was also a city-wide yard sale so we got to go try to find some bargains.  We didn't find a whole lot of good stuff, but we did find some baby clothes and children's books (shocking, right?).  At one garage sale that we were at this 6 year old girl who asked me if I was pregnant.  I told her that I was so she told me that I should probably buy some of their baby clothes.  Then she went and found some of her baby toys and gave them to me so that my baby would have toys to play with.  She said that my baby would also need toys when he gets older so he's not sad, so she filled up a metal lunchbox with a bunch of old McDonalds toys and gave them to me.  She was so cute!  I left with an arm load of stuff and only paid $1 for the clothes I bought. 

After we got garage-saled out, we went to Anchorfest and got to visit with some people from church and watch some dancers that are taught by some ladies from our church.  It was a good time except that I couldn't stand for very long, so I had to sit most of the day.  The only places to sit were in the sun, and I didn't think much about being in the sun all day.  My pasty white skin hasn't seen the sun in years, mostly since I got a horrible sun burn in Florida after my freshman year of high school and I decided I never want to go through that kind of pain again. I would much rather take pasty skin over severe sun burn. With being pregnant my skin is apparently a lot more sensitive and I got burned.  :-(  Part of my arm got a purplish tint to it for a couple of days.  I'm pretty sure that's not good, but I put aloe on it and it got better.

Anchorfest had all sorts of unhealthy foods.  Including fried Snicers!  I'm not too sure what a snicer is, but I'm hoping it's a typo for Snickers.

Week 29
Baby moved higher up this week so it's more comfortable.  Although now he keeps running his little feets up and down my side up to my ribs.  It's cute for now but sometimes catches me off guard when my belly starts suddenly protruding out.  He still doesn't like if anything is touching my belly.  He will kick and kick until I move it.  He's started responding more to Caleb's touch.  Caleb will jab him a little bit and he will kick back most of the time.  I'm ready for them to be able to play games like that with each other without having to go through my belly.  :-)  I hope this little boy is just like his daddy. 

Sunday
More Anchorfest!  After church there was a Sidewalk Prophets concert.  We missed a good chunk of it because there was an opening band that we didn't know so we got up and walked around the car show while they played.  Then I got worn out so we went back to church so I could take a quick nap. (The church is right on the same square as Anchorfest).  By time I woke up most of the Sidewalk Prophets concert was over.  We got to catch the last 2 or 3 songs.

At the concert

Monday
Caleb's parents were headed to Christa and Bert's house so they picked us up along the way.  I got to hang out with this little guy while his brother went through the awful torture of being potty trained.  Or at least he made it seem that way.

Tuesday
We just ordered Caleb a new cell phone because he still had a flip phone that he didn't like very much.  He got it when we moved to Indiana so he got the cheapest phone.  He's been wanting a slide phone to make it easier to text, and I found a good deal on one.

Look at how far in the phone technology world he has come! 

Once I got it activated, I had to call the cell phone company.  He uses Straight Talk, which is a prepaid deal through Walmart.  He's only really had issues with them one time in the past two years.  Until today.  Their wait times to talk to a real person are border line ridiculous, if you can even get on the "waiting list" without them telling you that there are too many people calling so try again later and it hangs up on you.  Then once you get a real person you are lucky if you can keep a connection with them.  I ended up being on the phone with them for 2 1/2 hours on Tuesday afternoon trying to get Caleb's phone working right without them changing his phone number.  It was quite the battle and we still have some work to do on it before it works right, but he at least can receive phone calls and texts on it as long as he isn't in the basement at Rachel's house.   Normally I hate when my pregnancy hormones get the best of me and I break down in tears, but it seemed to work toward my benefit this day.  I finally got to talk to a manager and she is going to work with me to help me get everything figured out and gave me the phone number to their manager's line so I don't have to go through their customer service reps who may or may not know what they are talking about.

Tuesday night Caleb called the landlord to the house that we applied for the week before. He said that he had our application and another application for the house and they would be making their decision in the next day or so.  Caleb then got a phone call from a Centralia police officer we met on Sunday who had a lead on another house.  It's for a house that is also in Centralia, cheaper and smaller than the one we had an application in for.  I looked it up online and at least from the outside it was a cute little house.  Caleb called about the house and the only downside is that it wont be available until after the first of July.  Another whole month away.  :-/

Wednesday

Wednesday during Caleb's office hours he got a phone call from the landlord telling us that we could have the big house.  We were still debating about whether or not we wanted the house since rent was higher and utilities would be higher.  We ended up deciding that this house was going to be the best option for us.   We have a place to live!!  Within less than a half hour we were also offered a very affordable refrigerator thanks to Caleb's Uncle Troy.  Everything seemed to just fall into place that day. 

Thursday
Thursday morning we got to go sign the lease for the house and got the key.  Woo hoo!  We also opened up a bank account in Centralia. Then Caleb was interviewed by the Centralia newspaper since he's a new pastor in the area.  The man also had like a whole photo shoot for Caleb to get a picture to put in the paper.  Some of them seemed a little awkward to me.  Anyway, he'll probably be famous once this article comes out in the paper in this bustling town of 4000 people.  I'm sure he will autograph newspapers for a small fee.  Or for food.  He likes the chocolate oatmeal no-bake cookie things.  Just fyi.

Friday
I got all of the utilities set up today for our new house!  Most cities you can call or go online to set up utilities.  Not Centralia.  So we had to make a trip to set up most of our utilities.  Since we weren't planning on going anywhere today I was wearing one of Caleb's old t-shirts.  Before we left I asked him if I looked like a slob.  He took a second to scrunch up his nose and give me a slight shake of the head, so I took that as a yes.  I just did laundry the day before and had my clothes hanging in the laundry room in the basement (I don't like to dry my maternity clothes).  I grabbed a tank top and a shirt to wear.  I went into the bedroom and put on the tank top and once I got it on I felt something on the inside of my shirt over on my right side.  I thought maybe it was some sort of balled up paper that got sent through the wash and stuck to the inside of my shirt.  I pulled up my shirt to see what it was and IT WAS A NASTY CRICKET HANGING OUT ON MY BELLY.  Natural instincts kicked in and I screamed, freaked out, flicked off the cricket, and smashed it with my foot before it could hop into my suitcase.  Caleb found my misfortune hilarious and couldn't stop laughing at me.  Fortunately he scraped up the cricket off of the floor for me.  I fully intend on shaking out all of my clothes and checking them inside and out before putting anything on from here on.  Gross.  I get heeby jeebies just thinking about it.

Saturday
We garage sale-ing through Mexico and into Hallsville.  We stopped in Centralia to unload stuff out of the van and into our new house.  :-)  We were looking at yard sales to try to find a lawn mower since our grass was already starting to get tall, and when we showed up, someone had mowed our grass! 

We actually had decent luck at yard sales today.  And we didn't even buy any baby clothes or books! Some of our finds included: fabric, a $5 ceiling fan, a router? (not so sure what this is but apparently it's for working on wood.  Caleb was excited about it.), and some free old kitchen cabinet things (at least I think that's what they are.  We have plans for them.  You'll have to wait and see what we come up with). 

I really wanted to go to more yard sales but of course my bladder was full and then we were both getting hungry and my legs were getting sore. 

So I just wanted to leave you with a conversation that I've had with Caleb this past week.

Caleb - "Centralia needs a Taco Bell".
Me - "Yes!  Let's open one!  They do franchises!"
Caleb - "People around here don't like Mexican."
Me - "It's not really Mexican."
Caleb - "It gets the job done cheap.  How much more Mexican can you get??"
(He says he didn't come up with that so he can't take credit for it)