Thursday, June 25, 2009

♥love♥

June 25th, 2005. 4 years ago.
The Place: Maple Valley Community Center, Maple Valley, Washington.
The Occasion: Our Wedding Day!
Friends and family gathered from near and far and even further away to help celebrate.
It was a gorgeous day:

Our journey didn't begin at the alter, however. Our story started a lot earlier. It started in 1997. He lived in Florida. I lived in Washington. Despite the miles, we made it work.
We've been faced with many difficulties, many challenges and hardships but balanced beautifully with opportunities, great fortune and good humor. We went from living at my mom's to our own apartment to buying our first little house. We made the decision to leave our cute little cottage in the woods (ha) and move to Idaho to be closer to family. It's provided Nick the opportunity to go to school. We've lost friends and made friends. We've seen San Francisco, Miami, Scottsdale, and Green Bay. We passed on a trip to Europe. We've had a nephew born and watched our nieces and nephews grow.

I'm proud of the man I married. He's willing to make choices that's aren't always easy, but are always right and good for us. He makes me laugh like no one else in the world. He puts up with my oddities and vice versa. He gets me through and through and hasn't run screaming for the hills yet. That says something.

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Heartbeatin'

Well Thursday I had my June appointment and it was a good one! I gained no weight my first trimester (I actually lost some, because I was so sick those 2 days in May) which is FANTASTIC. My blood pressure was really good. I talked to the doc about some things I'd been avoiding but wanted her opinion on - tea and Subway. She said either is fine in moderation, but to stay away from green teas. WHOOP WHOOP! I had a lovely, LOVELY Subway sandwich on Sunday and lemme tell you. It. Was. Divine.

Anyway, we got to hear the heartbeat with the little Doppler machine. That's so cool! It sounds just like it does on TV - whoosh, whoosh, whoosh. I could have listened to it all day, but she presses on my stomach pretty hard with the machine and that was uncomfortable, so I was relieved when we were done.

Next appointment is July 14th and hopefully we're not too early to see what parts baby's coming with. I'll be SO bummed if we go home without knowing...but we'll find out soon enough! It's only 3 weeks away!

Next up on our plan is our anniversary. It'll be 4 years on Thursday - aw. Nick and I are takinga 4 day weekend to celebrate. We're not sure what we're doing yet, but we'll do something special.

Well, that's about it for the update I guess. I thought I had more but apparently not!

Saturday, June 13, 2009

Looking For:

I've eaten and killed the hunger beast for now. MUAHAHA. :-)

Anyway, today was slightly productive. We started cleaning out the office/future nursery and moved the desk out to the front room. Unfortunately, it's just too big. So, we've listed it on Craigslist. Hopefully some one will respond soon.

http://boise.craigslist.org/fuo/1220245765.html

In light of the upcoming baby, I've been looking at some money saving ideas. I'm reading a lot of these Mormon Mommy blogs, and while I'm not LDS, I want to start embracing some of their ideas - like food storage, buying in bulk, etc. I've also decided that to save a bit of money once the baby moves from milk to food, that I'm going to try my hand at making my own baby food. I've been reading up on this and it doesn't sound hard to do at all, and is considerably cheaper than buying in the store.

That said, I need some stuff. I've been cruising Craigslist, but it's just not as good here as it was in Seattle (less people, less stuff moving). I want a chest freezer. The ones I'm finding on Craigslist are just as much as buying new from Lowe's. So, if you know of anyone that's got a nice chest freezer they're trying to get rid of - could you pass it on to me? I also need some sort of shelving for our garage. Our house hasn't got a pantry and limited cupboards for food storage. I'd like some shelving to not only organize the garage and get some off the stuff up off the floor, but to store our bulk food (that I will buy once I have that chest freezer and shelves to put it upon) and food that I'm considering canning.

Well, that's my Saturday update. Catch ya later.

Sarah =

RAR! Gimme food!!

Thursday, June 11, 2009

What's That I Feel?

So I've been feeling an odd little sensation in my baby bump today. Could it be the baby moving around? Perhaps. Of course, I took to the interwebs to see what's what. The general consensus is that most women carrying their first child won't feel any definitive movements until at least 16 weeks. For women who have been pregnant before, they are more equipped to tell much earlier (at 13 weeks) the difference between baby motion and gas.

Well, I'm 13 weeks this week (almost 14, can you believe it?) and I swear this isn't gas. It isn't much, just a light fluttering like butterfly wings. I'm choosing to believe it's our little potato (that's what Susan's dad calls it - he refers to me as Potato since I live in Idaho).

In other news, not much else to report. Morning sickness is completely gone. It's too early to start doing stuff with the nursery at this point, but I have begun registering for the more generic items we'll need. The room that will become the nursery is a bit of a disaster, so we're going to start working on getting it cleaned out and organized a bit ahead of schedule.

We're still adjusting to Nick's new schedule. He's not home before 9:00 at night any more, so my nights are sort of lonely. However, I've been tapped to help Susan prepare for a Scentsy event she's having next weekend (I'm making some flyers and samples) so that'll keep me busy.

Well, I guess that's it! Like I said, not too much exciting happening just yet!

Friday, June 5, 2009

Money Honey

I have a lot of thoughts running through my head at any given point throughout the day (and occasionally interrupting my sleep). Our lives are about to change in a big way, so it's pretty normal that I have questions and concerns and "how in the heck am I gonna...?"'s.

The biggest thing that weighing on my mind right now is the cost of daycare. There's a daycare right in the same parking lot as my work, which hello, is SO convenient. The owner was over at work the other day, asking if she could park her van in our spaces this weekend because the Challenger school is having an open house. I ran up and asked her what they charge for infants.

$170/WEEK.

That's $680/MONTH.

That's more than HALF my house payment.

I felt like crying. It was also that day that I found out from our HR department that my work only has a long term disability policy - no short term - and therefore I can't use any of those benefits for maternity leave. FMLA says I get 12 weeks off, but it's unpaid. I have just over a week of vaca/sick saved, but I can't accrue any more vaca until I take some. I'm maxed.

The daycare lady did say that if they're at capacity, she could offer me a discount (we do her insurance), so that's something. I've been seriously tossing around the idea of Nick reducing his hours to part time (he's on my insurance anyway) and he can stay home with the baby during the day and work only on the nights he hasn't got school. I kind of hate the idea, because I want to be the one that stays home - but the harsh reality is that I make more money than he does (his work truly blows) and while he's been sending out his resume like mad, no one is freaking HIRING. We simply can't afford for me to not work at this point, but I think with some clever budgeting that we could get by on my salary and a part time one for him. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that some fantastic job lands in Nick's lap before the baby comes....

I got my first baby gifts this week!! Susan sent me a box chock-full of bottle brushes, spoons, food containers, a dishwasher cage for bottle parts, a cosmetic type bag to use in the diaper bag for misc baby paraphernalia and.....I'm drawing a blank. I think that was it. The bag is SO dang cute, I can't wait to put it to use. We've started registering for some generic stuff that isn't really decided by gender (we're registered at Babies R Us so far). July can't get here fast enough - I'm dying ot know if my feelings are right (I think girl) or if Nick's right. Either way, I don't care if it's a boy or a girl, I just want to KNOW. Either way, we're having a freak. And I mean that in the nicest way possible. But I am having a tall, large footed child. I feel bad that we're passing on these genes. Perhaps they'll get some of Anne's genes and be petite. We can hope for that.

Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Baby Blabber

So last night I created a Wish List on iTunes for songs I want to put together on a little play list for the nursery. So far I have an Enya album, Jewel's new Lullaby album and some Baby Einstein instrumental songs. Here's the think to my wish list if any of you (wink, wink, nudge nudge) feel the urge to gift me some songs from it. Note: you have to have iTunes installed to view the list.

I'm finding it's hard to decide what I want to start planning for with the baby because we don't know what we're having yet. July could not get here fast enough. I found a bedding set I really like for a little girls room - here - but nothing is really jumping out at me for a boy's room. I'm not interested (so far) in the traditional animals or sports or fire engines or dogs or planes or whatnot.

I told the work yesterday the news. They're all excited and I have another offer to make a quilt.

Well, I guess that's really all the news from Casa Beesley. Nothing much exciting to report, just more of the same. :-)