Ryan landed his first job yesterday, and he’s so excited! A man from our church has dowel pieces that he gets from somewhere… They are like 3/4″ thick and round (obviously). He gets them and then smoothes them out and finishes them. Then a rubber stamp company takes them and adds a handle and a rubber stamp and makes them into stamps! Anyway, so he has all these wood pieces that are 5 different circle sizes, and he needs them separated so each size circle is in a different bag/box. (right now they are all combined in two big boxes. So Ryan’s job is to go through and separate the five different sizes into different boxes. It’s going to take him awhile… there are A LOT or pieces but he is getting paid $30 for the job, which is a lot of money for a 7 year old. He has been saving up FOREVER for a Nintedo DS so this will help him get a lot closer. He has been saving his allowance ($2 per week) for several months, so this will certainly save him – well 15 weeks of saving! So currently my living room is housing two big stinky boxes of wood (I think they have some kind of finish on them or something – they stink – leave it to my husband to stick them in the center of the living room, opposed to somewhere a bit more conspicuous – oh well.) At least it is nice out so I can open the windows.

I am hoping to make it out to the garden today to plant those plants we bought the other day. Well probably everything except the peppers and blueberries. It’s not warm enough for peppers yet and the blueberries – I have to figure out where to put them and test the soil first. It’s supposed to be warm, but now the wind is really picking up, so we’ll see…

We head out tomorrow for our mini vacation. Apparently yesterday Christian was totally out of control at school. I don’t know if it was the weather or his excitement for vacation or what, but after school his teacher said she has never seen him behave so bad… (Just what a mom wants to hear!) So today he is instructed to behave and if he doesn’t he won’t be going into the water the first day we are at the resort. (which will just be tomorrow evening from like 6-9, but that should be torture enough for a 5 year year old – hopefully he will just behave and we won’t have to worry about it.)

I had a really good day yesterady! I didn’t even take a nap! Although, I wanted to around 4:30 – I survived. I was only nauseous a couple times, but overall felt pretty good. Matt even got his grill working again and grilled us up some steak! It was the first time in months I had been able to eat steak or roast without feeling terrible afterwards. So promising! Here’s hoping for another day of the same so I can get us packed and ready to go!

Well, I guess I better get busy!
C-

I just posted a few pictures here: http://www.pastorsfamily.com for Jan-April. Apparently we didn’t take very many pictures during this time, but there’s a few there.

Mother nature provided us with a scary alarm clock yesterday morning. There’s nothing like waking up at 4:30 a.m. to feel your bed shaking and watching your room move back and forth. Matt and I both said “What is that?” Then we both decided it felt like an earthquake, but we don’t have those out here… so what could it be? My first thought was tornado, but it wasn’t windy, so that wasn’t it… Matt was thinking a big explosion or maybe a train crash since we have tracks not too far away, but I kept thinking that we would have heard a big bang if that was the case. It is amazing how much can go through your head in the short amount of time you are going through the experience. After it was over, I turned on the weather emergency radio and they didn’t say a thing about it. Finally the 5:00 a.m. news came on, they confirmed it was an earthquake, (even the news reporter was shaken up – he kept saying I’m pretty freaked out right now. LOL) and we were able to go back to sleep. I just wanted to make sure it was indeed an earthquake and not just our house shaking or something else more localized. It turns out it was a 5.2 magnitude quake about 2 1/2 – 3 hours south of us. So…. I guess we do get earthquakes out here! They claim we will only see a quake this size once every 10-15 years. Good news, because I can’t say I necessarily want to experience that again anytime soon. The kids slept through it all and we told them all about it in the morning.

We’re having a lazy day today. After waking up early yestrday morning and then having a packed day all day yesterday, it is nice to just hang-out and relax. We’ve been having weatherin the mid 70’s but today it is down to the upper 50’s again. Matt is out pressure washing his BBQ, getting it ready for the season. It needs a bit of repair work (a couple parts) and then hopefully will be good as new.

We went to the nursery the other night to pick out some plants for our garden. That was a fun trip, but wow, that bill added up quick! I was planning on getting 10 raspberry plants, but when I discovered they were $17.99 each I settled for 3. I know they will spread like crazy eventually (my last years plants are working on that) so I guess I’ll just have to have patience for a couple more years and then we’ll have raspberries in abundance. Matt also decided he wants to try blueberries, so we grabbed a couple of those bushes too. Then Matt got 8 more pepper plants (just what he needs! LOL) and we got a couple different kinds of lettuce and some strawberries. My strawberries didn’t do very well last year, so I’m changing from 2 beds to 1 and hopefully this year we’ll see a bit more of crop. I haven’t quite figured them out yet.. they don’t perform well until the 2nd year and then you are supposed to replace them every 3-4 years with new plants… seems like a lot of work! We’ll see how it goes this year.

Well I’m off to cook some dinner – something with hamburger haven’t totally decided yet. Either taco casserole or stroganoff or tator tot casserole or…

Take care!
C-

First off, Happy 32nd Birthday to my handsome hubby today! Love ya! It sounds like he wants to go out of town to his favorite Chinese Buffet tonight, so that is the plan. Right now he is out fixing the brakes on my car – they have issues… It’s so nice to have a husband who knows how to fix that kind of thing!

I was thinking in the shower this morning of some things I am looking forward to…

1.) Since I was in the shower the first thing that came to mind was getting my hair cut. I had it cut short last fall (well, not super short, but short for me – above the shoulder) and I really like it that way. I kept it up until I got pregnant. Now it is driving me in sane – it is that length where it is too short to put up, but too long to do anything with. It has been driving me crazy for about a month, but every time I tried to make an appointment they were either closed, off to lunch etc. I finally made an appointment the other day, but of course I couldn’t get in for almost a month. Oh well… something to look forward to towards the end of the month! This time I will be making an appointment for 8 weeks out while I am there!

2. Morning Sickness to go away! I am 14 weeks pregnant now – it is time for that to end. It is getting much better, but even this past week I had several long periods of time where I just felt sick. That could end anytime now and I would be grateful.

3. Shorts weather to arrive. Ryan and Christian are in the habit of putting holes in a pair of pants about once a week these days. (it’s driving me crazy!) They are running out of pants! The rule at school is no holes at all (not even tiny ones) so shorts weather needs to show up soon or they are going to be out of pants to wear! I really don’t want to buy new pants for a few weeks that they will outgrow before fall. I am guessing just about 3-4 more weeks, so we’ll see if we can hang on that long!

4. We’re escaping! Next week the boys don’t have school Wed – Fri. Well, I take that back they weren’t SUPPOSED to have school Wed. but now it is a half day to make up a snow day, but I’m letting them skip it. Anyway, it is so hard as a pastor’s family to get away – we can’t just leave on the weekend, and we couldn’t leave for Easter break because let’s see… Matt had services Thur. Fri. and Sun of that break which was Thur – Mon. (not exactly easy to get away). So, I am a member of a travel deals newsletter and the best deal landed in my e-mail box – I just had to take advantage of it. We are going here: Chula Vista Resort Everyone is really excited. It is a huge indoor waterpark, we are staying in a big family suite, and we got the all-inclusive package that includes all our food and drinks! The boys can hardly contain their excitement, and I have to admit I am pretty excited too. Now, let’s just hope the maternity swimsuits I ordered arrive in time and actually fit…

5. Gardening – It is getting to be almost that time! I guess we better plot out the garden and decide what we want to plant this year. I know we are planning on more strawberries and raspberries and Matt has his peppers in a homemade greenhouse downstairs growing already – they seem to be happy. Hopefully they remain happy when they are transplanted. I’m just hoping I will still be able to bend over enough to plant everything else when the time comes. LOL

So there are some things I am looking forward to!

It’s been a long time… sorry! I have posted a bit over the last couple months at www.dinewithoutwhine.com/blog if you want to go read small little updates.

I am sure most of you have heard that we are expecting baby #4! So the last couple months I have been sleeping, feeling nauseous, and sleeping more. We are now 13 1/2 weeks pregnant and FINALLY I am SLOWLY starting to feel a bit better. I still take my 2-3 hour naps a day, but during my awake hours I am almost able to function again. Baby is due Oct. 13th. And yes… I am hoping for a girl, but my intuition is telling me it is another boy – which will be just great too! We of course are just praying for a healthy baby. We pretty much all call it “him” right now, so we’ll have to change our wording if we find out it is a girl. We had an ultrasound the other day, and they couldn’t tell the sex yet, but he/she was moving around and was cute as can be – all looks well.

Things are going well – spring is slowly making her appearance. I actually went and ran a couple errands on Sunday and didn’t even have to wear a coat! Of course we also are starting to have our fair share of spring storms. I broke down and ordered an emergency weather alert radio the other day. I probably should have bought one right when we moved here, but we are pretty on top of the weather (well I am..) and we do have ones we can turn on if a bad storm is coming. The one I just ordered actually sounds an alarm when a bad storm is coming to wake you up in the middle of the night – such as if a tornado is on the way. I read a story in a magazine the other day, while I was waiting for Matt in surgery, about a family who was having really bad storms and then they finally ended and they went to bed, then about an hour later they were sleeping and a tornado completely destroyed their house. Thankfully everyone survived including their two small children, but the children were hundreds of yards away mixed in with the rubble. After crying my way through that story, I decided I needed an emergency radio. (Matt thinks I’m crazy)

Matt had surgery last week (wow, that feels like so long ago!) on his sinuses. He has had sinus problems for years and finally decided to get it taken care of. So they went in there and reconstructed things last Tuesday. He goes in tomorrow to get some plastic piece removed that is stitched in there along with all of the packing. (Yuck, sounds just terrible to me!) Hopefully once all is said and done he will have a much happier nose. The upside of the whole thing was that we left the kids with my friend down the road and we got to go out to dinner and stay overnight at a nice hotel the night before the surgery – it was a nice quick mini-getwaway – although we were both kind of nervous about the surgery and we had to get up at 5:30 a.m. to get to the hospital on time. It was still time away without the boys which was a nice break.

Well Dane seems to think he is hungry so I have to run, but there is a brief update. I will try to be a bit better about updating now that I’m starting to feel a bit better!

C-