Okay, let’s see if I can get this post done in 15 minutes or less. I have been meaning to update the last couple days, but just haven’t gotten around to it. It’s another busy school week! By the time we get home from school, do homework, grab a bite to eat, do football, snacks, get the kids in bed, I am ready for bed myself (or at least close to it).

Allright let’s see… Saturday was Ryan’s Birthday and the big football game. It was HOT – close to 90 at 10:00 a.m. The poor little boys were sweating like crazy with all their gear on. I could have filled a cup up with Ryan’s shirt sweat by the time he was done. They lost terribly – 35 to 0. I didn’t realize the games were such a huge deal. Most families had those big tent shade things up (which Matt of course had to go buy the next day – he’s been wanting one forawhile anyway, so it was his good excuse) and then there were cheerleaders, and the big banner they run through when they run onto the field. And the parents – they really get into it! We have this Saturday off and then start up again with 5 Saturdays in a row starting next week.

Right after football we rushed off to the Pirate Carnival. It definitely wasn’t worth rushing off to, but the kids did laugh through quite a bit of it. It was not crowded at all and it was basically people who are starting to practice to get into the circus but aren’t even close to being ready yet. There weren’t any pirates except those taking tickets and then the performers said the pirates had captured them and made them perform (DUMB). The worst part was we sat in the third row on the left and somehow we ended up almost totally below the rope act. We had to look straight up and the guy’s sweat was dripping onto the floor literally a foot from my leg – YUCK! Then at one point the spotter came and told me Dane had to move because the lady often fell during this part and she would land on him! EEEK! I don’t think I have ever grabbed him so fast in my life. I was pretty tempted to get up and move myself as he stood right next to me spotting. Thankfully she didn’t fall. It was only 55 minutes thankfully (of pure torture). LOL Matt had refused to go, and I was kind of grumpy about that, but when I got home I had to inform him he had made the right decision. The trip to DQ afterrwards was nice though. I told them they could order whatever they wanted, and Christian ordered a Banana Split and ate almost the entire thing! Ryan had a cookie dough Blizzard (extra cookie dough) Dane a bowl of chocolate ice-cream and me a Snickers Blizzard – yum! Then we came home and had presents and then that night Matt took Ryan and Christian to sign-up for Cub Scouts – they had some big thing in the park. I told him he was on his own for that he had to take them to all the meetings and such – I do enough running around with them and my rule is one activity at a time but he wanted them to sign-up.

Sunday Christian went to a birthday party in the afternoon (the boy who claims he never gets to do anything – he has such middle child syndrome). Then in the evening we had Bible Study which we hadn’t had in awhile due to various summer obstacles.

Okay, my 15 minutes are up, I guess I’ll have to finish tonight.

Okay, we’re home. Monday we had our 33 week ultrasound. She’s still a “she”! It was actually to check for weight, and low and behold she is not a giant! YET… She was measuring 4 lb. 12 oz – the 43 percentile. So far so good! Of course that is just an estimate, but I’ll take it.

Wednesday Ryan, Christian and I went to the Dr. We are transferring Ryan and Christian to the Dr. I am seeing for the baby as she is a general practitioner as well, so they just had meet and greet appointments. She was really good with them. Then I had my OB appointment. Everything seemed fine, so we go back in another 2 weeks. As of today we have 6 1/2 weeks until our due date. With how busy we have been it will probably fly by.

Christian came home from school today extremely crabby – not sure what that was all about. I made him stay him with Matt for football as everything was making him cry. However after about an hour they both showed up to practice. Matt spent the day at the nursing home with a lady who ended up passing away this evening, so he will have a funeral to do in the next few days here.

Well, I guess I better tuck the boys into bed and then I am looking forward to watching the double elimination show of Big Brother tonight.

Take Care!
C-

I just found a really fun site! It is called Paper Back Swap (but they do hardbacks and audio books too). If you look on the right and scroll down you will see a blue banner there that you can click to learn all about it yourself. Esentially you list 10 books that you are willing to part with, and you get two free credits and then every time someone “purchases” one of your books you receive another credit to “buy” a book. You have to ship your books out that are “for sale” obviously, and then when you buy books the person “selling” them ships them to you for free.

Have fun!

I just got done uploading the new pictures in the family album – http://www.pastorsfamily.com/may-aug2008/ Included are pics of the first day of school.

It has been a very busy week. It is strange to have it so quiet with the boys gone, but I also feel like I have been running around like crazy. They all seem to be loving school so far. Dane just goes two mornings a week, so I still have his company. Good thing we’re having another baby so I won’t be lonely for a few more years. : ) Between homework and football and the new school routine, we have been busy and now that it is Friday, I am tired!

Ryan’s big birthday – number 8 is tomorrow! He of course is very excited. I take treats to school this afternoon. He choose Waffle Sundae Ice Cream Cones for me to bring – YUM! (and super easy! – didn’t even have to bake!) Although, I will make him a cake tonight for tomorrow. Tomorrow we have to be at football at 8:00 a.m. for the hour drive to the game and then they have an hour warm-up and the game starts at 10:00 a.m. Then we have tickets to a Pirates Show of some sort at 1:00 – some sort of acrobatic something – not exactly sure – someone from church gave us tickets. Matt is refusing to go. Hopefully we can make it back in time to attend – it will be close! Then we’ll have cake and presents in the afternoon.

Along with Ryan’s birthday came the carseat switch around. Ryan is now old enough to not use a booster and Dane graduated into his booster. We were figuring out the other night that by the time the new baby is done with car seats we will have had car seats in our car for over 16 years! Crazy!

The stress of the week was that all three boys are supposed to wear tennis shoes to school. I bought Ryan and Christian each two pairs as theirs were kind of looking raggedy. However, Dane’s looked great so I didn’t worry about it. Well…. Wednesday night as we were laying out his clothes for morning, guess what? Yup, we couldn’t find one shoe! We tore the house apart for almost 2 hours and gave up and sent him in his sandals. We still haven’t found it, so I guess this weekend we will have to go buy him some new shoes as well. It’s driving me crazy that we can’t find it!

The changing table / dresser replacement is supposed to arrive this afternoon. Hopefully this one arrives in good condition. I’m ready to get that baby room done!

Well, I’m ready for some lunch and neither Dane or I have gotten dressed yet – we’ve had a lazy morning.

C-

One more sleep until school starts! Of course they only go until 11:00 a.m. tomorrow, but it is the official first day of school. Dane starts Thurs.

Tonight is busy – we leave in a few minutes to go to football, then we have to leave early to go to the school open house – Christian is 7:00 – 7:30 and Ryan is 7:30 – 8:00. Matt has council at 8:00 as well. We ate dinner at 4:30 as I just didn’t see when else we would eat. As soo as we get home from school we’ll have snacks, baths and bed.

I read “Drowning Ruth” the last couple days. It was a nice quick easy read – I enjoyed it. After sufferng through “A Million Little Pieces” all summer long, it was refreshing to have an easy quick read. Have you ever read either one?

Ryan ended up only having one other little boy at his sleepover, but he still had a great time. Turns out that I guess going into third grade is a bit early to have a sleepover as the three others that were invited were too scared to sleep over.

All three boys went through the little bug – started with Dane, went to Christian and then Ryan. (3 days apart each) It was esentially a sore throat and fever for a day. Dane threw-up, but I think it was probably because I gave him Motrin on an empty stomache as he was fine after that and the other two boys didn’t throw-up. I was wondering if it was a really light version of hand, foot, mouth disease as both Ryan and Christian complained about a few little blisters on their hands and feet. I thought that lasted longer than 24 hours though, so who knows.

Well, I need to get water bottes etc. ready and jump into the car.

C-

I added a new feature to the blog tonight called Twitter. Essentially it is an application where I can write little one liners throughout the day to keep you up on what I am doing. I can also follow friends who ae Twitter members to see what they are doing in my Twitter account. It’s a free service if you want to join and Tweet along! I have had a few friends ask me to join throughot the past year and I never bit the bullet, but finaly decided I would give it a whirl – so we’ll see how it goes. So since I know you are all dying to see what I do all day every day, enjoy the little updates on the top right of the blog.

Four more days until school starts! We got them all registered on Tuesday. Dane wasn’t sure he wanted to leave his class he was having so much fun!

My birthday was great – I enjoyed my pregnancy massage and pedicure. Dinner with friends was great as well.

The day after my birthday Dane came down with the flu. I was just glad he waited until after my fun day. It was just a 24 hour thing. Then Wednesday night Christian came down with it. So far no one else has got it. With any luck Ryan won’t get it tonight because…

Ryan is having his first sleepover tonight to celebrate his birthday. He invited four friends but only two can come. They aren’t starting until after football – so around 8:00. They plan to have a campfire with hot dogs and Smores. Then they plan to play video games until I make them go to bed at midnight. He of course is very excited.

Football is keeping us busy every evening. They have been going until almost 8:00 p.m. every night when it starts to get dark, so about 2 1/2 hours of practice a night! That will go down to 3 nights a week after school starts, but I think the first week of school they are practicing every night since some schools haven’t started and they have their first game the following weekend. That is going to be a LONG week – next week! I am sure Ryan will be exhausted by the weekend.

Wednesday Dane had his school check-up and I had my pregnancy check-up – still measuring big! I was measuring 36 weeks and I’m only 31 weeks… So on the 25th I go in for an ultrasound to see how big she is really getting! Her kicks definitely feel big! I also had sugar in my urine again, so I have to prick my finger and test my blood glucose levels once every day 2 hours after a meal until my next appointment – fun fun! So far they have been fine and after reading this article http://www.drspock.com/faq/0,1511,9606,00.html I’m not too concerned. This doctor just seems to be on the extra cautious side, which is probably good, but I’m not really used to that after using a midwife for the last 3. Other than that, everything seems to be going well.

I’m off to clean up a bit for the party before we leave for football.
C-

All right… I have had a lot of requests for a belly shot lately. I’ve been asking Matt for awhile, but he never seems to get around to it, so I just stood in the mirror and took my own picture. LOL Obviously not the best picture, but at least you can get the idea. Perhaps I can convince him later to take some better pics. So here I am at 29 weeks. I’m about 30 1/2 now so this was about a week and a half ago.

I’ve also had questions on what differences I’ve noticed in this pregnancy since it is the first girl. Here are my thoughts:
- Morning sickess had about the same intensity as with Dane (who was the worst as far as that goes), but lasted a bit longer than with the boys.
- My belly is lower (that could just be gravity and it being the 4th baby) and it seems most weight has gone to the tummy instead of all over my body – which is nice.
- I’ve gained less weight then wih the boys
- I’m not sure I have really craved anything this pregnancy, however I have really been enjoying a lot of fried zucchini… (maybe that is a craving…)
- All in all I don’t think there are too many differences that I have noticed.

So what have we been doing around here? Well, football practice has started. That runs every week night from 5:30 – 7:30. Ryan seems to be really enjoying it. They handed out a sheet of the line-up the other night that we are supposed to teach them, so I’m glad Matt came along that night, as I am completely clueless on what all that means. He and the coach chatted about it and hopefully he has some clue at this point. I don’t think I have ever seen him so sweaty before – they are definitely working them hard. Tonight was the first night with pads on. I actually didn’t go to practice the last two nights as he went to his friend’s house yesterday afternoon and he is in football too, so she took him last night, he stayed overnight at his house and then stayed all day today, she took him to practice again today and then brought him home. I’m sure he is exhausted now after only sleeping about 5 hours, swimming all morning and then football practice. Maybe he’ll actually sleep in a tad in the morning.

Dane had to go have his lead screening at the health clinic today for school. You can either take him to the public health clinic and they do a finger prick, or take him to the Dr. and they do an actual blood draw. I talked to my Dr. who is soon Dane’s Dr. about it and she said either way – it was up to us – so I went for the finger prick. I made Matt take him, and he said he did really good – he sat on his lap and watched and didn’t cry a bit. They gave him stickers and a certificate for a free ice-cream cone at McDonalds so he was a happy boy. Then he and daddy went and did a couple errands together and came home.

Yesterday we went to the new pastor’s house in Woodworth – 3 miles down the road where the kids go to school. His wife is also named Christine, and invited our moms Bible Study group over for ice-cream. It was fun to chat with everyone, but there were I think I counted 15 kids there so by the end I was ready to leave – I think I was on stimulation overload. Then last night we went to pick up our veggies at the farm and do our grocery shopping. Oh and I had a meeting at church in the evening.

Today was fairly relaxed. I slept in, did some laundry, worked out in the garden etc. Then Matt had a wedding rehearsal tonight for the wedding tomorrow afternoon. I wasn’t planning on going to the wedding because I was supposed to have the changing table / dresser delivered tomorrow between 2:30 – 4:30 and the wedding is at 3:00 so I figured I would have to stay home and wait for the delivery guy. Well, then they called later today (after setting up the appointment this morning) to inform us that they had damaged the item and it will be another 2 weeks to get a replacement. LOVELY. I guess at least I get to go to the wedding now! I won’t go to the reception since Ryan will have to be hauled off to football.

Saturday is my birthday and I have a fun day planned. A couple friends asked me if I wanted to go to the spa with them. They had their birthday’s the last couple weeks and were going to celebrate and didn’t realize it was my birthday too. So we are going to the spa – none of us have ever been! I am getting a 30 minute pregnancy massage and a 1 hour pedicure/foot massage. It sounds heavenly! Matt was a bit disappointed as I guess he was planning on getting me a spa gift certificate for my B-day so that was kind of spoiled when I told him my plans. Anyway, so after our treatments the hubby’s are going to meet up with us to go out to dinner. Should be fun!

Well, it is getting late, so I should be heading to bed. I’m sure I’ll have to watch my recorded episode of Big Brother before I go to slep.

C-