First Snow, Vegas, etc…

Vegas was fun, hectic, and weird as usual.  Terry and I met a ton of people at the convention, took a bunch of really interesting classes, and had some very fancy meals.  Tammy joined us there mid-week, and we went to see a comedy/broadway show called Spamalot on Friday evening, which was lots of fun, even if it stretched a bit far from the storyline of the movie it's based on... :)

Frighteningly, while we were gone, one of our power outlets nearly caught fire... 


That would explain the weird smell in the extra bedroom...  we thought maybe one of the cats had misbehaved...  what with all the boxes of stuff we put in that room during the recarpeting of the rest of the upstairs, we couldn't figure out what the smell was.  Apparently it was the smell of a melting outlet cover.

The carpeting was the last major change to the house before we begin work on the nursery.  Come spring we plan to move our office stuff into the spare bedroom, and begin work on making the office into the nursery.  The home improvements never seems to end around here.  Ah well.

In baby news, Tammy has officially felt the baby move!!!  Everything seems to be right on schedule, and we will be learning what we're having right after Christmas.

 That's about all I've got for now... watch for news of what we're having by New Years!

-Josh

Boycotting Christmas

My biggest complaints with the holidays is that people don't appreciate the current one, Thanksgiving is not even here and tons of people are getting ready for Christmas. I wonder if we are the only culture that does this, always jumping ahead. I told Josh that our Christmas tree or decorations will not be up until after Thanksgiving. The mums (even though half dead) will be proudly placed on our front porch till at least Nov. 25th. It's one thing to shop early but another thing to decorate early. The Thanksgiving Holiday should be called " the mistreated holiday".

So in honor of Thanksgiving -

I feel this year has been the best and saddest year of my life. I married my best friend in the world, He is a person that truly brings the best out of me. I am so excited to be having a baby and starting "our" family.

We lost a person very dear to us and as sad as it was in losing Josh's mom, I am so thankful that I was allowed to spend numerous days and nights with her. She was a person that was very special to me. I am also thankful for a great family both mine and the "in laws".

So…...

For Those of you that celebrate the upcoming holiday, Happy Thanksgiving, from our home to yours, and for those that do not, please enjoy the day off!

May your stuffing be tasty, may your turkey be plump, may your potatoes and gravy have nary a lump, may your yams be delicious, may your pies take the prize, may your Thanksgiving dinner stay off of your thighs!

Gobble till you wobble….and above all, give thanks

Thump, thump, thump

WE HEARD THE HEARTBEAT TODAY!!  Our appointment wasnt till Wednesday but I got a little anxious and called the doctor to see if he could move my appointment till today.   I cannot explain the feeling when we heard it on the monitor.... a little surreal knowing a little person is growing inside of you.   Josh was smiling from ear to ear.  I think Daddy-to-be is just a little excited.  The countdown is on, six more months to go!!

The apple of our eyes

So, Tammy has one major pregnancy food craving... apples.  So much so that she apparently consumed five or six of those bags of pre-sliced apples in a week, not counting her McDonalds visits for apple slices sans caramel dip...  Oddly she hasn't craved apple juice... just apples.  One of our friends asked us the today whether we had a nickname for the baby yet, theirs having acquired the nickname of "2.0" early on... and I'm thinking we might have to go with "the Apple."

     We had a normal doctor appointment the other week, and tried to see if we could hear the heartbeat early (30% chance at 9 weeks according to the doctor) but no luck.  Guess the baby was hiding under Tammy's veins?  Anyway, we will hopefully get to hear it at our next appointment, the day before Thanksgiving.  (I'm secretly hoping we get to be doubly thankful... don't tell Tammy I said that).

     In other news, we are getting new carpet, and we'll be doing the nursery in wood laminate for cleaning and allergen reasons... (okay, and cost savings).

     Also, I'd like to mention that while they do turn the trees nice colors in the fall, I really hate the leaves.  I filled 14 bags of leaves today from our small suburban yard.  In two more weeks, I'm probably going to fill another 14 bags with what's still on the trees right now.  Darned leaf dropping deciduous trees.  Maybe I should plant an apple tree though, eh?

 -Josh

Lost a good friend…

On a down note, our friend John Adelsberger (III) passed away this past week.  He decided to hike the Ozark Mountain Trail through part of Arkansas, and apparently met some misfortune there which has yet to be fully revealed.  John was a friend of mine since I got out of college, part of the group of us that got together to play various rpgs and other games on random weekend evenings.  In the past couple of years several of us had begun hiking and camping again, and we went on several short hikes with him among other friends.  With all of my time consumed with sweeping Tammy off her feet, I didn't join in the full scale multi-day backpacking level of hiking which some of the group took up over the past year, but I did still go meet them and hike along for some conditioning day hikes they did at Castlewood.  There were some other places we went too, like the day hike at Shaw Nature Reserve (very nice place... see picture).





There was also the horrible "Day of the Ticks" at Howell Island (sort of a brush mowed path on an island better for deer hunting than hiking).  I think I counted 35 ticks on me alone in only 3 or 4 hours of total walking around this island.  Through a method we developed of stopping every 5 minutes to spend 2 minutes pulling off ticks, we managed to make it through with, I think, me getting only one actual tick bite, and John might have had one or two, and I'm not sure if any bit into Peter...

Anyway, we had many adventures, both fictional and real, and the discussions we had ranged across such topics as computers, politics, games, work, and women... to only name a few.  He had tons of great jokes, and many witty moments.  As I have already written elsewhere, his wit, and tremendous presence will be greatly missed at our table.

-Josh

Bun in the oven!!

Well it's official, we are expecting.  I am right at 8 weeks.   We had waited to tell anyone because we didn't want to ruin our Halloween costume suprise and we wanted to make sure that everything was ok with my stomach issues.

The doctor was very reassuring that I shouldn't have any problems carrying the baby with having the hernia.   They can't do any more test until I am in the second trimester and that will only be necessary if I am still in a lot of pain.   He did say that I would probaly have to have a c-section if the hernia worsened.   We are hoping that is not necessary.

Josh is excited to say the least, he has already started reading "The Expectant Father" and is almost completely done with it :-) .  Our due date is June 8th and I can say that I am looking forward to having the summer off and spending it will a little one.  The polls have already started on what we are going to have and according to the chinese calendar we have a 50% chance for a girl and 50% chance for a boy, real helpful I could have told them that!!   Our wish is that we have a very healthy, beautiful baby.  

Love to all!!
Tammy

Married life…

Fall is finally here!! It's so nice to be able to take long walks without coming back drenched in sweat.   We finally have my stomach & asthma problems under control.  It was rather simple, no caffeine, nothing fried, no caffeine, no salads,  no caffeine, nothing spicy, no caffeine, no chocolate,  no caffeine....that's it - can you tell I am a tad bit bitter about the caffeine :-) The doctor recommend we do this for 4 weeks and then see how my progress is at that time.

Well we have been married almost 7 months now and its been a rather easy adjustment for us.   We were so busy the first couple of months that it flew by and now that things have slowed down we are starting to settle into a rather nice routine.   It's funny you hear all the horror stories of the "first year" and I don't think we have had any of the "growing" pains, yes Josh was sad to have to get rid of his "favorite" chair that he has had since childhood into college but he has adjusted rather well with the promise that I will replace it with one that the springs still in the cushion and not hanging out the bottom.  

As you can see with the picture below, he was with the chair till the very last moment.  



Parting brings such sorrow....

Stomach on Hiatus

Tammy's doctor told us the other week that she may have gotten a hiatal hernia in the past couple of weeks, and it caused her a ton of pain over the past month.  It got bad enough to cause an asthma attack (which she never had till this) that made it so hard for her to breathe that I had to take her to the hospital, where they gave her some sort of breathing treatment, along with a lidocaine laced mylanta cocktail of some kind, and a couple of tests to rule out some other possible causes of the kind of pain she was experiencing (i.e. blood tests to eliminate gall bladder / pancreas / kidney issues).

They don't want to do anything major to address it without trying diet and posture changes (i.e. sleep with head of bed elevated a bit, don't lie down for 1 hour after eating, etc.) so we've been experimenting lately to find what she can or cannot eat.  Suffice to say, I need to buy stock in Tums too.  There are a lot of things that can upset a herniated stomach and cause reflux which you wouldn't expect.  Obviously she can't eat any spicy, fatty, or greasy foods.  Less obvious is that salad, and basically any veggies in raw form are not recommended.

On the bright side is the improvement that dietary changes have made for the time being.  Her pain is way down from a week ago and hopefully the Prilosec will help give her stomach/esophagus a chance to heal up now.  For now we play the waiting game (4 to 6 weeks to heal such damage) then see how things are after that.

The craigslisting continues

So Tammy bought an ottoman that she found at Target, and it came so close to matching the couch, but was just barely off, and besides, it crowded the coffee table, so that's going up for sale on Craigslist.  The old coffee table is going too, as we picked up a well priced glass topped one.  Add to that the ceiling fan that was too heavy for vaulted ceiling, and my old computer desk, replaced with a big bookshelf we bought from... craigslist...  and it's clear that we're rackin up the craigslist usage... :D

I think I'm going to find a broker and buy some stock in Craigslist.  I'm not sure where they make money, but they sure are getting a lot of usage from us.  Note that I'm not complaining here.  We like getting money back for stuff we don't use... :)

Day 2

So, I spent all that time setting this complex thing up, I suppose we'd better use it... :)

We're both covered in mosquito bites from our camping trip last weekend.  For some reason it seems the mosquitoes of Council Bluff Lake (MO) are ankle biters.  I have 15 bites on one ankle, 5 on the other, and only 2 or 3 more on the entire rest of my body.  So, I've learned this past weekend that ankles need bug spray too.  Tammy managed to get bitten at random places.  *shrug*

It's been a heavy laptop week for us, what with me pulling together a whole lot of financial info, and Tammy trying to catch up on her ebay listings.  I'm not really sure what she listed, but she's set some lofty goals for sales by October.  I love having a suger momma.  On a small ebay side note, there was some sort of large ebay user phishing scam on the 25th/26th.  There's some info about the 1200 users whose info got publicly posted on the ebaychatter web site.  Remember folks, never give personal info to any site you got to by clicking a link.

No word on the baby front yet, but the search for female names we both like continues.  Isabella somehow became a top 10 name this year according to the Social Security report, so that's definitely out now.  I'm not listing candidates here, as some of our friends are known name stealers (you know who you are).

We celebrated our 6 month wedding anniversary on Monday evening, where I got Tammy 6 roses, made her this blog site, and I cooked her dinner.  I racked up some brownie points on that set :)

Woohoo!

We finally have our own blog