Sweet Girl!

This past weekend we celebrated the end of another great year of AWANA with our AWANA Grand Prix and awards night! One of the moms took this picture and I thought it was too cute not to share. This little girl is a ray of sunshine...always bringing a big smile into the room. She kept me company while I popped and popped and popped popcorn for the race!

On a side note...I normally don't post pics of kids from church on our blog, but her mommy is active in the blogging community and is a lot of fun to read. You can see her blog by clicking on Carolin on the sidebar.

A Little Clarification Please...

So I am realizing that as a new mom, I am going to have a lot of questions. So, I will be heavily relying on my faithful blog readers to help me figure this stuff out. The first question came up today as I was sorting through all of the clothes that we have already been blessed with. Here's the question:

Why are some clothes labeled 3-6 months, 6-9 months, 9-12 months, etc. while others just say 3 months or 6 months....and as I'm sorting the clothes should I put the 6 month clothes with the 3-6 month stuff or 6-9 month stuff? I know this probably doesn't matter to most, but my OCD tendencies create within me the need to have everything in perfect size order. So, help me, please!!! My mom gave me a great suggestion, but I just wondered what everyone else thought and if I'm the only one who wishes they would just use the same method to size everything!

Happy Quarter-of-a-Century!

This past Tuesday, Jared celebrated 25 years of existence! I always like Jared's birthday because it's the beginning of 5 months where I am only 1 year older than he is. Come, September I'll be 27 and back to being 2 years older than my hubby.

We started celebrating last Friday. We planned to go to our favorite restaurant Buca di Beppo, but when we got there the wait was an hour and we were pretty hungry. So, we went on over to Smokey Bones and enjoyed a quiet dinner before heading home. Monday, Jared, his dad and two other ministers here went to golf at a really nice course called Old Shiloh. I won this free foursome at a KAED golf scramble I worked last spring. So, it was free which made it a great "Present."

On Tuesday, Jared's actual birthday, he had a long day of classes. I was able to get off work a little early and take him to Cattleman's Steakhouse and Homemade Pie and Ice Cream for dessert before he had to be back at church for a meeting.

Wednesday night we all had church stuff and then last night we finally made it to Buca di Beppo for our favorite Penne Basillica and the free birthday cupcake which was almost as big as Jared's head. It was so good though!

We will finish up our week of celebrating with a quick visit to Knoxville to visit with Jared's family and see our month old nephew!

I'd say that's a pretty good birthday week! Love you babe!

7 Months Today!

We are officially 7 months along today. That means we are just about 12 weeks (or less!) away from meeting the boy that will turn our world upside down!

I was reading something the other day that was saying the mother really starts to bond with the baby when she can regularly feel the baby move. I couldn't agree more! I am learning he's very active (gets that from his daddy), a night owl (gets that from his mommy), and very stubborn (No clue where that came from!!!). Carter can be moving all over the place, but the second Jared puts his hand anywhere near my stomach, he refuses to move. Jared's caught him a couple of times, which is good, but I wish he could feel his son moving around more often!

So far the total weight gain count is 18 pounds. It's strange to me that all the books you read say in the beginning that you should only gain about 20 pounds, but then at 28 weeks it says average weight gain is 17-22 pounds. Either way, I am right on track--I think! We did our glucose test last Friday and everything came back normal, so that's a good sign. We've been seeing a different doctor in our practice who is much nicer and doesn't make me feel stupid when I ask questions, so that's definitely an improvement! I am getting used to sleeping on my side, which has made the back pain much less frequent. So, as I enter the third trimester, I am happy to report that things are going great--really can't complain about much!

Exercise is getting more difficult with the additional weight. I asked my doctor at what point I should slow down on the exercise and she said as long as I'm not in pain, to keep on doing it. She then mentioned I may have a contraction or two while exercising, but not to worry. To a new mom who's never delivered a baby...the word contraction always brings worry! So, in true fashion, today when I was about 1/2 mile into my walk with Asher, my left side started hurting with stabbing pain. Contraction??? Maybe, but it definitely wasn't pleasant. So, I will probably only be taking walks if Jared is along with me.

Speaking of Jared...he is only a week and a half away from the end of classes this semester. Then, he'll have finals and 2 summer classes. Then, he's done. Yippee!!!

I'm MAD!!! And now you have to hear about it!

So, I'm really angry right now and I'm in a place where I just want everyone to know how angry I actually am. So, sadly for you, you get to listen to my rant.

Recently, I purchased Windows 7 for my HP Presario laptop. This was an upgrade from Vista and has been mostly a GREAT choice! However, there is one little kink that I can't get worked out. The mouse pad is now SOOOOO sensitive that every time the palm of my hand gets anywhere near it, it "clicks." Now, depending on where the mouse is at that time, it either moves my cursor to a completely different place on the page, thus I begin typing in the middle of a totally different paragraph. OR, sometimes it hi-lights and deletes something completely. And then sometimes it just completely closes out a page. It can make typing a simple email a 10 minute ordeal. It's very annoying and it makes getting my work done very slow, difficult and frustrating.

So, I've have googled everything I know how to google and have had no luck fixing it. Several people are having the same problem, I've found, however, no one can seem to answer the question of how to fix it. I've seen the forums where someone posts a question and then someone else comes along and tries to answer it. NO ONE has been able to help with this that I can find. People say go to such and such setting and change this...But, when I try to do that I either don't have that setting at all or I don't have what they say to change.

So, anyway, as frustrating as all that is, that's just the background. That's not why I'm mad. Today, I'd had enough of this little problem. So, I found a customer service number for HP and called to find out what settings needed to be changed in order to fix this very annoying problem. After being on hold/on the phone for 1 hour and with 5 different people (that's how many times it took for them to route me to the correct department) the "customer service" guy informs me that if I want any technical support, that I would need to purchase a $100 warranty.

Excuse me??? I paid $1,000 for this computer and that doesn't give me the right to call you and ask you how to change a setting so that it will actually WORK right?!?!?! I actually repeated it back to the guy and he told me that I had understood him correctly.

Now, I am not one to yell at customer service people. Honestly, I know they are just doing what they are told and it's not their fault that I don't like their answer to something. But, today, I kinda lost it. I might have yelled at him, told him that that was the stupidest thing I'd ever heard and that not only did I not want to buy his "warranty" but I would never be buying anything from HP again. Then, I might have hung up. Might have...

It's kind of ironic that my quiet time yesterday was talking about not losing our temper over things we can't control...I guess I failed the first test :( And now, I'm just feeling bad for yelling at the poor customer service guy who's probably hating his job and just working to pay to feed his family of 10 kids. I am no closer to having my problem fixed and nothing has been made better by me being angry. So, thanks for listening...it's been therapeutic. Oh, and if you're shopping for a computer...just save yourself some trouble and buy a mac!

New Baby Bedding

Well, it turns out they have discontinued the bedding that we wanted. My wonderful sister has been looking to see if she could find it on Amazon or somewhere like that so that we can get exactly what we want. But last night when we went to register at Babies R Us, we found something similar that we really like. So, our new "theme" is Jungle Jingle.

I had seen this online and wasn't really crazy about it. But, when we saw it last night in the store we loved it. So, we went with it!

Registering is something that we have been dreading doing. Though we started out excited to register for our wedding 4 years ago, by the time we were done, we were frustrated and exhausted!!! So, we had kind of put off registering for the baby. So, last night, we bit the bullet and went to Babies R Us. It was actually kind of fun. I started the registry online a few weeks ago and went ahead and registered for the tedious things that I didn't really need to see, like baby gates and other safety items. So last night when we went, we got to pick out the fun stuff like crib sheets, strollers, bumbo chairs, etc. So it really wasn't that bad.

This weekend, my sister has graciously offered to help me finish our registry since I am completely clueless about bottles and a few other things. Much to my dismay, we will probably be registering at Target. After doing our bridal registry there, I swore I'd never register there again. They changed their return policy at least 3 times in the 5 months that we were registered with them. By the end of it all, you could only exchange something if you had a gift receipt (even if it was on your registry!) and you couldn't exchange it for store credit--you had to exchange it for an item right then in the same department as the item you were returning came from. SERIOUSLY?!?! But, things may have become easier now AND Target is just much easier (and cheaper) for our family and friends. So, I'll be registering for bottles and nursing items at Target, plus probably a few duplicate things from Babies R Us since it seems like Babies R Us is really out of the way for our families and friends in Tennessee.

Anyway, enough ranting about registering! We are greatful for any help we can get...whether it's on the registry or not! Like my sister says...if you're breast feeding, all you need when you have a baby is diapers. Everything else is negotiable!

Happy Easter!

Well, we had a different kind of Easter this year, but it wasn't so bad. One of the hardest parts of being on a church staff is that we can't always be with our family on the holidays. Easter has always been a favorite holiday of mine. I think it's mostly because it doesn't come with all of the stress that often accompanies other holidays. We used to always dye Easter eggs at my Granny's house the Saturday before and then on Easter we had a huge Easter lunch with all our aunts, uncles, and cousins and then we usually had an Easter egg hunt. My memories are of eating lunch at my Granny's but hunting eggs at my Aunt Linda's...so, I'm not sure which is right. But, the memories all include being with family.

This year, we had to be "grown ups" and do our own thing. Saturday morning we had our church Easter egg hunt which was a huge success despite the rain that came and went all morning.

Saturday night, we invited some friends over for Easter lunch and thankfully they accepted . We had some yummy honey baked ham from Jucy's, mashed potatoes, green beans, rolls, deviled eggs, fried okra and fruit pizza for dessert. The day was absolutely beautiful and we were able to have all the windows open with a nice breeze flowing through the house.

We ended our day with a drive down the Kentucky Scenic Pkwy between Frankfort and Lexington. We saw some gorgeous horse farms and had a lot of fun! We ended up eating dinner at Tony Carinos and then coming home and crashing. It was a pretty good day.

So, I guess I will survive being a grown up. But, I'll be honest...there was a little something missing from the day and I am pretty sure it was my family. But, when you have grown up in a loving family like mine, it's hard to replace that feeling!

I'll leave you with a pic of me in my Easter outfit. It was nothing fancy considering the growing baby bulge, but it worked for the day! (on a side note...we have a great camera, but for some reason we insist on taking pics with our phones. what is up with that???)