Life Update

Things are going well around here. I am now 25 weeks & 3 days pregnant. Our little boy has been kicking up a storm, some days more than others. I love this stage of pregnancy - still pretty comfortable & get to feel him moving a lot. We've had an outpouring of stuff from friends and are beginning to feel more prepared for our little guy to arrive. Our bathroom is going to get mostly redone this weekend while we're away and it will be so nice to get all the bathroom stuff back into the bathroom so we can begin organizing the baby's room. We've decided to get rid of our queen bed in the baby's room. A queen bed and a crib don't fit too well in a 10x10 room, especially when we'd like to put some storage furniture in there as well for clothes and toys and the like. Our priorities are changing - from hosting guests as our first priority to making room for baby. I am feeling SO blessed right now!! Praise God for every day He's giving me in this pregnancy!

Today is a good day! There's lots of stuff going on that I can't talk about quite yet, but can soon. Dave's mom is having shoulder replacement surgery today. Please pray for her recovery! Her health is not the best to begin with. Thanks!

Blogging & Danish

Well, I'm obviously not good at daily blogging. I always feel like I have to have something profound to say in order to write anything. Yet, I have friends who don't follow that rule and I feel much more connected to them and know what's going on in their lives because of it. So, I just want to let you know I appreciate "daily bloggers" and I'm going to try to be closer to that.

So, my boss & coworkers got me & Dave a nice gift for Christmas and I've been wanting ever since to make them some of my mom's "World Famous Danish" (which I'd never made before) as a thank you. Well, I finally finished making them last night and will post some pictures when I have my USB cord handy. They're not nearly as pretty as Mom's are, but I have to say they taste pretty good.

One problem - a batch normally makes three danish, so I made three danish - and I thought I had enough for everyone at work. Yes, I've worked there for two years now and did pretty well in math class when I was younger. You'd think I could figure this out! Well, I got to work and as it turns out, there are actually four people to give danish to. I don't know where my brain has been. So, I gave the three to my three coworkers and will make another batch to give one to my boss (who is one of the best bosses ever, BTW). I SO wish I'd thought this through before. I'm looking at it this way though - my boss will get a BETTER one because I've had one time to practice. Yay!

Three Women

One mother's water breaks at 22 weeks (5.1 months). The doctors hold her labor off until 24 weeks, then a little girl is born and every effort is made to save her life.

One mother, 5 months pregnant, leaves an abortion clinic crying hysterically. They have just shot her baby in the heart with something that will kill it. She must return the next day to complete the process.

One woman longs to be a mother, but waits, and waits, and waits, but no baby, no pregnancy.

LORD help!!!

Strange Happening

Well, we woke up to something strange this morning. I had already turned my alarm off and was getting up around 6:30am when I heard what sounded like a vehicle out in front of our house. We were expecting a phone repairman and it was "trash day," so I didn't think much of it, but it was still dark and when I peeked out our bedroom window, there was a pickup truck IN our front yard! Luckily, it didn't hit our house. It just sat there for a few seconds. We think the driver must have been drunk because he/she backed up into a neighbor's car that was parked on the street, then drove away. This all happened VERY very slowly, which adds to our thoughts that the driver was not very coherent. Unfortunately, I didn't have the presence of mind to call the police and report it until almost an hour later. I was able to get the license number, so hopefully they'll be able to figure out who it was.

I have lots of pictures that represent what's been going on in our lives the past few months. I'll share just a few.

At the beginning of June, my mom's house was flooded. Here are some pictures of the aftermath. All the walls had to be torn out below 4 ft. Mud was everywhere. Mom had tons of helpers come. God has been providing in LOTS of cool ways!


The waters came in torrents and carried corn stalks into most of her back yard. Here you can see some of them. Her yard goes all the way back to the hedge that you can see. The stalks were about a foot deep.


Underneath the house, the waters knocked down all the insulation and left a muddy mess.


More corn stalks - and one of the many fans trying to get things dried out.

Here's a very small percentage of the stuff that needed to be torn out of the house and carried away as trash. She was lucky to keep her refrigerator, washer, and dryer - still working.

This is Eli. He's our "beagle." We also like to call him Snoopy because he LOVES to lay on the back of the couch.

Below is B. D. (aka Brown Dog), Eli's brother. They are our "kids" and they provide continuous entertainment. Join us as we journey through life with "the beagle and his brother."

Just barely over average...how about you?

Apparently the National Endowment for the Arts estimates that
the average adult has only read six of these books. I've never been much of a reader, maybe more lately than ever, but this list is motivating to me. Now I have a list of books to tackle and ponder reading.

Hereare the markup guidelines:
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Star the ones you love
4) Reprint this list in your blog

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen*
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre- Charlotte Bronte*
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible*
7 Wuthering Heights- Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women- Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles- Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. The Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows- Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis*
34 Emma - Jane Austen (in the middle of and loving it)*
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen*
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis*
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code -Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi- Yann martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert -
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the dog in the night-time- Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men- John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist- Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection
91 Heart Of Darkness- Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince- Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory- Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo