Loving Life

In approximately 44 hours, I will hopefully know the gender of this baby!  I'm so very excited about this.  I just hope baby cooperates with us and let's us know!  If baby does not cooperate, you can be assured that I will be one very disappointed mama.  I will post an update sometime on Wednesday afternoon!  Right now I'm thinking it's a boy.  But by me thinking it's a boy, that's pretty much a guarantee for it being a girl. I am 0-3 in my gender guessing.  Aaron, on the other hand is 3 - 0 when it comes to knowing the gender of his children.  He is saying it's a girl.  We'll see if he continues his winning streak. On other not so exciting news, I got a phone call today from David's orthodontist saying that the impressions they took to get his false tooth were somehow destroyed in the mail, so we'll need to go in again on Wednesday afternoon and retake the impressions and start over again.  : (  Hopefully it won't delay...

Last Friday, Aaron and I had a very fun date night.  We have always wanted to go to Aldi's (our discount grocery store) with $20 and buy things to make gourmet meal together on a date night.  So we happened to go shopping the day before our date and decided that it was time.  Here's a rundown of what we got. A hunk of brie with some really amazingly good strawberries.  They almost tasted like summer strawberries.  We snacked on those while we cooked.  They made an awesome combination when eaten together. Here is master chef Aaron busy making our salad. A bag of spinach, some mushrooms, sliced strawberries, and our salad is born!  I had it with a red wine vinegarette that we had in the fridge. We marinated shrimp in three different sauces and made shrimp kebobs to grill.  Here they are pre-grilled. If you know me, you know that I am a sucker for cute food.  I have always wanted to have a cornish hen because they are so incredibly c...

I turned 33 yesterday.  I enjoy my birthday celebrations each year.  I don't need lots of parties or hype - mainly just a time to be with the people I love the most.  Aaron took me out on a date on Saturday night to celebrate my birthday.  We decided to dress up nicely for once.  Aaron even wore a tie for the first time in a very long time.  Here we are as we dropped the kids off at their friends house to spend the night there. We didn't have a super exciting date by many people's standards, but it was by mine!  We ate out - that right there is all I need to be happy.  Eating out is such a treat for me, we rarely do it.  We also went to my new favorite frozen yogurt place.  Aaron didn't swoon with love over it, the silly boy.  I still was enamored with it.  And since we were already in town and the night was still young, we did the romantic thing and stopped to pick up a few things at Walmart that we were out of (milk, bre...

I keep meaning to blog more than I do, but apparently I am only capable of 2-3 times a week, so perhaps I should readjust my expections of myself and be happy with my 2-3 times per week.  : )  Can you live with that?  More than that will be bonus gravy!  So while I had plenty of good picture opportunities, I only got one picture.  This is it. It was taken Thursday night at our family tea party.  Aaron had a busy first three nights of the week and wasn't home much, so we had family night on Thursday.  It started with supper, followed by a family tea party (complete with cute little pastries I made), and ended with a movie together.  Fun was had by all.  Movies are way more fun with the kids since they laugh hysterically at most things that are remotely amusing. Friday night was date night for Aaron and me!  The kids were overnight at friends.  We decided on a home date.  We took a walk together, had a nice dinner together (...

I found this written on the wall of the girls' bedroom last night.  While I don't encourage writing on the walls, I do appreciate the message.  Ana is the author of this note, but she hasn't shown it to me.  I suspecting it's because she knows she shouldn't have done it and doesn't want to risk getting in trouble.  I found it amusing and quite cute.  I think I won't say anything about it for now, unless I see more evidence of do-it-yourself wall decorations.  They like to tape little pictures they draw to the wall and it's kind of a cute way to decorate.  So we'll just keep this little note as part of the room's ambiance for now.  Last night while the Abby and I were sitting on the couch together, Abby asked me why I didn't have pretty glasses.  I asked her what would make my glasses prettier.  She answered, "sparkles" and that it would be prettier if they were pink and purple too.  I whole-heartedly agree with her....

So my weekend was awesome.  I started it being unusually social (for me).  I spent nearly 7 hours in the coffee shop with several different people at various points throughout the day.  My cheeks hurt from smiling so much.  I also had an evening out with some long-time friends at their house.  Definitely got my socialness in for the week all on Friday.  On Saturday, I woke and had a quick workout in the morning and then got the kids ready to go to Grandma's house for the day.  Aaron and I were going on a date for most of the day!  We didn't have huge plans for the day.  We mainly drove around Iowa and made a couple of stops here and there.  I did convince Aaron to stop at a coffee shop/soda fountain (yeah, I'm addicted to coffee shops) like place in Oskaloosa that looked promising.  Aaron was skeptical that it might be too girly for him with what he terms "girl-food".  But, there was enough "man-food" there to satisfy him and...

Last month while Aaron and I were in Texas church gathering, we had a little exercise of writing down "perfect days" that you've ever had in your life.  I've had quite a few perfect, or nearly perfect days that have been so wonderful and enjoyable.  And, I just had another one yesterday to add to my list! It started off with a great morning of church.  I sure do enjoy the people there.  Great people, great church, great pastor (hee hee!).  It was a lovely morning. The fun continued for lunch when we had over our church leadership team for taco salad & ice cream!  The food was yummy, and the conversations were even more fun than the food.  I loved it.   Once the meeting part was over, the day got better when Aaron voluntarily did the piles of dishes sitting around.  Could the day get any better?  Yes!  Our friends, the Groffs, volunteered to babysit for our kids while Aaron and I went on an impromptu date!...

Today has been good.  Aaron and I had a coffee house mini-date in the middle of the morning while kids were at Friday classes.  I've been working on the kids' Halloween costumes and I am now done.  They turned out pretty cute.  I'll post pictures of them once they get them all on tomorrow.  Here is my pile of peppers I picked yesterday before the frost.  My plants are now mostly dead, so I just need to get out there sometime and clean off the garden and prepare it for winter.  Yea!  I was feeling the need to organize my hat/mitten/scarf mess yesterday too.  Normally, it's in two baskets on the floor in the closet.  Ideally mittens go in one, hats and scarves in the other.  It very quickly turns into an unorganized mess as everyone rummages through looking for their own apparel.  I saw this idea in a magazine awhile back and thought it would be a perfect solution to my problem.  Before picture: And AFTER!  How...

I found a new favorite place to go - the new Kalona Coffee shop! Aaron and I dropped the kids off at Friday classes this morning and then went there for a mini-date in the middle of the day. It opened up a few weeks ago. I think I will try to get there as much as possible. It's almost exactly like a coffee shop I want to own when I get big (or when my kids get big). The only thing missing was cheesecake and a few more pastries. AND, it is another source of Monster Mash ice cream if I wear out my welcome at the downtown ice cream shop here. I giggled with glee when I saw they served it there. Aaron and I think we may do more mid-day date visits there while Friday classes are in session. A wonderful way to start the day. We didn't have too much time to loiter there today though. Aaron had a chiropractor appointment and I took that time to walk the 3.8 miles from the chiro to Friday class location to get a few more miles in since I didn't run/walk much earlier this ...

Our date night was quite lovely! We got a little bit of a late start since this is cross country season and practice ending times always vary. But by 7:00, we were nearly to town and would soon be eating at our new favorite restaurant. We decided to try new things on the menu and I was a little saddened by our choices as they didn't turn out quite as fabulous as I had hoped. But the company I had there was very delightful and we enjoyed ourselves immensely. We decided since we hadn't nearly stuffed ourselves completely full, that we had just enough room for ice cream - there's always room for ice cream in my book. So we squeezed some in along our way home. Since it was getting late, we decided not to visit the bookstore, but to go home and watch our movie that we had waiting for us from Netflix. We ended up staying until midnight so instead of an early morning run like I had planned, we treated ourselves to the luxury of sleeping in until 9:00 (an unheard of hour!)....

Tonight is Date Night with Aaron! I'm excited. We share a babysitting co-op type thing with two other couples where we take turns taking each others kids for an overnight giving the parents a chance for a date night. We're on a three month rotation where each couple gets a date night and a babysitting night during those three months. It works out well and the kids enjoy getting to spend time at each other's houses for an overnight. And best of all, it helps us busy parents to take time and be together as grown-ups. Our last date night was our fishing date to get us out of our dating rut. I think tonight will probably be a more traditional date - mainly because we have a new favorite restaurant we really want to go to without our kids! It's a Chinese/Thai restaurant - very delicious! After we stuff ourselves with amazing Thai food, we'll probably head over to the bookstore and try not to lose ourselves within the world of books too much. Then we'll mea...

About a month ago, it was date night for Aaron and me. We were tired of doing the same old thing of eating out and then maybe watching a movie if we didn't feel too tired. So we decided to break our rut and do something completely different - go fishing! Aaron's parents have a pond that is stocked with bluegill and catfish and a few bass. So we made some foil packets full of vegetables and hoped to catch some fish to add to that later. Here's my nicely sized packet. And here's Aarons very large pile for his packet - about double the size of mine. So we got to his folks and almost immediately it began to downpour. But it looked like it would pass over quickly, so we sat on the back screened in porch eating chocolate and practicing our fishing technique. After a small delay, the rain stopped and off we went to fish. We caught four fish, however our line was pretty old and brittle and three of them snapped our line. I maganaged to haul in a catfish which we were going t...