Burning Ones

YAY! We officially are Comcast cable internet users as of last week. It’s been nice being able to check the email. Pictures should be up now but they’re not because I haven’t gotten around to it. Hopefully next post.

Side note: my uterus is the size of a soccer ball! That’s INSANE!

I had no idea moving would be this insane! Almost all of stuff is moved in and so far the only thing that is really left undone is the living room (pictures will be coming soon!)

We sadly do not have the internet so right now I’m doing laundry at my parent’s and trying to do a few updates while I’m here.

In the past week we’ve slept at three different houses and have had a dog to watch. We took him home on Monday and although its more lonely without him and I did enjoy having him around, I can get more unpacking done.

I cannot tell you how wonderful God has been through all of this. Everything seems to be working out perfectly. Yesterday we were given an over-sized leather Lazyboy recliner (looked brand new) that fits perfectly into our living room and there’s a rumor that we might be given a really, really nice sound system with a DVD and VCR player. All of our furniture seems to be fitting “just right” with inches to spare and any fear that I had about living in Norristown in completely gone. I could not love living in our apartment any more.

So hopefully by the end of the week we’ll be all situated. Yesterday was our anniversary (two years!) and it was nice to spend in the new apartment. We’ve been taking pictures along the way but sadly our camera battery charger is still in the muck somewhere :-).

Just wanted to let everyone know why we’ve been relatively silent over the past week. We were in Kansas City (as Jessie let you all know about) until this Wednesday. Yesterday, Jess spent the entire day virtually packing up our entire room sans the big furniture and after I got home we packed almost all of it into our minivan. Then we trucked over to the Ambroses because we had committed to watching their dog, CJ, for the weekend. We’re taking it easy this morning which is why I’m writing this and for the rest of the weekend we’re going for a push into the new apartment.

So, please forgive us if we haven’t found time to do much posting. ;)

We’ll get back soon.

Tomorrow afternoon Tim and I will be on planes to Kansas City, MO to visit Alex and Jaclyn, see some other peeps, and visit the prayer room. We have a prophecy appointment set up for Thursday night which I am über excited about.

We did have our ultra sound this morning but I will post about it Lord-willingly on Friday because we wanted to tell Alex & Jac in person. It should be a very nice vacation. Yay!

Saturday was such a busy day: in the morning we dumped over 500 lbs. of garbage at a construction dump near us. Some of it flew off the truck on the way there but we drove back and picked it it up; no worries :-).
Mainly its just trash that we’ve accumulated over the past two years and a lot of Tim’s stuff from his previous house that we never went through.

After that we headed over to our apartment. We had originally planned to only clean but we were convinced that we should paint so we used some old paint from my parent’s and pastor, and bought some. We could not be happier with the outcome. I LOVE it. Here are some before and after shots (feel free to click to enlarge):

Bedroom:

Bathroom (my mom cleaned the whole bathroom- go mom!):

Kitchen:

Living Room (the cove):

So I wanted to do an official THANK YOU!! to every one who helped: my family who without we really couldn’t have painted; Robb and the kids (Johnny, Matt, Chris & Kathleen) who did a lot of the cleaning; Daddy Don- I have never seen a more persistent painter in my life. He was amazing. And of course God. We had no idea what we were doing and even though we decided to paint last minute everything worked out perfectly.

Here are some more work photos:

Everything is happening at once! Yay! This is a HUGE answer to prayer. We’ve been praying about God moving us into Norristown since before we were married and its finally happening! We’ll be cleaning out the place on Saturday, and then moving in the last weekend in May (Lord-willingly).

Here are the cool floor plans that I drew:

From L to R: first floor, second floor (you can click on them for a larger view). It’s a 3 bedroom, 1 full bath (which is on the first floor) with two bedrooms upstairs and one of them downstairs. At this point our bedroom will be on the first floor because I don’t want to walk down stairs to get to the bathroom 3X/night in my third trimester :-).

Here are some other pictures that we took when the previous family was still living there:

From top to bottom: This is one of the bedrooms upstairs that they made into a nursery. We’ll probably do the same thing when the baby’s a little bit older.

The next picture is the right side of the kitchen.

The last picture is of an area in the living room. I’m liking the cove :-).

So I swore these things were dead. They looked dead. I know that people say that vines in particular look dead in the winter but I thought I had killed them. I bought them in April ‘07, and then didn’t plant them until October ‘07, leaving them in their pots for their roots to do spirals at the bottom (apparently a huge no-no). The only place to plant them was outside of our room where the soil is extremely rocky (Japanese rock garden, go figure). But they look amazing! I took this picture (on the right) and I’m very proud of it because I think it looks professional :-).

Fortunately since I thought they were dying in October when their leaves started wilting (they looked awful) I pruned the heck out of them in order to revive them. It totally paid off there are double the amount of leaves this year than last year. Its still going to be a couple of more years before they can even think about growing fruit but exciting nevertheless. The whole thing is constantly reminding me of the vine-parables that Jesus talks a lot about in John. It feels like a loose-loose situation: either your pruned because God’s growing you, or you’re thrown out and burned. It seems like its so much more beautiful to be pruned though… in time.

So it’s a bit late, we know. With all the craziness and site changes its been one of those “we should really get around to doing that.” So even though anyone who would ever read this already knows, we wanted to announce it more for the site :-).

• When I’m due: October 6, 2008
• When we found out: February 5, 2008; 5:30 AM
• Our first ultrasound: February 28, 2008; 8 weeks (pictured right- we saw the heartbeat! 176 bpm)
• When I first felt the baby: April 16, 2008 (15.5 weeks- yes I know its early, but its definitely the baby)
• The “big” ultrasound: May 20, 2008- 1 more week!!
• Today I’m: 19 weeks

We’re super excited! God made it extremely clear that this was only a surprise for us (maybe I’ll write more about it in another post). On the day that we found out Tim and I both strongly felt (independently) that God was telling us it was a boy. We have absolutely no practical idea why God would tell us something like that but I’m excited for anything God wants me to know about my child. So although we weren’t going to find out the sex originally I think now we are to see if we were hearing God right :-) After all, we are human.

This is a picture of us on the day we found out. We look totally out-of-it. I’m not sure if that was because it was so early in the morning, if we were still completely shocked, or whether we were just tired from all the excitement (I don’t really remember). I always thought that I would be jumping hysterically up and down and crying/laughing when I found out, but when I found out out I showed him the test, smiled, and we hugged. It was more like a joyful-calm.

So on Friday at 4AM we are leaving for Chicago- yay! Tim’s uncle’s family lives out there and their youngest daughter is in Bye Bye Birdie so we’re going to go see one of the performances. I LOVE going out there… one of the reasons being the 12 hour car trip (in all seriousness). I checked the weather and today tomorrow’s gonna be like a high of 12.. which.. is cold. We’ll be getting back sometime on Monday.

I’m all for this raise in the gas tax.  Anything that will make the cost of transportation via gas powered vehicles too hard to bear in this country is a good thing.  It will force our country to reassess how it faces life.  If we can’t even afford to all drive our SUVs and Minivans and cars alone, how could we remain so ruggedly individualistic.  The country needs this.

Well, maybe that’s extreme…  Oh well :)