Picture - Yes I know it's a little late

This is a picture from St. Patrick's Day, March 17, 2010. I was officially 28 weeks pregnant on St. Patty's Day! :) I haven't really taken any pictures of myself before this because I wasn't really showing. I know this picture is about a week and a half late but I figure late is better than never! Try not to make too many jokes about the fat pregnant lady! :)

Where in the world did March go?

I don't know where in the world March went. Does anyone else feel this way? I'm pretty sure that it was February just a moment ago and now it's already March 27th! If you can't tell I'm basically in denial of the fact that March is ending and April is beginning!
I realized the other day that it had been two weeks since I updated the blog. Yes, I am a slacker but in my defense we have been SUPER busy!

From the 14th through the 19th my sister-in-law, niece, and nephew were down from Des Moines. They stayed at my in-laws house but we went over there several nights. We celebrated my other sister-in-laws birthday one evening, another evening everyone came to our house and I helped my niece and one of my student's make fleece tie blankets. Later in that week I helped with the interviews for our new PE teacher and then the next thing I knew was
that it was Friday.

Friday evening Michael was helping with the Knights of Columbus fish fry. I was supposed to help cook the grilled cheese for the kids. My faculty and staff was in charge of the Stations of the Cross, so I went into the church to see how they were doing and if they needed help. They needed some one to carry the crucifix so I told them I could. I started helping and at about the 12th or 13th station I started to get really hot and my legs felt really heavy and I was light headed. I was able to make it through the entire thing but as soon as it was over I was sitting on the floor for fear of passing out. My lovely friends on my staff went and got my husband who was washing dishes and got me a glass of water. That really helped but I still didn't feel great so we went home early. I ended up sleeping for 11 hours that night. At that point I figured I was just exhausted and needed some rest.

Saturday Michael and I got up and went to our birthing class. That was definitely an experience. I was really doing okay and not having any problems with it. I was listening to the lady in charge and a lot of what I was hearing was review. Of course there's always some stuff you didn't know so it was good to hear what she had to say. Then Michael had to confront his fear.... a birthing video and to make it better.... she showed it RIGHT before lunch! The video had four different births on it. Michael was doing okay until he saw a lady receive an episiotomy. Then he leaned over to me and quietly said, "I may not make it through this when you have to do this." I just reminded him that he doesn't have to watch anything and that he can just stay by my head and not look! Then we saw where a doctor had to use forceps to help the baby come out and that's when in a much louder voice my husband said a more profane version of Holy Crap (you can place the second word yourself). Of course everyone in the class laughed. After the video Michael said he understood now why women wanted drugs! :) He also said he appetite was ruined! It wasn't totally because we were able to go eat lunch after that. We came back and got to tour the maternity wing of the hospital and then did some basic breathing exercises. The rest of my Saturday consisted of visiting with some friends that had their baby at the beginning of this month and then going to another friends house for a Scency/New Moon party.

Sunday was a day full of work. I got up at 6:45 and worked on grad school work and got two out of three things done before church. Then we went to Mass and then I worked at school the remainder of the day except for an hour lunch break. That evening I paused on my work at school to go to our Lenten Prayer Group and I'm glad I did. They were throwing us a surprise baby shower. It was really sweet of them! :) They had some really cute little snacks and we received some very nice gifts. After we were finished there I went back to school. You may be wondering why I was at school so long. I was preparing for conferences! Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday evening I had conferences with my students and their parents. I was at school the majority of this week late because of the conferences.

The only exception was Tuesday because I had another episode of "feeling like I'm going to pass out". So I called the doctor and she was able to see me on Wednesday after school. This mean that I had to shift and change when some of my conferences were but we made it work out. The doctor told me that I have vasovagal syncope. I guess it's pretty common in women because of how all of the organs and stuff in our body is shifting sometimes they push on the vagus nerve and that causes the feeling of fainting or you can actual faint. I never fainted. I just felt like I was going to. The doctor told me there's nothing I can do to prevent it from happening. The one thing I can do so that I won't have a lot of these episodes is to make sure that I'm hydrated. I guess dehydration can make it worse. So I have been drinking a ton of water, even more than I was before. So hopefully I won't have any more of these episodes!

This weekend is going to be a pretty laid back one. Tonight we have the DARE auction and tomorrow is our last Lenten Prayer Group and that's pretty much it for the weekend. This week I have a couple of conferences that had to be rescheduled because of my doctors appointment. This week should be pretty good because of it being holy week and that's always a fun time with my kiddos at school.

It's just still hard to believe in under a week it will be April. April looks as if it is going to be just as busy as March! :) We'll we're going to go get some breakfast! We hope everyone is doing well.

Looking forward to this weekend!

I know that everyone is always excited for the weekend but I'm more excited than normal because we're going to go to my hometown this weekend. Michael, my mom, my dad, and I are headed to Macon for some Chinese. Yes, I did just say that I'm driving over two hours for Chinese food. Actually that's not the only reason we're headed east, it's also to celebrate my dad's birthday and because we haven't been to Macon in a long time. I actually haven't been there since November of 2008. So it's definitely time for a trip back home. There just so happens to be an EXCELLENT Chinese restaurant, that I used to work at, in Macon that we're going to go eat at. We're also meeting up with my mom's friend, Gayle. I'm pretty excited to see her because the last time I saw her I wasn't showing and I know she'll be all excited that I have a little baby bump now! :)
We're just going to go over on Saturday for the day. Saturday evening we're going to spend the night with my parents in St. Joe. While we are in St. Joe, either Saturday evening or Sunday morning, we're going to go register for the baby. I'm really excited about this. Of course Michael really could care less but he's going to appease me! Sunday evening we are having our Lenten Prayer Group over to our house. We'll have our prayer group session and then we'll eat supper. I am kind of excited because we have the baby room done for them to see!
Well, I need to go grade some papers. It's hard to believe but tomorrow is the last day of third quarter! I'm still kind of in shock about that!
Hope everyone is doing well! :)

A nice and relaxing weekend

This past weekend was really nice and relaxing for me (Jamie). Michael left on Thursday morning around 6. He and some friends went to Minnesota for a BBQ Contest on a frozen lake! I know it doesn't make sense to BBQ on a frozen lake but that's what he did.
Friday night I went and ate with a fellow teacher and a lovely lady that subs for us. After supper we went to see The Music Man at NWMSU.
Saturday during the day I cleaned up some more and later on in the evening my parents came to visit. It was really nice to have them here for the weekend without having anything that we had to do. Normally when they come up we have some kind of home improvement project that we need their help with. We hung out for a while and then went and ate and watched the Olympics. Sunday was basically just as easy going. We had breakfast at the house and watched the Olympics most of the day. Michael got home Sunday late afternoon so he got to see my parents for a bit. Sunday night Michael and I went to our Lenten Prayer group and then I worked on grad class stuff.
It was really nice to not have a weekend where I was on the run.
This coming weekend we have our infant safety class. We were supposed to take this in February but because of our massive snow storms it got postponed. We'll be there from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Saturday and then we'll go to our prayer group on Sunday evening again. Hopefully this will be a pretty relaxing weekend as well!
I hope everyone is doing well. I feel somewhat lost without facebook, I gave it up for Lent. If you feel like giving me an update on how you're doing please leave me a comment! :)

Downstairs Bedroom

Most people know that we moved into our house in July of this past summer. When we moved into the house we didn't know that I was going to get pregnant a couple months later :) Obviously this news changed how we were going to use some rooms. I already posted some pictures of the baby's room, which used to be our guest bedroom. Since we had a the furniture already we decided to make the downstairs bedroom into a guest bedroom. Now at this point you might be wondering why I'm giving you all of this background information. Well, that's simple, to explain the color on our downstairs bedroom walls. Originally this room was set up to be my teacher room. I told Michael when we made that decision that I really wanted to get a bright color that would encourage me to go down there. We actually got the color from the secretary of my school. She has a room in her basement painted the exact same color. So you have been forewarned about the color - by the way, I LOVE THE COLOR!!! After seeing the color you might be able to see why it was difficult to find a comforter that would go with the room. The comforter has white and light gray circles on it. I'm actually REALLY excited about how the room came out. It's pretty minimal when it comes to the furniture but I like it. It's pretty modern but I like the funkiness of the room. Let me know what you think, do you like our modern funky guest bedroom? Leave me a comment.

In case you can't tell there's a lot of changes happening at our house right now. We have gotten the baby's room done, the guest bedroom is done, and the furniture for our bedroom should be coming soon. We've got some more things planned like a new furnace and air conditioner. At some point we're going to redo the master bathroom. We don't have a bathroom anywhere in the house because the previous owners were older and they took out the tub to put in a walk-in-shower unit. So we're going to install a tub in our master bathroom. Like I said there's already been a lot of changes and there's going to be even more. I'm really excited with all the progress we've made and I can't wait to continue the process.

Oh, and I've totally started nesting. In the process of moving all of my stuff out of the teacher room I threw away a TON of stuff. I think I had something like eight boxes of recycling, three boxes of trash, and two boxes that went to NOCOMO (the thrift store here in town).

Enjoy the pictures and let me know what you think!

Cole's Room

We accomplished a lot today! Michael and I officially have stuff in Cole's room. We started getting the baby furniture last week. This week we received the final pieces. Before finding out we were pregnant we used the "blue room", as we refer to it, as a guest bedroom. After a LOT of persuading I finally got Michael to agree to make this into the baby's room. This took a lot of work on my part because this room was where all of Michael's clothing was. He has been moving his clothes down to the basement bedroom over the past week. I know this might sound like a demotion for Michael but really it isn't that bad. There is a bathroom that he has basically staked claim to. With his clothes downstairs it should make it easier to get ready because he won't have to worry about forgetting something and running through the house naked! ;)

Like I said, we finally agreed to have the "blue room" become the baby's room. I had planned on painting the room a different color but ended up keeping it the same. I really just couldn't wait for Michael to paint when I knew that we had baby furniture out in the garage waiting to be put together.

We started out our morning by calling Phil, our brother-in-law, and having him come over to move some furniture. We gave the furniture that had been in the blue room to Phil and Natalie. So Michael and Phil packed all of that in Phil's truck and then they brought in all the boxes of the baby furniture and put them in the baby's room. Michael went with Phil to help unload the furniture at his house and then came back.

I was busting at the seems to put the furniture together so we decided to start with the crib. We then spent the majority of the day putting furniture together. We started around noon or so and didn't finish until about 8 p.m. I know that sounds awful but it really wasn't that bad. We had an hour and a half to two hour break in the middle for lunch and Michael had to do some stuff for work. We also took our time and didn't get in a hurry. Most of the time it seems like we're always in a hurry to do something and it was nice to just have some time to ourselves and do something special. Around 6 p.m. Michael's parents stopped by to see the furniture and somehow Michael's dad got roped into helping us on the last piece of furniture. I'm really excited with how the furniture turned out! We still have to hang stuff up on the walls but below you can see the furniture and how the room is arranged.

ENJOY the pictures!

Michael and his dad working hard on the last dresser!

At least they are still smiling!

The rest of these are the room at the end of the evening! Remember, we still have things to hang up!

The crib and dresser. We're going to use the dresser as a changing table too!

The dresser and glider. We are really lucky because some friends gave us the glider. We've been pretty lucky because we've gotten a TON of stuff from friends for the baby! We have a highchair, swing, bouncy seat, Johnny Jumper seat, bottles, a bottle warmer, and soooo much more. I can't even begin to tell them all thank you!

This is a picture of our crib set. We have a blanket that goes with it but it was still drying when I took this picture.

Holy Snow!

Holy Snow! Yes, I said snow. In case you didn't know Northwest Missouri has gotten a LOT of snow. Michael has written down all of our snow we have gotten prior to today and before today it was 40 inches! Then today, they were calling from one to three inches by 11 a.m., then they changed it to two to three inches by 1. We got out of school at 12:30 and Michael followed me home because he was worried my car wouldn't make it. I made it fine and we measured and there is already SIX inches of snow on the ground! We measured around 1:45 this afternoon. So much for that three inches! Of course that means that I won't see my husband at all this evening since he'll be busy blading snow. Oh, and to make it better it's supposed to snow even more on Saturday evening and all day Sunday. Also on Sunday we're supposed to have high winds which is perfect for blizzard like conditions. Can you tell I REALLY REALLY REALLY don't like snow anymore. You know it's bad when my students, second graders, are complaining about snow! :-) I am beyond ready for spring. Let's hope this weekend is the end of the snow for this winter. I doubt it will be but I'm still going to hope for it to be the end!