We're having a boy!!

He'll probably come in the first half of December :)  I'll say more next post.

A baby!

Thank you so much for all your comments!  We wanted to tell all our family first : )

So we're adopting!!!  We'll find out in a couple weeks the due date and the gender but we think she'll/he'll be due at the end of November. : )

We started talking to a birthmother 3 weeks ago and Thursday night she told us that she chose us to be the parents of her baby!  We're so excited!

The story other than that is a little complicated and we don't want to share too much about the mom right now.  She left the situation for her safety and then found out she was pregnant.  She invited us to go to her ultrasound with her though and then we'll let you know a little more! : )  We're also probably going to make the blog private soon, but we'll let you know.

:)

We're going to be parents!

The real snow creature- A Duck

Much better!  It actually looked like what we were trying to make!





Weston did most of the shape directing




Little duckling : )




Our Bathroom is mostly painted now!  (The walls are dark blue)



NASTY!  I think this is my biggest cooking failure yet!!!!  But I learned never to try thickening a white sauce with corn starch!!!  Haha....  It formed a gel and all the liquid syneresed!

Look at all our snow!  I actually pulled one of my pec muscles one day while shoveling.  It hurt pretty bad for a while and I keep re-hurting it...  one day it'll heal.  Luckily I know what the pain is so it doesn't bother me all that much.



Free admission to the Imagination station through the Alumni association!!!!!  So awesome : )  We met up with some friends and that was cool.  We both got to ride a bike on a wire from the 2nd floor!




Cool harp that played by sensing where his fingers were.  But it was weird because they had the long "strings" as the high notes.  I thought harps were the other way.




Plumbing : )



Cool yo-yo.  I ALMOST made it to the top.  But I stopped because it was taking a long time to move up those last 3 inches or so.  We also made squares on the round sand table!  (it was hard to do)




Wind tunnel, testing out how airplane wings catch air!






Watching them build an ice sculpture at the zoo!  Way cool.  Impressive.  Mostly I was amazed at the confidence of his strokes.



Cheetahs : )



We watched the cockatiel for a while in Nature's neighborhood!  It was struting it's stuff and flaring it's wings and puffing up it's crown a lot!





Siku was looking for attention and came right up to the glass and looked through a couple times.

The animal that we get to pet!!!!!  Here she is rubbing her face on my hand.

I finally gave Weston his birthday scavenger hunt!  Thank you for those that sent me things you liked about him : )  I used the gps and made him hike through the snow to find them.  It was a good end to a frustrating day I hope.

Our snow creature for this year was.....   a CHUCK!  We tried to make a duck, but the snow wouldn't pack enough for us to make a good head.  So we made a chicken head.  So it is part duck, part chicken...  and really funny looking!  Needless to say I am the LEAST proud of this snow creation.  Hopefully we can make a different one to be this year's.  But at least we had fun doing it...  and it snowed afterwards so I don't have to be embarrassed by it anymore!

Water bottle- attempting to harden the snow.

I had a miraculous experience this week!
I lost my phone on my walk to the zoo to meet up with some friends. Later I realized that that's where I lost it when it wasn't in the car or the house. So, I set out to find it, without much hope of actually accomplishing that. Weston has had a sore throat and has been edgy lately so I had been flustered when I'd gotten ready and stuffed everything into my coat pockets, so they were pretty full. When he'd let me out of the car I'd had to hop over a large puddle and I started trudging though and un-shoveled sidewalk. When looking for the phone the puddle was way bigger and... the sidewalk was plowed... which was my first sign that this could end up being a fruitless search. I'd then gotten on to the road to walk better and had to run around another puddle to get out of the middle of the road, at which point things flew out of my pockets and I had to go back and pick them up. I looked over this stretched 3 times before moving on... no phone. On my walk I'd then gotten smart and zipped up my pockets, so in my search I was kind of giving up. At which point I'm not proud to say, but I was starting to get kind of frustrated with Weston for rushing me so much this morning, and kind of blaming him for the situation.... VERY un-Christlike and un-grateful and un-fair of me. So after stewing and looking while I walked along a main road and crossed a busy intersection I started to realize the error of my ways and what I was doing. Thankfully I had the presence of mind to start praying for a softened heart, and miraculously it came! I completely stopped being mad at Weston! During this prayer (it was obviously a watchful, alert prayer) I'd been thinking about how I'm really hard on my phones, and how if I didn't find it, it would work out somehow. So I added in the prayer that if I found it that would be nice, but if not I'd be ok. I was now approaching a spot where I'd helped a woman get her car unstuck from the snow. In the process I'd slipped and fallen. I think I remember getting a granola bar (the rest of my breakfast) out of my pocket before this so it probably wasn't very well zipped up. So in my search/simultaneously while praying/ I was thinking that I'd at least check this spot because I thought it was right after that that I realized I didn't have my phone when I was going to call and tell my friends I'd be a little late. As soon as I ended my prayer I called my phone again (using Weston's). And immediatly I heard mine! I was utterly suprised and amazed! So I went over to the spot and found my phone halfway buried in snow and partially run over but still working!!! Luckily it seems the snow is soft enough that the tire just pressed it deeper into the snow. There seems to be some water in the screen but with the fact that snow was starting to melt it's crazy that it still worked! What's even crazier is that the ringer doesn't work today (the rest of the sound does and the microphone does, so I've just set it on vibrate) but the ringer doesn't, so it's awesome that it worked yesterday!
So, wahoo! I can now say that I've experience the lost and found by prayer miracle that so often gets told by other people! And whether it would have been there if I hadn't prayed, probably. But I definitely wouldn't have been in the right frame of mind to really appreciate it, or I might even have been too frustrated to look very hard for it. So that was the real miracle.

New Bathroom floor and some pictures from December

Some happenings since my last picture post : )

At the botanical gardens.  We went on a horse-drawn carriage ride with the Tollers : )  They were GORGEOUS horses!!  Nice and strong.

Weston singing his Christmas concert.

The floor between tiling jobs!  We had to take all the old ones up because it turns out the floor really was just too bowed.  They were coming loose and the grout was cracking.  So we re did it after nailing/screwing the floor down more and it's worked!  I'm glad we found out BEFORE tiling under the toilet!

Awesome snowflake I got a picture of!  On the car before going to Kyle and Denielle's in December.

I believe this is the Sunday talking to his parents phone call : )

Haha...  queen Snowy.  She hated that we put that on her head!

Before removing the toilet.  I had prepared as much of the floor as I could.

Then found out it was rotted underneath.  So took a few hours to figure out what to do with that.

The solution.  Got rid of the rotted wood.  Put in new wood.  And made it slightly more level than it was before : )

We finished our bathroom floor yay!!!!!  Here are some pictures.  Unfortunately the bathroom is hard to take good pictures of.  Plus, we didn't get good "before" pictures because the whole demolition process happened so fast.  The bottom one is the only one I could find.  The floor was loose and part of it was rotted under the toilet and it used to be covered in vinyl tiles that weren't butted up next to each other very well or even straight!  (Plus most of them were already part way unstuck),



So soon afterwards that I hadn't even cleaned up my grouting and sealing tools yet!



The tile mortered down under the toilet.  I didn't have another whole slate piece left so I used one that would look whole and filled in the gap under the toilet with others of the same width.  The yellowish rectangle on it is packing tape residue that I still need to clean off of it.

The wax ring.  I was trying to determine the correct wax ring to use (they come in different widths/lengths).



During drywalling.



Before insulating that wall and between many of the other side projects we had to do before drywalling.



What it used to look like.  It looks deceptively good in this picture.  But you can see the stains on the wall.



Here are some pictures of us "TRYING" to take formal pictures.  We weren't too successful at it, but we did get a couple we could use for our adoption profile.  : ) 

These are the pictures we got back from the Nativity Festival.  They are ok pictures but they are the only ones he gave us.  I'm pretty frustrated because there were some really good ones that I really liked where we were both smiling for real.  But like almost everyone else in life, he won't respond to any of my calls or emails either asking if he still has the other ones.  So I guess this is what we get.