Our big news

We are expecting again. Mike and I have been trying for baby #2 for the last 8 months. And we finally have good news that we are expecting a baby around November 21st, 2011. We got to see the heart beating away today at our appt so we decided it was safe to announce the news officially!!! We cant wait for a new little one to bless our family this next winter.

Its been a while!

It had been a while! I have been slacking in the blogging duties. I have been super busy and feel like i am going crazy sometimes and so it hasnt even crossed my mind that i am way past due for another blog entry. So here it goes finally

Mike has been finishing up his one last lingering class to finish his bachelors degree. He has one test left and then he is done. Thank goodness too! It seems like this class is taking forever. He has to wait a long time for each of his assignments to get graded so that is what is holding him up so much. He has been working hard and playing harder. He starts doing home health again next week! That will be awesome to have some extra money coming in to pay off student loans! After all... that is our goal for the year. We have cut down all of our extra spending and are putting every last dime we have into student loans. We hope to have it paid off by march of next year! It is going to be a super hard year but it will be SOOO nice to be free from that debt! Then all we will have left is our house and we plan to have that paid off in 10 years! Mike is so proud of himself to have a full time job and a house and a family and hopefully have it all paid off in the near future! He is such a hard worker to be able to get all of that done and I am so proud of him!

Maeli is growing and playing lots! She has been learning colors and numbers and she is a super smart kid. We enjoy our learning time each day and we especially enjoy our cuddle time to watch "Elmo" That she is always asking to watch! She is an independent and strong willed little girl who is starting her terrible twos with vigor! She has also been potty training and often asks to go potty all by herself and will actually go on the potty! We are so proud of her! But she has to have someone keeping a close eye on her at all times or else the cat ends up colored pink with markers and so does everything else she can make a little prettier with her coloring skills!

I have been super busy with all of my daily tasks that need to get done. Being a stay at home mom is a hard job! I try to keep up on all of the house chores while keeping up with Maeli too. We have fun together though! I also try to take care of myself too so we go to the gym with a friend for an hour most days and I have been loving it! Maeli does great in the child watch at the gym too! I have been doing classes and running the few days a week i dont do classes. I am signing up for my first race this summer! I am running an all womens 5K race with some friends and I am so excited about it. I have never been a runner so this is a HUGE accomplishment for me! I also just got a new calling to the cub scouts that seems like its been taking tons of time. It is like a part time job between all of the trainings and meetings! But the gal that I teach with is super fun so we are starting to enjoy ourselves with that as much as possible. I am sure once we get the hang of it all we will love the fun activities and goofy boys!

On a side note... Mike and I have applied for foster care in the state of Idaho and have been busy getting all of the requirements met with that. We start our PRIDE classes in April and then a homestudy after that. We should have kids this summer I am thinking. We are very excited to take that on and hopefully make an impact on some kids' lives. The reason we decided to do this is because when we bought our house, we both had this overwhelming feeling that our house would not old be a safe place for us but it would also be a refuge for people who really needed it. And I have had this undeniable call to foster care and I am so excited about it. I am super nervous about it at the same time and wonder if i am fit to take on the emotional challenges of it... but a quote always comes to mind when i start questioning it. I have no idea who said it but it goes like this " Never let a problem to be solved become more important than a person to be loved." It is so true that my doubts and situations that i may have to deal with are nothing in comparison to the importance of these kids being loved.

Well that is pretty much all that is going on! We are super busy and having tons of fun at the same time! We cant wait for summer and for all the fun we are gonna have outside!! Hope you all are doing well! We love you all and miss ya bunches!!

Nauvoo; where we started our forever :)

We just got back from our week long vacation to Nauvoo. When i pictured my dream vacation it was definitely not snowy and cold! But our trip was a dream come true!

My grandparents served their mission to Nauvoo 15 years ago and we had the chance to go and visit them while they were there. Shortly after they returned home, the church announced that they were going to rebuild the Nauvoo temple and my Grandma told me and my sisters that one of us needed to go get married there so that she could go visit the new temple. Well she passed away before it was even dedicated and my Grandpa passed away a year and a half ago! So when mike got baptized we contemplated the idea of going to Nauvoo. I didn't think it would happen but then I heard rumors that the Boise temple would be closing. So we made our plans to go to Nauvoo! As the date got closer we realized that the Boise temple wouldn't be closing anytime soon but i was so excited about going to Nauvoo that we still planned our trip there.

Well we traveled all day saturday the 8th and finally got to Nauvoo! Our apartment was perfect and had plenty of space for all of us! Sunday we went to the local ward and then drove out to Carthage Missouri. What an amazing place to visit! it was so much fun seeing again the last place that Joseph Smith spent his time.

Monday we went sight seeing. We tried to see as many places as possible. Nauvoo is a little restored town that has lots of different shops that are run by missionaries. They are all set up to look like an 1800's home and they demo how people made things and such. The first place we visited was the brick yard where they used to make bricks. Maeli tripped and hit her face on the door jam so she had a huge lump on her face for the rest of the week. We also got to go on a carriage ride in the 20 degree weather and froze to death. But we came across the house my grandparent lived in when they were there. Then that night we got to go to Rendezvous in Old Nauvoo. Its a play that the missionaries put on. It made me remember my grandparents and we were all bawling by the end :)

Tuesday was the most special day! Mike and I both took out our endowments and then we were sealed to each other for all eternity! The most special and wonderful part though was when they brought Maeli into the room. She was so adorable all dressed in white! She was perfect!! i started bawling my eyes out and she just wanted me to hold her :) What a special and spiritual event.

Wednesday Brittany and Adam and my dad all flew home. Bryce, Mom, Mike and I stayed till friday. We saw some more sights and went back to the temple and just soaked up every ounce of the special spirit there in Nauvoo up that we could. We saw Rendezvous again!! Friday we flew back home and enjoyed the rest of our weekend.

It was definitely a wonderful week. We had so much fun having the whole town to ourselves! And I am so grateful to be sealed to my family now. I feel a much deeper love for Mike and we have both grown so much from it all!

Cloth Diapering

I know! It sounds so horrid and I have gotten a TON of grief about it... but we are doing it. We have been for two and a half weeks and LOVE it!!! But its not quite what you think it is. I PROMISE! There are no diaper pins and there are no nasty buckets of soaking poopy diapers. They are super adorable and super easy and even mike likes them! They go on just like a disposable.

So why are we cloth diapering...?

Well, a while back Maeli got a really bad diaper rash. It was like a blistering sore and it was all over! And we treated it with diaper rash creams but it just wouldnt go away. It took a few weeks of her screaming every time we changed a diaper before it got better. At the time i just thought it was a normal diaper rash but about a month ago i read something about how pampers diapers were causing chemical burns on babies. So i was just reading about it and it showed a pic of a chemical burn and it described what it was like. And i pretty much knew that that is what she had. So then i looked into what kinds of chemicals were in these things that they would cause a CHEMICAL BURN on a babies butt. Well that was enough for me to question our diapering methods. I found out that the chemicals in diapers are the same one that were made illegal in feminine products because they cause TSS. And there are tons of other things in them that are questionable to have near a babies parts. Including the dies and the bleach that is used in them. So i start to talk to mike about it and with resistance he agreed to let me try it. So we got two diapers and i loved it. SO then i ordered two more and still loved it. so then i made 21 more and they are all so adorable and we are loving it all!!!

Another reason that CDing makes so much sense for us is the cost factor. I did the math and figured out how much we would save with Maeli if she potty trained in a year from how. And just her alone we save $450. Well these diapers can also be used on our next child if we ever have one. So that will save us about another $1500 there and so on with each kid we have. So yeah.... the money factor is way worth it.

And no... its not gross

We shake the poop off into the toilet and just throw it in the wash! We never touch anything poopy or nasty. Super easy and they come out super clean. Maeli loves them too. We have put a sposie on her for when we go to other peoples houses or if someone is watching her and she wines about wearing one. She will bring you a cloth and ask for it to be put on. They are super soft and they do keep her bum dry. The inner fabric wicks it away from her skin and pulls it down into the other fabrics. They can stay on just as long as she was in the disposables too. And she has goes all night with no leaks! I have heard that kids potty train quicker with them and also they do not cause diaper rashes because the skin can breath in cloth. So all benefits for us!

Well anyways... Just thought i would share with you all my latest adventure! We are officially cloth diaper converts and we are loving every minute of it!!!

Temples, Tinkles and Thanksgiving

I just love this time of the year! I love all of the family time that i get and i love the warm snuggly feeling you get sitting inside and looking at the snow. Although i do hate the snow! I keep hoping that life will slow down here one of these days but it seems to keep busy still. Seems like we never have a free day even on the weekends ( and that is due to mike always at the BSU football games on the weekends). We have a few things that i needed to update this thing about so i thought i would write a post :)

First of all, Mikes on year baptism date is coming up! And you all know what this means. We have been looking forward to this day for a very long time! We were planning on going to the Boise temple to get sealed and take out our endowments.... but then i couldnt bring myself to get over my lifelong dream of going to the Nauvoo temple. So after many weeks of going back and forth about if we wanted to do that to all of our family ( make them either pay for plane tickets and go or just miss out on it all together) We decided to just do it! I dont wanna regret not going because i wanted to make everyone else happy! Although we love all of our family and friends who would have come, I just cant get over the thought of how special Nauvoo will be. You see... my grandparents went on thier mission to Nauvoo many years ago. Before they came home, they announced that they were gonna rebuild the temple. I remember my grandma telling me and my sisters that she wanted one of us to get married there so that she will have a reason to go to visit it. Well she passed away before it was even dedicated and my grandpa has passes since then too. But i always dreamed about keeping this promise to them. I was reading thought an old journal of mine from when i was little and i even said in there that that is where i wanted to get married. So we are gonna do it! It will be the most special thing ever!!!! I know that my grandparents will be there with us! But the thing that i am most excited about is having Maeli there! It makes me emotional just thinking about it. So our date that we are going though is January 11th. (my mom tried to get us to play the number game when we got married 8/8/08 but we did 8/9/08.... so this time i will make her happy and it will be 1/11/11 :) )

Maeli also has gone potty on the toilet! We got her a little potty chair and I had mike help me put her on it. We were just gonna let her sit on it and giver her candy and do the potty dance just for sitting on it the first time. I wanted her to feel like it was a cool thing to sit on the potty and want to do it again. So we sat her on there and she smiled and we did the potty dance and gave her candy! Then she stood up and mike looked in the potty and there was a little yellow liquid!! We couldnt even believe it! We have no intentions of potty training her yet (potty training sounds like a dog. I dont wanna train my daughter but teach her!) We have no intention of potty teaching her yet but did wanna familiarize her with the potty. So that was a huge success!

Another thing that is on our minds is Mikes blood tests. He had some blood work done and they came back a little alarming on a few things. Nothing too big to get scared of yet but enough to think about it. He has signs of the beginning stages of hypothyroidism and also has low platelet count. They are thinking this is because of the medications that he has been on since he was 16 and so we may be switching to a new medication. He has another blood test in a few weeks to see if they are going down or maintaining. So nothing too serious yet but its on our minds. So we will see what comes of it with his next dr. appt.

There isnt much else going on really. Thanksgiving in tomorrow and we are going to both the grandmas houses for that. We are also going to get a tree on Saturday. Mike already started putting up lights on the house and getting the Christmas stuff out. We love this time of year because it is so magical!

Trunk-or-treat!

We went to the trunk-or-treat last night and it was tons of fun. Our ward had a chili cook-off and so we got to try all sorts of chili and then they had a spook house and a cake walk and then trunk-or-treat outside. I found Maeli a costume at goodwill for $5 and it was the cutest thing ever! It was a little duck costume. She was so adorable waddling around with the big duck butt! It took some time to get used to but after a while she was loving the costume. When we took her out to trunk or treat it didnt take her long to catch on to the fact that everyone was giving her candy! So she was just walking up to people holding out her hands and asking for more. She was so super cute and i loved her costume this year!

Sweet memories

Our little girl is growing up too fast! It is so crazy how much she is starting to understand! She has been learning how to fold her arms for prayer and it is so cute! We havent really taught her but she has just picked up on it from watching us do it. So the other day she gets up to the table and stands on a chair. She put her sippy cup down on the table and folded her arms and started mumbling away! Then said "Amen" and took a drink from her sippy! It was the cutest thing ever and one of those moments where you are so glad that she picked up on a good habit of yours instead of a bad one :) lol!! I was so proud of her though! I truly am blessed with such a beautiful and special daughter of God. She brings so much happiness to our family and we feel overwhelmed by God's love for our family! there is nothing better than when she wraps her little arms around my neck and gives me a big sloppy kiss! Or when she runs to me with her arms stretched out calling me momma and wanting me to hold her. Being a mother is the most amazing job in the world!

Maeli also loves the water! We have been going swimming a lot at the Nampa Rec center! She is such a hoot in the water! She tries to run and swim and then almost drowns! But she giggles and splashes and it so much fun!


We also got a chance to go to Linder Farms in Meridian. It is a corn maize and a bunch of other things. It was so much fun! I know it has been a while since i have posted pics so here they are!!!

Our big girl is now sitting at the table with mike and I. We took her trey off her high chair and moved her to the table! She loves it there too!

Maeli loves her kitty! she carries her around everywhere and is always petting her and kissing her. We also have a boy kitty that is white but he doesnt let Maeli carry him around like a rag doll like the girl does. They are so funny to watch though!!