small disasters

our kitchen sink had a major clog in it and after 2 days without being able to use it and steve working on the sink for 3 hours, we are back in business. steve was pretty happy that he was able to fix it (even if it meant a lot of drano) and that elation lead to some reminiscing. we talked about all the times he attempted to fix things and it ended in small disasters. we laughed SO hard over all of these stories and now i am going to share them with you.

in our condo we decided to get rid of the nasty gold chandelier that hung above our table. steve decided he could do it himself with a friend. i was out that evening but before i left i reminded steve to turn the breaker off before doing the wiring. when i came home the new light was up and looked good. later i found out that when he turned the breaker off they didn't have any light in that room so they decided to do it with the breaker on....apparently that lead to some sort of loud noise and the entire frosted glass shade turning black. nice.

next came new couches. we ordered a new couch and loveseat from the brick. they were delivered, we attached the feet and it looked good. the armrest made a nice loud crack when i leaned on it so we got the couch replaced. when the new couch came we were attaching the feet and steve cranked it too hard and the foot cracked in half. awesome. after a lot of phone calls we learned that there was nothing we could do so steve just glued the foot together. thankfully it's on the back of the couch and not the front.

in our condo we had an issue with a garburator and ended up having to replace it. steve worked super hard on it (his brother helped too). he ended up successfully installing the new one (YAY steve) and i was one happy camper. the next day i came home from work and when i walked in our kitchen floor was soaking wet and part of the carpet was as well. i called steve, he came home and we spent quite a while cleaning up all the water and trying to figure out where the water came from. we couldn't figure it out. it hadn't come from the fridge or the sink. he left and i went to unload the dishwasher. when i opened it everything was still dirty. i thought we had forgotten to turn it on that morning so i turned it on. a few minutes later i heard water pouring onto our floor. i ran over and turned the dishwasher off. the water was all coming from under the sink. it turned out that steve had detached some pipe that went from the dishwasher to the garburator and forgot to reattach it. so i cleaned up flood #2.

this one isn't really a repair story but we laughed about it anyways. we bought a new car (mazda3) 2 years ago. we had only had it for a few months and steve decided to take it to the drive thru car wash. we paid at the little machine and started pulling forward. i noticed that we were really close to a yellow concrete pole so i said "watch out for the pole" and as i was saying it we scraped our nice new car along it. that sucked big time!!! thankfully it didn't dent the car it just transferred paint from the pole onto our car. we had it fixed shortly after.

we moved into our townhouse 1.5 years ago and replaced the flush ceiling light with a hanging light in our entry. i took forever to decide on which light i liked best (usually i rush into decisions so i think i was slightly annoying steve cause i just couldn't make my mind up. somehow i felt like this was a HUGE decision. haha). once we got the light home we had to figure out a way to hang it. because it is over the staircase we stood on the ledge on the one side of the staircase. it was awkward. i was leaning out over the staircase holding the light while he tried to attach the wiring (we learned our lesson and turned the breaker off this time). we ended up cutting the writing too short so it was super difficult to attach it, but we did and were so happy with the way it looked. then we had to put the frosted glass in and placed the marble piece at the bottom of it and screwed it all together. steve was up there tightening it all and (again) cranked it too tight and the glass shattered. thank goodness for a great lighting store who replaced the glass for free. :)

despite all of this stuff we have learned a ton! i am sure everyone has these stories and i am sure that i would have made many of the same mistakes and possibly more if i had attempted to do any of these fix-it projects. thankfully none of these small disasters cost us much money and we gained a lot of knowledge. as long as we keep laughing about it, it's all good right? :D

1 year ago

today marks 1 year from the worst week of my life so far. 1 year ago today i found out that i was having a miscarriage. that week steve was in montreal so my mom accompanied me to many doctor appointments and hospital visits. in so many ways it feels like it all happened yesterday, not a year ago. and yet here i am, 7 months pregnant, anxiously anticipating the arrival of this little boy. God is good! even though i never want to go through another miscarriage and i never wish for anyone to experience that kind of loss, i know that i am stronger for it and steve and i have grown so much. we are a better team, we are closer to God and we just feel 'older', more mature. as i read my post from march 2nd, 2010 (when i shared about my miscarriage) i sit and cry. cry over the loss. cry in fear of it happening again. cry in gratitude that this pregnancy is going SO well. during that week and the weeks that followed i made a playlist on my ipod of songs that helped me through that time. one of those songs i shared in my previous post on march 2nd. the song below i probably listened to the most. it still makes me cry. i remember going to mexico last march and on the flight to san diego i listened to this song over and over and just cried my eyes out. hearing it again today takes me back to that time. i don't want to ever forget that time in my life, nor do i want to dwell on it. i am who i am today partly because of this experience and i am better for it.

watermark - glory baby
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUZkjbYaKPA

to work or not to work?

i have 23 days of work left! wow! i can't believe that that is it. after that i will hopefully have some time to chill, rest, read and finish getting ready for this little boy to arrive. then BAM, life changes forever. i am so excited and so nervous at the same time. we are going to be parents. that's kinda crazy. i can't wait to meet him. it's going to be so amazing. i know i am going to be beyond exhausted and overwhelmed with the changes but i also think that the first few months will just all blend together because day and night will no longer mean anything. i will sleeping during the day when he sleeps and be up at all hours of the night feeding, burping, rocking, changing etc. but then if i fast forward a year i have a big decision to make. do i return to work or stay home? i know i can't make this decision now. i can't guess what our financial situation will be like. but we have attempted to save and to make life work on 1 income for the past 7 months and so far we aren't drowning. so if life continues this way am i just never going to work again until my kids are way older? until i want to work just because i want to work? am i going to give up my job? am i going to say goodbye to LCS forever? or just until my kids are in school? am i going to no longer have ties to that community of people? i love the kids i work with. i love my colleagues. i love my work. but i also really love the idea of staying home and raising our kids. i love the idea of hanging out with them, reading to them tons, playing with them, planning outings, and pulling my hair out because they are driving me crazy! so what does this all mean? i want to say that i am going to stay home and that i will not return to work after my year off, but part of me feels like i can't commit to that just yet. i don't know what life is going to be like. there are so many unknowns. i often feel like i need to aspire to do more, be more. but really i love my job, i love the idea of being a stay at home mom and in the end i believe that i will know God's plan for me, for our kids, for our family.

"beautiful"

so i feel huge. i feel like an exaggerated version of myself. i feel like when people look at me all they see is this belly. sometimes that makes me smile, sometimes i don't want anyone looking at my huge belly. no offense to other pregnant women but i don't look at you and think that you are more beautiful pregnant than pre-pregnant. i don't think that pregnancy is physically beautiful (again, please don't take this personally). i do not, like 100% DO NOT, get the people who look at me (or other pregnany ladies) and say that this (this huge blimp-like body) is "beautiful". i know they are talking about the belly and maybe they mean that the process is beautiful, that it's beautiful how we can create life.....but if they don't mean that then it's just messed up! maybe all of their wombs are aching for more children? is that what it's about? i don't get it. maybe i have to have gone through the whole process in order to feel this way. maybe some people are just being nice. honestly, it's only women who say this stuff and it's only women who have children that say this stuff. it must have something to do with the fact that they have been through it before and are reminiscing.

baby books

i like children's books, and i like sharing some of my favourites with kids at school and with anyone else who is interested. (here, here and here are children's lit. posts.) a couple of my favourite authors are Melanie Watt (who is Canadian by the way and her scaredy squirrel books are awesome!!) and Mo Willems (especially his piggy and elephant books!!). i used to buy a ton of books from the scholastic orders at school, slowly building my own children's lit library. now comes a new phase....baby books. i really should have started with these since our kid will not be into the other books for a lllllooonnnngggg time.

last friday i went to Kidsbooks in surrey with 2 friends. i ended up browsing the baby book section and started making a pile of the books i wanted. well the pile got big really fast so i had to get it down to 10 books. some of them have owls (obviously!) and others are more for warm, fuzzy feelings.

after high school i nannied for a while and i read to the 2 girls a ton. some of the books they wanted to hear multiple times a day. you would think that i would've gotten sick of those books but i loved them. and now reading them again brings back SO many memories. some of the warm, fuzzy books are Goodnight Moon, Five Little Ducks, Moo Baa LaLaLa and Snuggle Puppy.

i am gonna love reading to this little guy. :)

terrible, horrible, no good, very bad night.

ok, complaint central coming at ya.....be prepared.


this is my THIRD, yup third, cold since being pregnant. i rarely get sick. i haven't had the flu since 2004, i have a mild cold maybe once a year and otherwise i am relatively healthy. what is with this? i know that it's common to get colds while pregnant but 3 in less than 6 months is ridiculous!!

so last night i was feeling quite a bit better. i still have a bit of a fever, i still have my cough and i am having issues with my asthma, but this is an improvement over the last couple of days. i was looking forward to going to bed. i fully expected to get more sleep than i had the previous few nights.

you would think that either my cough, breathing or back and forth sweats to chills would have kept me awake. or maybe even steve coughing (since he is now very sick). but nooooooo. you wanna know what made my night so bad? the baby. yup. he was moving around SO much. it wasn't the occasional kick or hiccup, it felt like this baby was practicing for some kind of floor routine in gymnastics. i felt like he was rolling around and stretching all night. i had a lot of pressure on my right side and every time i laid down the movement got worse. at 3am i gave up. i was SO tired that i went into the den and stood there crying trying to rock back and forth hoping that maybe the baby would fall asleep or calm down or something (i read in a book that when you walk etc it rocks the baby to sleep, so there was a method to my madness). i was very uncomfortable. am i insane? maybe. do i care? nope. well it didn't work. so i got back out of bed and sat in the rocking chair in the baby's room and tried that. again it didn't work. when i got back to bed at 4am steve was awake and we both agreed that it was a big waste of time trying to sleep. so we got up and watched the office until 5:30am. brutal. the baby calmed down and when i went to bed again he was back to moving around a ton. i can't win. there has been a huge increase in movement the past few days, or maybe i am just more able to feel it now because he is getting bigger? i don't know, but i know it's intense.

ugh. tonight better be better.