Thank you

Some of you may know, and some may not, but my life has completely turned upside down in the past 3 weeks. My wonderful step father passed away 3 weekends ago and it was a very heartbreaking event for my family. My mom and step father were married for over 11 years so he was very much like a father to me and we will all miss him greatly. The past 3 weeks have been filled with stress and heartache and a mixture of emotions I cannot even describe. We are all exahuasted from going up every weekend to help my mom get packed up to move. My mother will be moving in with Justin and I for an indefinite period of time until she is able to get back on her feet. This has been a very difficult time for her especially and we are doing our best to be there for her.

With that said, I just wanted to say a special thank you to my husband. He has been so supportive during all of this and has not complained about anything. He has worked hard and helped with the move the best he can. He is not complaining at all about having his "mother-in-law" move in with us, and in fact has been very sweet and supportive towards me during this time as well...although we may hear a few complaints when her dog and bird also move in with us this weekend :)

It will be an adjustment for us all, but hey I guess that is what family is for. You have to help pick each other up when the going gets rough. So here's to you Justin. Thank you and I love you.

Outsmarting Nature

So you may have seen that I complained on Facebook about the stupid deer at our house destroying our garden. Well I think Justin and I may have finally stopped them. This year has been so frustrating b/c everything we planted the deer were eating before we even had a chance to harvest anything! They ate the tops off of almost all of our strawberries, zuchinni and sugar snap peas! I was furious! Well we built this contraption here out of PVC pipe and this plastic 'deer netting' stuff. So far it has worked pretty well and was fairly easy and inexpensive to build. I am just hoping they don't realize that all they would have to do is charge into it and they could tear the whole thing down!

Close up view of the netting

My poor grape vines. They used to be so full and bushy!
You can see where they ate the tops off each little limb.

These are still exposed since they grow up the arbor so we are

still trying to figure out what to do with them.

Disney World 2009

So I am finally getting around to posting pictures from our trip. It was a lot of fun even though I couldn't ride any of the fun rides. I really enjoyed the Disney meal plan. More food than I knew what to do with! Enjoy our pictures!

Miniature Golf

One of the few rides I was able to go on :)

Posing with Goofy

In front of the Epcot Ball

The massive amounts of strollers at WDW

In front of the Castle

Learning to ride a Segway!

Breakfast at the Grand Floridian

Wearing Mickey's Sorcerer's hat

Man, I am strong

Pregnant Picture

Winnie the Pooh

Me and the Bro

Whew!

So I thought I would write a post just b/c I feel like I have been MIA for a while. I can't even express how busy these past couple weeks or so have been. They have been filled with tears, stress, excitement and uncertainty. I won't go into everything, but it looks like things are finally starting to slow down.

First news...we are back from Disney and had a great time. I won't get into it b/c I plan on making a separate post about our trip!

Now some exciting news...we are having a little GIRL! We found out right before we left for Disney so it was nice knowing! The parents bought her a little cute outfit from Disney and a little stuffed Dumbo. I will have to be sure to post our ultrasound pictures as well. They weren't any super clear ones, but we got a couple good ones. I still haven't felt her kick yet...at least not that I am sure of. But they told me that apparently my placenta is towards the front of my stomach so when she does kick I probably will not feel it until she is much bigger. I am looking forward to it though!

Now for some news that I don't really know what to think yet...Today was my first day of working from home...kind of. As everyone knows, the housing market has been hurting for quite some time now and of course that has affected my job. I was told right before we left for Disney that we were consolidating into a very small office space and that I would now be working from home and cut back to 20 hours. I think I am actually really excited about this. I am currently still full time and no one seems to know what to tell me about when I go part time so I don't know my hours or anything yet. But hopefully this could be something that can really help us out when the baby comes. Since I get to work from home and only 20 hours a week I could keep working once I have the baby!

So that is my news for now. Sorry a long post of me just venting! I promise there will be fun pictures to come!

Triple Coupons!

So today was the first day of Harris Teeter Triple Coupons! I am new to this whole couponing thing, but it is great! This is round one. I could only get nonparishable foods since I went on my lunch break from work and so I didn't have that much time to try and find EVERYTHING that I wanted. I got everything you see here for only $3.66! Oh yeah! I know some of you professional couponers probably could have even done better than that! But I am pretty happy with my finds!

15 Weeks Today!

So I am 15 weeks pregnant today! Wahoo! The second trimester is so much better than the first. Not that I ever really had "morning sickness" but I always felt really weak and tired. And I felt like if I didn't eat every few hours I felt even worse. But now I barely even feel pregnant! It's great. I don't really have any side effects at all except headaches every now and then and usually a stuffy nose which apparently is pretty common. So here is a picture for any of you all that don't see me very often!


Also Justin and I just finished building our nursery furniture last night. I know its a little soon, and we don't plan on doing anything else to the room until we know the sex, but I thought I would post some pics of the furniture that we got! It was a gift from both my parents and Justin's parents. Yay! We love it!

Layoffs

So I guess my Employer is at it again. Due to the economy we had 6 more layoffs at work today. One of them being my boss. That leaves JUST me left to manage and run my whole department. Plus, the real kicker...they laid off our purchasing/estimating guy today as well, and they want to train me to take on some of his take off estimating as well! This economy is just awesome!

I probably shouldn't have done this, b/c now I have just created an awkward working situation, but I felt so bad for my boss getting laid off, that I told one of the Owner's that I was pregnant, and was most likely not coming back once I had the baby and perhaps they would want to keep my boss instead of me. But no. They said they would just deal with that situation when it arrived, but that he was still going. I really think I am about to go insane there. I would really have rather been laid off than have to deal with all of this stress and headache! ahh!