What a crazy beginning to the new year! Just 3 weeks into the new year we planned and then found out that we're adding 6 feet to our nest out on the limb. Six feet may sound like a lot and well, it IS!
We'll be getting a puppy in June that hopefully will help us recover from some of our heartache after losing Beau last spring. WE are super-duper excited about the puppy. Our little lab will be a half brother or sister to Beau from a different mom but the same dad. The mom is an amazing dog that is just a bundle of love herself so we can only imagine what a puppy from her will be like. The traits that Beau got from the sire were so awesome that we are extremely pleased to be able to get another one of his puppies.
So that leaves 2 more feet and those two feet will have 10 little toes on them. I can't even begin to describe what all we are feeling about having a baby. Elated, fear, excited, absolute joy, overwhelmed, proud, apprehensive, excited, bewildered, excited, nervous, blessed and did I mention EXCITED?!? We're about halfway through the pregnancy now and so far so good. We might be able to find out the gender at our upcoming appointment this week. We don't really have a preference on a boy or a girl so it will be very exciting to find out who is going to join our little family.
We chose names back around week 8 so we're excited to stop referring to the baby as "it", "the baby" or other odd nicknames. My brother in law likes to call "it" Cletus the Fetus, which just grosses me out. A little girl will be Teagan Marie which is Irish for "little poet" and my side of the family's common middle name and a boy will be Calton Joel, the hubs grandfather's middle name (which is actually a typo on his birth certificate) and his childhood best friend's first name. Both names are loaded with meaning to us so we are happy to bestow either one on our child.
I never realized how much it meant to either of us to be able to provide our children with names that had strong meaning behind them. I was also surprised at how quickly we came to a decision on the names, which happen to be names we never discussed prior to being pregnant (and we had a lot of discussion about names we liked). Only 15 minutes of discussion- perhaps a record for new parents?? I guess all that pre-discussion worked out the kinks like overly western (Colt or Wyatt - my veto) or too foreign sounding (Vibeka - hubs veto) names. Not to say those names won't be up for discussion in the future- but not this time. We compromised with the name choices to "resemble" our favorites and incorporated (by accident) little pieces of our family's naming traditions.
We are really excited for all the changes coming up but they definitely lead to a lot of questions about "what next?" But, as most of our friends and family know, we don't do big changes one at a time, we like to get 'em done all at once. Why this is only heaven knows, maybe it's just serendipity or perhaps it's just the relief of knowing huge changes are done and over with at once and once we settle, we're settled until we do it again. I guess that's part of the joy in being out on a limb!
On a side note:
It's going to be quite the household adjustment so we're hoping our 6 year old English Setter will adjust quickly to both a puppy and a baby. To keep things close to even, we've decided to get the opposite gender puppy as the baby so no one is completely out-numbered! How's that for family planning? LOL!
Friday, May 18, 2012
Friday, January 27, 2012
The wind blows but sometimes it just sucks.
Living here sometimes just sucks the life right out of me.
Recently the hubs and I enjoyed a late Saturday morning in bed then proceeded to attack the day by ten o'clock with a couple of "let's do's."
We started with breakfast, get a kolache (local speak for breakfast inside a roll) and then coffee. The kolache run was good, the coffee run was not. After seeing one of the coffee huts all backed up we decided to stop at the local inside a store coffee places. I ran inside, placed my order immediately and then waited patiently. Until... another customer brought his in-store purchases to the register to pay, ordered his coffee and proceeded to have a long drawn out conversation with the clerk.
Usually, this wouldn't bother me, except I waited for 30 minutes after my quoted 20-minutes-until-order-pickup the night before at a restaurant. Fries and burgers are not fresh after 30 minutes.
Seeing my coffee mostly prepared and getting cold while the clerk chats normally doesn't bother me. I typically enjoy watching people reconnect. However, my irritation reached the breaking point when she finally finished my drink (15 minutes after I ordered) and set it on the counter and sort of slid it to me and without making eye contact said "Sorry about that." Again, not something that would have hit a nerve but her tone of voice didn't really say "sorry for the wait".
I haven't quite determined if my customer service expectation are too high or if I was just easily irritable for 24 hours. Maybe I just expect people to multi-task as much as I do. Either way my irritation with customer service here started my individual life-sucking feelings.
We left the coffee debacle behind and proceeded to our next to-do, the local liquidation sale. TV adverts promised rock bottom deals on all sorts of electronics and gadgets. We arrived to find that there was a COVER charge. The fee was for the whole weekend but really, if you don't find something today are they possibly going to have anything different tomorrow?? Feeling a little fleeced and skeptical at this point we cruised the show and found nothing you couldn't already buy at Wally-world for the same price without a cover charge. 15 minutes later we left.
For some reason we were thinking that little adventure would take a couple of hours. Prior experience should have indicated that no.. nothing here really takes more than 30 minutes to go through. Next on the list ... was well nothing. I suggested we go look at the local furniture store and see if there was anything we liked. I'm itching for a new entertainment system solution. We walked through the store (keeping previous time in mind) and looked at a couple of things, and then the hubs plopped himself down in the theater sectional seating and proceeded to watch the 4 movies playing in front of him.
By noon we were struggling to find something ... anything that would keep us out of the apartment. Unfortunately, there are times when you just can't make yourself wander around Walmart just because there isn't anything else to do but go home.
Apartment living is a struggle for us, mostly because we like projects, something to paint, something to fix, something to build, something to tear down- grass to mow even. Apartments don't really leave a lot of opportunity to do anything but basic housework, laundry, dishes, cleaning, dusting, none of which I relish doing. Saturday we were having none of it... anything but back to the apartment to do something so mundane.
Why didn't we go somewhere for the weekend you ask?? SNOW... is the answer. We were expecting a storm and although the idea of getting caught anywhere other than our apartment was intriguing, we have a dog. A dog that requires going out, feeding, watering and loving. She is fantastic and we love her dearly, but truth be told, were she not waiting at home when we get restless, we'd have been gone more than once.
I can usually tolerate life-sucking attitudes, except when it happens to be my own.
Recently the hubs and I enjoyed a late Saturday morning in bed then proceeded to attack the day by ten o'clock with a couple of "let's do's."
We started with breakfast, get a kolache (local speak for breakfast inside a roll) and then coffee. The kolache run was good, the coffee run was not. After seeing one of the coffee huts all backed up we decided to stop at the local inside a store coffee places. I ran inside, placed my order immediately and then waited patiently. Until... another customer brought his in-store purchases to the register to pay, ordered his coffee and proceeded to have a long drawn out conversation with the clerk.
Usually, this wouldn't bother me, except I waited for 30 minutes after my quoted 20-minutes-until-order-pickup the night before at a restaurant. Fries and burgers are not fresh after 30 minutes.
Seeing my coffee mostly prepared and getting cold while the clerk chats normally doesn't bother me. I typically enjoy watching people reconnect. However, my irritation reached the breaking point when she finally finished my drink (15 minutes after I ordered) and set it on the counter and sort of slid it to me and without making eye contact said "Sorry about that." Again, not something that would have hit a nerve but her tone of voice didn't really say "sorry for the wait".
I haven't quite determined if my customer service expectation are too high or if I was just easily irritable for 24 hours. Maybe I just expect people to multi-task as much as I do. Either way my irritation with customer service here started my individual life-sucking feelings.
We left the coffee debacle behind and proceeded to our next to-do, the local liquidation sale. TV adverts promised rock bottom deals on all sorts of electronics and gadgets. We arrived to find that there was a COVER charge. The fee was for the whole weekend but really, if you don't find something today are they possibly going to have anything different tomorrow?? Feeling a little fleeced and skeptical at this point we cruised the show and found nothing you couldn't already buy at Wally-world for the same price without a cover charge. 15 minutes later we left.
For some reason we were thinking that little adventure would take a couple of hours. Prior experience should have indicated that no.. nothing here really takes more than 30 minutes to go through. Next on the list ... was well nothing. I suggested we go look at the local furniture store and see if there was anything we liked. I'm itching for a new entertainment system solution. We walked through the store (keeping previous time in mind) and looked at a couple of things, and then the hubs plopped himself down in the theater sectional seating and proceeded to watch the 4 movies playing in front of him.
By noon we were struggling to find something ... anything that would keep us out of the apartment. Unfortunately, there are times when you just can't make yourself wander around Walmart just because there isn't anything else to do but go home.
Apartment living is a struggle for us, mostly because we like projects, something to paint, something to fix, something to build, something to tear down- grass to mow even. Apartments don't really leave a lot of opportunity to do anything but basic housework, laundry, dishes, cleaning, dusting, none of which I relish doing. Saturday we were having none of it... anything but back to the apartment to do something so mundane.
Why didn't we go somewhere for the weekend you ask?? SNOW... is the answer. We were expecting a storm and although the idea of getting caught anywhere other than our apartment was intriguing, we have a dog. A dog that requires going out, feeding, watering and loving. She is fantastic and we love her dearly, but truth be told, were she not waiting at home when we get restless, we'd have been gone more than once.
I can usually tolerate life-sucking attitudes, except when it happens to be my own.
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