Miss Us???

Do you miss us yet???

We'll be back in just a few more days and can't wait to catch up on what has happened with all of our blog friends!

Not only will we have our vacation to tell you about, but we are also gearing up for our first TTC cycle since the miscarriage. I'll stop my BC pills on Friday and we'll be back in the swing of things next week. We are following the exact same protocol as last time, however, I am going to insist that we start the prog.esterone immediately following IUI. (We didn't start it until after the second beta last time.)

Happy Birthday, Mom!

Just wanted to wish my (Carrie's) mom a very happy birthday today!

Happy, Happy Birthday, Mom!

We love you very much!

June Quilt Blocks

I just realized that we haven't posted our June quilt blocks that we made and it makes for a good post while we're on vacation!

Here are the two sets of fabric that we had for this month.





This triangle paper is the best stuff ever invented! You pin it on top of your two pieces of fabric, sew on all the dotted lines, and then cut on the solid lines. It saves from having to cut out individual triangles and sew them all back together. It cuts the time down incredibly!



Here are the finished projects!

NY Wedding

Last weekend we went to a wedding in New York. On the way there, we watched the most beautiful sunset! This isn't the best picture, but it is pretty good considering we were in the car traveling at 70 mph! It really was gorgeous, and this was the end of it - I wish I had managed to get some earlier pictures.



This is where the wedding was supposed to be - outside, however the skies opened up about a half hour before the ceremony and when I say opened up, I mean opened up!



Check out this video of how hard it was raining (you can even hear the thunder in the first few seconds of the video)! We had a great time though, and by about 3:30 in the afternoon the skies cleared and it was an absolutely gorgeous rest of the day!



Here are a couple more pictures:

The Bride - Desirae and her dad - David


Mom - Brenda and Sister, Deedra


It was a great weekend away - Congrats Desi and Andrew!

Off We Go!

And we're off on vacation! We are driving to Minnesota to visit MJ's mom, her brother, and his wife and kids. We are very excited!!

We are taking 5 days instead of 3 to get out there because we are stopping in the Wiscons.in D.ells to be cheesy tourists for a couple of days. We are camping the whole way out because there is nothing better than sitting by a campfire at night to unwind from a whole day in the car.

We are bringing MJ's mom back with us and we are going to camp on the way back too. Her mom is way too excited about it! We are going to take one extra day on the way back to stay in NY and do a Fing.er L.akes Wi.ne Tour - should be lots of fun!

I have cued up a couple (really, not that many!) of posts for while we are gone. We will have limited to no Internet access which really is a nice thing to let us just get away from it all. We'll have lots to update when we get back in a couple of weeks!

The Good and the Sad

The good:

We finished out summer job today. We were contracted until Thursday, but we got everything done by 3:00 today. The best part - we get paid for Wednesday and Thursday even though we don't have to work!

Summer vacation has now officially begun! We leave for vacation on Thursday - more details about that in a later post......


The sad:

Today would have marked 20 weeks in our pregnancy - half way through. There are days that the emotional wound is still so raw. We really, really miss our Chicklet. They say time heals all wounds, but this wound is going to take a long time to heal.

We get to jump back on the TTC wagon in 3 weeks. It's hard to totally invest yourself for fear of miscarriage again.

Tomorrow will be a better day!

The Week

We've been working, working, working this past week. The job actually hasn't been all that bad and we only have 3 or 4 days left, so that will be nice.

We're off to NY for a wedding this weekend - leaving straing from work tomorrow afternoon. Should be fun!

Next week the real vacation starts as we will head west to visit MJ's family - then her mom is riding back with us for another 10 days. We're looking forward to it.

We'll post more of an update on Sunday when we get back - the doggies are excited as they get to spend the weekend at the farm with my parents!

Rest of the Fourth

The rest of the day yesterday was busy, busy, busy. We had lots of crafts to do so, we started out with the foam girl that had to be sewed together:

Then made an Owl that Olivia did a great job following the pattern for:

After that, we took some wooden bead necklace kits into the living room to have a little "rest" before the evening festivities. As you can see, I think Sadie needed more of a rest than anyone else!

The necklaces were super cute when finished!

Once the rest time was over, we decorated the cookies that were baked earlier while dinner was cooking.

After dinner we had time for one more craft - a foam monkey:

Then, we headed out to watch the fireworks which were awesome!

What a great day!

Saturday Morning

The most exciting thing about this morning was this:



I could hardly believe we actually blue sky AND sunshine. I almost didn't know what to do with myself!! However, we are currently in the midst of pouring rain and a thunderstorm, but they do say it should clear for fireworks tonight - I sure hope so. We are planning on meeting my parents later to enjoy the festivities!

So far this morning, we have watched Pinocchio (she had never seen it!), gone swimming in the pool:

and we also made cookies for the occasion with our Fourth of July cookie cutters. We need to decorate them later.

We're getting ready to have some lunch and then we are heading to the basement to do a few crafts.

We'll update later with the rest of our fun day!

Guess Who's Here for a Sleepover?

We are very excited to have Miss Olivia for the weekend! We have lots of fun plans for the holiday weekend with her, so stay tuned for updates. Here is the fun we've already had tonight!

It's always important to have ice cream for a bedtime snack - of course it makes you sleep better!





Having fun with MJ and a princess dress up book.





She picked out a new book for us to read for a bedtime story. The sad thing is that we all of a sudden realized that she really is growing up (she'll be 6 in 2 weeks) and we need to get some books that aren't all toddlerish! So, we introduced her to this:

Ju.nie B. Jo.nes just cracks me up - I love some of the humor in the book!

She also decided that she wanted to bunk with us tonight (instead of in the spare room) so we got the air mattress all set up in our room. I guess that makes it a true sleepover!

She's all tucked in and we haven't heard a peep!

Stay tuned for our weekend adventures!

Back to the Grind!

UUGGHHH!!! Back to work we went this morning.... We are both working a short summer job - it is an 11 day project scoring Speci.al Ed Alterna.tive Assess.ments for our state. Today was day one- a full day of training. At least we get down to it actually scoring tomorrow. It was a bit rough getting out of bed this morning as we have been sleeping in for the past week. It won't be bad though, and the pay is good - then we get to have the rest of the summer to ourselves.

As for Willy, our dog, he is not completely better yet, but we are finally on the right track. We went for blood work again on Tuesday and FINALLY all of his levels are reaching into the normal ranges. So, we finish one antibiotic tomorrow, another next Tuesday, and then he goes back next Friday for blood and we'll talk about weaning off the pred.nisone based on those blood levels. Let's just say he's giving us a run for our money with this one.

And finally, for the big surprise around here - IT'S STILL RAINING!!! Yeah, 21 of 30 days in June it rained and it is forecasted to rain through next week as well. They are saying we might get a bit of a break this weekend, but right back to the rain next week. We are seriously contemplating building an ark and bringing our animals in two by two!!!

That's all for here - looking forward to the weekend as we get to have Olivia for the weekend - hopefully we'll get to sneak in a fireworks display or two, but it's not looking real promising with the weather the way it has been. We'll just have to do some other fun and festive activities.