It's a GIRL!!!

We had our ultrasound this morning and it's a girl. Damien and I both really thought it would be a boy. I guess Damien's dream was right, Alphonse will have to wait his turn to come. He's going to have an older sister first.

The ultrasound was awesome. We got to see her cute little profile, arms, legs, spine, head. She looks healthy which we are very happy about!

She is quite active already. She was in three different positions during the ultrasound! I've knew this already though, because I've been able to feel her for over a week now. She moves around a lot. It's reassuring feeling her moving in there. That means I know she's still doing well. I'm afraid she's going to be quite spunky when she arrives! We're both very excited to meet her!

Damien's Dream

Damien and I both feel like this baby is a boy. We get to find out in less than a week though!

Last week he had a dream about our baby. We had a little boy and his name was Alphonse. But Alphonse had an older sister. So who knows. Maybe it's a girl. I just can't believe his name was Alphonse. I wonder where he got that idea from. He must be reading too many sci-fi books! Alphonse is not on my okayed baby name list.

Boy or Girl?

We are expecting a new addition to our family in April! We had our last doctor's appointment on Wednesday and were able to hear the heartbeat a second time. It's amazing how fast it beats! Glad to know it's still doing well. At our next appointment we'll get to find out the sex of the baby! I thought it would be fun to put a poll up to see what everyone's guesses are. You have until November 17th at 11:59PM. Have fun!

More Summer

In the last post, I briefly mentioned that we spent a week with the Olenslager side of the family. Andrea sent me some fun pictures from our week at the lake and I thought they'd be fun to share!


The Olenslager clan
(Left to right: Damien, Me, Dane, Jarrin, Landon, Andrea, Sofia, Randy, Tyla, & Jon.)



Dane decided to throw me into the lake because I hadn't gotten in the first few days we were there. He was kind enough to put a life jacket on me first!



Landon tried to help Dane get his sunglasses off me before they threw me in.



It didn't work though!







Damien was there too. He loves being in the water!



One of the days we were there, the boys decided to make HUGE water balloons to throw off the top deck at the lake cabin.


Damien getting ready to drop it.



Then Damien and Dane thought it would be so fun to drop it on Dane's head. It's amazing what older brothers can convince younger brothers to do.



Here are the results! I think it hurt a bit, but they did fill it with warm water to help "ease the pain."

We had a great time! Can't wait to see what will happen next time we all get together!

Summer 2011

We were gone on and off for about a month in July and August but it was fun to get to see most of our families. Here's what we did:

• Tyla's (Damien's sister) wedding in Utah
  
• Panama City Beach in Florida with Rita, Tricia, John, and Debbie (It rained almost the whole time we were there! We still had fun though.)

• I visited my family for a week in Washington and "ran" an 8k with my parents
  

• Damien joined me for a week with the Olenslagers for his grandparents' 50th wedding anniversary/Olenslager family reunion at Hayden Lake, Idaho

We really enjoyed our time off from responsibility and spending time with our lovely families but it's always nice to be back home. It took us a few days to get used to the Eastern time zone again. Those three hours make a huge difference.

Projects

I love to sew and I've usually got a project or two in the works! I'll share a few pieces I've made in the last 6 months.

These are some of the samples I've made for the quilt shop I work at.




This is a baby quilt I made for a friend here in Atlanta.


I was asked to test a quilt pattern for a cloth manufacturer. The quilt is hanging up in the quilt shop for the next few months!


My grandmother gave Damien and I this old wicker chair that she had gotten from my great grandma. A bit of the paint is chipping off and the seat cushion has been on there since my great grandma had it. I wanted to update it a bit so I started with recovering the seat cushion! I still need to touch up the paint and make some throw pillows for it, but that's in the works.

Before

After

Close-up of the fabric and piping.

Happy 4th of July

This morning we celebrated by renting road bikes and taking a 16.5 mile ride on the Silver Comet Trail. This was the first time I'd been on a road bike and boy was it fun! We were flying down the trail. It was tiring but we had such a great time.

I even got to ride a bike made by my people. (For those who don't know, my maiden name is Bianco. Pretty close to Bianchi. Same country.)

An Accident During the Primary Program

Here is Damien's embarrassing childhood memory.

When I was little, for some reason I always thought I needed Mom’s permission to go to the bathroom. Whenever I felt the call of nature, I would run and tell Mom, “I have to pee!” or “I have to poop!” And she would usually reply, “Well, go do it, then!” Neither of us is sure why I felt such a need to ask permission/announce my trips to the bathroom.

One Sunday at church we had the Primary Program. All of us children went up to the stand and sat in the choir seats. For a child, any normal Sacrament meeting can seem like a long time. For a child that needs to pee, Sacrament meeting can drag on for eternity.

Some time into the program, I started feeling that familiar pressure down below that means a trip to the restroom is at hand. Unfortunately, I had no idea how much longer the program was going to last. So, I tried to get Mom’s attention, in order to ask for her permission to leave the stand and sprint to the restroom.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t seem to get Mom’s attention. I admit my attempts were feeble. There was no way I was going to wave my hands and make a scene in from of the whole congregation. So, I settled on making pained faces and hoping she would notice.

That wasn’t getting me anywhere and things were starting to get serious. All of my fidgeting was no longer from boredom; it was an attempt to stave off the inevitable. My faces were getting more and more desperate and my agony was playing out in front of the whole church.

Finally, I reached the breaking point. Mom was never going to notice me and my little body couldn’t suffer another minute. So I did the only sensible thing.

I wet my pants.

Fortunately, the choir seat had a nice thick cushion that soaked things up better than a kitchen sponge. I was able to enjoy the rest of the program in warm comfort. Everything was just fine until the program ended. Then I had to get out of my seat and reveal my dirty deed.

I have no recollection of what happened after that. Maybe Mom took me home to change my clothes. Maybe I was forced to wear them for the rest of church as a punishment. Whatever happened, from that point on I made fewer and fewer attempts to ask Mom for permission before going to the bathroom. I was growing up!

On a related note, I feel bad for whoever sat in that chair after me…

An Embarassing Moment from Childhood

I've been wanting Damien and I to record stories about our lives. We want these stories for two reasons:

1. a way for our posterity to remember us
2. something to look back on and remember all the funny times in our lives

We began this evening by writing about an embarrassing moment from childhood. Here is my story.

In Spokane, one of our neighbors was the Maughan family. They had seven children, including a daughter a year younger than me. Our backyards faced each other and there used to be a slat missing in the fence so we could slide back and forth between yards to play.

The Maughans always had things going on at their house and a pool in their backyard. Bean and I accepted every opportunity to play and swim because they were few and far between. The Maughan children were not allowed to play unless their rooms were clean and chores done, which they never were.

One day I was over there swimming, don’t remember if Bean was there or not, and we were taking turns jumping into the pool. They had this old red-painted wooden picnic table and we slid it close to the edge of the pool so we could jump off of it into the deep end. We had taken a couple of turns already and everything had been fine. I got up to jump off again and this time I jumped and the table collapsed underneath me.

Thankfully, I was able to get enough momentum and make it into the pool, but the table was not so lucky. It had had enough and finally the legs gave out. I felt embarrassed about it falling on my turn and the Maughans gave me a bad time about it, only making it worse.

Looking back, the table was quite old and it could have happened to any one of us. That table had been left out in the weather for years and it was just a matter of time before it gave out. It’s too bad that it had to happen on my turn though.

I'll post Damien's next.

Another 5k Down...

two more to go. Damien signed up to participate in this program at his work. He got a free t-shirt for signing up and now he has to participate in 3 races between June 1 and sometime in September. The first 5k we did in May doesn't even count because it was before the start date. We ran the a 5k last Saturday, so we have two more races to run.

The race last week went quite well. We improved our time by a whole minute and I beat Damien by 5 seconds. We decided to try GU because we had talked to some friends about it and how they really liked it. (Side note: GU is a gel that you eat to help with energy levels during a race. It is mostly for endurance races, but we wanted to try it anyway to see if it made a difference.) We both took a GU 30 minutes before the race and this is how Damien felt by the end.


Yes, he looks ill. He actually threw up moments after crossing the finish line. He looked and felt much better after that.


I only experienced a side ache as a result of the GU and was able to push through it. I was quite satisfied with my race. I was able to sprint past this lady right before the finish line. She wasn't too thrilled about it, but it made my day!


Clark Howard, a consumer advocate who has a radio and television show, was talking to people after the race. Damien listens to him on a regular basis and wanted to talk to him. We were actually filmed during our chat, so we'll let you know if we see it air.

Raspberries

I just ate a huge handful of raspberries from Costco. Yum, they are so delicious! Definitely one of my favorite fruits! Every time I eat them they remind me of being a kid at my grandparents' house in Utah. They used to have a large raspberry patch in their backyard and every summer when we were there, we'd get to pick raspberries! I remember eating the sun-warmed raspberries right off the plant. Yes, I picked it off the plant first, but I didn't wait to wash them inside first.

Although, it might be a good idea to wash them first. This one time I was out in the patch picking and eating berries, when I was supposed to be collecting them for everyone to enjoy, and I started to chew this one. It was so gross, a little crunchy and very pungent. Yeah, there must have been a bug on that berry. If I would have washed it first, that bug probably wouldn't have been on there. That didn't stop me from eating them right off the plant though. After that, I just double checked to make sure there weren't any bugs on them before I popped them into my mouth.

Does anyone else love raspberries? Damien doesn't love them because of all the seeds. I was telling some girls at work how much I loved raspberries and they couldn't believe anybody actually liked them. Up to that point, I was under the impression that a lot of people like raspberries. I mean they sell them in huge containers at Costco. People have to be buying them for Costco to keep carrying them.

The Big Peach 5k

Damien and I ran our first 5k of the year. We had a lot of fun running it! The weather started out in the 50's but warmed right up! It was a fairly hilly course, but I think that may have helped our times. We set new personal records of about 26:30. Damien beat me by a few seconds but that's just because he saw the finish line before I did.

After completing the race I felt so good, like I could run another couple of miles. That was a really great feeling. I still remember the first 5k I ran while at BYU. When I finished I felt like I was going to die. I never had plans to run another 5k at that point, but I guess things can change. I'd trained more and had been eating healthier and it made all the difference! I'm even thinking about running a 10k in the fall. We'll see how it goes. Damien told me there is no way he's running it with me. I guess I'll just have a fan to cheer me on then.

Dane

My brother-in-law, Dane, just got back from a 2-year church mission to Honduras on Thursday. We were really lucky that he had a 3 hour layover here in Atlanta on his way back home! He made it through customs okay, even though he had two machetes in his luggage, and we got to spend about an hour and a half with him.


We got dinner with him at the airport and it was fun hearing him try to speak English again. He was having a hard time staying in English mode. A few words and phrases kept jumping out in Spanish, but we usually knew what he meant.

When we were ordering our food, Dane tried to order the Bella sandwich. He told the order taker "beya" though, because in Spanish, two L's make a y sound. The person taking our order was a little confused. We soon figured it out and were able to translate for him.

We are so glad we got to spend some time with him. He has matured quite a bit since we last saw him, even looks a bit more grown-up, but he's still the Dane we know and love!

San Antonio

Once a year, Damien's company has an annual general meeting with all of their employees at a resort destination. They invite the employees' families/significant others along for the trip.

This year the destination was San Antonio, Texas. It was a quick trip full of lots of fun activities! Here's what we did:

Saturday
For dinner the company set up a street fair just for us with 15 different food trucks. They had Indian food, cupcakes, BBQ, corn on the cob, deep-fried Oreos, etc.

For entertainment there were men carving ice sculptures with chain saws, a stand where you could get henna tattoos, and men playing African drums. While this was all going on they also had a high school marching band come through and a group of people on Harleys.


Sunday
They held a picnic-style Mother's Day brunch in the morning where we received really nice insulated bags full of food.

That evening they held a black tie dinner for all of the adults outside on the lawn. Following the dinner they had drinks and dancing at a club there at the resort with a DJ and drum set.

The Atlanta project crew

Monday
Continental breakfast in the morning where they had steel-cut oatmeal, which I loved! Damien had meetings until noon, but we got to enjoy the lazy river, pool, and 3 water slides that afternoon.



That evening we enjoyed Texas-style BBQ that was absolutely delicious. They had activities including mechanical bull riding, armadillo races, a live bull, caricature portraits, and the live band Reckless Kelly.




Tuesday
We enjoyed a nice breakfast and headed back to Atlanta.

We had a great time and were able to relax a little bit too!

This Week's Happenings

A few fun things that happened this past week:

1. Damien baked me my favorite chocolate chip cookies and they were GREAT!

2. We went for a run today outside and the weather was gorgeous!

3. I got my sewing machine cleaned and serviced. It runs like a brand new machine. (You're supposed to get your machine cleaned once a year and I'd never had it done. It had been 8 years since I received my machine as a gift. A little embarrassing!)

4. I played an April Fool's joke on Damien today even though it isn't April first. It's better when he isn't expecting it!

The Atlanta Temple

The LDS temple here in Atlanta has been under reconstruction for almost two years. Along with updating the temple, they have updated the Beehive Clothing building too. (This is where you can buy white clothing to wear in the temple.) Yesterday I went with my good friend Allyson and we helped Beehive unpack dresses and get the store ready for business. It made me even more excited for the temple to be rededicated.


I've been working on more family history so that we will be ready to take these names through the temple when it's open. Damien and I are excited to give our ancestors the opportunity to accept the Gospel if they choose. I think we have around 26 names so far between our two families! Now we just have to wait for the rededication. The open house will be April 9-23 with the rededication on May 1. Anyone and everyone is invited to come to the open house.

To find out more about why we Mormons do family history work, go here.

Valentine's Day

I was reading a friend's blog awhile ago and came across a post about The 14 Days of Valentine's. Basically, you do something special for you spouse each day leading up to and on Valentine's Day. I loved the idea and decided to do it for Damien this year. I think he really enjoyed it. Here's what I did:

1. One homemade Valentine card
   
2. Two shoe trees
3. Toy Story 3 movie night
4. Rock climbing date
5. Ciniminis from Burger King for breakfast (500 calories)
6. Six GOOD chocolate bars
7. Seven pieces of Camembert (his favorite French cheese) with fancy crackers in his lunch
8. Sourdough waffles for breakfast (8 ingredients)
9. Coupon to have nine items of clothing ironed
10. Homemade origami box with slips of paper inside listing ten things I love about him
    
11. "I love you" written in eleven different languages and posted on the mirror
12. Homemade crossword puzzle
13. Bakers dozen of his favorite cookies
14. Valentine's Day dinner

It was really fun to do for him, especially because he didn't know what was going on until day 2. When I gave him his homemade Valentine card (on day one) he thanked me but the look on his face said, "Where is my gift? Is this all I get?" It was really fun come up with everything and get it all together secretly without him knowing. He almost caught me one day when he came home early. Luckily our door has a lock on the inside that can only be unlocked from inside. It gave me enough time to shove what I was working on into a drawer before opening the door without him being curious!

Christmas in NOLA

We flew to New Orleans on my birthday and spent two weeks there. Here are some of the highlights.

Picked out a Christmas Tree
This tree was too small.

And this tree had too few branches.


But this one was just right. We just had to get it tied to the car well enough to make it down the block.



Then Damien had to get it in the house.


Celebrate my 24th birthday!
I got some fabulous shoes...had Thai food for dinner...


homemade chocolate cake with chocolate frosting for dessert!


Afterward we decorate the Christmas tree


while Damien fell asleep on the couch because he was sick.


Christmas Eve
The family came over for the gift exchange.

We got to open one gift before bed. Rita and Tricia got me raccoon mittens. They are nice and warm but still freak me out a bit if I actually look at them! (I'm terrified of raccoons after having a few encounters with them.)


Christmas Day
We had a great Christmas despite Damien's expressions in these first two pictures.



My husband likes to wear Indian dresses to dance around in. Bet you never knew that!


Dinner with the family. You have to be young and hot to sit at this table.


A few days later
We gave the Zellers a brief tour of NOLA.

New Year's Eve
Dinner with our friends and...

fireworks and ice hockey. Damien got owned by a girl who's 12!

New Year's Day
Lunch with the Krentels!