Update on Our Life

Where to start!! Our life is kinda crazy right now! 

So lets start with Parker! He is doing so great! We have been off of the oxygen for almost a month now! And I have to say it is so nice and SO much easier having a wireless baby!! At his last appointment he weighted 11 pounds and is around 26 inches in length! We started speech therapy last Friday and it went great! We will go see Ms. Connie once a week. Those of you who do not know, of course this is not for actually speaking!! The speech therapist will be working with him on learning to properly eat from the bottle. We will soon be starting both occupational and physical therapies. We will more than likely continue therapies through his first year to try to catch him up developmentally to his actual age. He is actually 5 months old but is on a developmental level of 2 1/2 months. He is starting to hold his head up really well on his own, with an occasional bobble!! He has started rolling over to his sides but not all the way yet! He is always smiling and talking to me...he is such a happy baby! We have an appointment with a kidney doctor in March at Childrens in LR, followed by an mri that afternoon. If you did not know, Parker was born with only his left kidney. But so far it seems to be functioning correctly. I will post after his appointment. Overall, he is doing so well!! 

As for Nathaniel and I, we are busy busy!! I am going a lil stir crazy being stuck in the house 24/7. It doesnt help that Nathaniel has been working at least one day each weekend since the new year. Dont get me wrong, I am so thankful they have work. But this momma would like a lil break every now and then! We cant wait for warmer weather and to finally get through this awful flu season. So we can get out of this house some! I love staying at home with him but at the same time I am really missing my kiddos and classroom. Not to mention, my lovely teacher friends!! 

In other Big news: as of this coming Wednesday are house will officially be on the market!! We are so excited. I have been working hard on boxing things up and decluttering the house to help it show better! And when Nathaniel has a day off he helps with the bigger things. Though, it is a tad bit stressful at times I truly feel it will make it alot easier when we do sell and move temporarily into a rental home. We have searched and searched and just can not find what we want. So, we have decided to build at the family farm in Wesley!      I can not express enough how excited I am to get out of the city and back to the country!! I cant wait for Parker and I to spend our days outside with the cows, garden or just playing in the dirt!!! Nathaniel and I are  both so excited to build and choose everything to do with the home. BUT, I at least am so anxious, nervous, scared etc about it! There is so many choices to make and if you know me, I can be a bit indecisive!! The decisions have already started and we are already having trouble....picking the house plan. Whew....what a decision that is. You can change interior things down the road and even tear down walls or out new ones up but the main structure/design of the home cant be changed....well at least not easily! We have always talked about building our home and doing it ourselves. But, now that we have Parker that has changed. If we built ourselves it would take awhile do to only working on weekends/days off. So we have found a builder that we will be meeting with soon and so far have a good feeling about him!! Ideally, we hope to sell our house right away, to break ground on the new home the day we close and to be moving in just in time for Parkers 1st birthday!! But, we will put all our trust in the Lord to lead us during this big step in our life. We know that his timing is always perfect and so is his plan!! So, we just pray for direction and the path to be clear.

So, in a short! story that is our current life!! We are doing great!

Oh, as for our first born...fur baby!! She is doing great and has adjusted well to Parker being home. To say there is a little bit of jealousy would be an understatement!! But, she seems to really love him and be interested in him. I cant wait till they can be in the backyard running and playing being the best of friends!! 

The Very UnNormal Pregnancy

Finally, after almost 3 years our prayers were answered and dreams were on the road to coming true!!! Little did we know, that we were just boarding a roller coaster of crazy ups and downs to get to that dream! We were so excited to be pregnant again and wanted to shout it from the rooftop, but with the previous miscarriage we waited till we were further along to let parents and close family/friends know. After the excitement of letting them know, we had a huge scare one night. At 12 weeks 2 days on a Friday night, I started bleeding and we just knew it was another miscarriage. We went to the er at Willow Creek assuming the worst. But to our surprise after lots of tests and an ultrasound, we were not miscarrying. But I had had a blood clot rupture...aka hemorrhage.  This was a relief to hear but this could cause us to miscarry if it continued to where the placenta was attached, it could cause it to start detaching. I was sent home with the orders to follow up with Dr. Hinton on Monday. Dr. Hinton done another ultrasound and it had gotten a little bigger over the weekend. She put me on partial bed rest and said to come back in a week. We ended up having to come back every week for 2 months until it finally healed. Because of having to go for weekly ultrasound we were able to know weekly that our baby was growing great and found out at 15 weeks that it was a little boy!! At our 20 week ultrasound, they did the routine anatomy exam. During this exam, we finally had the good news that the hemorrhage had healed! Excited from that news we went in to see the doctor next(not our regular doctor this day) not expecting to hear bad news. She said they seen not one but three issues that was alarming and since there was 3 different issues that there was a good chance he may have some chromosomal issues. Alarming things: 1: Calcium deposit on the muscle of his heart. They said this was not to worrisome and that they seen it often. And that there was a good chance it would be gone by the time he was born. 2: 2 vessel umbilical cord instead of 3. They said this could keep him from gaining as much weight at the end of pregnancy, as he would if it was 3. Basically, with only having 2 he was not able to get as much nutrients without the 3rd vessel. 3: No right kidney. As long as his left kidney functioned properly, he can live without his right one. They said he would probably have yearly appointments until he was 18 but he should be fine. Although, the said he shouldnt play contact sports and risk damaging his left/only kidney. Because of him having 3 different issues it alarmed them. Usually when they see several different issues, it causes concern of a chromosome defect. The doctor we seen that day said she wanted us to have a level 2 ultrasound done to look at everything. It was a very scary appointment. So we scheduled our level 2 and anxiously awaited that day. The day finally came and we were so nervous, but knew God was in control. The ultrasound revealed everything the previous one had but nothing more. We video chatted with a nurse and genetics doctor, both from Little Rock. The genetics doctor said she thought everything would be ok and that when he was born she wouldn't be surprised if he was healthy and without any genetic or chromosome defects. We thankfully left that day thinking everything was fine and we were good to go and enjoy the rest of the pregnancy. But just 3 days later, I was sitting on the couch when my water broke. We went to the emergency room. We were only 23 weeks 2 days along and we truly thought we were going to loose the pregnancy. But to our surprise the doctor said he was admitting us to be put on bedrest. I was not contracting so they said we would stay on bedrest until I delivered. And that the next 48 hours would be a deciding factor. Most women whos water breaks delivers within 48 hours. Well like the rest of the pregnancy, that did not happen for us. I was able to stay on bed rest and keep baby boy in and growing for 6 weeks. At 29 weeks to the day, on September 19 baby boy finally entered the world. He was 3lbs 2oz. Laying in bed for 6 weeks was not an easy thing to do but it was so worth it when we finally got to see our precious baby boy!!

Nathaniel and I have always wanted a family and couldn't wait till it was our turn! But God had different timing plans than us! We started trying, well not really preventing July of 2009. We had lots of struggles on the way. I was diagnosed with Polycystic ovarian syndrome/disease in 2006. This is a very frustrating syndrome to have. It caused my body to change in so many not fun ways, ie: weight gain. Along with everything, we were told it could make it complicated to get pregnant and higher risk of miscarriage. But with all that, we had faith in God's plan for us. We started getting help from the doctors by taking clomid and then we had 2 AI's (artificial insemination). After our second AI, we finally had that second pink line on the test that we had long hoped for! But, at just 5 weeks along I started bleeding. We went in first thing the next morning to the doctor and sadly we had a miscarriage the following week. It was something that was painful both physically and emotionally. After the miscarriage, we decided to take a step back and just go with the flow for awhile. Well, we went with the flow until about Dec of 2011. My close friend Sam works for Parkhill, so we decided to changed doctors and see what they would say. We started seeing Dr. Emily Hinton and fell in love with her right away. She is so sweet, down to earth and personable! We started Clomid again along with AI. Our first round was unsuccessful and we were sure the second would be to. The second has quite the story of why but a probably a lil to personal to write about. Anyways, the second was successful and come tomorrow we will be 26 weeks pregnant!! Praise the Lord!! Though this pregnancy has not been easy and defiantly scary most of the way. I will post in the next few days about the pregnancy itself. Anyways, if you are struggling with becoming pregnant dont give up Faith! Here is a qoute that helped me along the way: 'Faith in God, includes Faith in his timing'!!

Celebrating 3

Wow how time flies!! On Dec.13th, Nathaniel and I celebrated our 3rd Anniversary! We booked a 2 night stay at the Mulberry Ranch Cabins on the Pig Trail towards Ozark. We spent Saturday driving around through Altus, Paris and Mt. Magazine! We love driving and splorunking(sp?)!! We was given a tour of the Post Family winery in Altus, which was really cool! We drove all the way to the top of Mt. Magazine and boy was that view AMAZING!! Absolutely breathtaking!! We have decided to stay in one of their cabins on anniversary #4!! Extra excited about this one bc they have pet friendly ones!! We had dinner Saturday night at the Weideker Restuarant, part of the winery. I'm sad to say, we weren't to impressed. : (  We finished up our weekend Sunday in Fort Smith doing some last minute Christmas shopping! We had a blast together...as always!!! 

Wow...Time Flies!

It has been just about 3 Months since my last post!! Whew! There really hasn't been a whole lot going on in our lives besides getting ready and starting the holiday season off!! One bigger exciting yet scary thing that has been going on is we put our house on the market a little over a month ago! We started looking around for houses not really expected to find the 'right' house after thinking we were going to build! We we were wrong! We found a house in Wesley with 7.5 acres and almost double the size of ours!! We both have fallin' in love!! We both feel like this house is meant for us. So after lots of praying and laying out the details, we put an offer in! Yikes!! Yes before ours has sold! But we love it and did not want to miss out on it plus we feel confident in ours selling! Negative yet postive think about the house...it is in short sale! Positives: we might get it at a great price and short sales can take a lil while giving time for ours to sell. Negatives: they might counteroffer higher saying we are buying it for too little and the waiting is tough!! I am not gonna lie, Nathaniel and I are a little nervous about our house not selling before everything might fall into place with the new house and the closing date. Don't take us wrong, we are not going into this stupidly, we know we can afford both mortages if it comes to that but we do not want to! I,myself, did lots of praying and talking to God while Nathaniel was gone on his hunting trip and faithfully felt ready to put an offer in. So when he returned home, we had that lovely heart to heart!!! He felt the same way, so in went our offer!! In the meantime, we have had to things with the process that has defiantly tested our faith! A couple things that help me; 1: a fellow teacher at work said you will struggle with it your whole life, but when you lay it down at the cross DO NOT pick it back up!! 2: a lil saying I read awhile back that I say to myself daily "Faith in God includes Faith in his timing"!!! Day by day we anxiously await the phone call saying we have another showing on our house and await at the earliest mid Dec the phone call saying they accepted our offer!! But for now all we can do is Pray, Pray, Pray and Pray some more and put our entire Faith in God and know that what he has planned will happen in his timing!! We have Faith that all of this is meant to be, we just have to remember it will not happen we when say it will but when God says the time is now...which is always the perfect time and in the perfect way!!! In the meantime, if you know of someone who is looking to buy a house send them our way! It is perfect for first time home buyers and is in a great community!

Button Canvas

So I have newly gotten an addiction...its lovely little name is Pinterest http://pinterest.com/!!! If you have not checked it out, then you so should. But...BEWARE!!! I have already addicted 2 people within a week!! It is a website full of ideas from crafts to recipes, it has it all!! The site is constantly updating! All of the stuff comes from other peoples blogs, etc! It is A-mazing!!!

I seen this on the site and fell in love with it! So since we do not have kids, I decided to make some for my fellow teacher sweet Ms. Amy! I am in love with her children...and of course her! She is absolutely the sweetest person I have ever met!! I knew she would love and appreciate them, so I chose her and her girls to I guess you could say be my guinea pigs!! Ha! So since the girls share a room, I wanted to make them similiar but still unique to the girl! I look at both Hancocks and Hobby Lobby before I found this fabric. So I thought the fabric was a bit of a hassle...I was so wrong. The buttons...oh the buttons! Hancock had a good assortment of buttons(which I went to first), but I did not purchase any yet due to not knowing my fabric chose yet. Hobby Lobby had buttons, but no packages that contained all the same color. So I went to Jo-Anns, bc online they seemed to have alot. Well, they did but only had one left of the pink. So I had to drive back to Hancock to purchase more. Why can't there be one place with everything you need...or the business' be side by side??

I used 11x14 canvas, half a yard of the fabric, short piece of ribbon and it took about a whole package of buttons!

Cover the front of the canvas with the fabric and staple to the back...just like they do with the canvas material itself. Then, I penciled an outline of how I wanted the letters to look. I painted on Elmers Craft Glue and started placing the buttons. Once finished, I tied a bow with the ribbon and stapled the ends to the back of the canvas. That's all folks!!! Overall, the project cost just under $6 a canvas! Awesome easy to make gifts at a great price!!

I love how they turned out and can't wait to make some more!!

Enter to Win a $500 Shopping Spree to MASONS!!!!

Are you ready to win $500 to Masons? Go to Masons facebook page, like it and Comment on giveaway photo, and tell what you would buy if you are the winner. Maximize your winning potential by Tweeting about this contest, posting it to your blog, or reposting it on your facebook page. Just leave a comment on giveaway photo for each additional entry. That's four chances to win! Contest ends on September 8th, GOOD LUCK!