Ultrasound pics - IT"S A GIRL!!!

Ultrasound

We went in for our ultrasound on November 30th at 20 weeks pregnant. I was feeling pretty nervous about the outcome since we were wanting a girl so badly and knowing that this is my last pregnancy.
It is just so amazing to see you little baby moving around inside you up on the screen that that alone almost brought me to tears. We had mentioned to the ultrasound tech that we were really hoping for a girl and at one point so said something like "I think you got what you wanted" but I wasn't sure if I had heard her correctly so I tried not to get my hopes up.
As we were going through checking everything on the baby for proper development she showed us the "bottom" again and put a little arrow on the screen. She said "you see where it is flat? that is where something would be for a boy." I was feeling pretty choked up but I still didn't want to get overly excited since I know it is harder to tell a girl than a boy.
After we were all finished I asked how confident she was that if was a girl and she said that we had several good looks from different angles and unless it was hiding pretty well it was definitely a girl!
We came home and showed the ultrasound pictures to the boys and my mom and they were very excited to find out we would be having a little girl in April. Everything is measuring on time and the development all looked good. We are very thankful for the family that God has given us to care for. Praise God for answered prayers!
Today Hayden has preschool and will be taking the ultrasound pictures in as a "special" show and tell day so he is excited about that also.
I will get some of the ultrasound pictures posted once I am able to get them scanned.

Announcement

The boys have an announcement.....

We will be adding a new little brother or sister next Spring! I am currently 14 weeks/3 months along. My due date is April 19, 2010. I have had one ob appt and my second one is Tuesday so we are excited to get to hear the heartbeat this time! We are all keeping our fingers crossed for a little girl!!

New ride

So last friday we went to the DSM area to do some car shopping. We traded in my silver sebring for a black pacifica. I love it!! Lots of room and drives really nices!

A little behind

Ok so I am obviously not a very good blogger since it has been over a month since my last post. We now have a new roof on the house and garage and new gutters on the house. The bathroom is so close to being done I can taste it - just need to prime and paint the trim around the shower! So now of course since we have things all fixed up - it's time to try and sell it! We are looking for a place with a little more room for us so hopefully someone will buy ours soon and we can find something bigger!! That's all for now. Hopefully some pictures soon!

Roofing!

So we have finally decided on a few weekends that should work for us to get the house and garage reroofed. We will be tearing off all the old shingles and then putting down new paper and shingles - the whole works! Hopefully this doesnt end up costing us a fortune! We are planning on new gutters for the house and garage too!

I have called a few places around town and gotten some price quotes so now we just have to decide who to order from, pick out the color and order them! And then pray that it doesnt rain on the weekend we need to get it done!

hot rod pics

me and the boys at Eddyville

the boys with the Nash

the boys with the 38 Chevy

Car Shows

Car show season is in full swing. We spend the 4th of July weekend camping up at the Iowa State Fairgrounds in DSM and going to the Good Guys show. The boys loved it and were sad to see it end on Sunday afternoon.

This weekend is our show here in Pella. Friday night we will be out at South Overlook at Red Rock Lake and Saturday day we will be downtown and then back out to the lake for the evening. This is the 30th anniversary of the Pella Bologna Nationals!

I am sure I will have lots of pictures from both shows soon! :-)

more recent bathroom pics

damage behind the old shower surround

Uppercase Living decorations

more new Uppercase Living decoration

Sprinkelr fun!

Happy Birthday to Me!

Well I haven't updated this in quite some time so I figured I will write a little something. Monday was my 27th birthday. I am starting to realize that 27 is getting up there! I am inching closer to 30 everyday and not sure how I feel about that?! I am very blessed and I don't take one day of my life for granted. As I reflect on the past 5 years so much has changed! When I turned 22 I was 6 months pregnant with my first child, Hayden. It seems like just yesterday! I was not sure what the future held for me but everything turned out very well and it was all part of God's plan for my life.

I now have two beautiful babies who are healthy and happy and a wonderful husband of 4 and a half years. We both have amazing families and friends who would do anything for us and we are continuing to trust God's plan for our lives.

We are still working on the bathroom. The "last" project is under way. We have ripped out the old shower surround and are in the process of replacing some of the wall that was damaged behind it. This process is barely inching along due to my dad working on replacing their front porch and the business of summer in full swing. Hopefully soon it will be completed and then we can decide whether or not to put our house on the market. It will largely depend on if the house we have found that we are interested in is still for sale. This is just one more way that I am giving up control and letting God handle our decisions and future.

That is all for now - off to bed to rest up for another busy day at work and getting ready for our car show here in town this weekend. Pictures to come!

More bathroom remodel pictures

new counter, sink & faucet!!


new floor!!

Hayden's preschool program pictures

Dancing to the Tootie Talk song

Miss Cherie, Hayden & Miss Peggy - his teachers

Tulip Time pictures

The boys in their costumes on Saturday




Nile in the big wooden shoes




Hayden in the big wooden shoes







Hayden in his first parade! The whole Dutch family

Poffertjies!!

NEW!!

Apparently I am having trouble keeping this up to date....since my last post we had tulip time here and in Pella and Hayden finshed preschool. The bathroom is looking very good and we just need to replace the shower surrond - which we ordered yesterday. Our next house project will be the new roof for the house and garage. We also ordered these yesterday. Memorial day was quite expensive for us this year!! But at least once that is done we will be done with the house - for now.
We have been looking into new vehicles for our family recently. I have only had my sebring for almost 2 years so I would like to pay more off on it before we trade it in but I am looking for just the right vehicle so I thought it would be a good idea to start looking now. If you know of any feedback, positive or negative, about the Chrysler Pacifica please let me know.
I am off to work on a fleece tie blanket for the boys now. Hopefully I can get back on later today and post lots of pics!!

Update

It has been a few weeks since I last updated this so I suppose I better get to it. The bathroom is coming along nicely. We are kind of at a standstill at this point. We are waiting for our new floor to be laid so we can get the new counter/sink/faucet put it. Things should be looking pretty good at this point. The final steps will be fixing the toilet so it doesn't run as much and putting in the new shower surround. I am so excited to see what it will look like when everything is finished. We already went ahead and hung up a few "decorative" things on one wall.

We are all getting excited for Tulip Time in Pella next week! Hayden is looking forward to running in the kid's klompen classic Wednesday night and then all of us will be walking in the 5K Klompen Classic walk afterwards. Still trying to decide how we are going to "transport" Hayden. I know he wont be able to walk to whole thing so we may just have to use a stroller again. This year Hayden will be walking in the parade on Thursday afternoon with the whole Dutch family. He is very excited since he hasn't actually been in the parade since his first Tulip Time when I walked in the baby parade with him, my mom and my niece Sevanna.

I will post again soon and include pictures of the bathroom thus far and the boys' new bunk beds!

Bathroom Remodel

Well we have been working on our main bath for what seems like forever now. It never fails that something we think will only take a little while has been taking three times longer and it should. Pretty much everything we have done so far has hit a bump in the road. Last night we cut a hole in the wall to recess the medicine cabinet and of course there had to be a pipe on the one side. Today we went shopping on another of our many popular Lowe's and Menard's runs and tried to find a new medicine cabinet that would fit our hole - since the first one we bought didn't have a flange. Of course we find out that if you want the size we need it can be ordered but that has a 4 WEEK lead time!! As much fun as it is putting on my make up and doing my hair in our bedroom is I would rather not have to continue doing that for that much longer! We were very optimistically hoping to accomplish a lot of work this week since Jeremy is off work at Pella Corp for the time off rotation. I am still hoping that we get a lot accomplished but we now know that it isn't going to be nearly as much as we had first hoped. I hope to be adding some more work in progress photos and hopefully some somewhat finished pictures soon!!

Nile also thought the work that Grandpa and Daddy were doing looked like fun and decided to help a little too!

Easter

We are very excited for Easter at our house this year. Pella Corp always has an Easter egg hunt the week before so the boys enjoy going to that. Then the city of Pella has on the Saturday before Easter and we have one after Easter lunch with the Rozenboom side. This year the Easter bunny decided to have a hunt at our house also - instead of just bringing the boys baskets. This is for sure an area where, as a parent, I tend to go a little overboard. It generally starts because I am going to cut back from the year before but I just start shopping to early and continue to pick up little things here and there for the boys.

We are going to really try and enforce that the reason we celebrate Easter is because Jesus died on the cross for us and rose again from the dead. It has been fun talking to Hayden about this because he is in his second year of Sunday school at our church and he is starting to understand things and able to answer our questions quite well. He has also amazed us with his wonderful skill of memorizing all his memory verses with little help from us! We are counting down the days at our house and we hope you will all remember the reason for Easter as well!

NKOTB

So my friend Alecia calls me at noon yesterday about going to the New Kids On The Block concert in DSM that night. After considering the idea for a little while I decided it sounded like a lot of fun and just need to check with Jeremy once he was off work at 4. He didnt care so we headed to DSM around 5:30 and had dinner at Legends. We had a great time talking and having a few drinks and then headed to the concert. I was not really sure what to expect because I have honestly only been to two "real" concerts in my life - Amy Grant at Hilton when I was like 14 and REO Speedwagon at the fair when I was 20. We bought the tickets online before we left Pella and we had AWESOME seats. We were row 15 Center! Once the opening act was done we headed to the concourse to get some drinks. I actually ran into another friend I hadnt seen in forever so that was fun. It took a while for NKOTB to get set up and start but if was well worth the wait. I just wish I had downloaded some more of their songs earlier in the day so I knew a few more of them. I was a little on the young side the first time around but I was still a big fan. I remember having a poster and the day I got it was one of the happiest days of my life - at the time. Alecia and I had a total blast and if was definetley worth our time. For Cover Girl Donnie even wore an IA Hawkeyes shirt!! Had to take a few pics of that for my husband! Maybe someday they will come back and do the fair - if so we will for sure be getting tickets!!!

Random Thoughts

Well I thought it was probably time to get this updated again. We are all back to good health so we are thankful for that! Our latest project has been updating our main bath. There was wallpaper so that has been a bigger project than we anticipated. We are finally finished with ripping off all the wallpaper and we just have one tiny section of the walls left to scrub clean. Next is cutting a hole in the wall for the new medicine cabinet and skim coating the walls before we can texture and paint. I know it is going to look so good once we get everything done but it just seems to be taking forever!! Once we get things ready to paint it should go fast. We already have the new counter for the vanity, new sink and faucet, new overhead light and exhaust fan, new wall lights and new medicine cabinet! Lowe's and Menard's has been loving us lately!! Next up on the list is ordering the flooring, a new toilet & and the new shower surround.

On another note we have a few prayer request. A good friend of ours had there twin babies at around 28 weeks and they are both in DSM at Mercy, I believe. They have been doing incredibly well but you can never have too many people praying for you. Their names are Jacob and Emma (the babies).
Also my parents are in Texas/Mexico this week on a mission trip with a group of around 10 people, also including an aunt and uncle of mine. Please pray for their safety!
Finally a good friend of ours here in Pella has family up in North Dakota that has been dealing with all the flooding and snow up there so they could use some extra prayers too!
Thanks in advance! Love ya! :-)

Twilight

So the much awaited release of Twilight happen this Saturday. I got hooked on the books by a couple of good friends and really enjoyed the series. In an attempt to save some $$ I opted to not see the movie in the theater and wait for the DVD. Target had a 3 disc special edition for just $17.99 so I just HAD to buy it! I watched the movie alone Saturday night after the boys went to bed. It was good but I have to say the book was much better. I know they cant fit everything from the book into the movies but there were something that were changed or added to the movies that I didn't think were that great. I guess I will have to watch it a few more times to get the full effect and then I will probably re-read the book for the third time. I am interested to see New Moon next. It will be in theaters in November. I guess that is all for now!

Flu bug

Well generally my family is pretty lucky about avoiding the flu bug. I thought we had made it through another season with nothing more than a few close calls but I apparently "thought" too soon.
Sunday after his nap Hayden woke up with diarrhea and then started throwing up! We tried just giving him some water or Pedia Lite but that all ended up coming back. I was pretty worried about how Sunday night was going to go but he slept well. We were up at 5 AM to use the bathroom and then he drank a little Pedia Lite again and we waited to see how his stomach would react. Unfortunately his little tummy was still not ready for anything so the drink came back up and then we were back to bed at 5:45 AM for a few hours. I am really thankful that on days like this I dont work full time! By the time we were up again around 8:30 AM we tried some toast but that didnt work either. He was able to keep liquids down at this point so we are glad for that! He napped again in the morning and then tried apple sauce but that also came back. We have been pushing the water and Pedia Lite and that is working ok.
Hayden has not eaten anything and kept it down since lunch Sunday. I took him into the doctors today and they tested for strep but it was negative. She also said that he didnt seem dehydrated but to keep a close eye on him and keep doing what we have been. For now the throwing up has stopped but we are still struggling through the diarrhea. His is really too afraid to eat anything so we are just trying a few animal crackers. After the doc appt Hayden slept the rest of the morning and just got up about an hour ago. I am going to work really hard on getting him to take more fluids and pick up some Imodium at the store. I feel so bad for my little guy - he is so weak and shaky that I have to carry him almost everywhere.
Hopefully the rest of us will luck out and remain healthy!

First offical post!

I decided yesterday that it might be fun to start a blog to let everyone know what is happening in our lives.
I am currently reading a book called The Shack. I would HIGHLY recommed this book. I think I should probably re-read this book at least yearly!
The boys are growing like weeds! Hayden recently started preschool on Tuesday and Thursday mornings and he is really enjoying it! Nile was not quite sure what to think after we dropped Hayden off the first day and came back home. He wandered around the house like something was missing until we went back to pick Hayden up 2.5 hours later. It is hard to believe that Hayden is almost 4 1/2 already! He is very excited about turning 5 this fall. Nile seems to learn new words constantly and he really enjoys repeating the words we say - Yikes! :-)
Jeremy is still on reduced hours at Pella Corp but he is on days now so that has been a blessing to our family.
I am still working job share a Pella Corp and I feel very blest to be able to work part time and be home part time. I started selling Tastefully Simple 6 months ago! I really love the products and it is fun to get out and meet new people at parties.

Welcome to our new family blog!!