Internet Spottiness and Other Incidents

Our Internet has been having trouble all week.  We thought at first maybe it had something to do with interference from the air conditioners, since it would immediately quit when the air was on.  Then came a day when it was pretty warm, but not warm enough to turn the air on...and it still konked out.  Why?  We have no idea.  Perhaps it's allergic to heat.  If this keeps up, though, I'm going to have to write blog posts in Word and post them whenever I have a random few minutes of connectivity.

It's been a very slow week or two.  I'm still very low on energy, though I found out over the past few days that I feel drastically better if I drink about twice as much water as I'm used to and eat more fruit.  Strange combination, but I'm now having days where I feel nasty at times rather than most of the morning or afternoon.  We went to visit the midwife for the first time, which was very interesting - with Joshua, we miscarried before we made it to our initial consultation, though that's partly because I called quite a bit later along than I did this time.  We're working on 9 weeks right now and I didn't call to set up an appointment until 11 last time.  As Ben says, "This time around, everything is different."

I think that's a very encouraging sign.  It's weird to be happy about feeling crummy, but I never felt like this with Joshua and finally just decided that must simply be normal for me.  Perhaps not, after all.

Ben has had a slow spell at work, which has been quite a blessing because he's been working from home and only going in for a few hours in the afternoon, taking quite a bit of responsibility off my hands on days when I end up moving pretty slowly for a while.  What a life we have!

Ben's sister Kim was in town for a few weeks with our brand-new cute-as-a-button niece Emma - we found out again that it's one thing knowing with our heads that living next door to Mom and Dad is a good thing and quite another experiencing what it's like to just have Kim and Emma drop by every day while Emma was a happy girl so Grandma could see her and hold her.  Not something that would've happened if we'd been even five minutes away: planned visits are just so much different than living normal life.  Stephen was here for a few days as well and we had everyone over for tacos one Sunday afternoon.  By an odd series of events, my siblings were all here as well and we introduced Anna to tacos.  From what I hear, it was a case of new-favorite-food-at-first-taste.

And it turns out our house really can hold eighteen people.  There was a shortage of chairs, but having the wall gone between the kitchen and living room meant everyone actually could move around and sit together.  I'm looking forward to having an additional space in the kitchen and another living room area - this house will be a comfortable place to have family get-togethers when all is said and done.

Speaking of which, we've been asked pretty frequently when we're actually going to build the addition.  The simplest answer is "we don't know".  The more complicated one is, "Perhaps in September, if we can get everything lined up correctly."  The plans are moving forward, albeit quietly for now.  Aaron has done a lot of work the past few weeks making sure the addition will fit within various codes and requirements and has been building a cost list so we can effectively budget.  Dad has come up with a fairly simple way to modify the roof that does not involve completely tearing off the old one or drastically changing the shape, etc.  We have a little better idea who might be doing what in the way of actually building.  But we're definitely not ready to start yet.

So that is what's going on with us.  I would really like to make some more normal blog posts and add some pictures of our rapidly growing garden (I've never had a garden grow this well...I think it's because Dad and Ben are babying it even more than I normally do!), but for now I think I will just post this quick update and start my plan of writing-offline-and-uploading-when-there's-a-chance tomorrow.

Because to be quite blunt, I'm usually not able to keep my eyes open any later than 10:30 and it's 11.  Quite a difference from last summer, when Ben and I routinely stayed up until 1 or 2 AM because we were reluctant to say goodnight.  We were just about to get engaged this time last year.  

Wow.  Things have really changed a lot since then...