Stice Family

Ashton had a great birthday. Adam and Katrina (Todd's brother and sister in law) came by for dinner with their new baby, Camden. We also had several family members stop by to wish him happy birthday and stay for cake and ice cream. He was a very good boy and loved all of the attention. We gave him some match cars and a little match car race track that he was actually with me when I bought it. How tacky is that. I hid it in my closet for a month and he was constantly trying to brake into the bag and make the little sounds go off on it. So he was thrilled to finally see it again and actually play with it.

I had my glucose test at my Dr. appointment last week and I passed! Yeah! That means I'm gaining weight because I'm naughty, not because of my pankreas! My swelling actually went down, finally. At the apt. I asked the Dr. about the swelling issues. She said I had a lot of veins in my lower abdomen and legs that were getting pinched off when I sat. And I do sit a lot to keep off my feet because vericose veins are surfacing. I had also spent a good deal of time sitting at the computer to type up family recipes for the book I gave as gifts. The Dr. said I just needed to sit intermittently with standing and laying down in the mix to keep the blood flowing and the swelling down. That's been working well so far.

We have some good friends who own a cabin in Tamarack that rented it to us and Todd's other family members for a very generous discount this past weekend. All in all it held four families, a total of 18 people. And it was a beautiful weekend up there. The kids were in a winter wonderland playing outside all day. The older guys had their fun on their 4-wheelers. They found a nice huge sledding hill to drop kids off at the top, then speed to the bottom to pick them up and do it over again. Hot chocolate water was in the pot around the clock and we played a lot of cards inside too. Just a very relaxing weekend. My favorite part was the breakfast for dinner at the Pancake House restaurant in McCall. They have giant cinnamon rolls the size of a large dinner plate for appetizers and massive plates of loaded hash browns to die for! I'm pregnant, I can't help but be all about the food!

The evening we got back, we had to move around a bunch of furniture to make way for new carpet the next day. I guess I wasn't thinking too well when we made the install apt. We wished we could just come home and relax. But the carpet is in and it really made all the difference! It amazed me how I could paint, decorate, and keep my house as immaculate as I wanted and STILL feel like it was shabby. Pale carpet full of impossible stains is just such a damper. But it's gone! Hooray! Except, I'm losing my voice from barking at the kids CONSTANTLY to keep their food and shoes off the new carpet. They've got to learn! I did color match the new carpet to the color of the stains we used to have, haha. In hopes that any possible new stains would just blend in....

The carpet took 2 days to be installed so we could move half the house's furniture to one side one day, and then to the other side to finish laying all of the carpet the next day. Our beds were all taken apart and crammed into rooms and everything was in crazy disarray. You couldn't get from the living room to the kitchen without rock climbing, which doesn't go over too well when you're pregnant. So at the last minute, we decided to get a hotel room. The hotel asked for my address at check in and the clerk raised an eyebrow. So I explained that, yes, I'm from around here, but had no place to sleep or function at home with the new carpet being put in and moving everything around. He looked so proud of himself when he replied that if our backs are stiff from all the moving, they have a room with a hot tub in it for only $20 more. My jaw hit the floor. He gave it to me at a discount and I was happy as a lark. Then I remembered that you can't use hot tubs when you are preggers!

SO. We got to the room and I was pleasantly surprised to see the hot tub empty. Which meant we could fill it to whatever temp. we wanted. So Todd used it first at a blazing hot temp. and then drained some water out for me to use it, filling it back up with some cooler water. It was just what the Dr. ordered and we were very happy to have chosen to stay there rather than sleep on the floor in a crazy house. I've never heard of a hotel with hot tubs in it, but we were happy to discover such a thing. The next night we had our bedrooms back so we couldn't justify going back to the hotel while the living room and office were out of order, but it was tempting.

Now, after moving literally everything we own on carpeted areas (everything but the kitchen and bathrooms), we are all the more convinced we have to get rid of some things. I've been at this for a while, but I'm clearly far from being done. So we put back into rooms what we knew we wanted to be in the rooms. But the rest is in mounds lining one of the living room walls. It's a little overwhelming, and of course, is mostly MINE. So I'm a pack rat and didn't know it! Most of it came from our office.

There's just not enough room in it to find homes for everything. I have a lot of scrapbook/card-making supplies that I keep in a suitcase and a plastic tub of more of it stacked on top of the suit case, then a few stacks of decorative paper and boxes of ink that were stacked in the corner of the room, a couple piles of bills that need to be filed away, but my file cabinet is too full, camera bags and photography supplies, drafting tools, drafting paper, the folding drafting table that I just got for Christmas, books that won't fit on the book shelf, etc. Too much stuff with no room for it! We already have 2 desks and a piano hogging the room. But it all really would belong in my office if it had room. Maybe I have too many hobbies. It's really just bills, books, and 3 hobbies. Either way, it looks like our office may have an "extension" into the garage from here on out. Maybe if my hobbies weren't office appropriate like snowboarding or something! This room wouldn't be so overwhelmed!