Happy New Year!

Here we go!

We’re entering into a new year, and our final weeks of pregnancy! Poor Amanda is really starting to feel it now. Her hips are hurting, her back is hurting, and she just can’t get comfortable. Who can blame her, she’s carrying around an extra 45 pounds! She’s having trouble sleeping, eating, walking and breathing! I feel so bad for her. I keep reminding her that she’s getting close to the end. I try not to mention that the “end” means major surgery (C-Section) and two babies to feed and take care of at all hours! Shhhhh!

Other than the physical discomfort, she’s doing great! She knows how special it is to feel the babies inside her belly, and she knows that she’ll miss that feeling!

As for me, if anyone cares, I’m doing fine. I sleep on the couch a few days a week now. Just so I can get some sleep! It’s not easy sleeping with Amanda now. She’s constantly uncomfortable and therefore moving all night. And when she rolls over, she ROLLS OVER! Watch out!!! My side of the bed has dramatically shrunk in the past few weeks. During the day I mostly eat and sit around with her. She likes to buy sweets, and real butter, and real yogurt, and real mayo, and fattening cheese, and fattening EVERYTHING… and then she’s never hungry enough to eat it! So… I do. Let’s just say that she’s not the only one out of breath when we climb our stairs!

We had our 31 week ultrasound today! Everything is great, right on track. Mason (left) is 3 1/2 lbs and has a huge head like his daddy. They said his head measures at 34 weeks, so three weeks ahead of his body :-)

You can see in his picture that he had his mouth open, and of course, he was moving all around!

Madison (right) still seems to be a little camera shy. She doesn't like to show her profile as much, but we got a pretty good picture here. She weighed in one ounce shy of 4 lbs!

She did the cutest thing while getting this picture though! She turned and looked right at the camera, and we could see her blinking and looking at it! We wondered what she was thinking right then. So amazing!

Well, now we enter into a new year. I’m happy to see this one go. It’s been pretty tough on most of us. For Amanda and me, it’s been an emotional roller coaster. We started the year struggling to get pregnant, and not knowing if we ever would. That was a scary time because we have always wanted to have a family. Around the same time I was starting a new job, and things were looking great for us on that front. Then the price of oil went crazy and my job was in jeopardy, and at the same time we were so happy to find out Amanda was pregnant. Then the joy we had when we found out it was twins! Then it was the news that it was a boy and a girl, what a wonderful day that was! A couple months later the stock market collapsed and now nothing was certain. Then, in November, I was laid off and we were trying to figure out what we’ll do next. As I said, a roller coaster! What a year!
We know that so many of our closest friends and family have struggled in this past year as well. So, in this New Year, it is our prayer that things get better for us all. And it’s our prayer that everyone keeps in their heart the fact that God will provide! We must keep reminding ourselves that God has a plan for our lives, and everything will work out in Gods time.
For us, I know that God has blessed us with the opportunity to be a mommy and daddy, and to raise a family this year. Our New Years resolution is to be the best parents we can be. To raise our babies with so much love, and to dedicate our lives to them!

We hope that everyone has a wonderful new year and God bless!

Finally... it's raining again!

I don't know if we've ever been so happy to see 40 degrees and raining! The foot and a half of snow that trapped us in our house is melting fast. Thank God. Portland is really bad when it comes to snow removal and de-icing!
Thankfully, we were able to make it to all of our Christmas events. We did have to shuffle the schedule around a bit, but it all worked out. We spent the night of the 23rd trudging over to Priscilla's in our Civic with the chains on. We made it a record slow time, 1 hour and 45 minutes. But we were safe and sound! We had a nice time chatting with Mark and my mom over a nice meal, and enjoying the festive music. After desert we hit the ice roads once again, but this time made it home in an hour.
The next day we thought we were going to be hanging out at home, but when we woke we saw a window of opportunity to make it south to Salem. We scrambled through the house to pack and hit the road as fast as we could, and then set out for the Andersens. We made it to Salem with little trouble and we were able to be there to watch Emma and Jake open their presents Christmas morning.
Today is Saturday, and we just returned from Larry and Nancy's house, where we spent most of the day eating great food and playing games. Unfortunately, we failed to take any good pictures at any of the three events! So if anyone has any, send them to me and I'll post them.
Tomorrow I get to spend all day in a CPR class. It normally would sound fun, but I've been under the weather, so we'll see how that goes.
Amanda and I have our next ultrasound this Wednesday and if there are any good pictures I'll post them on the blog!
Until then, enjoy the last week of 2008
(kind of a tough year for most of us, not to sad to see it go)
Chris

It keeps snowing, and snowing... and snowing...

Okay, we're being buried over here. What a winter already! Crazy!

Amanda and I have been stuck in the house for a couple of days now, and we're getting cabin fever. Well, I say we're stuck, but we could leave if we needed to. We just don't feel like risking anything. I have a feeling that tomorrow we're going to find an excuse to go somewhere.

We're thankful that we still have power! So far we've been lucky. The lights flickered a few times but that was it. However, if the power does go out, we have an inside guy at PGE. Our friend Donald has been staying with us for the past couple of days because he's been working overtime at the PGE call center right across the freeway. He hasn't wanted to risk driving back and forth from his home in Oregon City. It works out well for us because he has a 4x4 with chains (seen below) and he brought his Nintendo Wii!

We also took another picture of Amanda today. As you can see, she is getting bigger by the second. It's so cute to me to see my little babies growing inside her! And their getting strong! We can sit and watch Amanda's belly move now, it's so crazy. Mason has had the hiccups twice today. Maddy went on a rolling frenzy this evening.

We were supposed to take a tour of the maternity ward at Meridian Park today, but it was cancelled. I can't imagine why!!!

Well, I hope everyone has found stuff to keep them busy while we wait for warmer weather.

stay warm and dry!

Lazy Day!

We woke up this morning and looked out the window and it was bone dry. About ten minutes later, as we were lying there dreading getting out of the warm bed, it started to snow! This picture was taken this morning, and it's been snowing all day! We now have at least twice what you see here.

We had planned to spend the evening with the Parker's, but thought better of it after watching everyone slam into each other on the freeways. So now we're just in for the day, doing chores here and there but mostly being lazy. it's a good day for it!

We had a great time yesterday making sugar cookies with our nephew and niece. They were great, as usual. We can't wait to be able to bring our kids down to play with their cousins!

Well, Amanda wants me downstairs now, and I know better than to push the patience of a woman with two babies in her belly. Got to go!!!

I'm getting a lot of questions about where I am with the fire dept. stuff so I thought I would give everyone a quick update.
I intially applied at Portland Fire & Rescue in August. Since then I've passed the written test, physical test, and interview process. I'm now on a list of 300 people that are eligible for hire. Portland Fire has no idea how many they will hire in the next year, but rumors are around 100 or so. The list is unranked, so the Captain can choose whomever he would like when slots become available.

Portland and Vancouver are the only fire departments that I know of that will allow you to apply without having your EMT-Basic certification. Vancouver Fire is testing in Januaury, and I plan to apply there too!

I'll be taking classes for my EMT-B starting in January and will apply to other fire departments after that.
In the mean time, I'll be looking for a good job. Getting hired as a firefighter can take years, so I want to find another career I can start now and continue if I don't get on with a department, or if I choose to not do the fire fighter thing. But as you can see from the picture, I'd look so good saving babies!

This pretty much sums up what I think of computers! We had another virus infect our home computer a couple of days ago. This one was brand new, and a good one! Technically it was adware or spyware. It gets into your computer and pops up warnings every time you try to get online that say that your personal info has been compromised. It won't let you go to any other websites except, surprisingly, the website where you can purchase the the product to get rid of the virus! Interesting. Somehow, that site works just fine!

Everyone needs a computer guy in their family, ours is Dale Sloyer. I called him up and he walked me through the troubleshooting process for an hour or so. He said that the company that is trying to sell me the anti-virus software is the one who infected our computer in the first place. Shouldn't that be illegal? In any case, it sure is frustrating.

Long story short, I ended up fixing the problem and killing all the "cooties" in my computer. Thanks Dale. I'm sure the first thing you want to do after fixing computers all day is to help fix my computer!

In other news, Amanda had her blood pressure checked again today, because it was high last time. Everything is back to normal and she keeps truckin' along. She's getting pretty uncomfortable as she continues to grow. Her belly now measures the same size as most full term singleton pregnancies, but she still has another 2 months to go!!! Let's pray that we can make it to full term!

Looks like the possibility of snow is still lingering out there. That would sure be nice!

Could that be snow?

It's that time of year again! Time for the local network news to put a few snow flakes on their extended forecast and tease us with lines like "could a winter blast be on it's way? Find out in our weather forcast, coming up!"

And every year I fall for it!!! Sure enough, I sit and watch the ENTIRE news waiting for the weather segment, which is always last, only to hear that we MAY see some snowflakes in the foothills above 500ft!

They always send out one of their flunkies to the top of Sylvan hill, and the other to the truckstop in Troutdale to report on the non-event.

So here I go again, getting excited as I see the snowflakes on Sunday. I never learn!

On a seperate note, We have officially set the date for the C-section! Assuming Amanda can make it this far, it is scheduled for Feb. 18th.

Plan accordingly!

Christmas Decorating Day!

Amanda was finally successful in motivating me just enough to do the Christmas decorating. I don't know why, but I just haven't felt the Christmas spirit this year. Nevertheless, we hauled a tree home on the top of the van and I wrestled the thing into the house.

We turned on the Roger Whitacker Christmas album, made some hot cocoa, and dug into the decorations. Even Quincy got in on some of the action! He mostly just got in our way though.

Three hours later, we are done... and spent! It's been a long day!

This morning, before our decorating, we had our bi-weekly doctor appointment. Everything went fairly well. Amanda was having one of her bad days so her blood pressure was up. 140 over 80. Our OB said that if it didn't go down by the end of the appointment she was going to have us go to the maternity ward to be monitored. Luckly, it did go down. We now have another appointment this Friday to double check everything. Other than that it was great. When Dr. Allison put the microphone up to Amanda's belly to hear Mason's heartbeat, he kicked the microphone!

Well, that's been our day. Hope everyone is doing well!

Enjoying the down time

It's kind of a dark and dreary Sunday today. A perfect day for us to be lazy! We spent a couple of hours on the couch this morning, drinking coffee and watching a movie. Finally we worked up the strength to take showers and clean up the place. I (Chris) was able to watch the Blazer game (we won by 1) while Amanda made a few phone calls and did who knows what upstairs. Our only outing was to Babies "R" Us to do some exchanging. Amanda is having a rough day, so that pretty much did her in. Now she's taking a nap before we head out to dinner with Bill and Linda Allred.

With the exchanges we made today, we're pretty much done with the babies room.

Buiding a nursery is tough work! We're blessed to have had a lot of help though. Thank you to Jenn k. for helping with the painting, nice job on the edges! Thank you Michael for helping cut and hang the trim, and thank you EVERYONE for giving us everything we put in it!

Amanda is getting bigger by the second!

This picture was taken a week ago, and she looks even bigger now! The babies have been doing gymnastics in her belly all day today.

We are so very excited to have these babies! We absolutely can't wait to be able to kiss their little foreheads and look into their eyes! We already love them so much! They are the greatest blessing in our lives.

Having said that, we are enjoying the ability to have a lazy Sunday! We know that we're going to be longing for days like these.

Well, off we go to dinner for now. bye.