tonyandkirsten.org

…Is just like riding a bike.  :-)  Despite a few wobbles the first time up and down the block, riding a bike came back to me pretty easily.  My mom gave us a bike trailer that she had purchased to take her dog on bike rides.  The dog hated the trailer, but Erik loves it! He gets to ride in the trailer in his car seat, pulled by Tony.  We got an inexpensive used “back of the bike” seat for Madeline (as well as a helmet!), and she gets to ride behind me.

We just went a couple miles last night, and it was both fun and tiring.  My bike purchased almost seven years ago at a garage sale for $20 is not too bad.  After I bought it back in 2000, I rode it a couple of times and it has been storage ever since.  It needed new tires and needs one other part to make the ride a little smoother…but overall not bad.

There are tons of great bike trails in Minneapolis, so it will be a fun summer family activity to explore them!

While our beautiful warm weather is not quite as beautiful and warm as the weather in Ames, Madeline and I have certainly been enjoying it.  Yesterday we did a few errands in the morning and then in the afternoon trekked over to our neighborhood park, about four blocks away.  We both wore our somewhat-waterproof boots, which was a good thing since the melting snow created huge puddles of slushy, icy water under many of the playground apparatuses.  A puddle under one swing was so deep in the middle that had I let Madeline step all the way into it, I think the water would have come over the top of her boots.  Despite having the rubbery boots on, somehow Madeline’s feet were still completely soaked by the time we got home. Of course, her clothes were also really wet from all the splashing, landing in the snow at the bottom of slides, and so on.

For today’s outing we went to the library for a little bit, and then later a short walk around the block.  “Walk” might be a generous term.  It was more like a very, very slow stroll.   We were gone from the house for about 40 minutes on our short-distance journey! (Not that I minded — my main purpose in taking the walk was to get out and enjoy the 60 degree weather while trying to get less wet than we did at the park yesterday.) Traveling that short a distance in that long of a time frame would probably be impossible without a toddler in tow.  Madeline is very curious about the world around her and stopped for lots of puddle splashing, looking at/picking up sticks, rocks and leaves, watching other kids, drawing lines in the snow with sticks, popping small bubbles in puddles, and generally asking questions about her world.  It’s actually a lot of fun, at least on days like today when we’re not heading someplace purposefully.  Even though Madeline was again wearing a pair of semi-waterproof boots and didn’t splash in any puddles that were too deep…her feet and pant legs again still got pretty wet. 

In an adventure completely unrelated to warm weather, we got a portable dishwasher today! Yeah for not spending 45 minutes to an hour per night doing dishes! We received a couple of belated housewarming/early baby gifts this weekend to be used “as needed” for something for the house or the baby.  We decided the best use of those gifts might be to buy a used portable dishwasher, since it is both something for the house and something we will greatly appreciate once the baby comes and we are going to be exhausted and have even less energy for doing dishes! When we looked on craigslist yesterday, there was only one portable dishwasher in our price range, so we made an appointment to look at it tonight.  It looked great and our gift money covered most of the asking price so we brought it home with us.  It seems like it works great so far!

As we arrived home from picking up the dishwasher, we noticed several parents and lots of small kids congregating down our block.  Since it has been wintry and cold most of the 2+ months we’ve been here, we’ve not met very many people in our neighborhood.  We walked down the street to introduce ourselves and had a great time chatting with several other families who live on our street. There’s another little girl who is within a month of being the same age as Madeline, and a number of other kids ranging from baby to young elementary school age — as well as two other babies “on the way” besides ours.  The people we talked to said that the block is pretty friendly, especially on our side of the street.  Apparently they try and do some social things together and it seems like the kids must play together fairly often.  We’re excited for the warmer months ahead and more chances to get to know our neighbors!

Today will mark a milestone in our new house.  Now that we have been here a little over a month, we are going to have our first dinner guests! Last week at Aldi I found a bargain I couldn’t refuse — an 18lb frozen turkey on clearance for $8! I had been planning anyway to spend $6 for a 3lb bag of chicken breasts, so it was a no-brainer to spend an additional two bucks and get a lot more meat.  So, tonight we’ll have turkey dinner, with a few fixins’ normally eaten in November or December.

My mom came to visit on Friday (we went bassinet shopping and found a cute Pooh bassinet for $35!), and she told me she has a turkey she got for free she wants to bring us the next time she comes to visit…so with the leftovers from cooking both of those birds, we’ll have enough to keep us stocked up for a long time!

Besides cooking a turkey, today Madeline and I are catching up from our busy weekend in Ames — resting, doing laundry, and putting stuff away.  We got back last night around 10:45pm.  We had really hoped it would be earlier, but we hung around talking with people until after 6:30pm and didn’t get out of town until around 7pm.  Though we had looked at a weather forecast for both Ames and the Twin Cities, we hadn’t seen the forecast for everything in between…so we were quite surprised to hit a small snowstorm from northern Iowa through southern Minnesota that really slowed down driving for a while.  I was actually surprised that we didn’t get back later than we did!

It was a great, action-packed weekend and we had so much fun hanging out with everyone.  Madeline clearly had a great time too. We’ve discovered a new passion of hers — “playing” Karaoke Revolution.  After the dinner portion of the Counter Culture team valentines/sister appreciation event on Saturday night, one of the primary activities was a game of Karaoke Revolution.  So, while Tony and I played a game of Settlers of Catan, Madeline sat with the group that was singing. They gave her a microphone that didn’t work, and she pretended to sing along, sometimes while also dancing.  We weren’t really paying too much attention to the time since we’re used to her coming to us crabby and tired when she’s ready to leave a party.  Soon it was getting close to 11pm and we were scooping her up and putting her shoes and coat on her somewhat against her will as she kept saying, “sing more! sing more!” (or something like that).

Time to get to work on that laundry!

For the last four and half years we’ve been married, our music collection has been scattered and stored in variety of places. Some CDs in the car. Some CDs in old CD books, with their cases packed away in two different boxes. Some CDs in their cases in one of the boxes with the empty CD cases. Some CDs sitting next to the computer, in or out of their cases. A stack of cases in a corner in the basement. A stack of newer CDs in the bedroom. Some of our CD collection had been ripped (made into MP3s or other electronic files, for back-up and for use on our computers and ipod shuffle) but others had not.

Having gathered all the CDs and all the cases in the process of moving, I decided enough was enough. I took a detour from more necessary unpacking one day last week and organized all the CDs. Each one was finally with its case! They were all in one place for the first time! I went through the tedious process of figuring out which ones had been ripped and which ones hadn’t. Tony picked a small stack of his CDs to set aside and sell. I couldn’t bear to get rid of any of mine (Well, I guess I did throw into the thrift store box my WOW 1996 Christian Hits CD and a CD I bought in about 1995 of a local Christian band in MN. Those hardly count!) I got rid of some CDs in high school of jazz and classical music I now wish I would have hung onto…so even though I have CDs I probably haven’t listened to in 5-8 years…I just kept them anyway. Even most early/mid ’90s Christian CDs have at least one good song on them.

Then, while doing other unpacking last week I ripped all the CDs that had not yet been ripped. Next came the process of organizing them on the two main computers so that both would have a complete copy of our collection. The new files were easy…but some of our previously-ripped CDs were on one computer, some on the other and some on both…so I had to get that all straightened out too.

The end result? Our CD collection (along with some legally downloaded music from the free mp3 section of amazon.com) turns out to take up 12.5 GB of space amongst a little over 2800 files…with quite an amazing variety in genre when all of Tony’s picks and my picks are considered! Now all the CDs and cases will be stored in one box in our storage area, and backup copies will be used in the car so we don’t have to worry about them getting stolen. Unless someone wants to buy us a nice big ipod and some better way to connect it to our car stereo than the cassette adaptor we’ve used with our shuffle.

I’ve decided this is a universal truth about potlucks — never are there enough deviled eggs brought that everyone who wants one can get one. So, that’s why I brought deviled eggs to the Urban Refuge potluck on Saturday night. It was a good thing I did, because I was the only person that brought some! I wasn’t exactly watching, but I think they were all gone before even 1/3 of the church had gone through the line.

Since we are still trying to decide between the Rock and Urban Refuge (though we will probably be making this decision soon), we are doing a lot of church stuff on the weekends. We went to the Rock on Friday night, and Urban Refuge on Saturday night. The Urban Refuge service was particularly memorable. They are celebrating their four year anniversary as a church, and Andy Gray started a series called “Living for the City” — it’s a series about what God calls us to be living for personally, and what the mission of the church is corporately. A lot of the focus this week was on the priority of our personal connection with God. That’s a topic that can get re-hashed a lot without really saying anything new, but Andy’s message was really heartfelt and convicting. (You’ll be able to listen to it here after it’s posted — they’re still a week behind as of today in posting the messages. Scroll about 2/3 of the way down the page to see the link to Urban Refuge messages. Though this may not be as meaningful if you weren’t there, since part of the message was spent with each of us individually reading a handout.)

In the two months since we have been so caught up with the holidays, family celebrations, Tony’s graduation and moving, it’s been really easy for me to give my relationship with God a pretty low priority. I think it had been at least a month and a half, if not a lot longer, since I had gotten away for an extended time with the Lord. After the message on Saturday, I knew I couldn’t wait any longer. I went out and did that Sunday afternoon and it was so refreshing — and I feel a lot more motivated for my daily times with God now too. I don’t know exactly why this is, but if I am not getting my weekly extended time, then my regular daily times with God either turn to being really irregular or not very meaningful. I’m looking forward to my daily and weekly spiritual disciplines of meeting with God to be present in a newly-refreshed way.

On Sunday night, we visited an Urban Refuge small group for the first time. Their small groups are organized a little differently than we’re used to in Ames — they are topically-focused and the groups meet together for a pre-defined length of time, then people may re-organize into somewhat different groups to focus on different topics. The group we visited is just getting started on the book “Premeditated Parenting” by Steve Nelson (a pastor of a Great Commission church in Colorado). I was honestly pretty surprised at how open and deep people were for it being a group that is just starting together (though I get the impression that most of the couples in the group know each other fairly well already). It was a really helpful discussion, and I think we got some good ideas both from points brought up in the book and from the discussion itself. It was a neat group to interact with, since almost everyone’s kids are about the same age as Madeline, plus a few kids a little bit older and younger — but the age of the parents in the group ranged from being about the same as us to about 10 years older.

It’s a great way to start the week, having had so much encouragement over the weekend!

It was such a warm day here (it got to at least 40 degrees), that Madeline and I were energetic enough to not just go out and return the video we rented last night to the nearest Redbox machine, but we also went to the bank and picked up a couple items at the grocery store.

Motivated by my need for greater iron intake, I bought some cream of wheat cereal. When we got home Madeline wanted to eat some for her afternoon snack. I was highly disappointed that this cereal wasn’t really what I remember cream of wheat being like! I have fond memories of what I thought was cream of wheat from my dorm days eating ISU Dining Service food. I remembered it as this pure white substance with some lumps. At least my third year (when I lived in Towers), this was usually for some reason served on the same day as lemon poppyseed muffins, so I often ate the two together.

This cereal I made for Madeline was, well, wheatier. It had a definite tan color with a few white speckles. I did manage to achieve the lumps though. I tried a bite and the taste, while not bad, wasn’t what I was remembering from my dorm food service days. It’s hard to explain the difference in taste.

Now that I’ve bought it I’ll be eating some cream of wheat…but does anyone know what that cereal in Dining Service might have been? I know it wasn’t grits, because the texture was less grainy and the taste was not that of grits (which I do also thoroughly enjoy, by the way). I noticed that they also had “cream of rice” at the store so that was something I thought of trying.

My experience taking the glucose test here was much better than my experience in Ames. I had assumed that the drink would be exactly the same as I had tried before (carbonated and syrupy — with a consistency almost like cough syrup). At the clinic in Ames they told me that this was the only way to do the test. Well, the clinic here had a drink that was still really sweet, but it was a lot more liquidy — just normal drink consistency and not carbonated. Granted I had to drink 10 oz instead of 6 or so…but this was much easier to get down. I can’t imagine why this product wouldn’t be a better choice for anyone taking the test — after all, who wants to drink a whole cup of something that is reminiscent of cough syrup?

After getting the drink down with no problems, they let me and Madeline wait in a small room with a recliner. Taking the test still made me feel a little sick, so it was really nice not to have to chase her around a waiting room! We sat and read books for almost the whole hour. I got my blood drawn after an hour, and they told me within a couple minutes that I passed. Anything under 140 is passing and my level was 100! Madeline was fascinated by watching the nurse draw my blood, and watching them put the sample in the machine to run the test.

They also tested my iron level, which turned out to be slightly low. I’m not surprised at all by this since I don’t eat very much red meat and I have had somewhat low iron levels on occasion even when not pregnant. A few years ago after giving plasma a couple times, I gave up trying because every time I went after my first two tries my iron level was always low. Since I was just a little below normal, it doesn’t sound like I’ll need to take any additional vitamins. I just need to try and eat a few more iron-rich foods. They gave me a list of suggestions — the item on the list with the highest amount of iron was actually cream of wheat cereal. Who would have guessed?

So, almost everything that could have gone wrong, did go wrong this morning before I actually had my first OB (pregnancy) appointment here in Minnesota. The clinic I am going to here has two locations — When I called to make the appointment I thought I had made it clear I wanted an appointment at the location closer to our house. But when I arrived they didn’t have me on their list — somehow I had ended up with an appointment at the downtown location. So, we got back in the car and drove downtown. I was only about 10 minutes late, amazingly enough. Too bad that going downtown meant we had to pay a total of $8 for parking.

When I started talking to the women behind the desk at the downtown location, it became clear that the person I had been talking to on the phone the day I made the appointment really wasn’t listening very closely. Somehow they had scheduled me for a type of appointment for someone who is 8 weeks pregnant and just starting medical care, rather than for an appointment for someone doing a transfer of care at 32 weeks (like me). They said though that they would do their best to get everything taken care of at this appointment that needed to be done, I just would be seeing a nurse practitioner instead of an actual doctor.

Then they went to look at my file. Although I had mailed a form to my former clinic in Ames two weeks ago to get my records sent, the records apparently had just been put in the mail yesterday or today…so my new clinic had no information on the care I had received so far. They decided to call the clinic in Ames to get at least a few key pages of my records faxed over. Despite how easy this sounds, they were apparently having fax troubles on the Ames end and it took about 15-20 minutes to get four pages faxed.

Finally, about 50 minutes after my appointment was originally supposed to begin, I saw the nurse practitioner and got checked out. Everything is still looking really good with the pregnancy. I have to try tomorrow to take a glucose test that I tried to take in Ames before we moved. This test involves drinking a really sickly sweet liquid and then sitting for an hour, after which they do some kind of blood test to see how your body reacts to the sugar. Unfortunately, the sickly sweet liquid made me throw up the first time I tried to take it, so they couldn’t actually do the test. I guess it is important to get it done soon, so I will go take it tomorrow at the closer clinic location. I really hope I can keep it down this time! Then I am back on track for two appointments next month, and weekly appointments for the last 3-4 weeks or so until I deliver.

The really good part in all of this is that everyone I talked to at both clinic locations were nice and extremely helpful and understanding of my situation. Despite the fact that everything took over an hour and half instead of 45 minutes, they did get done everything that really needed to be checked at this stage of my pregnancy. While the person who took my appointment information was probably either having a bad day or just didn’t understand my unusual situation of moving and transferring care so far into a pregnancy, I think overall the people at this clinic will be very competent and helpful.

Means I caught the 7:30 express bus and was here at 7:45! Awesome!

This weekend was actually pretty cool, even before the Bears and Colts won. First off, since we haven’t actually picked a church (deciding between The Rock and Urban Refuge), we’re doing double duty, and that means I got to hear two sermons instead of just one. Mark’s on Friday night was on the importance of time. It’s not online yet, but it was a good one. I found myself nodding in agreement throughout. Of course, that’s easy when he’s doing the math on how our time gets spent, and I’m a big numbers geek.

Saturday night’s message was on Grace, and how that fits in with the topic of “Breaking the Chains of Religion”. Chad (the speaker) had us do something experiential to get the feel for what to do when the grace we’ve experienced doesn’t seem to erase the guilt we feel. At the end of the message, he had us take bread (for communion), dip it in horseradish, and eat it, to fill our mouths, noses, and eyes with bitterness. The we were to take the communion wine (actually juice), and drink away the bitterness. They made lots and lots of juice, so that if the first drink wasn’t enough to wash away the bitterness, we were to drink more, and more, until the bitterness was gone. Cool, huh?

In addition to church, we’ve been making some serious progress on the moving-in projects and unpacking. Another week, and I think we’ll be mostly done (at least with the things that make a home feel stressful, like disorganization and not finding stuff). Saturday morning was a fun trip around the cities (70 mile loop going to Lakeville, Edina, Brooklyn Park, and back home) to pick up cheap stuff we found on Craigslist. Just some tires, fenders, and some lights, and my bike’s ready for the frosty commute!

As always, life is full! Please be praying for our house in Ames to sell, for us to find a good renter for our basement apartment here, and for us to figure out which church to be a part of.

We’ll be sure to keep you updated on all kinds of goings on (including some tech posts in the next couple of days).

XOXO

Question and answer between Madeline and Daddy.

I had the question, Madeline the response!