Thanksgiving

I have started seeing the chiropractor again. It's costly, but it keeps me mobile so I'll take it. On Thursday I went visiting teaching and got to give a message about how temples bless us. It was great. I love the temple. John and I are going on Thursday and I'm very excited about it. I also love visiting teaching. My companion is wonderful and so are the ladies that we get to go and visit. Visiting teaching is definately inspired.

John worked a half day on Friday and then we headed to Wainmo. That night John took me out to dinner at BPs for date night. We spent Saturday in North Battleford at my grandparents' place. We were supposed to come home on Monday morning, but decided to come home after our Thanksgiving dinner on Sunday night instead. All 4 of us were ready to be back to our own beds and our own routine. Apparently we don't travel well with the kids.

Not too much else is really new in my life, though. It's pretty boring. Caleb has been doing loads better with his behaviour. If he's good all day, he gets a small Halloween treat at the end of the day. Maybe some people think that's bribery, but if it stops him from extremely destructive and disgusting behaviour, I'm cool with it.

Hope you have a great week.

Attitude of Gratitude

So I just wrote up my entire post and posted it and then realized I'd accidentally put it on the baby's blog.

At any rate, after being encouraged during General Conference this past weekend to develop an attitude of gratitude, I have decided to adopt Thankful Thursday. Each Thursday I'll post three things that I'm particularly grateful for that week, besides the obvious answers each week.

I'm grateful for a husband who is so willing to give. A few days ago my oldest SIL invited me to join her, her sisters and her mom for Time Out For Women in Calgary next year. I went to TOFW last year when it was here in Edmonton and I loved it. However, the Calgary TOFW is the first weekend in May. The baby will only be 1.5 to 2 months old at that point. Most husbands wouldn't be thrilled about taking care of all 3 kids by himself while his wife goes away overnight for an unnecessary trip, especially with the youngest being that young. But mine was wonderful. He thought it would be a great idea for me to go and had no hesitation in saying he'd be fine taking care of the kids by himself. I am very much looking forward to spending time with his family that weekend and coming home being even more spiritually uplifted.

I'm grateful to finally have scheaduled a prenatal appointment and a diagnostic ultrasound appointment as well. It was a huge fiasco to get my GP's rear in gear (and his receptionist near the end) that took over 5 weeks. However, the OB/GYN's receptionist was great and made sure during our phone call that everything would be taken care of and that I wouldn't miss any windows for testing. We're looking forward to seeing our little Perry for the first time on the 27th. Perry is the name we're calling the baby until we know the gender.

I'm grateful to have been enjoying such beautiful autumn weather. It almost makes up for the summer that we didn't have up here in E-town.

So, what are you grateful for?

Caleb's Turnaround

Caleb had his turnaround this week. After a few weeks of tears and screaming (on pretty much everyone's part), it finally happened.

The first part of the week was really bad. I'll give you one day's example. On Wednesday, I had to go upstairs long enough to find out the location and hours of the dump due to the boys's previous day's activities. In the whopping 10 minutes that took me, the boys dumped a litre of canola oil and two full tins of baby formula on the floor and a kitchen chair and started smearing it all around. Needless to say, I was far less than impressed. If you've ever bought formula, you know that each can costs about $25, and they destroyed TWO!

We had actually ended up doing our date night on Tuesday after a particularly frustrating day. We went out for dinner and dessert. We went to the Swiss Chalet, and the service was very slow. Plus, the waitress gave me a Clamato juice when I'd specifically asked for tomato juice, which is frustrating as I don't like Clamato at all. The ribs in our meal were pretty good, though, and I loved my cheesecake. Now it's my month off and John's turn to plan dates for October. It should be interesting to see what he plans for us.

So on Wednesday, I finally got through to Caleb while he was cleaning up the formula (the bag of chips I bribed him with if he was good for a whole day may have helped). The only bad thing he's done since then was throwing a raging hissy fit last night, but he was tired from staying up hours past bedtime the night before. It's been wonderful to have my not-quite-so destructive Caleb back. We're getting along great now. He helps me when I need his help and is so happy to hear that he's being a good boy and making Mommy so happy. He keeps telling me that I'm beautiful (guess it's a good thing he's having an eye exam tonight, ha ha) and that he loves me. I love it and I love him, too.

As this weekend was General Conference, we spent a lot of the weekend in front of the TV watching it. Caleb woke up at 8:30 on Saturday and was crushed that it wasn't time to see the prophet on TV yet. It made me feel great and like I'm doing at least 1 thing right. Caleb lets it show how much he loves the prophet, temples, church/Sunbeams, saying prayers and Jesus. I love that he loves them.

Tomorrow is my birthday. I'll officially enter my late twenties. I had a brilliant plan for my birthday and Christmas this year. Normally I ask my parents to buy me things for the house. This year I was going to do something for me. I was going to ask for gift cards for HMV so I could save them up and get something I've been wanting for quite a while. My parents, however, ended up giving me enough in gift cards just for my birthday that I was able to get it without having to wait for Christmas. I was able to get the entire Stargate SG-1 series PLUS another season of Stargate Atlantis. I was VERY happy. My actual birthday will be nothing special as I'll be spending the night at a Birth Parent Support meeting, but I guess that's what happens as you get older.

So in the end I did have a good week and was able to remember just how special Caleb really is to me.

Caleb is 4

Caleb and I had another not-so-fun week. I'm not really sure what to do with him.

On Saturday he turned 4. It's so hard to believe that he's that old already. He had a birthday party with a couple of his cousins. He was very happy with his presents and had a great time. After the party we went to Walmart where he got to spend his gift card from Grandpa M. He was so excited to get to pick his own toys and to give his gift card to the cashier all by himself.

That evening John and I had our date night for the week. We watched Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Since this coming weekend is General Conference, we've decided to do the date on Wednesday. I'm not sure what to do. One of the rules is that you can't do the same thing twice in a month. So far we've eaten a 'special' meal together, played a board game and watched a movie. I guess I'll have to look through the Project 52 blog to get some ideas.

Found out this morning that we're just waiting to hear back on a date from to OB for my first prenatal appointment. That means I'm not mad at my doctor anymore, which feels nice.

The exciting news for the week is that I felt the baby move a couple of different times. That was fun:) Oh, and I officially moved into mat clothes.

Not too much else is new right now though. I hope you all have a wonderful week:)

Cleaning, Caleb and Visiting Teaching

I'm not going to go into details, but Caleb and I had a week where I felt like he'd be lucky to survive until his 4th birthday, which happens to be only 5 days away. It was long and stressful, but I'm glad it's over and we can work on moving forward.

For last week's date night, we got some Chinese food and had a nice dinner with just the 2 of us. Then John gave me a foot rub. It was nice, relaxed and much needed.

We finally got our room nice and clean (just one bookshelf, the computer desk drawers and the closet left to go through and organize. My mum and her husband had bought new bedroom furniture a few months ago, so they gave us their old stuff. We moved that in on Saturday. I love having a bigger dresser. I managed to really downsize my junk drawer, so I'm very happy about that. Now I just have to work on getting everything else nice and organized.

Caleb went to West Ed on Saturday with my mum and her husband. He went to Build-A-Bear and made a wolf named Wileey. He insisted that Wileey needed 2 e's. He also got chicken and fries for lunch, which he was over the moon about AND he got to go on a pirate ship. I've never got to go on the ship in West Ed, so I must admit that I was a tiny bit jealous. But he had a great day and I'm glad. We managed to get the last of his birthday presents plus some other things that we needed for around the house.

Yesterday I got to go visiting teaching for the first time since last December (I think). It was great, I loved it. The message for this month really hit home for me, about our responsibility to nurture the rising generation. This is always a big worry for me, about whether or not I'm doing enough to prepare my kids to live in this kind of a world. It's way scary out there. So here is the part of the message that I want to share:
"We must speak respectfully of marriage and family. And from our example, the rising generation can gain great hope and understanding - not just from the words we speak but from the way we feel and emanate the spirit of the family. "

I hope you have a great week:)

Butter, Larry the Cucumber and Project 52

I see I'm back to just writing for my own benefit. That's okay, though. It's still always nice to know what's happened when I look back.

Well, the most interesting thing that happened last week was the butter incident. Caleb took an entire brick of butter out of the fridge and during the 10 minutes that I was taking a time out from him because we'd been screaming at each other he decided to take chunks of butter, get them a bit squishy and throw them all over my living room ceiling, wall and floor, not to mention smear it all over Ty. I was not a happy mommy.

We did, however, get our new credit cards. That meant that I was finally able to order Caleb's Halloween costume. I'm really excited about it. He picked it out himself.

The other exciting thing is that we decided to do Project 52. For our first date night we played Lord of the Rings Monopoly, which John had bought for me as an early birthday present. I beat John by such a long shot, it was actually rather sad. He made one 'bad for him' trade early on, and it cost him the whole game.

Anyway, that's all for now, I think. I hope everyone's doing well and if you have a second to comment, I'd love it:)

Goings On

So here's what's new at the Bly home.

We think we've figured out the colour schemes for the nursery. The gender will determine what one of the accent colours is. I've started cleaning it out. It's all organized, everything just needs to go where it belongs now and it needs a good vacuuming once everything is out of there. I also cleaned the boys' closet this morning.

My brother and his girlfriend came to visit on Friday and Saturday. We loved having them here. I missed them a lot and miss them again already. They are lots of fun and the boys just love them. My brother took a couple of family photos for us, but Ty REALLY didn't want anything to do with it, so most of them didn't work out too well because of that.

We went to IKEA yesterday. I love IKEA:) We bought some hampers, some yummy smelling candles, a recycling system for our pop cans and a few other miscellaneous items. It was lots of fun.

Not too much else is new. I hope you all enjoyed your long weekend.

PS
John and I got engaged 5 years ago yesterday.