Behold the Guest Room.

After much trial, frustration, scraping, stripping, sanding, painting and many short nights, I am pleased to announce that the guest room is now ready for company. Just in time too, My brother Mark and his family showed up about an hour after we had it put together. There are of course the requisite drips and missed spots but all in all we are pleased with how it turned out. Especially when you consider what we started with. If you ever do any painting, please be considerate of the people that will be painting the room 30 years after you do. Here are some before and after pics.

Wedding, friends, family and projects

Since the canoe trip we have been to Vail, CO to see Brittny Sheely become Brittny Tucker :) It was so much fun to see her get married and to spend quality time with dear people that I rarely get to see. I went down on July 15 (Wed) and the week was full of events from the Bachelorette party to dinner at Los Amigos, a bridal shower/luncheon, rehearsal dinner at a beautiful ranch and then the wedding on the 18th (Sat). You can fill in any free time with hanging out/playing with Beth, Ryan, Tyne, Caleb and 5 children 4 and under. We ended the weekend on Saturday morning having breakfast with my Dad in Glenwood Springs (thanks for driving in to see us and thanks again for breakfast!). It was a fun and very full 5 days.

We came home to our computer crashing... yeah, not our favorite thing to happen. The sad part about it is the loss of our pictures. If you know us at all then you know that we take a ton of photos and that it is one of our favorite things... we are now missing a year and a half of photos and are mourning their loss! We do have our computer repaired (a new hard drive) and will be getting an external hard drive to keep everything on.

We are preparing to welcome our second houseguests :) Jeff's brother Mark and family will be here on Thursday. We are looking so forward to their arrival and are really working on the house to have it ready for them. Jeff's biggest project these days is the guest room... under normal circumstances our only plan would be to paint but the former owner must have let someone very young paint this room a long time ago. Layers upon layers of drippy blue paint everywhere! Jeff is sanding and stripping and using steel wool... if any of you have been in this position and have words of wisdom we would love to hear them!! Hopefully we will have it done before Thurs along with organizing the basement and getting a few decorations on the walls.

Here are a few pics from our weekend in CO:

Tevas Make Good Canoe Racks and Tacoma Roofs are Resilient

Today we took the canoe to the mountains for our maiden voyage... it was an experience. The weather was less than ideal but we continued driving toward ominous dark clouds. After a lot of rain and a lot of wind and stopping twice to secure the canoe (once due to a loud thump which turned out to be an old dent popping out) the sun came out and the day turned beautiful. We wound up Beartooth Pass, once again in awe of God's creativity, making our way to Island Lake and the first time out on our canoe... this was not as uneventful as it sounds. As we went up the pass the wind picked up, and then picked up some more causing several more stops to secure and re-secure the canoe. We finally make it to Island Lake and realize that we probably should have known that the rainy day in Billings did not bode well for the mountains. The wind, rain and clouds had once again made their way into our day but, could we really drive for over 2 hours and not even put our boat in the water? No, not a chance :) We put the canoe in the water and loaded it up with our dogs, life vests and food and made our way out. The unpredictability of the wind and our 45 lb puppy means that we were out on the water for all of 10... maybe 15 minutes, but we know our canoe floats and look forward to many trips in the future! So began the process of loading the canoe back onto the truck and doing a bit more sightseeing before making our way home... which only continued the experience. As we were driving back up to the top of the pass we were feeling pretty good about how secure the canoe was, hoping not to make the excessive stops our original trip involved, one side gust of wind shattered that hope by blowing one of the blocks holding the canoe off the truck and into oblivion. What to do now? Well pull the other block off and use Jeff's Tevas to secure it, of course... It was all we had on hand and it basically got the job done, our trip was a little slower and definitely involved more stops than we would have wanted (we had a brand new dent in the top of the truck that once again popped out by the end of our trip) but we made it here. We had a blast together today, even contemplating the 10 min canoe ride, multiple unplanned stops and nearly being blown away by the wind... I would do it all again!

Here are a few pictures from our day:

October 16th...?

Today we had a 4 week appointment to check on our baby girl and after reviewing the sonogram and measuring my uterus they have moved our due date to October 16th... three whole weeks sooner! I feel a little like I have missed a portion of this pregnancy and, because I know certain dates to be true, am still wondering if they could possible be correct or if this is just a big baby. Oh well, we are incredibly excited at the prospect of meeting this little girl and starting this new adventure. Jeff's very excited that it is 10 days before hunting season opens so that he can go and provide red meat for his family without wondering if his wife is in labor back in Billings :)

IT'S A GIRL!!

The anticipation was almost more than we could handle but we made it to the appointment. We are thrilled to announce that we are having a baby girl! Below we have a picture of her foot, she was curled up in a ball giving the lady performing the sonogram quite the time getting all the measurements so it is the best picture from today. It was so much fun to see our little one and now to be confident with saying she/her and so on :) Everything is looking good, we are only 22 weeks today but she was measuring 25 weeks so we might have a big baby on our hands. We appreciate all of the prayers and would also ask that they continue :)

Every Redneck's Favorite Holiday!

This is basically just a filler post to kill time until the big post tomorrow about our ultrasound and hopefully baby Grissom's gender. Yesterday was the perfect Fourth of July. Well, the weather was only in the low 80's so that was strange but we did get a sweet thunderstorm right before fireworks. LeeAnn made brownies and Shirkie's salsa and we went to the Wofford's house in Lockwood where there are no fireworks ordinances. We hung out and talked and ate hotdogs and hamburgers and enjoyed an all American holiday. Ruger and Otis accompanied us and thoroughly enjoyed the attention from all the kids not to mention all the room to run. Once it was finally dark all the 14 year old boys and myself proceeded to go nuts with the fireworks. I actually only spent $25 on fireworks this year compared to the $300 they spent and I spent more time taking pictures than I did blowing stuff up. I suppose it's inevitable that being 32 now and expecting a baby, fireworks don't seem like rock solid investment they once were. Anyway, got a couple of cool pics.