Blessings

It has been a while since I have taken the time to write.  Things have been so busy around here!

First, we went for a week long vacation in Bradenton at the end of the summer, which was amazing.  We spent hours at the beach, stayed up late like we were in college again, and did a lot of relaxing.

Thank goodness for that beach umbrella and beach chairs from the condo!

The amazing peach pie from Yoders.

I had to report back to work as soon as we got back.  Work has been great.  I am enjoying first grade and my new school.  I got a great group of kids, and my first grade team (we are a team of two!) is wonderful.  We both have 23 students, and have since the beginning of the year, so hopefully within the next week or so a new teacher will be hired.  I decorated my room with all kinds of beach paraphernalia, and the kids love it.  I did it in the hopes that I would feel like I was spending every day at the beach.  If the kids weren't there with me, it just might have worked!!!

But all of that seems insignificant since September 2nd, because...

We found out we are having a baby!!!  A real, live baby!!!  We were so incredibly excited when we found out.  We couldn't keep the secret for long, and told our families the following Monday, Labor Day, when they came over to our house for a little birthday get-together.  We pretended we wanted everyone to pose for a family photo, then recorded their reactions.

It was so much fun telling everyone!  

We had our first ultrasound today.  We found out that I am almost 9 weeks and the due date is April 26th.  Seeing our baby for the first time was like nothing I have ever experienced.  I am so in love.

There's our precious little gummy bear!!!

People ask me how I'm feeling, and I feel pretty lucky to say that I feel good, for the most part!  I've had some nausea, but I have kept everything down (so far!)  Eating a few saltines in bed every morning, although making my sheets awfully crumby, seems to be helping with that.  I'm also pretty exhausted at all times.  Once I come home from work and sit down, I have a hard time getting back up.  I am so blessed to have a husband who has gone out of his way to make me comfortable and happy!  We are both beyond excited about growing our family.  He is going to be an amazing daddy!

While I will try to blog more regularly than I have been, I can't promise anything.  I am busy growing a person, you know!

Love Soup and a sunset.

Ahhh.

Jon and I got home late Saturday night from a delicious beach vacation. We thought it absolutely necessary to take a vacation from vacation before the school year started again. I am not going to take the time to write about it in full now, because I have to go to the grocery store. I am making either "Quinoa Stew with Potatoes, Spinach, and Chard" or "Butter Bean and Summer Vegetable Soup" for dinner tonight. Either way, I have to go to the store because we have no potatoes, spinach, chard, or butter beans, and very little in the way of summer vegetables (do canned green beans and corn count?!). I got this book from the library and I am so excited to make soup. I think it's a huge comfort food, and I love it. This will be my first try at soup, and I hope there will only be a few disasters.

Until the dinner experiment is over, this will be the only picture I will post from our trip to Bradenton. A beautiful sunset, because the few pictures I actually took of us are either bad or of Jon making funny faces.

I sure hope that my photo-taking desires, skills, etc. grow and improve by the time we have babies. I'm pretty awful!

Well, I'm off to shop for soup ingredients. Wish me luck!