February Wrap-Up

As February comes to a close with only a few more days remaining, I thought I'd take a minute to share some recent events, happenings and thoughts.

John and I kept Valentine's Day pretty low-key this year. We went to a matinee showing of Valentine's Day the Friday before. Then Saturday night John surprised me with a tasty treat of some Rice Dream ice cream and strawberries! Sunday he gave me the movie Couple's Retreat (we saw it in the theater and both enjoyed it) along with a box of microwave popcorn and a sweet card. My tradition for John is making him red velvet cupcakes with cream cheese frosting. He graciously shared - perhaps you got some. He also got a box of chocolates.

We've been watching a lot of Olympics (ok, not a lot, but enough) and are ready for them to be over so our regular shows will start airing new episodes. John has been enjoying curling and I've been enjoying watching the skiers wipe out. Oh yeah, we've also been learning a lot about polar bears thanks to Mary Carillo ;)

Since the beginning of the month I've been on my shortened work weeks at our new work location in Young America. Despite the decreased income, this has really been a blessing. It allows me to sleep in every morning and I only have to sit at my desk for 6 hours 4 days a week. This is great since I've been extra tired this past month from carrying around all this extra weight. Every Friday I have off and that's when I've scheduled my weekly appointments. John has been able to come to the last couple for support which has been nice and it's also nice that because of my shorter work days that him and I have been able to spend more time together.

Last Thursday John got to enjoy the day with his Dad at the Home and Patio show. His Dad was teaching a plumbing class. John went to watch the class and then they walked around the showroom together. John's also been pretty busy at work lately, especially with a lot of early shifts.

We had another unfortunate event with John's Explorer last week. It started smelling really bad when he drove it on Thursday. Luckily, he could use my car to drive to work a few days. The diagnosis was the air conditioner compressor was shot and a couple hundred dollars later it's fixed. At least now we can install the car seat for the long drive home from the hospital!

I am planning to both work and teach piano until I have the baby. A couple of my students' parents told me last night that they didn't think I'd be having lessons next Tuesday. We'll see who wins! I was so proud of my students last night because they all are doing really well on their recital pieces. We started working on their new pieces after the holiday break and most of them have pretty challenging pieces. My goal was to have them at least feel comfortable with all the notes before my leave so they could work more on getting the feel of the pieces, moves, and tempo up to speed on their own. I only have 4 students participating in the recital and I've given each one of them a make-up lesson in preparation to my leave and then we'll do one make-up lesson when I get back, before the recital. I more than likely will be starting lessons up again during Chaska's spring break so I should only have to deal with 2 make-up lessons. Then I will just teach through the recital and be done.

Here's my most recent picture at 38 1/2 weeks. John tells Bib every day that it's time to come out and play. He is getting very anxious to be a Dad and start this new adventure called parenthood.