5th Anniversary Trip

On the 25th Nate and I celebrated our 5th year of marriage together! It definitely doesn't feel like it's been 5 years! (It feels like it's been about 20! j/k) Anyway, for our 5th anniversary we ended up going to a Bed and Breakfast in Heber Springs, AR. We came upon this decision for a variety of reasons. I originally wanted to go northeast to Washington DC and NYC. I have never been up there (well except when my family drove through New York on our way to Maine) and I would have loved to see all the sights, as well as a musical on Broadway! But...this adoption stuff kinda messed up my great plan. The problem with adopting is you have no idea when anything is going to happen, so it is very difficult to make plans. First, it was going to be very hard for us to justify spending $1000 or more on a trip to NYC when we still don't have enough money for the adoption, and since we have no idea when we will get a baby, we don't know how many more months we will have to save. Also...Nate only has 5 vacation days left, so if he used them for this vacation and then we ended up getting a baby this year, he wouldn't be able to stay with me at all while we're waiting for interstate compact to go through. I'm already not thrilled about having to stay in a hotel room with a new baby for up to 2 weeks, but to have to do it all alone would be sad. :( All that to say...even though Heber wasn't our first choice, it was the most logical choice looking at our circumstances.

I looked online and found a cute bed and breakfast in Heber Springs called the Oak Tree Lodge. We've never stayed in a B&B before so I was excited to get to see what it's all about. As soon as Nate got off of work on Friday we went and ate at Chilis and then drove up to Heber. Once we arrived we ended up getting our choice of a few different rooms because they had had a cancellation. I really liked this room called the "Safari Room" but it had an animal skull on the wall, and I'm not too fond of animal skulls so I ended up picking the "Sandy Beach" room. Here is a pic of our Sandy Beach room.



The owners of the B&B were awesome. They had cookies set out for us, and a fridge with drinks in it that we could have, and since we were the only ones eating breakfast (another guy staying there was a fisherman so he left really early) we got to pick when we had breakfast. Amazingly enough our room had cable TV and wireless internet, which I wasn't really expecting at a B&B so we ended up watching TV for a little bit that evening, and then we went to get some ice cream before retiring for the night. Our bathroom had a whirlpool tub, so I definitely had to try that out too!

In the morning we got up, went down and ate a yummy country breakfast, and then went outside and walked around a little bit taking pictures. We had only booked our room for 1 night so after that we got packed up and checked out.

We hadn't really decided what we wanted to do the rest of the day. I wanted to go walk around the downtown shops some or go to the sandy beach at the lake, but Nate wasn't really up for swimming so we just looked at some of the shops. I'm glad we did because I found this awesome store that sells really cheap jewelry, purses, and bags. I got some necklaces for $1.25 each, and a purse for $25. After shopping we decided to go back to Searcy so we could go watch Toy Story 3. We might have stayed in Heber but their only movie theater only has one screen and it was showing Karate Kid. So we headed back to Searcy, ate lunch and went to the matinee for Toy Story 3.

All in all it was a fun trip and I enjoyed spending time with Nate. I am so thankful I've spent the last 5 years with him, and I'm looking forward to 50 more!

Here are some pics of the lodge from our trip!

Weekend Adventures

This past weekend I went down to Texas to one of my friend's weddings. On Friday I drove down to Abilene so I could have a free place to stay and could see my 3 month old nephew Jaxon. I can't believe how big he is getting! Here are some pics of me and Jax.





On Saturday I followed my parents to Austin for the wedding. We stopped for lunch at Storm's in Lampasas which is one of my dad's favorite restaurants. I remember stopping there many times growing up as we were going to visit my grandparents. I can't believe how much the area in and around Austin has changed. We got changed in the hotel, and headed to the wedding. It was a beautiful wedding, and it was wonderful getting to see my childhood church, and many of our church friends. The reception was outside, and I'm glad the wedding was at 7PM, because even at 8PM it was still hot outside! I'm so excited for Sara and her new husband and I wish them all the best in their new life together! Here is a pic of me and Sara.



Then the trip back home. It was pretty uneventful for the first half of the trip. I got stuck in some traffic, but it didn't put me too far behind. I missed the exit for the gas station I always stop at in Mt. Pleasant, so I stopped a few miles later. Unfortunately, after I got back on the road, a mile later I heard a noise under my car like something was stuck under there. I looked through my rear view mirror and saw a little piece of something land on the road behind me. Unfortunately, I hadn't noticed anything in front of me on the road, so I pulled over to make sure my car was ok. Then I noticed that one of my tires was missing a piece off the outside of it. It wasn't flat yet, but if I kept on driving it would have either gone flat very quickly or blown. So...I pulled out my donut, and started changing my tire. Thankfully (or unthankfully!) I had just had a flat tire a few months ago, so I knew exactly what to do after watching the guy who helped me then. This time, I was almost finished changing the tire by the time anyone stopped. He picked up my donut to help me put it on, and commented that it felt flat. We checked it, and it only had 10 lbs of pressure out of the 60 it is supposed to have. That wasn't going to get me far. This good Samaritan helped me back my car down the embankment onto the access road. I drove back to the gas station I had just left to air up my spare. Then I drove the few miles back to Mt. Pleasant to get a new tire. Unfortunately it was 5:45 on a Sunday afternoon. The only place that was open was Walmart. I got there at 5:57, only to find out that the automotive closed at 6. I figured I would go ahead and try, and thankfully the guys there were really nice and went ahead and got me a new tire. By the time I got done it was 7PM, and I ended up staying in Mt. Pleasant because i would have been pulling into Searcy around 11 or later...and with everything I had gone through, I knew I would fall asleep trying to drive that far that late at night. So I got a hotel room, had a pretty good night's sleep, and left at 9 today to finally come home. What a crazy day!

Reasons NOT to get pregnant

Due to a request by my loving husband to write a more cheerful post, I decided to post this list I made a few years ago when Nate and I weren't ready to have children yet, but I had friends who were starting to get pregnant and they were complaining about it. (no offense but yeah you totally were!) This list is definitely on the graphic side, so if you get queasy easily or don't want to read anything disgusting I wouldn't recommend reading any further! It is a helpful reminder though, whenever I'm feeling jealous of all the girls at my church who get to experience pregnancy, the things they have to go through that I will never have to deal with or worry about.

*One more thing to say: I didn't make up this list I just wrote it down, so I'm not even sure what everything on this list is, or how accurate it is.

The Reasons NOT to Get Pregnant: (in no particular order)
1-morning sickness all the time
2-implantation of the egg
3-round ligament pain
4-stuff coming out of you all the time
5-water breaking
6-mucus plug
7-nurse pulling on your head while you push
8-placenta birth
9-in labor for numerous hours
10-bleeding for 4 weeks after birth
11-huge pads to wear (and special paper panties)
12-boobs leaking
13-uterus infection from placenta detaching
14-breast infection from nursing
15-explosive diarrhea going everywhere(don't ask me...I just wrote it down!)
16-up at all hours of the night
17-forced to give up caffeine

That's all I have...anyone else have anything to add?

"The Letter"

A letter I found in a book I'm reading. Feel free to read it...or not.

Dear Caseworker,

How perfectly furious it makes us that we do not have control of our own lives. Most couples decide for themselves when the time is right for a baby. Most couples need not ask for references from their parents, friends, neighbors, employers, or clergymen before planning additions to their families. Most couples have health insurance that helps to cover the financial strain of the arrival of a new child. Most couples decide on their own whether or not both of their children's parents should work outside the home. Most couples do not live each day of their lives over a span of several years of family planning with the anxious knowledge that any time, any day, the phone might ring, and, with no warning, no nine month wait, no gradual acquisition of correctly sized clothes and appropriate toys, no previous guarantees that carefully made vacation plans or education or job commitments could be carried out, a caller might say, "Are you ready? There is a one day/three month/one year old/boy/girl waiting to be yours if you say the word."

But we aren't most couples. We are an infertile couple. Frankly we came to adoption as a second choice, our primary motivation a selfish one-we wanted a baby and we couldn't make one. but this wasn't something that we felt we could openly share with you. Nor could we share with you how humiliating it felt to need to prove ourselves to you and to those whom we had to ask to fill out reference forms for us before we could have a child placed in our home. Though in our private conversation with each other we talked about what financial strategies we would need to follow in order to save enough money to "buy" our baby from you, we feared that you would be horrified and insulted if we shared with you our feeling that the fee you need to charge us was a purchase price. We got all kinds of messages from both you and from society in general about the process we were entering, and because those messages were so mixed, we felt it safer to say nothing, even when we felt strongly about something you were saying or doing. Because we acknowledged your expertise and questioned our own, we smiled and nodded and agreed to whatever you asked of us without daring to question anything in your agency's process of adoption.

Surprised at the depth of our own reactions to our thwarted family plans, we found it difficult to trust that anyone could truly understand us and the trauma to an individual or to a relationship that comes of being found to be infertile and considering the alternative of adoption. the only way this can truly be grasped is to be infertile and to want children. How we'd love to insist that all caseworkers be adoptive parents, but we know that this is both impractical and impossible.

Though in most other aspects of our lives we are assertive people, we didn't dare assert ourselves with you, Dear Caseworker. You were too powerful. With you rested our only hope of being parents.

But now that we are parents, Dear Caseworker, we need to speak, because the system we dealt with, an old and beleaguered system entrenched in tradition rather than responsive to changing needs, needs revision. As it is it hurts too much, and, having satisfied our desire for a baby, even realizing that there are other, older children out there who need us, we can't quite bring ourselves to risk again the adoption system's humiliating pain. Fix it, Dear Caseworker. It shouldn't have to be this way.

An Adoptive Couple

From: Adopting After Infertility by Patricia Irwin Johnston.