Sitting, Waiting, Wishing...

This is a limbo week for us. Nothing much has gone on since the last post--I had to sit and come up with something to post about so I don't seem so lazy!

I'm usually not up this early. This is our 7-week break. Because we have 3 semesters/trimesters at BYU-I and we go to school during all three, this is the only break we get! Every year it falls between Spring and Fall semesters, and it's definitely a time worth making the most of, before the schedule grind starts again.

So, I usually sleep in. At least this week. I've had to get up super early for work, then for school, all of Spring semester, so i'm enjoying it.

This is our calm before the chaos week...we purposefully didn't plan much (although a lot has come up to do!) so that we could have a veg week. We've even been picky about being social. It's just nice to do nothing every once in awhile before our lives are changed completely by this little man!

However, this morning I was wide awake at 7 am. Nathan's easing me into the sleeplessness thing pretty regularly, I guess. Between his constant kicking/punching and lots of back pain, it takes 4-5 pillows and a Sudafed to get me to sleep (yay, swollen blood vessels=stuffy noses!!), and even then i'm only asleep for 2-3 hours. Then it's up, to the bathroom, to the fridge/cupboard, then back in bed for another 2-3 hours. Anyone who knows me will know that I love my sleep. This is a weird experience for me: I haven't had much to interrupt my sleep for years. I know all you experienced mamas out there are probably thinking, "JUST WAIT!!", like everyone else is telling me!

Next week is an exciting one for us, then the rest of the month continues just as exciting! On Sunday i'll teach the music to the kiddos at church like I do every week, then Monday we leave for KANSAS CITY!!! I haven't been home in a year, and I miss it terribly. I've seen my family since then, but I miss ALLLL the friends, extended family, my dog, etc. I miss just living around my family. There was never a dull moment; Mitch and I have a lot of them, because there are only two of us, and we're both pretty laid-back.

We'll spend most of the time helping my parents move (Mitch has been recruited to help them move both their grand and upright pianos!), but we have lots of fun things planned as well. I have all the colors picked out for Nathan's room, and i'm hoping to find fabric while i'm there so I can start making bedding/decor.

We come home the 11th, I have a dentist appt. the 12th, my glucose test on the 13th (What a way to celebrate a one-year anniversary, right!?), and we're off to Lake Chelan in Oregon on the 14th! We're so excited! I wish I could do everything that everyone else will get to do, but I have no doubt it'll still be a blast! I love boating and swimming, and my mom found me a GREAT maternity swimsuit (it's pretty cute, actually! Who knew anything maternity could be cute!?), and Mitch is just about as excited to fish and do everything else. We can't wait!

Hopefully we'll have a ton of pictures to show off when we get back on the 22nd!

My parents are dropping Camille off at BYU the last week of August/first week of Sept. and they're stopping by Rexburg to drop off baby stuff that we won't be able to fly home with. I'm way excited: my mom hasn't been here since we've been married! Then school starts September 9th and we're back to a routine and a schedule!

Happy Seven-Week Break! :o) Sorry for gabbing ears off again...anyone with the patience to read this should be given some legit award! :o)

July 2010...And a belly pic!

Well, it's been 29305 days (give or take :o) since I posted last, so here we go!

I'm jealous of all those people who can update their blogs on a regular basis!

We've had a pretty great July. I've been getting through classes, work, and growing a fetus. Mitch has been kept busy with work (maintenance in our complex; towards the end of a semester work piles up!), and donating his plasma to save up for a new pistol! I'm so proud of him! He gets about $50/week for donating plasma and puts it all towards his new gun. We couldn't find wiggle room in our budget, so this turned out to be a good option! He's working hard for it, so hopefully it'll mean he appreciates it more!

Speaking of growing our fetus, here's a picture of our little Nathan man! :o) He's kicking and "tapping" my belly all the time!

We had a doctor's appointment today: 23 weeks! Just a normal one; listening to the heartbeat, measuring the belly, etc. Nothing too interesting! Nathan's doing great and i'm still measuring normally, so everything's going pretty well I guess! In four weeks is the big glucose test for gestational diabetes...cross your fingers! Luckily i've had to drink that yucky, syrup-y glucose drink before, when I tested positive for hypoglycemia. Luckily that glucose drink was twice the size of this one, so this shouldn't be a big deal!

Anyway, to drone on, we went garage sale-ing on Saturday and Mitch found a great fish tank, all set up with a really nice pump and filter and everything! We bought 5 fish, 1 suckerfish, and 2 crabs! We like them :o) Here's a few of my favorite pictures!

We like our fishies :o)

We also had some family visit in late June/early July to help us celebrate the Fourth of July! Mitch's whole family was in town at some point: Ethan and Jayna went to BYU-I summer camps out here (like EFY, but more outdoors-y) and their mom dropped them off one weekend, then their dad picked them up the next weekend! We loved having Ethan stay with us for the few days before and after his camp. We did lots of fun things while everyone was in town: we went to the duck ponds and fed ducks popcorn, then went to dinner at Red Robin with Mitch's mom and the next weekend ate at Famous Dave's and blew off fireworks with Mitch's dad. Talk about some spoiled weekends! We didn't know what to do with ourselves this last weekend! Here are some fun pictures :o)

Fun at the duck pond feeding them popcorn, and my father-in-law and sister-in-law Jayna enjoyed swinging at the park we lit fireworks off at! :o)

Can you find the Mitch in the tree?

Well, that's been our July so far...sorry for all the gabbing!

It's (Obviously) A....

BOY!!!!!
That's right, we're having a sweet, little boy!!

Our appointment for the full sonogram and finding out the gender was supposed to be this Friday, but it turns out only 3 of the 4 midwives from our practice are in town, and they have 8 babies due this week. Since midwives stay with you the whole time you're in labor, each baby is like a day-long project! So, they wanted to move all of us "non-due patients" toward the beginning of the week so we could get out of their way! :o) We didn't mind at all! It took us about an hour to even comprehend that we would be finding out the sex of our little one that day!!

Our little man was spread eagle--perfect for us to see. The umbilical cord was in between his legs, so the ultrasound tech (who was fabulous, by the way!) poked and prodded till it was out of the way, and said she could see tell right away what it was, but she wanted a shot that would convince us! Here it is: it's like he's sitting flat on his bottom with his legs spread out. His little "tool," as his Papa Dooley calls it, is ready to be seen and you can see his little hand above it. We decided he's trying to make himself look bigger :o)



We got lots of sweet pictures; they labeled them all for us so now we know what we're looking at after the appointment. It's amazing how clear it all was! She did scare us a bit when she said, "Wow, watch out! You guys will have your hands full! He's all over the place!!" Ugh!! We'll see if she's right!

He's in the 40th percentile for weight, which makes him a whopping 9 ounces...how funny! My sisters and I were always in, like, the 10th percentile while we were little, and Mitch's mom didn't have big babies, either, so hopefully he won't be too big when he's born!


Here's another sweet picture of his cute little face! I love it all! Check out the little button nose, his little lips and his chin!! He doesn't have any fat on his body yet; that develops in the next 10 weeks or so, but he sure looks sweet right now! I wanted to kiss his little face so bad! A little further down you can see his arm sitting flat against the side of my uterus, and if you look really closely, you can see his little fingers of his right hand lying on his chest; the dark little dots are his fingers, and the long little line is his thumb bone...can anyone see what i'm talking about!?

Luckily, our neighbors, Jake and Amy, brought their sweet six week-old cuddlebug, Burton, over for us to love on while they ran to the store. I just wanted to love on a little one, and that gave me the fix I needed! :o)

And the name? We picked one girl name and one boy name, so we know if he's not born "looking like" this name, he better grow into it, because we only had one favorite:
Nathan Patrick Dooley
I like it :o) My mom wanted to give this name to a baby boy, and all of us girls wanted to use it first: looks like we win! Nathan is just a family favorite name, but Patrick is his Grandpa Larson's, my dad's, first name and it's also Mitch's uncle Patrick's first name. We love keeping names in the family! :o)

7 times

Yup, that's the grand total. I have started this post seven times...SEVEN. Hopefully I get to finish it this time :o)

Mitch and I have had a pretty good semester: i've hit a few roadbumps in classes and such and had a few days where I haven't felt very well, but everything's pretty normal, and subsequently, pretty boring! Hence the gap between posts :o)

Mitch has made a hobby out of "inventing things," as I like to call it. It's not unusual for me to come home from work and classes and for him to say, "I thought about it all day while working, and I know how we can make this....it'll save us $130!!" (silly man, as if i'd ever pay full price for anything! He knows he's talking to a Larson here, right!?) Or, my personal favorite, "Okay, I turned this into this and now it's all pinned...but I need a sewing machine." The funniest thing is that everything is always safety pinned together...he doesn't like straight pins because he gets poked too much... :o)

Recently he's been preparing for a hunting trip in October. It's a big deal: they've found private land to hunt elk in, and i'm starting to accept the fact that we may be eating elk meat all winter! He has decided he doesn't want to carry a backpack.

So, he turned his regular pistol holster (I guess you bring a pistol for self-defense or to "finish off" a deer...gross.) that clips onto a belt or something into one that will hook to a belt and also strap around his leg, using extra buckles and straps from an old backpack. I'm always so impressed with his ingenuity when it comes to these things. He gets really creative with his little projects! I replaced safety pins with straight pins and sewed it up. It works great and he was really smart about the design! It took about an hour to stitch up.

He's now fascinated with how a sewing machine works--even my vintage family heirloom sewing machine! (I LOVE it...it works like it's brand new!) He always says, "it's amazing...they thought of everything!!) He's really tested my knowledge on how a sewing machine works!

Next he wanted a pouch for a first aid kit and his GPS that could go around the other leg. Pretty much the same design as the leg holster. We wanted something to close the flap on the top with that wouldn't make tons of noise and that would be easy to sew (velcro=too loud, snaps=too hard to sew...we went down the list). He tries to do these projects for as little money as possible (he's good at that, too!) and headed to Deseret Industries (a thrift store around here) to look for something to make the pouch out of that also closed easily and quietly. Since there are 29325850 Mormons here, he found a great scripture case that someone had turned in, black and complete with buckles. He brought it home and was just thrilled!

This one took about two-three hours to sew up, but we did it. He was so excited to try both on, and practice crouching like he was hunting, making sure they were comfortable. I love it :o)

The last project we've done is a vest with tons of pockets for ammo or deer calls or whatever else you take hunting. He bought a great vest when he was about ten and still had it in the closet. He can still wear it but it was too small in most places...so, we headed to the fabric store (I wanted to go to D.I. and buy an old shirt to cut up, but this worked too!) and bought half a yard of brown, ribbed, stretchy cotton fabric. We wanted black, but this worked too. I'm not a fan of sewing on ribbed, stretchy fabric, but who is!?

We cut the vest up the back (would've done it under the arms where the seams were, but there are pockets there...so we had to do it a harder way!) and across the shoulders and fitted pieces of fabric to as wide/long as he wanted them. He kept asking, "why do I have to try it on!? It doesn't have to be exact!" (Because I don't want to have to redo it!) It took about four hours to sew it all. It would've gone faster, but I was super stressed and trying to do other things, too.

We finally finished it and he put it on all proud...I wanted to make darts for the back, but then I remembered how much I hate sewing darts...so the fabric can gap out a bit around the collar, it doesn't matter. He said anyone who notices isn't manly enough to be out there hunting with them. I loved seeing him in all his gear--he was so proud because it was all made from his ideas. I love that! (Now maybe he'll feel the same way about me sewing baby room stuff!)

I couldn't get many pictures of him all dressed up (he doesn't like that phrase...) in his gear. Turns out the boy doesn't care for posing for the blog...oh well :o)

ch-ch-ch-ch-changes!!

Well, i've been attempting this post for awhile now! I wish I had pics, but I don't...we've kind of run out of interesting things to take pictures of!

Our schedules have changed up quite a bit--mine, especially!

Mitch is busy working this semester as a maintenance man for our complex. I'm AMAZED at everything my guy can fix!! It makes me excited to own a house in 203957 more years, after we're done with med school :o) He's been reading a huge book about every other day, including the Bourne series and is loving it. He also joined World Gym and is working out every day! I'm so proud of him for trying to accomplish his goals and using his off-semester to do so! He has also made me so proud in taking care of our apartment so I can focus on school. Plus, I'm still not feeling "normal" (will I ever again!?), and it really helps to have a man willing to take over when I feel like spewing...

My schedule changed drastically last week. Long story short, my boss's-boss, Jim, told my two bosses at the ticket office that I could still work while taking only 6 credits, not 12, which is full-time. I found out last week that I would be let go this semester without 6 more credits.

PLUS, I had had a job interview for a 2nd on-campus job (the only kind available in Rexburg) that would give me 15 hrs/week. We did the math and found that my two jobs alone would completely pay our rent every month!! That is HUGE for us! So, I was excited about this job. It was offered to me the same day I found out about the 6 credits. Turns out they have the same requirements and I had to be going to school full-time...

So, TWO DAYS before the add/drop date I had to find 6 credits to add. I petitioned and called and emailed professors whose classes were shown to have open spots, but they all turned me down. I was kept up at night by nightmares of having to give up both jobs. I woke up the next morning to SIX professors who would let me into their class!! I picked two three-credit classes that ACTUALLY HELP me toward graduation, and off I went...I accepted the job, bought some books, picked up more grant money (it doubled due to my credits) and i'm still playing catch-up. I have -3 weeks to make up 3 weeks of work, but the professors are being very nice and understanding...that's why I picked 'em! :o)

So, my new schedule includes starting work every morning at 8 and working until 11, then 4 out of 5 days going to my first class at 11:30 and staying until about 4:15. Then I come home and do tons of homework and work evenings with the ticket office at events.

We are excited about this new job, but it puts a huge demand on me. I couldn't do it if I didn't know how supportive and wonderful (am I gushing? Oh well!) Mitch is, and how much he's willing to do around here!

Well, I guess it doesn't sound like a change worth four "ch-'s", but it reminded me of a song from Shrek 2, so it sounded good :o) Plus, it affects our day a lot, especially if you know me as well as the next guy and know that I HATE mornings. LOATHE them. DETEST. Ughhhh.... But hey, it's a job that pays the rent! :o) Mitch and I are putting ourselves on strict schedules this week, and planning our days out hour-by-hour. This should help with the whole "self-motivation" aspect.

Wish us luck! :o)

New trimester, new semester, new schedules!

Well, it's a new trimester for baby Dooley--hopefully this means the lessening of morning sickness will continue and i'll fit into my bigger clothes soon! (Hey, i'm more comfortable, so I don't really care how I look!)

A new semester for me (my first summer at BYU-I!)

And we have new schedules: Mitch isn't taking classes right now; however, the challenge is now keeping his time occupied with something that isn't completely useless. He's getting a lot of maintenance work from our complex, reading a lot of books, and he joined World Gym (yay, $10/month memberships! He loves it and goes almost every day!).

I'm supposed to be "off-track" -- out of the 3 semesters, this is my semester off, but since we figure it'll be harder to finish school after baby Dooley comes next semester, i'm taking 6 credits. I like the workload of going part-time! If only I could do this every semester and NOT take 4 more years to graduate! The weird thing is that this is my 5th semester, so I should be done in 3 more semesters...I'm sure it'll take longer than that, though :o)

A few weeks ago we spent a GREAT week with Mitch's family. We get to see them again for Ethan's graduation (!!!) over Memorial Day weekend! Can't wait! :o) Here's a picture from our drive: Mitch was scaring me right after this picture was taken (in Bighorn National Forest) by stepping over the guardrails...luckily he's not insane, so I didn't have to worry :o) We'd pulled over to let our brakes cool down after the hugely steep roads into the base of the canyon.

AAAAHHHHH....

It's another welcomed end to another semester at BYU-Idaho. I was all excited for it to get warm, but of course, the weather just teased us like always.

I wish I had pics for this post, but I don't, so i'll try and make it short!

We are so excited to see Mitch's family this weekend/next week! We'll get to spend some good time with them!

I am working at graduation this Saturday also...a gig I used to get out of by flying home! Not this year! I can't believe it starts so early--on the first weekend of the break, too! Oh, well--it's a job, and it's money :o)

Baby Dooley's doing great as far as we know--nothing unusual so far. We go back to the doctor at the end of April, which doesn't seem like it's that far away! We're excited to see how things are cookin' in there! I'm learning how to stay ahead of my morning sickness--eating until i'm full before i'm hungry, getting plenty of fluids, eating when i'm nauseous, etc. I'm not wearing my Sea-Bands nearly as much anymore--I always have them with me just in case, but it's good to not be totally dependent on them. I am worried about this weekend's long car ride, though! Mitch has been SUPER at helping me with EVERYTHING I don't feel like I have the energy to do: he cleans the house during my daily nap, does extra chores, and doesn't complain one bit! What a great guy :o)

Well, that's it! Everything's going great in our Dooley world!