12 Days of Christmas

Date Night

So Jude and I went on our first date since before Sabrina was born. We grabbed a bite to eat at Steak n Shake, went to the mall to get some of my favorite treats-chocolate covered gummy bears-and headed over to The Flying Monkeys. I love celtic music and Irish dancing. They had a celtic band called Slip Jig playing AND they had Irish dancers. It was a ton of fun.

34,000 WORDS

I feel like I have so much to catch up on! Instead of writing about it I thought I'd post pictures instead. A picture IS worth a thousand words, right?

Halloween

Getting ready.

About to put pixie dust on (eye shadow).

Somebody did not like the way I did her hair. =) "This is not how Snow White does her hair, mom!"

Snow White and Star Fairy (yes, she may look like an angel, but Lisi wanted to be a fairy so we got a little creative)

Enjoyable

I love it when he hits the high notes.
It makes me smile; I hope that it does the same for you.
-Jude

Big Sisters

Lisi and Sabrina

Evie and Sabrina

Sabrina

Our little angel number 3.
Weight: 6.15.5 rounded to 7.0 lbs
Length: 19.5 inches
Time: 09:36 a.m.
Name: Sabrina

Interesting

My little mommy

Ashley and I sometimes believe that we run the castle but this is the face of the real boss. I feel completely confident that if Ashley were to die, Evie would keep me in line. She lets me know if I do not have a lunch when I am leaving for work, and that my feet smell like "avocado and cucumber". She is a bucket of sunshine in my life.

and a video....

My Little Skater-Girl

Lisi could spend all day on the pipe. She just lays down on the board and rides. She doesn't make a sound at all and is never ready to get off when you finally stop. The only thing you might here from her is "faster", if you you are going to slow. We bought her her own set of gear - she is adorable.


and another video...

Pink and Pretty Lisi

Lisi is my little attitude girl. She is as precious as they come though.
Here are some photos of her.


and a video of her dancing ballet...

Don't Snicker

Here are a couple of words defined on the inside of a snicker's wrapper. I found them entertaining.

Substantialiscious \sub-'stan(t)-shu-'li'shus\ (noun). The weight of something when you weight it with your tongue.

Peanutopolis \pE-nut-a-pu-lis\ (noun). A state of mind making you feel very strong and powerful, almost mayor-like.

Pipe Dream

Some of you may know that back in the day Jude skateboarded. It was something he enjoyed doing, but he never really got into it too much. However, he always dreamed of having a half-pipe. So, he got online and found some plans and started working on it a few weeks ago. He finished half of it this past weekend. When it is done it will be twice as wide. This has not stopped him and the girls from enjoying it anyways. Lisi was the first one to try it out.

Lisi skateboarding



Evie skateboarding




To come:

Jude throwing down massive tricks. Ummm...maybe not massive. And "thrown down" might more accurately describe the outcome. Love you babe.

Too Cute

A few weeks ago Evie started crossing her eyes. At first I thought she was just playing around. But after three weeks it just kept getting worse and worse, so I called the doctor and made an appointment. Evie actually did really well at her visit despite having to get her pupils dilated and people constantly shoving things in front of her eyes. (Thanks Meg for sending me a few e-mails to help me prep her for the visit!) The doctor said she was farsighted but that it should correct itself over time. Until then she would need to wear glasses. So, we went to Target's optical center and Evie picked out her "princess" glasses (I had to get her excited about it somehow). She has been wearing them now for over a week now and is doing so much better. She is really good about keeping them on. And of course we had to get Lisi a pair of "princess glasses," too!

You cannot have too much Lord of the Rings

This is pretty cool. An independent not-for-profit Lord of the Rings prequel was created by die hard fans. It comes out on Sunday (3 May 2009) free to download and enjoy at your own discretion. The quality of the video appears to be amazing.
Watch the trailer, my preciouses.

Trailer 2 - The Hunt For Gollum [2]
by HuntForGollum

IT'S A....

Well, for everyone who thought that I was having a boy.....including myself.....were wrong! Yep, I'm having a girl! I was very surprised when she told me. I really, truly thought I was having a boy. I even had a name picked out secretly. I haven't even thought of girl names. We are very excited however, and Evie gets another little sister (she did NOT like the possibility of having a baby brother). The most important thing is that she and I are both healthy. We look forward to August/September when she arrives!

4 Months Pregnant

4 months pregnant

Just some more pictures of the girls. I love the top right one.

This and That

Well, I thought it was about time to write something on our blog. I still get on frequently to see what's going on with everyone else, but I haven't made myself sit down and actually write something myself.
The past few months have been much of the same. I've been without a car for about 3 months now. We are looking for a van right now. I feel like I've been saying that for a while...haha. But really we ARE looking.
Jude and I took a trip up to Nashville a few weeks ago to go to the Bishop's storehouse. When we moved into our house last fall we painted some and tiled our kitchen floor. After that we promised we were not going to do anything else until we got our food storage in order. With baby # 3 and the nesting kicking in you can imagine what kind of motivation that has given me. So, we packaged 6 months worth of the staple items. We plan to go back soon to get the other 6 months worth. It feels so good to be working on getting our food storage. We have also been building up our water supply. Anyone know where we can get a good deal on the 55 gallon water drums?
I go to the doctor on the 27th for my 20 week ultrasound. Any guesses on whether it is a boy or girl? (Check out the poll to the right). We are excited to find out and to start thinking of names! I already have a couple up my sleeve, but I'm afraid if I think about it too much or talk about it I'll change my mind, so it may just have to be a surprise =).
Jude will be leaving in May for a two week business trip to California. I think that will be the longest we have been away from each other since we have been married. I might just go crazy with him gone. I'm thinking it might be time for a girl's party =)...anyone game?

Making Argentine noquis with daddy.

Lisi's 2nd birthday...Yeah, I thought I had birthday candles. Oh well =).

Update on Kyle II

We want to thank everyone for their prayers. Kyle is doing wonderful. Last Friday they finally released him to go home. He spent 3 weeks in the hospital and was definitely ready to get out of there. He has something called a "wound vac" that he has to wear for a while. I guess you could say he is "wearing" it. I have not seen it, but supposedly it is this tube stuck in his abdomen that sucks to the incision to keep it closed and dry. Sounds gross. Kyle is in good spirits though.

Update on Kyle

Kyle is doing better but he is not out of the woods yet. He has been recovering wonderfully, so much so that they have taken him off of the paralytic although they still continue to heavily sedate him. Hopefully, Kyle will be back to normal in no time. We thank everyone for their prayers for him and his family. Please continue to pray for the family.

Pray for Kyle

Many of you may know already that our brother-in-law Kyle has been in the hospital for a week now. He was diagnosed with mono a few weeks ago which caused his spleen to swell. He was in an accident last Saturday that ruptured his spleen. They decided last night that it was not going to heal on its own and that the best thing to do would be to remove it. Upon removing it they found that he had developed blood clots in his lungs and is at risk of developing more clots. At first they had intended to sedate him for a couple of days while he was on a ventilator in hopes that they could get rid of the clots with some blood thinner. However, because of his incision from surgery he is not able to take any blood thinners. He will now be placed in a comatose state for 7-10 days in hopes that his body will reabsorb the clots. This is very serious. Please keep Kyle and his family in your prayers. Thank you.

My Hood Will Open

There are a few details that need to be corrected from my recent post.

Correction number 1/2: Only one of my lights was obliterated. For some reason I thought that both had been destroyed but one is perfectly intact. I failed to notice that somehow.

Correction number 1: my hood will open. I was trying to pry my hood open with a pry bar a few days after the accident, and after a few pries, I let it be. A day or two later George Walker stopped to look at my car for a minute and he began undoing the bolt on the latch that holds hood down (it was easy to access since the grill was busted out. About this moment I had the most amazing flash of insight, "Jude, pop the hood". I hadn't tried that yet. Sure enough it worked.

Correction number 2: not being a car guy, I did not know that the venty thing that was bent up is actually the fins to my air-conditioning unit and not my radiator. My air-conditioner does not work anyways, so no loss there anyhow. There is a bend in the front framework of my car that needs to be pulled out, but George says it is easy and he will help. So it turns out that the only expenditure will be one new light housing which george says could be about $60. Not bad.

Correction number 3: I spoke demeaningly of my wonderful wife by hinting that she was not compassionate towards me in the post. That is not true at all; she cares for me very much. I have retracted those lines from the post. I did it thinking it to be funny, but it is never funny to be funny at someone's expense. I am sorry.

I'm Pregnant!

We are very excited to announce that we are expecting baby # 3! Today I had my first visit with my doctor and everything is looking great. We were able to hear the baby's heartbeat and it was wonderful. My due date is September 14th, but I will be having the baby on or before August 31st since my doctor says I'm at high risk for having a "car baby." SCARY! With Lisi I was 7 centimeters dilated with no symptoms whatsoever. And with Evie my water broke at 36 weeks. So, needless to say we are going to be cautious this time around. I was going to wait a few more weeks to make an official announcement, but most of our families know already and I have accidentally let it slip to a couple of people as well. I don't know if I could have lasted much longer. Looking forward to keeping everyone updated!

Broken Lights

So you know how I fixed my lights...they are broken again, actually obliterated. All that remains of my lights is broken glass. Actually just one of my lights is gone, the other survived unscathed. I was in a car accident.
Now to explain the situation; luckily, I chose to drive the 19 year old Toyota Camry to work this day. The accident occured at a busy intersection where wrecks occur all of the time. The lady in front of me started to go but changed her mind and braked to a stop, and I followed suit, BAMMM!!! The gentleman behind me was already looking over his shoulder to see if it would be clear and had not noticed that we had stopped. When he hit me my foot came off the brake and in the confusion I did not realize that I was moving, CRUNCHHH!!! I stopped on the bumper of the lady in front of me. No major damage occurred, except to my car. My neck was a little sore that day and the next but it feels great now. After the accident my car was still running and wasn't leaking anywhere although it looks as though my air-conditioning heat exchanger thing is now one with my fan. I was able to drive my car home. One of my light casings is obliterated. The gentleman who rear-ended me was insured so some compensation should be obtained before too long, much to my wife's satisfaction. We will be needing a van soon with another baby on the way.
-Jude

Ladies and Gentlemen

I am not sure where Evie gets her ideas from. This is a cute little episode from our lives the other day...

Ashley, Lisi, and myself are sitting in the living room.
Evie comes walking out from her bedroom carrying her book bag and nonchalantly says, "Hey mean people." This captures our attentions and smiles. She then says, "I've got something to make you nice." Then like a magician pulling a rabbit out of the hat, she puts her hand into the deep recesses of the backpack, says "Ladies and Gentlemen", and whips out a pink head band. I say "Oh, is that going to make you nice?". Evie responds, "No, it is going to make you nice". She then crowns me with the pink head band and her precious little smile.

- Jude

Saturday's Warrior

Yeah, do you remember that movie? It sure was cool.

A narrative tells of a legendary narrative whose story was the stuff of narratives. This will not be one of those, but if you have watched Kung-Fu Panda 13 times in the past 3 days you will understand - okay, maybe you only need have watched it once.

First off, I would like to tell of the second trash can turkey that I cooked this year. This occured the Saturday before Christmas. We were having a family party at our house and my wife commanded that I cook another parrot. Wait my wife says that she cannot stand when I call it parrot, so I cooked another wood pecker, is that better? This is okay with me because it is one of the few manly things I get to do. Most of my evenings are spent dancing like a princess, painting filange nails, and wearing feminine head apparel as this is the only items of my daughter's dress up clothes that will fit me. I found out the hard way. Yes, I dream of the day when testosterone will enter my life again.
Well back to the bird... It was a rainy week and the heaviest of the rain occured on Saturday. I believed that my bird needed to be cooked before the Sabbath so I went to work Saturday evening. It was still raining but that was okay with me, because I have a garage now. I often have brilliant flashes of insight like this, and when they hit me it is pure euphoria and all rational thought and my wife's cautions do not ever connect with my elated brain cells.
My wife tells me she is becoming annoyed reading this so I had better get to the guts of the matter. I opened both garage doors at either end of the garage so air could flow, and prepared my pigeon as described in a previous blog post. I arranged the fire area in the middle of the garage at the opening of the big door just inside from the rain and as much outside as possible. I lit my fire...then seeing how big the flames got, and how far the storm winds blew them, I panicked...I immediately removed the nearby gas cans from the vicinity, ran out the back door and drug my hose into the garage. After a while the flames died down and everything worked out just fine. The crow was amazing! The only drawback was the smell of burned wood pecker juice that stained my garage over the next few weeks.

The eve of Christmas Eve I had another opportunity to feel manly. Yes, feeling manly has become somewhat of a treat and I do feel to rejoice at these opportunities. The lights on my 1990 Toyota Camry have been busted for some time. They just stopped working. I do not know much about cars but I did know to check the fuses and the bulbs, all of which were good. Others suggested things like replacing relays or your dash switch, but that would have required about a half-hour of effort and would never have satisfied the inventor in me. I decided that I would take the road less-traveled. Some less-traveled roads are traveled because it is the right thing to do, others are traveled because the traveler is stubborn or desperate. I fell under the desperate category. I had procrastinated fixing my lights until the very last moment possible as we had to drive both cars to a Christmas Eve party. On my way home from work I stopped at Lowe's and purchased 40 ft of wire for about $10.
This was much cheaper than a 40 dollar steering column switch but probably more expensive than a relay.
However, inventing your own solution is priceless.
My car feels old, looks old, and is old. So I felt little or no fear at drilling holes in it and removing any sort of aesthetic panel that stood between me and my dream. Rather I felt a sense of excitement at the operation. Could I remove things make the changes I needed to make and put everything back together? I realize now that this might be how surgeons feel who operate on really old people. I appreciate the years of service my car has given me but I know the end is coming. I will do what I have to do to the car and if it passes away, oh well - it was going to happen before long anyways, but ripping the chest open for heart surgery sure was exciting. I hope that none of you ever have a doctor like this work on your loved ones. The plan worked. I cut the wires to my lights to get the plugs and ran wires straight off of my battery to the light plugs. For anyone who cares, the lights are wired in parallel. The most interesting part was deciding where to put the light switch. I decided that it definitely had to be in the cab, but how to get it there? Lucky for me, I walked out from church a few years ago and found my passenger sideview mirror missing. It had been broken off and was just gone. Some might not see this as a blessing but really it provided me the only decent way to run a wire into my car. I drilled out a bigger hole in the metal plate on which it had been mounted and pulled the wire through it. Now where do I put the switch? In the glove box of course. I removed my glove box door and used my soldering iron to carve out a rectangular piece out of the plastic back plate. I then drilled a slot big enough for a standard light switch to switch in. I mounted an old light switch to the back side of the door and wa-lah! My lights are now controlled by a switch on my glove box door. Pretty cool huh? In high school we thought it was cool when one of our friends duck taped his rear lights in place - this is so much cooler. Maybe my next task will be to route my window washer fluid line into the cab to use it as a Kool-Aid dispenser.

I am tired. I will try to add pictures soon and continue narrating recent events.
-Jude Collins