Fun for Friday

Today, I decided I'd copy Heather's post because it sounded like fun! Mimicry is the truest form of flattery, right? So feel free to copy me, too. To play, just...

1. Go to Google.
2. Type in "[YOUR NAME] needs" (e.g., I typed in "Bethany needs").
3. Blog about Google's advice.
4. Don't trust Google. It can meet your Internet searching needs, but not your real-life needs.


Bethany needs...

• ...a middle name. Wrong, Google. I have 2 middle names now, but Bethany's baby does need a middle name. And a first name. Google suggests Bethany Renae, Bethany Elizabeth and Bethany Anne.
  
• ...a new liver "or else she could be dead by Christmas." Wow, I didn't know I was in such bad shape. How about fried chicken livers instead? I wouldn't mind having one of those.
  
• ...you. Not sure what for, but don't say you don't feel needed.
  
• ...help. That's true, but I think this is another post about the liver transplant. I do need help in plenty of other ways, though.
  
• ...to go home. I like that suggestion, Google!
  
• ...parents who love her. Google, you can scratch that one off your list.
  

My list didn't turn out as fun as I thought it might, so I'm going to also copy the second part of Heather's post -- creating my own CD cover. Here are the rules:

1. Go to Wikipedia.
2. Hit "random." The first article is the name of your band.
3. Go to Random Quotations, and the last four or five words of the very last quote on the page is the title of your first album.
4. Go to Flickr and click on "the last 7 days" near the bottom. The third picture is your album cover.
5. Use an image editing program and post your album cover.

Here's mine:

My band is named Flores da Cunha, after a municipality in the state Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. I like that! The album name is Offer Me the Position. Obviously, we are a bilingual band notably influenced by our love of Brazil, on a never ending search for a career near the beach. Think "Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay" with a distinctly Latin feel.

I'll be signing autographs as soon as the CD tops the charts.

Lock-in

Technically, can it be called a “lock-in” if the minister’s wife breaks out and heads for home at 3 a.m….or if we spend as much time out as we did in?

The so-called lock-in was an awful lot of fun! Our first order of business was to eat pizza (always a good way to start), and to make it even better, some wonderful person had actually stocked CAFFEINE-FREE Diet Sam’s cola. It might have even been my husband, but I was so pleasantly surprised, I forgot to ask. Before you get worried about the “diet” part, know that I am paranoid, so I don’t overdo artificial sweeteners.

So now, it’s 9:30 p.m., and I am still wide awake.

Next, a bunch of giggling 7th grade girls piled in my car to go glow bowling. Many things about 7th grade girls cause me to scratch my head in puzzlement, but I do love me some enthusiastic junior high kids. To illustrate these girls’ enthusiasm, one in the backseat kept saying, “This is an awesome car.” Ha. To anyone else, it’s just a dirty, gray, four-door Ford, but to a 7th grade girl, it’s “awesome.” We also maneuvered through the parking lot in a huddle.

These boys might look like they're not having much fun, but they really are.

The bowling alley was jumpin’, so we waited a while. You know, second-hand smoke is good for the sinuses. I wonder…at what point did bowling become partners with drinking beer and smoking cigarettes indoors? It’s like you’re making one of the dorkiest sports a “cool” date idea by pairing it with long-necked bottles, tight metallic T-shirts and lung cancer.

I do, however, understand the social aspects of bowling. That’s what I go for, not so much to actually roll the ball.

It’s now somewhere around 1 a.m….still going strong.

Back to the church for Rotel dip and cookies.

Gunter wanted me to run the sound during our worship time (which for me means pressing “play” and “stop” on the CD player while operating one slider for volume), so logically, he moved worship time up in the schedule so there’d be a better chance of me still being awake.

Sadly, worship did me in. I was nodding off in the Spirit.

At that point, my stamina was pretty much depleted. I decided it would be safer for me to go home and to bed than to drive a group of kids around town for a video scavenger hunt, which was next on the agenda.

I did get to see the videos of the scavenger hunt and the Murder in the Dark night vision the next day, so I didn’t completely miss out. Gunter got home about 7:30 or 8 Saturday morning, and we spent most of the day recovering from our night of fun.

Hope you youth enjoyed the lock-in! We’ll go ahead and plan the next one in about 5 years.

13 weeks and then some

It’s been quite a while since I’ve posted a baby update (as if it hasn’t been on my mind). I guess I talk about it so much in real life, I don’t feel the need to blog about it, or I forget that I haven’t.

I’m 13 weeks now. I still feel good, except for occasional bouts of sleepiness, which are nothing out of the ordinary for me. I’m not suffering from the constant, biting hunger I once was, but I continue to eat more often than most. Maybe it’s a mind thing, maybe it’s to keep my blood sugar regulated or maybe it’s just because I like to eat.

Speaking of blood sugar, I have had a couple episodes. I’ve had minor issues with my blood sugar before, but because I take great pleasure in snacks, I don’t have problems often.

There was one scary incident when I woke up in the middle of the night with a little bit of pain in my midsection. Getting out of bed was no easy task, and neither was stumbling the few feet to the bathroom feeling dizzy, nauseated and sweaty all over. For a while, I figured I had caught a virus that had been going around, but when I got to the bathroom, nothing ever happened. In about 15 minutes, I felt better and went back to bed. The nurse said it could have been my blood sugar, and I haven’t had anything like that happen since.

Strange things happen when you’re pregnant. Seems like it’s something different every day. Or is it that I just pay more attention to every little sensation?

I am feeling pretty chunky around the midsection. I guess you could say that I’m poking out a little, but it doesn’t look like a cute poke-out to me. It just looks like I’ve gained some weight and have a spare tire sitting on top of my britches. I’ve pulled the rubber-band-through-the-buttonhole trick on a couple pairs of my pants, but I can still wear most of them without much trouble. Longer, looser shirts are, of course, more comfortable, but I’ve tried not to delve into my maternity clothes pile too much yet.

Sorry I have no new photos to share. Some days I look a tad on the pregnant side, and some days, I don’t…at least in my opinion.

Babycenter.com tells me the baby is almost 3 inches long and weighs nearly an ounce – about the size of a medium shrimp. A shrimp? What? How could we go from a lime last week to a shrimp this week? Limes are bigger than shrimps!

My next doctor’s appointment is on March 5, just 2 days before we leave on our trip (good timing and God’s mercy!). Then, we should find out the baby’s gender at the next appointment, probably the last week in March or the first week in April.

We've been tossing around some names, but no significant progress there. We haven't started transforming the junk room into the nursery, either. That's awful, isn't it?

Anyway, there’s my baby update at 13 weeks.

We have a youth lock-in tonight at church, and it sounds like Gunter has a great time planned! I’m going to hold out as long as I can, hopefully at least until 2 or 3 a.m., after our worship time. But, considering I usually feel like going to bed by about 7, staying that long is doubtful. Thank God for willing adult chaperones!

Plans

Many plans are in a man's heart, but the counsel of the LORD will stand. - Proverbs 19:21

Ran across this Proverb during my time with God this morning. I've gotten some pretty clear, straightforward lessons lately. I'm so glad that God has His way, no matter what our plans are.

Give our regards to Broadway...and Brooklyn

A trip update: We are still going to Israel, but we are not going to New York City.

We got our flight plans from DuCar Tours, the travel agency handling the Israel part of the trip, the other day, and they had “IAD” on our itinerary, not “JFK.” I got the worst feeling in the pit of my stomach when I saw it. I wasn’t sure at first what “IAD” meant, but I knew it wasn’t “JFK,” like we had been told…up until a month before the trip. I soon found out that “IAD” meant Dulles International Airport, 26 miles outside Washington, D.C.

Cue pregnant emotional meltdown.

That is, after I called DuCar and found out there was no way to trade airports or tickets. They had “already been printed.” And we all know that printer ink might as well be blood.

Apparently, they encourage everyone to wait to make their travel arrangements until receiving official flight plans from them. I must have missed the memo with that important bit of information, along with “Pay no attention to the itinerary on our Web site or the paperwork we sent you. We cannot guarantee you will leave from the location we told you or at the time we told you.” Still haven’t seen that anywhere.

I’m okay now. Really. I just wasn’t very okay for a few minutes there. As usual, Gunter took it in stride.

We rescheduled our domestic flights (what's an extra $300 fee when you've paid so much already, right?), cancelled our hotel in NYC and got a new one in Sterling, VA. We’ll leave on Sunday instead of on Saturday, fly out of Dulles on Monday, make a happy little stop the next morning in Vienna, Austria, and arrive in Tel Aviv Tuesday afternoon. What better opportunity for me to learn some key German phrases! Could anyone tell me how to pronounce, “Where is my plane?”

I realize there are real problems in the world much worse than not getting to go to New York City. I know I'm spoiled. God helped me work through my anger and psycho-planner issues, and I believe I’m moved on with my life. Life doesn’t follow my plan…just a small lesson in adulthood.

It’s me, moving toward maturity, one raging tantrum at a time.

Good news

Good news! Gunter's scans were clear, and his blood work looked great. Thank you, Lord! And thank y'all for your prayers.

Scans

Yep, it's that time again. Gunter has checkup scans on Wednesday, and we'll meet with the doctor for the results on Thursday. We appreciate your prayers!

26 wonderful reasons to celebrate the birthday boy!

Today is Gunter's 26th birthday! In honor of the birthday boy, I'd like to embarrass the mess out of him by posting a list of 26 reasons I love him. So, here it be.

1. He knows what makes me laugh and does it over and over.
2. He has an unquenchable hunger to learn.
3. He would rather drag me off the couch and endure verbal abuse than leave me alone to wake up in the middle of the night in the dark.
4. He not only has a servant’s heart, but also a servant’s hands.
5. Being a part of a mighty movement of God is His life’s passion.
6. He’s easy to get along with.
7. He takes one thing at a time and doesn’t get bent out of shape about the future.
8. He spurs me on to righteousness but doesn’t hold my faults against me.
9. He's great with kids...Okay, he's great with everyone.
10. He is FUN!
11. He doesn’t shy away from an adventure.
12. He’s intelligent.
13. He is humble. He's been good-looking and talented his whole life, but he's never acknowledged it.
14. He constantly sacrifices for the good of others.

15. He exhibits patience with people.
16. He’s good at what I’m not, and he lets me be good at what I am.
17. He values my opinion and invites my help.
18. He likes to spend time with me, and he lets me know it.
19. He is careful with money but doesn't care a thing about having much of it.
20. He helps around the house, not because he has to, but because he’s a good man.
21. He can speak the language of every place he’s visited.
22. He is a hard worker.
23. He taught me to cook chicken roll-ups and breakfast muffins. He makes better omelets than the Waffle House.
24. He has more hair on his arms than I do.
25. He is trustworthy.
26. He is always himself, never put on, and people respect him for it.

Happy birthday, Husband! I'm so glad you were born!

Goin' home

After a 3-year illness, Gunter's granddaddy, Willard Durell Galimore, went home to be with Jesus on Tuesday, February 3. We miss you, Granddaddy Galimore, but we're so happy for you.

Precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of His saints. Psalm 116:15

Better late than never

Talk about a late responder! Melissa @ MyBlueMorning tagged me over 2 weeks ago, and I am just now participating.

The Rules:
1) Choose the 4th folder where you store your pictures on your computer.
2) Select the 4th picture in the folder.
3) Explain the picture.
4) Tag 4 people to do the same. No cheating (cropping, editing, etc.)!



Here is my very intriguing picture. As you can see, it’s a stack of boxes in a hallway. But not just any hallway. I took this picture as we prepared to move from our house in Sanford to New Brockton. It seemed like a long, painful process, but was exciting at the same time. We’re happy where we are now, but seeing a picture of those familiar walls brings back such good memories…even with all that piled-up junk.

Since this tag has gone around so much already, I won’t officially tag anyone to participate, but I think Melissa @ MyLifeasitHappens, Penny @ DailyDoseofDribbles and Christi @ TwoPeasinOurPod might be the most likely to want to play.