Our Little Brock

Just a quick update about our sweet nephew Brock. He is continuing to do better and better every day. He is eating more and more through his feeding tube and getting stronger and stronger. He most likely will be moved to the "next step up" nursery sometime next week if all goes according to plan.

I went to visit him yesterday and Aunt Stacey continues to think he is the cutest and sweetest little baby. He had been awake and looking around prior to my visit but decided to nap while Aunt Stacey was there and that is just fine. I know that I will be his favorite and there will be plenty of time to talk and hang out with me! : )

Thank you all for praying for Brock and please continue to pray for him and his parents.

My Boys

The past few days I have been in awe of how big my boys are getting. Logan is 3 and Luke will be 1 in 7 days! It seriously seems like yesterday when Dustin and I were trying to have a baby and were unsuccessful for 4 1/2 years. Then the Lord provided and we got pregnant with Logan. I was so thankful for Logan and for being able to get pregnant. I felt that if the Lord decided to bless us again with another child then that would be great but I was just so thankful to have been pregnant and to have given birth to a healthy baby boy.

Dustin and I decided to start trying to get pregnant when Logan was a little over a year old. We didn't know if we would be blessed again with another baby but we thought we would try. After deciding it was time, we got so busy with life and didn't REALLY start trying. We talked again and figured we would wait until after the first of the year and get serious about it. God had another plan.

I had gone to the doctor for my regular yearly check up and began talking about another baby and asked some questions and so on. Again, wouldn't you know it that the very next month (to our surprise) I was in the doctor's office again and this time I was pregnant! What an amazing gift and now we have our Luke. They say that after struggling trying to get pregnant and then finally getting pregnant, most women are able to get pregnant again without any trouble because your body now knows what it is supposed to do. I am living proof of that!

It touched my heart to reminise about my boys. Again, they are getting so big. Logan is talking like crazy and some of the things he says are hilarious. Luke is now pretty much walking all over and also starting to talk a bit. Both boys just LOVE each other. They are best friends and Dustin and I couldn't be happier. Right now as I type this the boys are playing together and it is just precious to watch.

I meant for this post to go in another direction but it didn't and that is O. K. By remembering all of this, I am able to see how truly blessed Dustin and I are with our family. Our issues with infertility were so hard to deal with (especially for me!). I know that there are so many other couples out there who are dealing with the same thing. My heart truly goes out to them. I pray that I never forget what it felt like to want a baby so bad and it not happen right away. Please think about people you know that may be experiencing infertility in some way or another. Keep them in your prayers and be sensitive to them. Also, let them know that you care about them. There is nothing you can say that will make them feel better, but just being there for them will help.

Our Visit With Baby Brock

Dustin and I went with Jenn and Ryan, the new Mommy and Daddy, to see Baby Brock yesterday afternoon. What a visit we had! Jenn and Ryan were able to hold Brock for the first time yesterday and we were able to be there for their moment. Only two people are allowed in the "pod" to visit Brock at a time but the nice nurse allowed Dustin and I to be in there with Jenn and Ryan for 2 minutes. I took the first family picture and how sweet it turned out.

Brock just amazes me everyday. What a strong little guy he is. He truly is a little miracle and oh so cute. He was stretching and opening his eyes looking at Jenn and Ryan. A couple of times he started to cry because he wasn't happy with everyone messing with him.

It is crazy for me to think that he was born a little less than a week ago at roughly 10-12 weeks early. It was such a scary time last week when we found out the Jenn was in labor and was going to deliver. We just didn't know what to expect. We knew that Brock was going to be little and that he was going to be in the hospital for a while, but Brock came out screaming and fighting and hasn't stopped since.

I don't know a lot about premies but from what I have heard from other people and their stories, Brock is doing just fine! He doesn't have a lot of tubes and wires at all. In fact, it seems that every day they are taking him off of one thing or another. He even was able to eat through his feeding tube a bit yesterday. I thank God for Brock and for how well he is doing.

Please continue to pray for Brock and his Mommy and Daddy in the weeks to come. Please pray that he will continue to progress as well as he has been and that he will grow to be strong and healthy.

Did I mention how sweet he is?! : )

He's Here!

A new member of our family arrived this week. He was about 10 weeks early but we are thrilled that he is here. My brother-in-law and sister-in-law welcomed their baby boy on Tuesday night. Baby Brock was born at 9:58 pm much to the surprise of everyone. He came out crying with his arms and legs moving all around. He weighed 3 lbs 1 oz and was 16 inches long. Because he was so early he was transported to another, bigger hospital with a NICU.

Before they transported Baby Brock, we were all able to see him for a few minutes. I know that I am a bit partial but he seriously was the cutest little peanut. I started crying when I saw him because I was just amazed that he was here and amazed at how sweet and adorable he looked.

Baby Brock has been doing just WONDERFUL. The doctors are all very pleased with how well he is doing. He is get stronger and stronger every day. My brother-in-law and sister-in-law were told that the doctors do not believe there will be any long terms effects on Brock because he was so early. They also believe that he will be able to come home sooner than the "normal" stay for premies. Did I say how sweet and cute he is?!

So, as you can imagine, Aunt Stacey has been doing a little shopping here and there (I am not allowed back into Babies R Us for a while!). Both Uncle Dustin and I hope to go and see our new nephew this weekend and I will be sure to blog about our visit.

Please pray with us that Brock will continue to do as good as he has been doing. That my sister-in-law will heal and that both she and my brother-in-law will be able to rest and feel refreshed and strengthened to go and take care of their baby.

Thank you all in advance for your prayers. I will be sure to keep you all posted about our precious new addition to the family.

We're Home!

As I type this post I am in the comfort of my black mold-free home. I can't believe that it has been 12 days since we left. I actually sort of enjoyed being away from home for a while. It was a bit much loading and unloading the car several times but nice to be able to spend time with our parents. It didn't get too bad for me until yesterday. I had expected to hear from the mold company yesterday with our clearance testing results, but when the call didn't come, I was a bit disappointed and overwhelmed with not being home for another night.

The boys and I have been home for about 3 hours now and I haven't unpacked anything but the refrigerator items that we took with us. Dustin went to the store after work to buy the staples that we needed. You know like toilet paper, milk, food for the boys, etc. So, we should be all set for the next day or so!

We are getting settled in for the night and I am praying that the boys fall asleep soon and sleep well throughout the night. Mommy and Daddy sure need a good night's rest!

Hope you all have a good night's rest too!

**Luke has started taking some steps since we've been gone. His birthday is 2 weeks from today and I am betting that he will be walking by then. Let the fun begin or actually continue! Luke is a fast crawler and into everything so I guess him walking won't change too much for us!**

"Girls Weekend" and Still Living Out of Suitcases

I have to say that this was one of the better weekends I have had in a long time. It was very busy but it was filled with lots of "girl" time with some special people!

First, Friday I was able to go and pamper myself a bit with some hair highlights and a new (much shorter) haircut (I am over my "growing out my hair stage!"). Usually when I get my hair cut, I don't care for it. There is always some sort of "fixing" that I need to do. Not this time! I am very happy with it. I must say that it is VERY short and I love it!!! It is so easy to do now!

Saturday, I went to the movies with my mother-in-law and her sister to see "Mama Mia." It was very good and I really enjoyed it. After the movie we picked up my sister-in-law (who didn't go to the movie because she is not into musicals and you must be in order to see this movie) and we all four went to lunch and did a little shopping. My mother-in-law and her sister are something else. We laughed and laughed. They tried to recreate scenes of the movie during lunch and then while we did some shopping. They really are a hoot to be around. Never a dull moment with those two!

Finally today, I met up with a friend of mine who also happened to be my former boss. She had to put up with my while I was pregnant with Logan. May God bless her for putting up with me during those months. She was probably glad to get rid of me when I finally stopped working. Lets just say that I shared my whole pregnancy with her. The good, bad and the ugly! Thanks for putting up with me Kate! Anyway, Kate has since moved out of state, back to her hometown, so we don't get to have lunch on a regular basis. So, she was in town for a bit and we met up today and it was really nice to catch up with one another and reminisce a bit. Thanks for lunch Katy! Maybe one day I will make it to your hometown and treat you to lunch! : ) I also made it to "Whole Foods" (remember my new fav!) on my way back home, well not home but back to my parents!!

Yes, we are still not able to go home yet. The remediation was completed on Wednesday but the final inspection and testing was not preformed until yesterday. We could have stayed at the house while the remediation was being done but we opted not to. The company told us that we were free to go home now that the work is done but we aren't to go near the affected area and also not to turn the air conditioning on. For those of you that know us, you know that Dustin turns the air on the first 75 degree day and it doesn't normally go off until the first snow! No we aren't THAT bad but close! So, with it being so warm here lately we would not have made it without the air. We are hoping to be back in our house by mid-week. Please pray that everything is good and well and healthy with our house. We ALL miss being home in our own beds and having our own space. We are forever grateful to both sets of our parents for letting us stay with them. We have been taking turns staying at both parent's houses for the past 10 days! I think that we ALL will be happy to be in our own homes...alone! I tease but it hasn't been that bad at all. The boys have enjoyed being with their grandparents and the grandparents have enjoyed being with the boys. Dustin and I are just extra baggage! Thanks Parents!

Well, that is it for now. I have a busy week...hopefully. We plan to be back in our house and taking care of all that needs to be done there. Then I have to start seriously planning Luke's first birthday party. My baby will be one in a little over two weeks! I can't believe it. This past year has flown. Both boys are getting so big and oh are they so precious and cute! I will try to post some pictures of them this week if we get back into our house!!! Please pray!

Have a blessed week!

Still Kickin'

We are back at my parents house tonight after spending Sunday and Monday nights at Dustin's parents. I tell you what. I am about tired of living out of suitcases. I have packed and unpacked our bags and our van so many times that it is crazy. You would think I'd have it down pat now, but I don't. : )

Dustin is officially not "on call" for work any more as of tonight. YEAH!! He was on call for the past 2 weeks. It has been a long 14 days or nights really. We are appreciative for the extra money but it is so nice to have Dustin home (or at our parents' houses!) with the boys and I at night.

Logan is having a hard time not being home. Every night he says he wants to go home. My heart breaks every time he says that. I continue to tell him that our house is sick and that we will be able to go home in a few more days. Poor guy! I did take him to Target (his favorite place) this afternoon, along with my cousin Sarah our world traveler who just returned home after a 6 week internship in New York (what's up Sarah?!), and he got a new train. He was quite happy and played with it all night.

Luke is doing good. He loves both his Papas. That is his new word of late...Papa. Last week the boys and I came to visit my dad and when my dad opened the van door to get Luke out, he said "Hi Papa!" I am not kidding, even my dad heard it. Luke is soaking up every moment with his Papas. He is actually sleeping in the Pak-n-Play pretty good too! Thank you Lord!

Dustin went to the house this morning and let the mold experts in to start the job. He said they were very nice and explained all that they were going to do. They also gave him some specific things we could do to ensure our mold problem never returning! According to the office assistant for the mold company, we have their two best guys working at our house. I am very relieved that the cleaning process has started. I pray there are no surprises along the way and that we are back home in our own home this weekend! Also that the mold never comes back!!!

So, that is it for now. Not much else going on. The boys and I have been so busy during the past several days so I think we may just hang out here at my parents house all day and do nothing but eat, play and rest.

Have a blessed day!

Let the Remediation Begin

We are very happy that the toxic black mold in our basement has not affected our air quality throughout the house. However, we don't want it to get to the point where the air quality is affected. For those that know me, I am an "act now" kind of person. If I could have had the company there yesterday to fix this situation, I would have. So, I spent roughly 3 hours on the phone Friday with our insurance company in order to see if they would be able to help us with the cost of the remediation. On a side note, the cost of this remediation is 2 1/2 times more than we had originally thought! I don't even want to think how much it would have been to wipe down every surface in our house and hepa vacuum our furniture, beds, etc. I am getting sick just thinking about it. Do you see why I want this taken care of now?!!

So, back to the insurance company. They offered me absolutely now help at all! My original call to the service center to make the claim was quite pleasant. The gentleman that I spoke with was quite concerned and sent me to the "Rush Department" to see if they could get an adjuster out yesterday. After 2 hours filled with frustration and being transferred here and there, the manager of the "home" department told me that I was basically getting all upset for nothing. To him, our situation didn't seem to be considered "dire." I told him that I thought he would feel quite differently if it were his house and he had two small children there. He told me he dealt with mold everyday and I then asked if he dealt with BLACK, TOXIC mold everyday and he went a different way with the conversation. The call ended with him telling me an adjuster would be in contact with me within 48 business hours and that the insurance company would not be able to help us because our coverage doesn't include that kind of water damage. Seriously!

I then took it upon myself (with Dustin being in agreement with me) to call and make an appointment to get this stuff out of our house. The very nice lady at the mold company, has become my best friend in the past week and a half, said that it was a good thing that I called because they had a cancellation and that we are on the books for Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday of next week. Whew!!! I asked her if this mold would just be contained and really never go away and her response was that the mold would be gone and should not come back as long as we fixed the down spouts from our gutters and make sure that rain or any kind of water doesn't leak into the foundation back there. Thank you Lord! This was a relief that I can't even begin to explain.

Because I am me and I freak out about everything (which is something I am not proud of and am currently trying to change!) I have convinced Dustin that we should not be staying at the house until after the remediation is done. I don't want to take any chances with the boys. So, right now I am typing this post from my parents living room where we are currently staying. We are going to go back and forth between both our parents houses this next week. Thank God our parents love us (they probably just love their grandsons and are allowing us to come along because we are the parents of their precious grandsons) and that they live nearby.

For now, we are all living out of suitcases for roughly the next week, but in the end it will all be worth it. Dustin and I were talking that after all of this we are going to have a nice and cleaned out basement. (We have to remove everything before they start the remediation process.) It feels good to get rid of all the stuff piling up down there. It sure is an expensive way to go about it though!

Have a blessed Sunday.

Update on Our House

The mold company called me late this afternoon with the results of our air quality tests. The results were very good. There is very minimal counts of mold found in the air. She told me that when the level reaches 1000, that is very bad and dangerous. The highest level in our house, which happened to be right by the affected area was 178. She said we could go home and wait for the estimate of the remediation that should come tomorrow. We are still expecting the dollar amount to be very high, but at least (praise the Lord!) our air quality is good. She actually told me that I am a very good housekeeper!

So, this was an answer to prayer. If we have to be in this situation, we are happy that is isn't posing a danger to the kids or us at this point. Hopefully, we can get all of this taken care of in a reasonable amount of time. We are trusting God to see us through this time. We are very thankful for the good news today.

In a totally different direction, I had a follow up dentist appointment this afternoon from my teeth cleaning a couple of weeks ago and they saw that I need a filling. They asked if I wanted them to do it today and I said no because I thought it might put me over the edge with all that was going on (I hadn't gotten the phone call from the mold company at this point). Then when the dentist came in he informed me that I would need to have at least get 2 of my 4 wisdom teeth taken out. He will refer me to an oral surgeon and they will decide if all 4 need to come out. Once again and the last time I will say this, ARE YOU KIDDING ME? Oh well, that is how life goes sometimes!

Have a great weekend!

Are You Kidding Me?

Owning a home is quite a luxury. It is the American dream. I remember living in an apartment and thinking how wonderful it would be to own our own home. Then our dream came true and the first couple of years it was great. We painted and decorated the way we wanted. No big deal I thought. HA! Is all I have to say now.

Let me just say that I know there are people that do not have the luxury of having their own home and I hope to not come across as ungrateful, because that is not my intention of this post. I am thankful for our house and that our boys can make as much noise as they possibly can at times and we don't have to worry about the neighbors hearing them. I am thankful that I can decorate and paint walls purple if I want (not that I want to!). However, I don't think I am alone when I say that owning a house can be a pain in the rear. I am having one of those moments.

We have an older home. We need new pipes, because ours tend to leak at times. We need a new kitchen because we have the original cabinets and some of the paint tends to flake off in some of them (I do not use those cabinets at all...there is only 1 that does this). I try to make our house as nice as possible working around these problems. But here is the kicker...

A couple of weeks ago, I took notice of the far back wall in our basement. It looks like the paint is pealing and it looks awfully dirty. I am not the type of person who likes basements. Ours is nice but not redone by any means. So, you will understand after these next few sentences why I hate our basement today. Any ways, Dustin and I were both down in the basement at the same time and we began to talk about this back wall and how "weird" it looks. We weren't sure if it was just dirt or if it may be some sort of mold. We knew there was another area of our basement that should be looked at due to some water leaking into our basement quite a while ago. So, we made the appointment to have a mold company come and look at the two spots in our basement.

The nice man came last week and said that the one wall was definetly mold and that the other wall just needed to be cleaned and treated. I asked if he thought the mold looked like the "bad" mold. He said no, but that he has been wrong before. We were to get the results today.

We got the results alright and IT IS THE BAD, TOXIC MOLD!! Are you kidding me? We spent $190 last week just to have the man come out and look at it and then take a sample to be tested! Today, he came back out to check the air quality of our house. Each sample is $125. He tested all of our floors that total 3. This means we spent another $375 today! Again, are you kidding me? None of this money will go to fix our mold problem.

So, now we wait another 2 days to see if the mold spores are in the air throughout our house. If it isn't then we are O. K. and will have to pay to have the basement wall cleaned and treated. It the mold spores are in the air, then we are talking BIG money. I was told briefly that every horizontal and vertical surface in our house will have to be wiped down with some special rag or something. Then our furniture and beds will have to be treated or vacuumed or something. Once again, are you kidding me? I have packed up the boys and our bags and am heading out until we get our results. We are not taking any chances.

Apparently the reason for our mold is that our down spouts from our gutters don't extend out enough into our backyard. So when it rains all of that rain water is going straight down into the foundation wall of our basement. I think I am saying that right, but who knows!

Right now I am trying to make light of the situation because I have cried too much today at the seriousness of it all. I thank God that that none of us are showing any signs of reactions to the mold, which is a good thing. I called our pediatrician today to just make sure that I don't need to do anything else with the boys. So, please pray that the mold spores have not spread to the air or whatever it does and that we won't have to come up with thousands of dollars that we don't have, like most other people in the economy today. This truly is a nightmare and again I am praying that our air quality is good.

Here is my advice...If something looks wierd, have it looked at! I know a good mold company you can call! : )