Random stuff, no pics

First up, a few recap-ish things from the past few days.

Sunday after Church, we DID clean out the garage! I was so determined to get it done, and I knew we were running out of time fast. So we ate lunch and put Miss Joanna down for a nap, then headed outside in our work clothes. I love cool weather -- LOVE IT!! Matt helped me move everything out of the garage and onto the driveway -- I was pulling a "clean sweep." We opened up the van to throw all the stuff we've been meaning to donate but haven't yet. Now that it's in my NEW VAN, I'll be dropping it off very soon. (or really Matt will) I organized everything into like groups and threw out what was junk. I went through all my mom's stuff and organized it and labeled it for her. Fortunately, we were on our own out there for a while. My mom was home that afternoon, and when Joanna woke up, she took a Gran-snap. Then she got to come help us. That child LOVED wandering around all the piles and gathering "treasures" to carry with her. There were a fair amount of toys I stumbled on that came inside. They're awaiting cleaning and organizing in my front entry right now. I also found a tub of old pictures and stuff, a lot of which was from my childhood. I pulled out a couple of things I'm going to scan into the computer. I held up a picture of me at around Joanna's age, and asked Joanna, "who's this?" She said, "Anna!" which is what she's calling herself these days. Yup, I look like my daughter, that's for sure. We had to work a little in the dark, but we were completely finished and back inside by 7:30pm. Not too bad, I think. It got pretty chilly after the sun went down, so I gave Joanna some sock mittens for her cold hands. She thought they were pretty great, until she wanted her fingers out to push buttons on things. She told me, "off, off."

An aside story: last night we put Joanna in socks to sleep. When I checked on her around midnight, she had one sock on a foot and the other on a hand. So cute!

Anyway, we got everything (minus some junk) back into the garage with just a couple of little projects left. We have a hanging system to put up for rakes, the blower, etc. We also have some "heavy trash" that has to wait for heavy trash day, as well has a plethora of regular trash to wait for Thursday. And, it turns out Matt had a bunch of stuff in there that he snuck in a some point from an old storage room or something. It has to be gone through and put in it's place. We also will put the desk that's in our bedroom (future baby's corner) into the garage for while she's bunking with us. Hopefully these things will get done this weekend. We'll see!

That was supposed to be a shorter story, but oh well.

We got our new van checked out by our mechanic yesterday, and they couldn't find anything wrong with it. Yea! Joanna and I will drive to CarMax tomorrow to get the (hopefully) last few little issues taken care of with their service dept, and get my clicker made. I'm optimistic they'll work fast and Joanna and I will have time to run our errands after they finish. While we're there, we'll be stuck! Very fortunately they have that kids' room there that Joanna likes to play in. Maybe I can manage to get some reading in...

Yesterday I picked up some orange juice at the grocery store with this date on it: January 8, 2009. Whoa. If you're not catching on, that's Baby Sister's due date!!! The orange juice makes it seem so close!

Now to the not fun part of my week thus far. The stomach bug finally hunted me down and got me yesterday. :( I think I got about 4 hours of sleep last night. It was awful, really really awful. Being sick is no fun; being 8 months pregnant is hard work, and both together is seriously the pits. So far Matt and Joanna are fine, but we'll see! Matt is so good about taking care of me. I spent most of the night out on the couch because, like I've mentioned before, Matt was just enjoying sleep too much and I was jealous, and I got to read and watch TV out here without disturbing anyone. I asked Matt to stay home this morning and get Joanna ready and off to MDO. I know he really enjoyed taking her to school and visiting with everybody up at the church. Here is the other theory to my stomach issues: it's hormonal/pregnancy related. This is how we've come up with that theory: I got super stomach sick when I was 34 weeks pg with Joanna. Maybe it's just something my body does when I'm close-ish to giving birth. Hey, I said it was a theory. Since it's going around, I pretty sure it's the bug. I'm feeling tons better now and luckily, fortunately have the day to rest. Joanna is at school, I skipped all my work meetings, I canceled my dentist appointment. That last one was the hardest -- their next available appt is at the end of January! I'm on the call list for anything that comes up this year. I'd much rather go pregnant than nursing to the dentist.