Hello Autumn

It's November! One of my favorite months. The leaves are changing colors and falling outside, our heater is set to come on at night when it gets too chilly, and the holidays will soon be here! My Halloween decorations are down, and my turkeys are up. In just a few more weeks, I will be pulling out all of my Christmas totes and doing another major transformation! This year we are getting a real tree for the first time so that should be an adventure in itself!

It has been nice to be able to wind down after all of the Halloween hubbub. I still have a pretty full calendar of appointments, weddings, and birthdays but nothing too time consuming. My next craft shower isn't for another month so I can relax until then! Today is my friend Sara's 26th birthday so I am going over there tonight to take her a gift and hang out until her husband whisks her away. Saturday is a childhood friend's wedding that I am very much looking forward to because there will be tons of people there that I haven't seen in years!

Nick is closer than ever to graduating! Only about 6 weeks left until the big day. He is about to finish up one class, then start another and after that he will be done! They are at-your-own-pace so he is trying very hard to get done as quickly as he can so that I can pick up extra shifts before the holidays and he can substitute teach and get extra money too. I keep telling him that all of this hard work and stress will be worth it when we both have good-paying jobs in needed fields.

As for my job, I have been wanting to get a specialized certification for critical care nursing called CCRN, but the test is uber expensive and we just have not had the extra money to spend on that. But now that he is about to start working, I went ahead and bought a (used) study guide from Amazon.com to start reading and getting my knowledge base up. Hopefully next spring sometime I will be ready to test. I think at work I will get an extra differential for the certification also.


Brad is doing well, he is truly learning something new everyday. I say "tummy" and he smiles and raises his shirt and pats his tummy, then comes to me to see my tummy! I try to get Grandma to play too but she doesn't like to show her tummy! He waves bye-bye now, and eats just about anything I give him (sometimes I have to take a bite first). He is walking very well, almost running practically. He is getting better at walking up/down short steps. He can kind of feed himself with a spoon. He says "thank you" whenever I give him a drink (or when he wants a drink). He knows how to pull grapes off of the stems and just eat the grapes. He tries to brush his own hair when he gets ahold of my brush. He grabs tissue and wipes his own nose. It goes on and on! Nick and I just look at each other in pride whenever he does something new--there is nothing more amazing than watching a human being grow from being a helpless newborn to being an independant person. God is good! (I almost have Nick convinced that we are going to have a second one in a few more years!)