Saturday I went with our church small group to Bodies the Exhibition. I know, I know... real people?? eeu! But it was actually really interesting! I'll confess, when I saw an arm peeled down to the muscle I got a bit queasy, but everything was really tastefully done. After a while... you get used to it, I guess. It was so fascinating to see all of the tiny details of every part of your body. Amazing to see how every little thing works together perfectly, it really reminded all of us of just how awesome our Creator is. They had a "fetal room" (scary sounding...) that was really neat to go through. It started off with a 4 week old fetus and by 8 weeks it was just so cool to see it's little fingers and toes even though it was so tiny. Definitely made me really excited to see our little baby, and her tiny fingers and toes. :)

We had such a fun weekend! On Saturday morning we took pictures for a family that we met while working on our church's food drive. While we were at the donation center they noticed that Ben had a nice camera, and told us that they were having a small family reunion that they wanted to have photographed. They asked if we would, and we said yes! They were such a sweet family, and the pictures turned out awesome. Ben really has a gift for taking pictures, and I got to be his assistant (Vanna White style of course). Then on Sunday our church held a baby shower for us! I was a bit nervous going into it because I knew that I would pretty much be the center of attention, but it went so much better than I thought. I had such a good time. I never dreamt that I would have so many sweet friends that would throw a shower for me, especially after only being in the church for just under a year. Ben and I are just overwhelmed by how generous everyone was, our baby girl is definetly already spoiled rotten. :) It's so neat to get to know all of the other families in the church going through just what we're going through becoming parents. I've gotten close to many of the ladies through our pregnancies and now we're all going through the same awe and anticipation. It's nice to be going through this with so many other first time moms, we can all help each other through this! We all come from different backgrounds but now we definitely have some common ground!

dad's thoughts

Where have the last 50 days gone...

It seemed like just yesterday that we were excited for our little baby countdown to pass into double digits. Forget 100 days left, which felt like yesterday by the way. 50 days left and I hope I'm ready. Life is going to be so different so soon, and I know it's coming but it still just feels so abstract and far away because I have no idea what it's going to be like. I get to feel her kick and move very often - Gina makes sure to let me feel her whenever she is nice and active. Little things make me very excited to see her little face and be able to hold her. The other day some noise startled her and she was kicking Gina pretty hard. For some reason she calmed down when I started talking to her. This morning she was asleep and I made her start moving by saying 'wake up!' Figuring out how to be a dad is going to be ... I don't know, I hope I'm good. But I do know that she will be a very photographed baby!

Well Saturday was an interesting day. I thought it would be just like any other day while Ben was gone to work. The weather said that it was supposed to rain later on that day, so I decided to take Magnum for a walk. While we were outside sure enough it started to rain and I started to hear sirens. When I was in Middle School we stayed for a bit with my Grandma in Nebraska and those kind of sirens went off all the time, so I assumed that this was probably the same kind of thing... maybe a fire somewhere or something. I thought it was odd that so many of my neighbors were going with their whole familys somewhere and when they passed me gave me some pretty odd looks. Turns out they were tornado sirens... woops! I got back inside just as a second siren started to go off, so I decided to turn on the TV and see what all this was about. Apparently I was suppsed to be in a storm shelter as soon as I could. We live in an appartment so I grabbed the poochies and got in the tiny downstairs bathroom with the radio. It ended up raining pretty hard and the power went out for a while but we were all fine. The only damage that the tornado did was to a barn quite a ways away from where we're at. Still made for a day out of the ordinary, which can be nice sometimes... :)