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Amazing Kids

2010-04-23T19:15:00.000-07:00

I imagine that every parent is proud of their children. Parents also think their kids are super duper smart. We are no exception. Let's start with Amaris. She is almost 18 months old so we decided it was time to get rid of the ba-ba. Our strategy was straightforward...let's just talk to her about it and tell her what we wanted to do. Thus, I told her that she was a big girl now and didn't need a ba-ba anymore. She said "Ba-Ba?" I said "I'll just give you a sippy with some milk if you are thirsty". She said "Sippy" (in a happy voice). We proceed with the going-to-bed process without any troubles. She hasn't asked for the ba-ba again. How cool is that. I've got lots more stories about her super-smartness but not enough time or energy to type them. I can only pray it will be that easy when we go to take away her "binkie."

Now for Sheinah. Most everyone who knows us also knows that we are pretty conservative parents. Our kids don't watch very much television and what they do watch is limited to programs that we approve of. The same goes for movies. We check out new movies online before we decide if Sheinah can watch them. We then honestly explain to Sheinah why we don't want her to watch that particular movie. Somehow we managed to not communicate this with her daycare facility...bad parent move. Here comes the really cool part. Sheinah tells us at dinner "Mommy, I have to tell you something and you are not going to like it" (that's a great intro if I ever heard one). She told me that the other day one of her teachers brought in a movie to watch because it was raining outside. Then she says that it was The Princess and the Frog. This movie is on our do-not-watch list for a variety of reasons. After calling her teacher we discover that she didn't watch the movie. About 10 minutes in she told her teacher that her mommy and daddy looked up the movie on the internet and that it had some bad things in it that she was not supposed to watch so they took her next door to play with her sister. How cool is it that she actually listened to us, acted on it, and then told us the truth about the whole thing. It was a proud parent day!

Things Kids Say

2010-04-02T19:02:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow morning, the Bumgardners are going to watch their first branding and castration of baby cows. The owner of one of the larger cattle ranches in town holds an annual branding party every spring to brand (and castrate if needed) the spring calves. The Marshalls are coming up to check out the festivities so we've been talking it up with Sheinah for a few weeks. Today Sheinah learned that the baby cows cry alot during this process....geez, can't imagine why :) So tonight at dinner Sheinah was talking to the person sitting in the booth behind us and I asked Sheinah to tell her what she was going to do tomorrow. Her answer: we are going to watch baby cows cry.

Amaris, on the other hand, has a very simple vocabulary. A few months ago she had her first cupcake which she promptly named Kai Kai. We enjoy hearing her say it so much that we've bought/made cupcakes for her several times. We've learned recently that Amaris now calls pretty much anything that is sweet Kai Kai...ice cream, jello, cookies...if it is sweet and yummy it is Kai Kai. Those of you who have not heard her say it cannot quite appreciate the cuteness. We have a video of it somewhere that we'll post if we ever get time.

Boogers

2010-03-18T20:22:00.000-07:00

Like most 4 year olds, Sheinah can't help but put her finger in her nose when she feels the urge to clear her nasal passages. Pre-schoolers also enjoy talking about boogers and occasionally eating them. Sheinah is no exception. The other day, we found something hard and crusty on the armrest of the couch that, after close inspection we determined to be dried boogers (gross). Apparently, she would just wipe her fingers on the couch rather than using a tissue. We had a little discussion about that. Today, she asked Travis to sing her a song. Of course, since Travis is a 4 year old at heart, he chose the topic of boogers. For several minutes the two of them went back and forth making up words to the song related to boogers. At one point Sheinah sings something about wiping boogers on the ladder during the night. She sleeps on the lower bunk of a bunk bed with her head by the ladder. Apparently, we need to do a little further discussion about where boogers belong and maybe put a box of tissues by her bed...oh, and one of us should probably go clean the ladder...

Sheinah-isms

2010-02-10T20:27:00.000-08:00

Life is incredibly busy, but I just had to take a second to post a few of Sheinah's comments from this week:

1. I have a tooty bottom (said after multiple episodes of flatulence at the dinner table)

2. My eyebulbs are hurting...there is something in my eyebulb. (eyebulb = eyeball)

3. Daddy, you are warm like a blanket (said while snuggling with Travis on the recliner)

Sleepers

2009-12-10T19:33:00.000-08:00

Thanks to the help of BabyWize, we've raised some pretty good sleepers. Case in point, they both slept through the powerful flash of Travis' Nikon D90. We couldn't resist getting a picture of their strange sleeping positions. Now you must realize that both of our girls sleep in pitch black darkness. The reason it looks like daylight is because of Travis' bright flash. You should also know that neither girl MOVED...despite multiple pictures taken of each. We think it's cute that they are both sleeping in almost the same position!

Special time with daddy

2009-12-05T19:19:00.000-08:00

Whenever Travis is alone with the girls (for even just a few minutes) the camera comes out and strange things happen...we've had my little pony pieces up the nose, running through snow in flip-flops, and on this day, we had underwear on the head. Of course, Amaris will do whatever her big sister does so there were lots of underwear on the head.

Sheinah turns 4

2009-10-03T22:17:00.000-07:00

It's hard to believe that it has been four years since Sheinah was born. It's always a little bittersweet for us on her birthday as it brings back memories of the near-death experience for Melissa when Sheinah was born. That said, we had quite an exciting day. This weekend we are celebrating our grand opening at the pharmacy so Sheinah got to spend the morning with her Nama and her sister while we worked. She got calls from all of our immediate family with lots of happy birthday songs sung to her. She even got a call from one of her babysitters, Nicole Skinner, all the way from Wisconsin.

We've been telling her for several months that when she turns four she would have to give up her B (her special blanket that she uses to suck her thumb). We are trying a technique we saw on Super Nanny (yes, it's cheesy but we hope it works). The episode was with a family whose four year old twins had a pacifer in their mouths 24-7. The "Binky Fairy" came and took all the pacifers and left presents in their place. Thus, the "B Fairy" was born. Now, we try our best to be truthful with Sheinah so when she asked who was the B Fairy, we told her it was daddy :) The deal was that she would need to give all of her Bs to the B Fairy and then she could get one present for each B she turned in. We let her pick out the presents at our store. We had planned to do this transaction next weekend after her birthday party, but today, she came to the pharmacy and said she wanted to turn in her Bs for her presents. We patiently explained the consequences of this which she professed to understand.

Fast forward to 8pm tonight when the B Fairy came for the Bs. The short version is that it did not go well. Melissa cried almost as much as Sheinah. Sheinah just kept saying "I just need my B for one more night and then I'll give it back tomorrow." This sounded completely rational to her mommy! Travis, in all his daddy-B-Fairy wisdom, knew that it would only get worse if we gave in. Two hours and many tears, screams, and one potty accident later, she was finally asleep. It was most certainly a birthday to remember!

Peach's Accident

2009-08-29T14:06:00.000-07:00

We got a call on Tuesday night, August 18th, from the folks who are boarding our horse saying that Peach had gotten hurt and we better come see her. When we got there, things looked pretty bad. She had long scratches down her back and a big giant hole where her left front leg attaches to her body. Unfortunately, as soon as we got there, a huge hailstorm went through, destroying any evidence of whatever had happened to her. Travis and Dave (the guy who boards her), drove 30 miles to Ogallala to take her to the vet. The vet sewed her right up and said it looked like Peach had impaled herself on a fence post. The next day, Dave and his friend walked the property looking for downed fence or any evidence of what might have happened to Peach. Since he couldn't find any damaged fence, he decided to call the Department of Wildlife to investigate if it could have been a mountain lion attack. It should be noted that Travis had called his cousin Mike in Wyoming (where we got the horse) and emailed him a picture of Peach's injuried the night it happened. Mike's theory matched the vet's - that it was a fence post as mountain lions usually attack from the front at the neck. After a week of investigation, the DOW agreed with Mike's conclusions. Dave spent several more days walking the property and still has been unable to find what might of happened to injure Peach. In any case, Peach chewed on her stitches and they came out so she still has a big gaping hole in her front side. She finished a course of antibiotics and now Dave or Travis just sprays her with some pink stuff (there's a name for it, but I don't know what it is) and the vet says it will eventually heel. In the meantime, she has to stay in a small fenced area so that she won't walk too much on her injured leg. When we went to see her on Friday, all the other horses were visiting with her on the other side of the fence. They seemed kind of sad that she couldn't come out and play. She has a roommate now too...one of the horses was "naughty" (in the words of Dave's 11 year old daughter) and has to stay in the stall.

We have to give Peach all kinds of props from coming through this injury. The pictures of her injury are just too graphic to post but it looked really horrible. Since she has so many scratches on her back that have to be sprayed with the pink stuff, she kind of looks like a painted pony from the circus. Once those stitches popped out, it looked really bad again, but that pink stuff is actually working. I'm guessing she is gonna have one heck of a scar though when it is all said and done.

Sheinah has been a real trooper through the whole adventure. We took her to see Peach that first night because we honestly didn't know if the horse was going to make it. We wanted her to be able to say good-bye to the horse, if needed. Sheinah did really good despite the gruesome hole in her pet. She goes with Travis a few times a week to feed/care for the horse and hasn't balked at the big hole at all. She hasn't even complained that she can't ride the horse. Of course, we haven't got the bill from the vet yet so we are still doing good ourselves (wink, wink).

Tennis Ball Gun Gone Wrong

2009-08-09T21:08:00.000-07:00

The Bumgardner boys have never really grown up. Case in point - while we were in Wyoming at Dusty's house, Dusty took all the kids (including the grown-up ones) outside to play with his toy. It was basically a potato gun on steroids. The goal of the gun was to shoot tennis balls really far using hairspray and a flint in the bottom of a PVC pipe. Apparently, he uses this gun all the time to entertain the kids. Enter Travis....

Now those of you who know us well are aware of Travis' various head injuries...all of which involved ice. Somehow, in the process of doing nothing more than observing someone else use the tennis ball gun, the lid to the gun shot off the back, hit the concrete and bounced up, hitting Travis in the eyebrow. It just so happens that Travis doesn't have health insurance. Thus, we had to make the decision about whether or not the cut was deep enough to need a trip to the emergency room for stitches. The group concensus was that superglue and steri-strips would do. The operating team included Melissa, Dusty, and Shannon with assistance from the entire Bumgardner clan. The repair was videotaped by Kerry and I'm sure will show up on some Bumgardner's blog or facebook page. Dusty swears that he and the kids have used this thing forever without any problems...

The best part of the story is when we got home. Remember that we are business owners and Travis is the face of the pharmacy up front. His story was that he mouthed off to Melissa one time too many :)

Welcome to Peach

2009-08-07T20:50:00.000-07:00

Sheinah has been asking for a horse since her third birthday. We took her to the Bayfield Apple Festival last October (our annual tradition) at which she rode a pony on a guided pony ride. Right after that she told us that on her next birthday she was going to get a pony. Now we usually don't like to just give her everything she asks for. However, part of the point of living out in the middle of nowhere is so that we can have things like a pony. It just so happened that Travis cousin Dusty had an older horse that could no longer go hunting in the mountains. Dusty offered to give the horse to Sheinah. Thus, we took a trip out to Wyoming to visit with Travis' uncle JimBob and pick up the horse.

The horse's original name is Peaches. When we first asked Sheinah what she would like to name her horse she said "Miss Kim." Kim is her favorite teacher at pre-school. We were thinking that Miss Kim might not enjoy having a horse named after her but we were willing to let her choose. Once she met the horse and we told her the horse's name, Sheinah decided that the horse's name would be Peach. We got scolded if we forgot and called her Peaches :)

Her first ride required Travis to have his hands on her...then she let him let go...then she rode with her cousins. Once we got Peach home, Sheinah actually rode her all by herself! Check out some pictures.

Sedgwick County Fair

2009-07-29T20:30:00.000-07:00

The Sedgwick County Fair began today with the annual parade. We found out on Monday that we (Abts Pharmacy and Carolyn's Flowers) needed to be in the parade. The ladies of the store did an amazing job creating a float in just two days. It helps that we have a flower shop well stocked with decorating supplies. Faye, one of our clerks, provided her truck and trailer which everyone (except the pharmacists) proceeded to decorate. It is my personal opinon that we had the best float, but I may a bit biased. The theme for the fair is "Tough enough to wear pink" in support of breast cancer awareness. Thus, the entire float, including the folks on it, wore lots and lots of pink. Donna, another of our clerks, found day-glo hot pink hats for the guys to wear and Judy (one of the former owners) provided Travis with an amazing hot pink shirt. I have three favorite memories from the parade: (1) Travis in the hot pink shirt with the collar turned up to make him look cool (2) Murl wearing his hot pink hat sideways saying "I is the pharmacist" (3) Sheinah talking about caramel poop (in reference to all the horse manure on the road).

Raspberry toots

2009-07-28T18:41:00.000-07:00

We try to spend a little one-on-one time with Sheinah in the evenings after we put Amaris to bed. Tonight, we were having a tickle fight. Sheinah and I decided to blow raspberries on Travis' tummy. Sheinah needed me to show her what to do because she didn't quite know how to do it. I showed her and then gave her a turn. As soon as she blew out, she also tooted. We, of course, started laughing and asked her to do it again. Amazingly she did...again, and again, and again. I wonder if there is any need for people who can fart on demand? Anyway, we got a video of it. My favorite part was her trying to show Travis how to do it and Travis's face turning red as he tried unsuccessfully to toot. Apparently, she didn't get her ability in this area from her daddy. Be sure to turn up the volume in order to hear the toots.

First tooth

2009-07-26T18:39:00.000-07:00

Amaris finally cut her first tooth today. It seems like she has been teething for months. Of course, she is very grumpy and drooly and can't seem to put enough stuff in her mouth but we are happy that the first tooth is through.

Life is Good

2009-07-23T20:36:00.000-07:00

Life in Julesburg has improved dramatically since our last post. Our insurance problems have been mostly resolved, we are actually getting paid from insurance companies now, and we almost know what we are doing in running this business.

The girls are flourishing here. Amaris started crawling last week. Her amazing daycare provider caught it on video with her cell phone for us! After just one week of practice, she's already crawling all over the place...mostly to chase the dog. Travis is convinced that she can say "dog" but what she is really saying is "Doh." We've got some videos of her saying this and the crawling that some day we will find the time to post.

Sheinah graduated from her level 1 swimming class. She passed everything EXCEPT putting her face in the water. She can ride her bike by herself pretty fast (of course, it has training wheels on). We call her our little brownie because she is getting so tan. She talks like a grown up, talks back, and generally gives us a glimpse of the joys the teenager years hold for us in the future. She did amazing with her cousins while we were gone in Orlando. She didn't get weepy or anything until the very last day...such a big girl.

As mentioned above, we left the girls for the first time for three days to attend a conference in Orlando. It was good for us to figure out how to leave our girls and we got so much done with the business. It was a great trip and everyone survived with only a few tears!

That's all for now. We are so blessed to be here in Julesburg and appreciate your continued prayers as we figure out what we are doing.

Official Pharmacy Owners

2009-06-30T19:27:00.000-07:00

We closed on the pharmacy yesterday and are now the official owner's of Abts Pharmacy and Gifts. It was actually a bit anticlimactic. We had so many errands to run while we were in Denver that we didn't even celebrate the moment. We did pick up "Nama" (Melissa's mom) from the airport and she entertained Sheinah for the whole ride home which was a blessing.

First day at the pharmacy was very, very bad courtesy of our friends as the insurance companies. Here's what happened, all pharmacies have to register with a place called NCPDP which gives the pharmacy a special number that identifies the pharmacy. We got our number assigned to us a few weeks ago. The application asks when the transfer of ownership of the pharmacy will be completed so that the old number can be "turned off" and the new one "turned on". Pharmacies cannot have two numbers so the switch date is very important. Insurance companies use this number to identify pharmacies for payment. When a pharmacy transfers ownership, the new owners have to renegotiate contracts with every insurance company. We've been working on that for over a month, but the companies all require a bill of sale to complete the transfer. Since we didn't have that until yesterday afternoon, all of our applications are pending.

Now, back to that all important switch date. We didn't understand what the form was asking when it wanted the date of the completion of the transfer so we put in the date of closing. This means they turned off the old number yesterday and turned on ours today. Doesn't seem like a problem until you realize that none of our contracts with the insurance companies are active!! This means we couldn't process any prescriptions (or get paid for them which is kind of an important thing). It took Melissa 3 hours on the phone before she figured out the problem. We got to pay $150 to get the old number turned back on...gotta love the government. Once we figured it all out and switched all the numbers back, all the insurance companies worked...except one called Humana. Melissa spent no less than 2 hours being bounced back and forth between different phone numbers at Humana and still never got a person who could fix the problem.
This probably doesn't sound all that bad still until you factor in the fact that Melissa hasn't filled a prescription in 4 years and had to learn an entirely new computer prescription processing system all while working in an environment that is stuck in 1989.

While Melissa was dealing with pharmacy payment issues, Travis was struggling with a fax machine that wouldn't work and trying to get us a State Sales Tax number so that we could order flowers for the flower shop. The application would take 3 weeks to get processed if we mailed it (they won't accept a fax) but could be processed instantly if we did it in person. The problem...the guy in Fort collins is on vacation for a week so Travis would have had to drive all the way back to Denver (6+ hours round trip). The supplier rep was in Julesburg to meet with Melissa (who hardly spoke to him because she was on the phone with insurance companies) and he volunteered to turn the application in for us. It ended up taking him 2+hours to deal with all the problems with that application. Poor guy was trying to help us and ended up spending his whole day at a government office.

Oh yeah, and every few minutes someone would come in to meet the new owners which neither of us could really enjoy because we were so distracted by all the problems. Did we mention that Melissa never left the pharmacy between 7:45am and 6:30pm...yuck! Luckily, Jackie did an amazing job with the girls. They had a blast with their Nama!!

All in all, it was one heck of a first day for us. A little margaritas has softened our memory of the day a bit but we figured we should chronicle the truth for posterity sake. We appreciate your prayers that our insurance problems will get resolved tomorrow and that we would be able to enjoy our second day much more than the first. All the folks who came in were so incredibly welcoming and Julesburg is a really wonderful place. Stay tuned for more installments of the saga of Julesburg.

Journey to Julesburg

2009-06-26T19:37:00.000-07:00

We arrived in Julesburg, CO on last Saturday evening after an eventful journey. We thought that one week would be long enough to pack and get settled and even have like a little vacation. Boy were we wrong.

Let's start from the beginning (told from Melissa's perspective). We had intended to have the trailer packed up by the end of the day last Thursday so we could clean the house on Friday and head out in the late afternoon. The reality...on Friday morning we were still packing. We had also intended to leave our mini-van to be sold in Duluth. The pharmacy purchase includes a mini-van that is used for deliveries and we really wanted to travel together in one car. By 1pm, we had completely filled both the trailer and the truck and still had our suitcases and other small things to load. We decided to go ahead and pack the mini-van for me to drive. We had to pick up the girls from their last day at daycare by 5pm so at 4:30pm I drove off while Travis loaded up the last few things.

We didn't even leave Duluth until sometime after 6pm. Now, we stayed up late and got up early every day that week so we were pretty exhausted. Now, I (who am a big sleeper and don't do well driving at night) knew that we would need to drive as far as we could while the girls were sleeping so I decided to use her pharmaceutical knowledge for assistance. That's right, I, in all my brilliance thought it would be good to take some caffeine pills. Those of you who know me know that I DO NOT drink caffeine...pretty much ever. Now I actually used to teach a lecture on insomnia and drowsiness. You would think that I would remember how much caffeine is in a regular beverage. I will blame my miscalculation on my extreme exhaustion. I was thinking that one cup of coffee had between 200 and 300mg of caffeine (in reality, it's about half that) Each caffeine tablet has 200mg. A standard dose is two tablets. I took two tablets at like 7pm. Thus, I had the equivalent of about 3 or 4 cups of coffee...in a person who is caffeine naive. Needless to say, I was wired, my heart was racing, and my hands were shaking; but I was totally awake. We drove until about midnight and found a hotel. No matter how hard I tried, I COULD NOT get to sleep. The last time I looked at the clock was 3am. The girls woke us up at 6am. NOT good.

We hit the road at 8am and pulled into Julesburg at 7pm Mountain time (12 hours later). We encountered bad weather, at least a hundred miles of road construction, stops for the dog to pee and the baby to eat, and one nervous breakdown on my part when grooved pavement made sounds that I thought meant something was wrong with the van. Travis was able to navigate traffic in Omaha while feeding the baby and talking to me on the walkie-talkie...amazingly talented!

When we arrived, Travis' folks were here along with the current owner's of the pharmacy and a few other people. I honestly don't remember much due to extreme exhaustion. I do know that the people who we are renting our house from were kind enough to put milk, eggs, and bread in the fridge for us because the grocery store closes at 7pm. They got half the trailer unloaded to get to the beds so we could put the girls and me to sleep. Unbelievablely, I couldn't sleep...laid there for three hours before Travis came to bed and I finally went to sleep.

We've spent the whole week getting settled and we are still not done unpacking. We've got inventory at the store tomorrow which will be all kinds of fun. David and Shannon and the kids are coming up to watch the girls while we are at the store. D-Day is Monday when we will sign on the dotted line to become the official owner's of Abts Pharmacy and Gifts.

Stay tuned for the next installment in the saga.

God and Money

2009-06-13T18:33:00.000-07:00

Tonight on the way to church, Sheinah initiated a conversation about money that turned into a conversation about God. The conversation is recapped below as it was remembered to have transpired between Melissa and Sheinah. I am pretty sure that the conversation started because we gave her some spare change to put in the offering at kids church.

Sheinah: Mom, where does money come from?
Daddy and I get money from working.
Sheinah: How?
Well, we get hired by someone to do a certain job and then they pay us money for doing that job. Sheinah: And then you use that money to buy stuff for kids?
Sometimes, but we were thinking that you are getting old enough to earn your money.
Sheinah: What do you mean?
Well, we would give you a job to do and then give you money for doing the job.
Sheinah: I could help you do pharmacy jobs!
Yes, you could help at the pharmacy.
Sheinah: What do we do with our money?
Daddy and I spend it in three ways.
Sheinah: wait I know, we use money to buy stuff.....what are the other things we do mommy?
We use it to buy stuff we need. We save up money for bigger stuff like we want to buy a new car so we are saving up money for that and then we give money to God like how you give offering at church.
Sheinah: We need big stuff like a new house and a new car and a new pet.
What kind of pet do we need.
Sheinah: A pony...so do we throw the money up in the air (to get it to God)?
No, but that would be a good idea. We get the money to God by giving it to church. We also give money to people in other places who don't know about God yet. (Travis steps in), we give money to a little boy in Africa who is poor and his parents don't have a job.
Sheinah: His parents should get a job
Yes, so we give money to help them have a job, and food, and the little boy gets to go to school and learn about Jesus.
Sheinah: My school doesn't teach anyone about Jesus or God.
No, they don't, we go to church to learn about Jesus.
Sheinah: We like to pray for people who are sick or sad or at the hospital or if they got hurt or if they got eaten or if they have a cavity in their teeth.
If they got eaten?
Sheinah: Eaten is when an animal has big teeth and then it bites you

And then we arrived at church. How's that for a lesson about money and God.

Abts Pharmacy and Gifts

2009-06-09T19:24:00.000-07:00

It has been 2 months since our last post but we have a good excuse! As most of you know, we are moving back to Colorado. That in and of itself is likely a good reason to be too busy to post to our blog. However, the real reason we haven't posted anything is that we are purchasing an existing pharmacy in Julesburg, CO which is turning out to be more work than anything we've ever imagined.

When we tell people we are buying a pharmacy we usually get a jaw-dropping exclamation of some sort followed by a request for the story that led us to this new adventure. Thus, we've decided to post the saga here on the blog (which gets automatically uploaded to facebook) to save us from repeating ourselves hundreds of times. We've already told the story about a dozen times so this version here should be pretty accurate. It will, however, be very long.

Told from Melissa's perspective:
When we decided a year ago to move back to Colorado to be closer to family (and because we were sick of the MN cold weather), the assumption was always that I would find a teaching position at my alma mater: the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center School of Pharmacy. When I learned that Regis was opening a School of Pharmacy as well, I was excited to have the potential for more options. As the time to actually look for a job neared, we both realized that we just were not looking forward to living in Denver. We have grown accustomed to life in a smaller town. We were most definitely NOT eagerly anticipating sitting in traffic, having a long commute, living close to neighbors...the list goes on...but I really didn't want to go back to working for a big chain pharmacy and there aren't that many clinical pharmacist jobs outside of the hospital setting to choose from.

Now Travis is notorious for his ability to function normally (well, normal for Travis anyway), on relatively little sleep. He often puts me to bed and then gets up after I fall asleep and surfs the net. One night back in February he was doing just that when he got the idea to look for pharmacies for sale in Colorado. Those of you who know Travis should not be surprised by this idea as he is always thinking outside the box and coming up with all manner of crazy schemes. He discovered four pharmacies for sale in Colorado: one in a mountain town (too expensive to live there), one in a dying mining town (no explanation needed), one in southern Colorado (too far away and he is not a big fan of southern Colorado), and one out in the plains. Without talking to me about it, he filled out a brief form and signed a non-disclosure agreement to get more information on the pharmacy.

Fast-forward a day or two: I am very, very sick...sick enough to miss an entire week of work...when Travis decides to share his brilliant idea with me. He waits until I finish vomiting (so nice of him) and then says something along the lines of "What do you think about buying a pharmacy?" For all you pharmacy folks out there, you will understand why my immediate response was an emphatic NO. In fact, every time he opened his mouth to say anything, I just said NO. He graciously left me alone...for a few hours...before he tried again...and again...and again to talk to me about this idea. I think I finally gave in and agreed to at least see the information solely to get him to stop bugging me.

Fast-forward one week: I am convinced by Travis' irrepressible enthusiasm and optimism that we can actually own a pharmacy. I forget everything I've ever heard about independent pharmacy ownership: long hours, no vacations, you live and breath at the store. Instead, I embrace the dream of raising our girls in a small town, being able to leave doors unlocked, and "changing our family tree" (in the words of Dave Ramsey) through the financial benefits of owning this fiscally stable business. I imagine being able to take care of my patients in whatever way I think is best. I start talking to my trusted confidants. Everyone I tell thinks that this would be a perfect fit for both me and my family. No one tells me I am crazy. Maybe this could actually work.

Fast-forward one month (March 2009): We run into all kinds of trouble trying to find financing in the current economy. It doesn't help that our new president has changed the banking rules with regards to how much banks can loan on what they call "blue sky" under a small business loan. Basically, when you buy a pharmacy you are buying very little real property. Instead, you are trusting that the customers will continue to come there...hence the "blue sky." The new banking rules would make it such that we had to come up with a significant chunk of change on our own. We head out to Colorado so I can interview at Regis because we aren't sure if this whole pharmacy thing is going to work. We go to Julesburg to check out the pharmacy and meet the owners. We fall in love with the town, the store, everything. Yep, we definitely want to do this, but we are having a heck of a time finding a way to buy the place.

Enter my amazing boss, Randy Seifert. He knows someone in everyone area of pharmacy, including the folks who help pharmacists buy pharmacies. He connects me with a consulting company that eventually gets us a loan (but that whole process takes two months). The consultant has us fill out forms (the first of many) and says he'll get back to us in a day or two to let us know if we are pre-approved. He calls us in an hour saying we would be crazy NOT to buy the place and he we are approved! Yes, it is THAT good of a store (I think that is bad English but you get the point).

Fast forward two months (May 2009): We have a trip to Mexico planned for over a year that gets cancelled thanks to H1N1 flu. No worries, we just book ourselves some tickets to Colorado for a 12 day trip. We hang out in Breckenridge for awhile waiting for one tiny piece of paper that will allow us to go to Julesburg and meet everyone at the store. The paper finally comes and we are off. Murl, the owner, finally tells his staff that he is selling the pharmacy (it had been a secret the whole time). We arrive with the girls knowing that our kids will pave the way! Sure enough, they are a hit and we are instant celebrities! By the end of day one, we've looked at a bunch of houses, met the county commissioner, and got the girls registered at school. By day two, the local paper has contacted Murl for a story and we found a place to rent. There is a whole nother story about the rental house, but we'll save that for another post. We are actually going to do this!!

Fast forward to today: So there is a RIDICULOUS amount of paperwork involved with purchasing a pharmacy. We basically spend every night filling out forms and then play phone tag with various folks during the day. We have barely started packing and we are set to leave on June 19th...just 10 days! We are so excited to start this new adventure and a bit nervous about small town life as business owners. We appreciate your prayers during this busy time or just happy thoughts if you're not the praying type. We will most definitely miss our Vineyard family, the College of Pharmacy and the beauty of Lake Superior. We will most definitely NOT miss sub-zero temperatures and forty degree weather on June 8th!

I almost forgot to give the scoop on the town! It is the county seat so it actually has quite a bit of stuff: county courthouse, library, elementary/jr.high/high school, nursing home, assisted living facility, and critical access hospital with a helipad. There are somewhere between 1247 and 1500 people in the town depending on which website you look at. The website for the town is: http://www.townofjulesburg.com/.

Thanks for reading this first installation of the Abts Pharmacy saga.

What happens when daddy is home with the girls...

2009-04-09T12:46:00.000-07:00

1. Daddy takes lots of pictures.

2. Sheinah and Amaris get some quality one-on-one time.

3. Sheinah puts puzzles together all by herself

4. Toys end up in the nose?? (that's a hat for her my little pony toy)

Happy legs

2009-04-05T13:26:00.000-07:00

When Amaris gets excited...or bored...or pretty much any time of the day...she kicks both legs up and down. Sometimes she kicks so hard that you can hear her banging the floor from several rooms away. We caught it on video to share.

Mommy snowman

2009-04-02T13:01:00.000-07:00

We got a nice snowstorm to welcome us home from our trip to Colorado. Since it was spring snow, it was wet and suitable for building a snowman. It turns out that our snowman, is really a snow mommy. Check out this video (note, Sheinah said this all on her own). We ended up building a snow baby for the snow mommy after the video was recorded.

Cereal for Amaris

2009-03-14T12:31:00.000-07:00

Amaris is old enough now to start solid foods so we started with rice cereal. The first time you are supposed to make it really runny. She didn't seem to be a big fan of that so we started making it like paste. By the time she spits it out several times, it gets all runny anyway. Enjoy a few pictures her second or third feeding! We'll get the video posted as soon as blogger decides to cooperate (we keep getting an error when we try to upload the video).

It's a girl dog

2009-03-07T12:31:00.000-08:00

Sheinah gave Travis a lesson today on the difference between girls and boys. She had one of her stuffed animals (a little puppy) that she was playing with and Travis made the mistake of referring to it as "he." Sheinah says: "No daddy, it's a girl dog. See (showing him the dog's belly), there's nothing sticking out. Do you see anything sticking out? (Travis says no). Well then, it's a girl dog. If there was something sticking out it would be a boy dog."

I guess this means that all her stuffed animals are girls...

Rolling Over

2009-03-01T19:22:00.000-08:00

Amaris has rolled over a few times (from her tummy to her back), but it has been so random that we haven't been able to catch it on video. Today she was a rolling queen. Here is how the story goes. Amaris rolled over three or four times while Travis was getting the camera ready. Once he got it, she rolled again and then he realized that he didn't have a memory card in the camera. Each of these rolls had been to her left side. Finally, he was really ready, and Amaris rolled one last time...to the right...right to Sheinah. If you listen closely in the video you can hear Sheinah something like "This time she is going to roll to me daddy." Enjoy!

Counting

2009-02-26T18:22:00.000-08:00

Sheinah and Travis have developed a bit of a new ritual. On our way home from the store, they start counting to whatever number Sheinah picks. It helps pass the time on the way home. Tonight, Sheinah started the counting and asked her daddy to count with her. Normally, Travis says the number first. This time, Sheinah said the numbers. She counted all the way to 20 without missing a number. After 20, she skipped to thirty one for whatever reason and then she kind of started jumping around. It was just so cute to hear her leading her daddy in the counting!

Sheinah's prayer

2009-02-24T18:29:00.000-08:00

We pray with Sheinah every night before we put her to bed. Usually, we do the praying and she does the listening, but we can occasionally convince her to pray her own prayer. A few nights ago, this is part of what she prayed:

Dear God, (some stuff we didn't understand)....everything I know about you, I love...(some more stuff we couldn't understand).

What a profound prayer from such a little girl!

Home Sweet Home

2009-02-24T18:20:00.000-08:00

After nearly two years of hard work, our house is finally (mostly) finished...just in time to put it on the market. We were talking about why don't always keep our house looking like it is for sale and then we realized that it is ALOT of work! For those of you who don't remember what it looked like when we bought it, check out these old posts before you look at the Virtual Tour Travis put together:

Original purchase: http://daminnesotabums.blogspot.com/2007/03/movingagain.html

Demolition: http://daminnesotabums.blogspot.com/2007/05/kingston-progress.html

Summer progress: http://daminnesotabums.blogspot.com/2007/06/house-update.html

Painting done: http://daminnesotabums.blogspot.com/2007/06/painting-done.html

Finally done: Virtual Tour
http://www.tourfactory.com/488011

Princess nightgown

2009-02-21T18:31:00.000-08:00

Sheinah has three special nightgowns that we have acquired over the past year. All of them have princesses on them (she is quite facinated with princesses). She has been working hard on getting dressed and undressed all by herself. Tonight, when she put on her nightgown, she stopped with it down at her shoulders and proceeded to explain why she had done this. It took a few repetitions, but Melissa finally figured out what she was saying. She said she was wearing it like this because sometimes this is how the princesses wear their dresses and then she pointed to the picture on her wall of Belle (see picture, it's a weird picture because we had to find one that wasn't copyrighted). Apparently, she'd be trying to explain this to Travis for several nights, but he didn't understand what she was talking about. There is not much you can say to convice her to wear it the normal way when she has a picture on her wall of the "off the shoulder" look :)

It's all baking "stuff"

2009-02-20T19:48:00.000-08:00

Melissa has been sick with some serious infection for about a week now. This means Travis, being the amazing husband that he is, has been doing pretty much everything around the house. As a result, Sheinah and Travis ate brinner (breakfast for dinner) several nights this week. Two nights ago, Melissa was feeling well enough to eat pancakes so Travis said he would make some. Now, we don't keep pancake mix in the house anymore because Melissa found a good, easy recipe for homemade pancakes. The family decided that we like the buttermilk variation of the recipe so Melissa pointed out the variation to Travis and then sat down with Sheinah while he cooked. After tasting the pancakes, Melissa thought something tasted odd, but she is sick so she figured maybe it was just her taste buds. After several more bites she asked Travis to show her what he put in the batter. It took only a moment to discover that Travis only made the buttermilk substitution...he missed the part that required him to reduce the amount of baking powder and baking soda in the batter. That in and of itself would likely not have been an issue. However, when he was reciting to Melissa what he actually put in the mix it was discovered that he put three teaspoons of baking SODA rather than baking POWDER. He stated quite adamantly that it said BAKING on it so he figured it was all the same. He then went on to compare cooking to fixing a car, saying that if he wrote detailed instructions for replacing a ball joint would she know the difference between a ball joint and a U-joint. Melissa responded that those parts aren't LABELED :)

Travis did try to eat the pancakes in a show of defiance that they "weren't that bad." However, he finally admitted that they were not good and threw them out. Needless to say, Travis finally understands that the recipe might actually be important.

Sitting Up

2009-02-19T18:51:00.000-08:00

Amaris is almost four months old now and she's been working hard on building her tummy muscles enough to sit up. We gave her a try today with a little help from the boppy and she did great. Maybe now her little bald spot can start growing back since she can do something other than lay down on her back.

My computer

2009-02-15T19:11:00.000-08:00

Apparently, we must spend a lot of time on our computers. Check out this video. It speaks for itself.

Curling is a contact sport?

2009-02-13T18:39:00.000-08:00

We've been curling every Wednesday night for the past 4 or 5 weeks...it's kind of our date night. This week, there weren't very many people there so we curled in teams of three people instead of four. For those of you who have never curled, let us explain why this small fact is important. When there are four people curling, one is the "skip" (basically the captain of the team) who shows you where to aim your "rock" (the large granite stone) and decides the team strategy. One player throws the rock, one is skipping, and then the other two players "sweep" the rock if needed with the broom to either help it go faster or to make it go straighter down the ice.

Now, when you only have three players, that leaves only one person to sweep. Sweeping is actually the most strenuous part of curling, it takes quite a bit of work. So, sometimes the person who is throwing the rock might need to move quickly after throwing it to help sweep their own rock. This is what happened on Travis' first rock of the second end this week. Melissa was skipping (because she doesn't sweep all that well), and a girl named Courtney was sweeping. Travis threw the rock and felt like he didn't throw it hard enough so he decided to run up to help Courtney sweep. This was probably not the best idea he has ever had. Running on ice is not exactly safe...a lesson that we thought Travis learned five years ago when he got a concussion running on the ice playing broomball. Wouldn't you know, a similar thing happened when he ran this time. His feet ended up in the air and his head ended up on the ice....and he didn't get up.

The short version of the story is that he cut his head open in two places and bled quite a bit on the ice (we are curious about how they are going to fix that up). There was an ER doc curling that night who came over and checked him out, saying that he needed to go get stitched up. The ambulance came and agreed and one of the other curlers drove us to the hospital. Travis got three stitches and four staples and we were out of there in less than two hours. The funniest part was that the doctor who stitched him up actually wants to go curling!

Nighttime Rise

2009-02-07T16:47:00.000-08:00

Sometimes Travis takes Melissa and the girls to school (because he is an awesome husband). We have to leave pretty early to get the girls in their respective rooms at the Children's Place and Melissa to work on time. Since we live in the frozen northland, the sun rises pretty late. Thus, we get to see some pretty awesome sunrises. The other day the sun looked red and Sheinah was facinated by this so she started paying attention to the sky on the way to school. Suddenly, she yelled out "Dad, look, God painted a sunrise for us! How did God do that?" Then she went on to say some stuff we didn't understand. The next thing we heard was something about "nighttime rise." It took us a minute to figure out that she was talking about how the sky gets dark after the sun sets. Travis started to correct her and tell her that was a sunset, but we decided that we kind of liked the term nighttime rise.

Last night, we went out to Perkins to have breakfast for dinner (our whole family can eat for like $15). On the way, there was an amazing sunset that we were watching as we drove. When Travis tried to get Sheinah to notice it, he called it "nighttime rise." Sheinah proceeded to say "DAD (in an exasperated tone), nighttime rise is when the sky turns dark, this is afternoon nighttime rise." If only kids came with a dictionary or something...

Sheinah goes to the dentist

2009-02-04T18:55:00.000-08:00

At three years old, we figured it was time for Sheinah to get her teeth checked out. Yes, we realize that this set of teeth will be replaced, but we wanted her to get used to the dentist while she was young. Travis had the honor of taking her since it was at Melissa's check-up last month that the dentist said Sheinah was old enough to come in. Our dental hygenist is amazing! She let Sheinah sit on Travis tummy while she cleaned his teeth. She told Sheinah what she was doing and showed her all the tools. Thus, when it was Sheinah's turn, she was her usual cheerful self. She let the hygenist do the entire procedure without a single unhappy moment.

The best part was when Melissa asked her how her appointment was...the first thing Sheinah told Melissa was that the dentist told her she had to stop sucking her thumb and stop peeing in her pull-up. Now, the real story is that our dentist has a three year-old also. He DID tell Travis that Sheinah's teeth were starting to be affected by the thumb-sucking and that she did need to stop. However, the pull-up statement was exaggerated. Travis and the dentist were just talking about having a three year-old and mentioned that we were working on her getting through the night dry. Sheinah interpreted that to mean the dentist wanted her to stop peeing :)

Enjoy the pictures (they were taken with Travis' phone so the quality is not all that great).

Row your boat

2009-02-03T16:44:00.000-08:00

Now we can't exactly remember what got Sheinah to start singing, but we thought you might enjoy the performance. It should be noted that we are not entirely sure what she is talking about when she stops singing, but it sure made her laugh!

Need a vacation

2009-01-25T18:48:00.001-08:00

If you are sick of the cold (it was 32 degrees in FLORIDA last week!), take a peek at Travis' travel website. His company is giving away one vacation every month. This month, it is to a resort in the Bahamas. Just go to his website: http://www.ichoose2travel.com/ and click on the Trip of a Lifetime sweepstakes in the lower right corner. The trip includes airfare and spending money. How cool would it be if a Bumgardner family friend won this month. Good luck!

Aisle 19

2009-01-25T18:43:00.001-08:00

We love the convenience of shopping online. I think our neighbors think we are strange because we seem to get a delivery of some sort about once a week. We are excited to share a new way to shop online in which we get cash back for our purchases. It's called Aisle 19 and there are about 600 different stores where you can shop and get cash back on your purchases. You can watch this 3 minute video that explains the concept http://www.aisle19.com/Video.aspx?ReferralRepID=905916 and then Click on this link https://registration.escapeintl.com/default.aspx?ReferralSiteID=2&ReferralRepID=905916 to get your own account.

Happy shopping!

Little Laugher

2009-01-22T19:57:00.000-08:00

Amaris is at the age where she is smiling for real...not just gas. She smiles best when her daddy makes faces at her. Check out this little compilation video:

It's a pinto

2009-01-22T18:52:00.000-08:00

One of Sheinah's favorite movies is the "horsey movie" also known as Moondance Alexander. Sheinah often likes for us to search for pictures of horses on the computer (we do a google image search and let her choose which pictures she wants to look at). Tonight, she asked to see a pony like the one in Moondance Alexander. The only problem was that Melissa drew a blank on the kind of pony it was. Melissa said outloud that she would have to ask Travis if he remembered what kind of pony it was when Sheinah said "Mommy, it's a PINTO." Of course, she was right! Kids have an amazing memory...it helps that she has seen the movie probably twenty or thirty times...but she remembered the kind of pony and her mommy didn't!

Happy Birthday Daddy

2009-01-21T19:14:00.000-08:00

Today Travis turned 38! Daddy requested a chocolate cake. After much debate, we decided to go with a recipe from one of Melissa's friends from work. This cake is not for the weak-hearted...literally...it's got enough cholesterol/fat in it to clog your arteries! Check out the recipe.

Sheinah likes to taste everything when we are cooking so when she asked to taste the sour cream, Melissa figured she would take one taste and be done. She was wrong! Sheinah licked the measuring cup clean.

This was the first time Sheinah had ever seen a bundt pan (we bought it special for daddy's cake). She is a big fan of sprinkles and didn't quite understand that what she thought was the top of the cake was actually the bottom. We let her put the sprinkles anyway.

Pee-er?

2009-01-19T18:04:00.000-08:00

Tonight we went to dinner at a friends house. The "boys" that live there apparently are not trained to put the toilet seat down after the use the bathroom (this is likely because the guys are single so there is no wife to enforce this important rule). Anyway, when Melissa took Sheinah to go potty, the toilet seat was up and Sheinah asked why it was up. Melissa told her that God gave boys different equipment than girls. The conversation that followed went something like this:

Sheinah: Daddy and Samson are boys (Samson is our dog)

Melissa: yes, they are

Sheinah: Boys have pee-ers

Melissa: What?

Sheinah: Boys have pee-ers

Melissa: What did you say?

Sheinah: (sticking out her chin, speaking loudly, and trying to enunciate) Boys have PEE-ERS

Melissa: Yes, they do don't they. If boys have pee-ers, what do girls have?

Sheinah: Not pee-ers

Melissa: (Trying hard not to laugh)

Sheinah: Samson's pee-er is on his belly in the middle of his fur. (goes on to say something about the boys at preschool that Melissa couldn't understand)

So now we at least have a name to call boy parts! After telling this story to our friend, Adam, who is the parent of Sheinah's friend, Eva...Adam informed us that Eva just says "boy parts" and "girl parts." We kind of like the term pee-er. At least it accurately describes the function of the part! :)

No Boogers

2009-01-12T18:00:00.000-08:00

Travis was reading Sheinah one of her older baby books called "Who Says Woof." On each page, the book asks which animal says a certain sound and then the child gets to say which animal makes that sound. Travis always makes the sounds rather than saying the words. For example, the book says that a horse says NEIGH and Travis actually makes a semi-authentic horsey sound. Then, we always ask Sheinah to make the animal sound. Tonight, when he got to the OINK of a pig, he made a snorting sound with his nose. When he asked Sheinah to do it, she told him "I can't make that sound because I don't have boogers in my nose...I just say oink." How cute is that.

Sheinah's Haircut

2009-01-08T12:55:00.001-08:00

Sheinah's hair has gotten really long, but it is still all different lengths from when we grew her bangs out. This isn't a big deal except when Melissa braids her hair....when she gets to the end, lots of little pieces stick out. The other issue is that Sheinah often doesn't want to have her hair done so it ends up getting in her eyes. With the extreme cold weather in Duluth comes static electricity which also makes Sheinah's hair go all over the place. Thus, we decided it was time for her to get her hair cut such that the back was more even. We had meant to have her Opa cut her hair and then we forgot all about it...bummer!

Anyway, we took her to a little tiny shop by her dance studio thinking that it would be more fun for her to get personalized attention. She did enjoy herself immensely. The only problem is that the stylist did a HORRIBLE job!! Sheinah's hair basically looks like one of us cut it...it's all uneven and very choppy (check out the picture of her in the purple shirt).

We ended up taking her into another place the next day to get it fixed. The stylist there said that he thought the first stylist cut it so uneven because she was lazy...she pulled the hair down instead of cutting it while it was hanging free. He had to take off another inch or so to get it even so it is now a little shorter than we expected. In any case, the second stylist cut her hair with it parted so now it actually stays out of her face a little better.

Sheinah's Beauty Shop

2009-01-04T12:38:00.000-08:00

With Melissa often occupied feeding Amaris, Travis has had the opportunity to play a little more with Sheinah. Those of you who know her know that she is a very "girly" girl. Today, she decided to do Daddy's hair. Travis had to help her with the blue clips, but she put all the rest in herself. She took her time too...they must have spent a good 30 minutes at the "salon."

Otto

2008-12-18T12:42:00.000-08:00

Allen has always loved the name Otto. He's tried to convince all of his kids to name one of the grandbabies, Otto (yes, even the girl babies). In fact, Eliya's nickname is Otto. Imagine how delighted we were when we discovered that the Dr. Seuss book "A Fish Out of Water" starred a fish named Otto. We asked Allen to read it to Sheinah and enjoyed the look of surprise on his face when he read the fish's name.

Is hotdog a Vegetable?

2008-12-14T14:14:00.000-08:00

Travis has been talking about shooting a deer for a few weeks now because we have so many in our backyard. With his parents coming to town, he actually got a deer tag. Coincidentally, Travis bought some straw last week to cover our septic area since we hadn't had enough snow to keep it from freezing. Who'd have thought that deer would want to eat the straw! Now, deer baiting is illegal in Minnesota (but legal in Wisconsin, and thus, quite controversial). At one point we had 9 deer in the yard. So, Travis and Allen got out the bow and Travis shot a deer on his first try. They waited overnight, went out on our property, and found the deer just a few yards past the edge of our yard. Allen took care of skinning the deer and all that stuff. We were very open with Sheinah and talked about the whole process with her so she wouldn't be freaked out. Luckily, she hasn't seen Bambi :)

Anyway, Lori took this video this morning while Allen was cutting the deer up into steaks. Here is a transcript for those of you who can't understand Sheinah-ese:

Travis: What is this?

Sheinah: A deer that doesn't walk anymore

Travis: A deer that doesn't walk anymore? Do you like deer?

Sheinah: NO

Travis: How come?

Sheinah: Cuz they walk.

Travis: Cuz they walk? Where do they walk at?

Sheinah: Grass

Travis: In the grass? What are you gonna eat if you are not gonna eat deer?

Sheinah: Vegetables

Travis: Vegetables? What kind of vegetables?

Sheinah: Broccoli...

Travis: Broccoli!

Sheinah: and, uh...hotdogs

Travis: and hotdogs!

Sheinah: and carrots

Travis: Broccoli and hotdogs and carrots. I don't know if hotdogs are vegetables. You don't know, but you're not going to eat deer?

Sheinah: no

Travis: no, because they walk, huh? You want to touch it.

Sheinah: no

Travis: Look it, Opa has some, you want to touch it?

Sheinah: no

Travis: OK

Dance Class

2008-11-22T13:03:00.000-08:00

Now that "baby sister" has arrived, we were looking for a way for Melissa and Sheinah to have special time together...enter Mommy and Me dance class. Melissa saw an ad for the class in the local paper and decided to sign up. Melissa and Sheinah go to class for 30 minutes on Saturday mornings. As Sheinah likes to say, "no daddys can come." In addition to Mommy and Me, Sheinah's best buddy from her old daycare, Gabrielle, also goes to the class so it's doubley fun for Sheinah.

This Saturday, her Nama was in town so we all went together to class. We decided to get some pictures and video to capture this momentous ocassion. It should be noted that Melissa managed to leave the camera there (she has a long history of losing cameras, just ask her Aunt Jo-Ann). Luckily, someone turned it in!

The little girl in the green shirt is Sheinah's friend, Gabrielle. You'll see that they are the only two little girls who are not wearing fancy dance clothes. Maybe Auntie Shannon can make Sheinah a little dance skirt for Christmas? HINT, HINT, HINT :)

In this week's class, the girls learned first position. In the video below, you'll see Gabrielle and Sheinah practicing first position and doing a Plié and then doing a dance at the end. The teacher uses some neat terms to help the girls learn the positions. To get them into first position, she talks about zipping and unzipping the feet. To do the Plié, the girls "open a window." Sheinah really doesn't like first position at all (she won't unzip her feet in the video). I guess we'll be doing tap dance class instead of ballet in the future! Enjoy the video!

Abi or Amaris

2008-11-20T12:35:00.000-08:00

Now that Amaris is a little bit bigger, she is starting to look a bit like other family members. Melissa thinks that in this picture she looks just like her cousin Abigail (Abi is the baby on the right).

Twins?

2008-11-20T12:31:00.000-08:00

We've been thinking that Amaris looks a lot like Sheinah so we decided to duplicate a picture we had taken of Sheinah when she was six weeks old. Can you tell which picture is Sheinah and which one is Amaris?

Shannon, the master seamstress

2008-11-10T12:07:00.001-08:00

Shannon's gift to baby Amaris was the gift of sewing. We sent Shannon some fabric and she made a nursing shawl and new cover for the glider in Amaris' room. The result was quite amazing. She even found matching buttons for both fabrics! Check out the glider (to the left). To see the nursing shawl, check out the Marshall Kids' blog: http://marskidsinterest.blogspot.com/

She also made Sheinah a really neat jacket and matching doll for her birthday. Sheinah has been wearing it every day since we opened the package.

What's Missing?

2008-11-09T12:02:00.000-08:00

Check out this photo and see if you can tell what's missing. Hint...it used to be attached to Amaris and went missing today.

Story time for Amaris

2008-11-08T10:31:00.000-08:00

Sheinah really loves to "read" stories to us. This weekend, she got to bring home Duncan, a little dog who travels to the homes of the kids in her preschool class. Duncan comes with his own suitcase, pillow, blanket, and story books. Tonight, Sheinah decided that Amaris would like to hear Duncan's story so she asked daddy to help her read to Amaris.

You'll hear Sheinah talking about duck poop several times. After we stopped recording, Travis asked Sheinah why she was talking about poop so much. She said, "here, let me show you where the poop is" and proceeded to turn to a page that had a drawing of what she thought was the duck's poop. It was actually a soda bottle in the water, but she was convinced it was poop and that became the focus of her story :)

Amaris photo shoot

2008-11-06T18:07:00.000-08:00

During our travels this summer, we came across a cool photo of a baby's feet that we decided to try to replicate with Amaris. We also found a cute photo in a baby magazine that we tried to duplicate. See below for the finished products:

Wake up time

2008-11-04T10:41:00.000-08:00

Travis has a facination with the faces babies make when they are waking up. Both Sheinah and Amaris made/make the same faces. Check out the video to see what Travis loves so much.

Fixing Jonne's bike

2008-11-02T18:02:00.000-08:00

Travis took Sheinah outside to play because the weather was nice (an oddity for Duluth at this time of year). He decided to put the muffler back on Jonne's dirt bike while they were outside. "Uncle Jonne" travels for his job so our home is kind of his storage unit. When Travis was done, it was Sheinah's turn to fix Jonne's bike. It's important to notice that she actually uses the wrench appropriately (only putting it on actual bolts) and that she figured out she needed a larger size for the big bolts. At any rate, she had a good time hanging out with her daddy.

Just like daddy

2008-10-31T17:57:00.000-07:00

Note to the reader, this post may be slightly inappropriate for younger readers...proceed with caution :)

For those of you who do not have little girls, you may not be aware that the genitalia are swollen when little girls are first born. In fact, it takes quite awhile for this area to shrink to normal size. Sheinah was helping her daddy change Amaris' diaper today. She pointed to Amaris' private area and said "Daddy, she looks like you!" This taught us two things: (1) it might be time for Sheinah to stop taking showers with daddy (2) she is very observant because of the swelling it DID look kind of like male genitals. We tried to explain to Sheinah that Amaris would look like her soon, but we're not sure if she understood.

Pictures of Baby Bum

2008-10-27T21:16:00.000-07:00

baby bum

2008-10-27T20:47:00.000-07:00

Amaris Laela (ah-ma-ris lay-la) came into the world at 10:12 October 27, 2008. She weighs 6 pounds 1 ounce, 17.6 inches long, head 12 inches, chest 12 inches and beautiful. Her mom is sleeping and her dad is typing with one hand as she sleeps-cries in his arms.

37 Week Excitement

2008-10-26T07:50:00.001-07:00

We went in for our 37 week check on Wednesday. Melissa's blood pressure was up a little bit (140/86 for you health professionals out there), but it wasn't enough for the doc to do anything yet. She was still dilated 2.5 cm but the cervix had thinned out more 70%. Thus, it was back to the waiting game for another week...until Friday.

On Friday night, Melissa started having contractions that were stronger than they had been and they were coming pretty close together (about 5 to 10 minutes apart) for about a 2 hours. We decided to do the lay on the left side and drink a bunch of water thing and the contractions stopped after 30 minutes. We figured we better check her blood pressure and it turned out to be high (150/100) so we gave the doc a call. They wanted Melissa to come in so they could run lab tests and make sure she wasn't heading into HELLP syndrome again. Well, our planned babysitter wasn't available and Sheinah was already in bed so we had to call around to find someone to come stay with Sheinah. At the last minute, we remembered that we needed to do something with Samson also. Luckily, we have enough friends with dogs and found someone to take him.

We got to the hospital about 10:30pm and got set up on the monitors. The contractions had slowed down but Melissa's blood pressure was still high. After about an hour, they had Melissa lay on her side to see what happened. It was amazing actually. The contractions stopped (which we kind of expected) but her blood pressure also dropped to normal within 15 minutes. They watched her for another hour until her labs came back (all normal) and decided that since her blood pressure went normal when she was laying down, that we could go home. The deal, for this weekend anyway, is that we are to call them if her blood pressure goes back up. We aren't exactly sure what they will do if it goes up but goes back down if she lays on her side but we'll keep everyone posted. For now...her blood pressure was good all day on Saturday :)

P.S. Travis took a bunch of pictures trying to get the settings right on his camera just in case they decided to induce labor. If you click on the picture of Melissa and the nurse to enlarge it and look at the tracing on the right, you can see that Melissa just came off a contraction.

Who needs a table?

2008-10-25T07:47:00.000-07:00

Melissa's belly is big enough to serve as a table for her drinks and even a small plate. All is well as long as she doesn't laugh...

Reading a story

2008-10-22T18:20:00.000-07:00

Sheinah has been very interested in "reading" to us lately. Kids have an amazing memory, especially for books that they've heard many times. Tonight, Sheinah wanted to read us an old book that we bought awhile ago called "I can go potty" (it's from the Muppet series of books). The best part of this was when she turned the book around (like they do during story time at preschool) and started pointed to the words as she "read." Unfortunately, Travis didn't grab the video camera until she was halfway through the book. Since you all out there don't know the story, you'll have to take our word for it that she was saying the right information for each page except the one where she mentions kindergarten. If you look closely on the last page, you can actually see the words "Hip, hip hooray."

Baby Car Seat

2008-10-19T18:31:00.000-07:00

Sheinah was pretending that she was a baby and could not talk. She asked to be in the car seat and be rocked. Travis keep asking questions to trick her into talking (because he is stinky like that).

Hopscotch

2008-10-15T18:32:00.000-07:00

Tonight, Sheinah found sidewalk chalk in her basket of craft supplies and asked to go outside to use it. It was a little windy and chilly and we don't actually have sidewalk on our dirt road, but we figured she could use it on our walkway (which is badly in need of repair). She told Travis she wanted to draw hopscotch. She then drew some squares on the ground and proceeded to hop on them. We've never played hopscotch with her so we are assuming she learned it at preschool.

36 Weeks

2008-10-14T19:00:00.000-07:00

We went in for our 36 week checkup yesterday. At this visit, the doc likes to check to make sure the baby is in the head-down position. Our baby was not. Melissa has been saying for months that the baby was kicking her in the cervix...turns out she was right. The doctor checked to see if Melissa was dilated, which she is (2.5cm), and then made a little exclamation when she said she felt "a small appendage." That prompted a quick ultrasound to confirm that the baby's head was up by Melissa's ribs, the bottom was on her left side, and the feet were down in the cervix.

This left us with three options: (1) wait and see what happens (2) perform a procedure called breech version in which the doc pushes on the uterus to get the baby to flip over (3) schedule a C-section. We, of course, opted for trying to get the baby to flip since we really don't want surgery. Our doc doesn't attempt breech births...if the baby is not head down, mommy gets a c-section...that's it. Thus, our best bet was to give this breech version procedure a try. You can read about the procedure at this website: http://www.webmd.com/baby/external-cephalic-version-version-for-breech-position

We spent three hours at the hospital going through all the steps described above, but it took only 3 minutes for the doc to get Baby Bum to flip over. The procedure could be described as "uncomfortable" for mommy, but much preferred to surgery! Melissa immediately felt a whole lot better not having that little tiny foot kicking her unmentionables :) Even her belly looks a little bit different now that the baby is head down. Anyway, there is no guarantee that Baby Bum will stay in the proper position until it's time for her to make her entrance into the world so we would appreciate your prayers that she stays where she is supposed to be.

Dancing Princess

2008-10-11T18:37:00.000-07:00

Sheinah has been facinated with all-things-princess for about a month or two. Her Nama, being the great bargain hunter that she is, found her all sorts of princess things for her birthday: jewelry, shoes, a crown, etc. Nama sent money to buy a special princess dress for her birthday. Luckily, it is halloween time, so we had many options to choose from. Sheinah picked out this lovely pink one that even has fiberoptics in the skirt. Today, she told us that she needed to dance because she was a princess. Check out the video:

35 weeks

2008-10-07T18:16:00.000-07:00

After many months of not looking all that pregnant, baby Bum number two has finally made an appearance...in Melissa's belly. Travis has decided that we need to start taking pictures every week because Melissa's belly is growing so fast and so dramatically. Thus, here is week 35 placed side-by-side with week 32 just so you can see the amazing growth. The white pants picture is 35 weeks, the black pants is 32 weeks.

Sheinah turns three

2008-10-04T18:50:00.000-07:00

We celebrated Sheinah's third birthday at the Children's Museum again. Sheinah got to sit in the special birthday chair and be the birthday princess (with a special hat and wand). She picked out her dress that she wanted to wear and was adamant that she get to wear her hair down. She had tons of fun and we learned several important lessons:

1. Eight kids aged three to five are much louder and full of energy compared to three two-year-olds

2. The parenting styles of Sheinah's classmates at pre-school are different from our's in many ways which makes partytime a little more interesting.

3. It's hard to take pictures and chase kids at the same time :)

Sheinah really enjoyed herself with so many of her friends from preschool. Scott and Brandee Davis caught a flight up to Duluth for the day so that Avery could attend the party also. It was such a blessing to see them for a few hours. Seriously though, when Sheinah turns four, there will be fewer kids at her party!

Check out this video of her blowing out the candles.

Spokane WA

2008-10-02T07:17:00.000-07:00

While visting Spokane Washington to build a business relationship with http://www.tourfactory.com/ , I took an evening to watch the sunset over the Spokane river.

Maternity Photo Shoot

2008-09-24T18:51:00.001-07:00

When we were pregnant with Sheinah, we had intended to to get some photos taken professionally, but she came a little sooner than we expected so we never got around to it. This time, we decided to let Travis' blossoming photography skills take a stab at maternity photos. We did a Google search to find some poses we liked and then set up shop in the living room. We had purchased some fabric to use as a backdrop and figured this would be a good a time as any to try it out. Two hours and a little photoshop later, and we got some amazing shots. Given that these photos are of Melissa's belly, we won't be sharing most of them publically. However, this one was too cool not to share.

Magic Braids

2008-09-21T19:17:00.000-07:00

One of Sheinah's teachers at preschool as really long hair that she always wears in braids. Sheinah has been having Melissa braid her hair so she can look like "teacher Dani" for about a week now. The cool part about wearing braids is the awesome bumpy waves that show up when you take out the braids. Check out these pics we snapped in the bathroom while we were fixing up her hair.

The Almost Pony Ride

2008-09-20T19:09:00.000-07:00

We took Sheinah to the Fall Festival at Chester Bowl today specifically so that she could go for a pony ride. After waiting in line for about 15 minutes, it was finally her turn. She picked out which pony she wanted to ride and it happened to be one standing next to a big pile of poop. Melissa called Travis' attention to the poop so he wouldn't step in it and it apparently distracted Sheinah enough that she used that as an excuse not to ride. She wouldn't let Travis move away enough for us to get a good picture of the few seconds she actually sat on the horse, but at least she tried. She told us that she would try again when she was bigger...after she turns 3. There is a place to ride ponies at the Apple Festival in Bayfield. We'll be going on her birthday weekend in 2 weeks so we'll see if she will give it another go.

32 Weeks

2008-09-18T18:58:00.000-07:00

We had our 32 week check up today and got a clean bill of health. Melissa's blood pressure is good and she is measuring the right size. She is up to 17 pounds gained and Travis has lost about 12 pounds so all is well in that department as well. Joining the gym at the University has really helped Travis find time to work out...he drops Melissa and Sheinah off at school and then goes to the gym. It's very convenient. He's looking quite studly!!

I'm a Mommy Too

2008-09-08T17:55:00.000-07:00

Sheinah has enjoyed playing with baby dolls for awhile now. Recently, she has started telling us that she "is a mommy too" and very carefully wrapping up her babies, feeding them, pushing them in a stroller, etc. Today, Travis put together the crib in the babies room. We also went to the fabric store and bought fabric to make the baby two little fleece blankets and to make Sheinah a new princess blanket for her room. Travis left Sheinah alone in the baby's room to clean up the mess of putting together the crib and came back to find this (see picture). Sheinah had put her "horsey baby" to sleep in the crib. You'll notice that she made a pillow for the horsey out of a burb cloth. Apparently, she can reach in there by standing on the stool she uses to reach the sink in the bathroom. We'll have to teach her not to play with the baby's crib really soon!

Sheinah's Memory

2008-08-31T18:18:00.001-07:00

Sheinah want to look at pictures of mommy today so we got out the wedding album. While Melissa was getting it down from the shelf, Sheinah said "I went to a wedding. It was Dan and Annie's wedding. We went to lunch with only one of them not two of them because Annie had to work." This, of course, was all true. Dan and Annie are a couple from our church who we led the premarital counseling for. We went to their wedding back in June, but Travis and Sheinah just went to lunch with Dan last week. Then, as we were looking through the wedding album, Sheinah pointed to a picture of Dan and Jodi Martin and asked who they were. When Melissa told her his name was Dan, she said "no mommy, he has hair!" (Dan, our friend from Duluth, has a shaved head). On the next page, there was a picture of our friends Ben and Eryn. Ben happens to have a shaved head. Sheinah pointed to the picture of Ben and said, "that's Dan." But wait, there's more...we saw another friend of ours from church at Sam's club today named Dan Ahlfield. This Dan has hair on his head. When Sheinah asked what his name was and we told her "Dan"...you can guess what she said :) Thus, we tried really hard to explain to Sheinah that many people can have the same name. She said there is only one Dan...and he has no hair!

Week 28

2008-08-18T18:08:00.000-07:00

Melissa had her oral glucose tolerance test to check for gestational diabetes today. For those of you who remember, she had diabetes with her last pregnancy so we were pretty much expecting she would get it again. Sure enough, she failed her test...major bummer. Thus, she's back to poking her finger 4 times per day and counting carbohydrates. Her weight gain is going well though, she up to 14 pounds gained.

Singing to Baby

2008-08-16T18:23:00.000-07:00

We bought a book for Sheinah several months ago called "What to Expect When Mommy is Having a Baby." It does a really nice job of explaining, in kid terms, what's happening to mommy during the pregnancy. There is a section of the book that talks about how the baby can hear from inside the uterus and encourages the child reading the book to sing to the baby. Well, it just so happens that Lori taught Sheinah the "You are my sunshine" song this week specifically so Sheinah could sing to the baby. She sang the song and then told us "I forgot some parts" before we could get the video camera out. When we finally got the camera going, she decided to sing the birthday song. She happens to be facinated with her birthday right now because we've been telling her about things that will happen after her birthday (like the baby being born and she has to stop sucking her thumb). Anyway, check out the video of Sheinah singing to the baby.

Princess Piggy Bank

2008-08-12T18:20:00.001-07:00

While we were in St. Louis, Aunt Jo-Ann gave Sheinah some money to buy a piggy bank...because every little girl needs a piggy bank. We had told Aunt Jo-Ann that we had tried to buy her one awhile ago but we just couldn't find one. Well, Sheinah kept reminding us that we needed to go to the store to buy her a piggy bank so tonight we did. We went to WalMart because we knew our local Target didn't have one that we liked. We walked all through the store and asked three different workers who sent us to three different places looking for a piggy bank. As a last-ditch effort, Melissa decided to check in the bedding department where they sell the kids themed bedding. She looked down the aisle and didn't see anything but decided to walk down it anyway because it was on the way. Of course, Sheinah wanted to stop at the display of the princess bedding. Wouldn't you know, wedged between the princess pillows and the princess comforter was a princess piggy bank. It even makes noise when you put the money in. She is beyond excited for this special piggy bank. See below for the video and listen carefully for the sound it makes when the money goes in. Thanks Aunt Jo-Ann!

Horsieback

2008-08-12T18:05:00.000-07:00

Sheinah has become a little bossy in her old age :) Last night she told Travis she wanted to play "horsieback" and then proceeded to order him around until he performed the way she wanted him to perform. See below:

YTB Convention 2008

2008-08-11T18:03:00.001-07:00

Last weekend marked the 2008 Annual Convention for YTB in St. Louis. The whole family went, including Al and Lori Bumgardner, Travis' Aunt Boots and her daughter, and Melissa's Aunt Jo-Ann and Uncle Brian. The theme of the conference was Liberty and Travel for All and the founder of the company commissioned a near-life-sized replica of the Statue of Liberty to celebreate this theme (it's about 20 feet shorter). The Statue will make her permanent home in Indiana as a tribute to our soldiers after the convention is over. We took Sheinah to the opening session when lady liberty was unveiled and she had a blast! The best part was when she saw the picture of the statue on the YTB magazine and she said "I saw her!"...she remembered seeing the statue! The convention was amazing and everyone is excited for what 2009 holds in store. We are most excited about the changes that will be happening with our travel website. By January 2009, you'll be able to save your profile and search preferences just like the other booking engines. The best part is, if you book with us, the commissions go to us instead of the mystery folks behind the big-name travel engines :) So, next time you're heading out on a trip somewhere, please consider checking out our travel website: www.ichoose2travel.com We appreciate your support!

While we were in St. Louis, we got to connect with Erin Kletti-Keich, one of the bridesmaids from our wedding. She and Ben have two little ones now and their oldest, Maddie, is just a few months older than Sheinah. The girls had a good time playing together at the restaurant and the mall.

Of course, we also had to go check out the famous Arch. Travis' wide-angle lens was able to capture the whole thing. Sheinah wanted to "touch it" so Travis took her over for a closer look.

where do the underwear go?

2008-08-11T17:39:00.000-07:00

Sheinah has been going to the potty by herself for awhile now. She even empties the potty container into the toilet, flushes, rinses it out and then washes her hands. She likes to take her underwear and pants/shorts/skirt all the way off while she sits on the potty sometimes. She knows how to get dressed by herself so it's not a big deal. Today, she came running out of the bathroom with a sly grin on her face. It took us a minute to figure out what she was smiling about. She had put her shorts on first and then her underwear over the top. She was quite proud of making a "funny", but she wasn't quite so happy when we asked her to get dressed the proper way.

Sheinah's new room

2008-08-01T17:10:00.000-07:00

We decided to move Sheinah upstairs and put the baby in Sheinah's old room. The rationale behind this decision was that Sheinah sleeps through the night now so the number of trips upstairs should be limited. We were wrong...not on the sleeping-through-the-night theory but on the limited-number-of-trips-upstairs theory. It seems we (read that as Travis since Melissa does a lot more sitting now-a-days) spend a whole lot of time going up and down the stairs. On the plus side, Sheinah really likes her princess room and actually goes up there to play by herself. We decorated it in a princess theme and let Sheinah pick out pretty much everything in the room. We got a new, upright desk to put in the guest bedroom which is now Travis' home office also and cleaned off the bottom three rows of shelves for Sheinah's toys. All in all, we think it's going to work out pretty well.

Baby Belly Week 24

2008-07-25T18:47:00.000-07:00

We had our 24 week checkup today and all is well. The doctor is not concerned about Melissa's contractions since they stop with rest. She told Melissa to just keep resting and drinking lots of water (enough to pee every hour, so fun) to keep the contractions under control. Melissa has now gained 9 pounds or 6 pounds, depending on which starting weight we use. Travis has lost 6 pounds so both Bumgardners are on track :) The belly is growing slowly and the baby is moving like a future soccer player.

Strawberry Pickin'

2008-07-23T18:27:00.000-07:00

It's that time of year again when the pick-your-own fields open up for picking of whatever fruit is ripe. This week, it was strawberries. We had a gorgeous Duluth day ideal for the event...70 degrees with a cool breeze. We went to the same field as last year only this time we were prepared with knee pads, sunscreen, and hats. This year, Sheinah actually did a good job of picking berries for about 5 whole minutes. After that, her focus was eating them and putting the berries we picked into the container. Sheinah decided that all the little strawberries were for the baby and refused to eat them. She insisted that she had to eat the big strawberries because she was a big girl. All in all, it was a good day and we'll be eating strawberries for awhile!

Chicago

2008-07-21T18:55:00.000-07:00

We all went to Chicago for four days so Melissa could attend a teaching conference. For the first time since Melissa's been teaching, we actually got to stay at the hotel in which the conference was held. Boy, was that nice! The conference hotel was just 5 or 6 blocks from Navy Pier right on the water. Chicago has a Children's Museum at Navy Pier so Sheinah got to go play everyday while we were there. Since Melissa does best in the morning, that is usually when we took Sheinah down to the pier as Melissa had enough energy to make the walk there and back. Check out snapfish for the full repertoire of pictures. Travis got a new, professional grade camera as he's been contracted to shoot the student portraits at the college so he took a whole bunch of pictures.

As many of you know, Travis traveled with a woman's choir while he was in college. One of the women from the choir, Rosie, lives in Chicago so we connected with them one night to go out for dinner. We decided to go to Cheesecake Factory (Melissa's favorite restaurant). It was about 12 blocks away on the "Miracle Mile" where parking is virtually non-existent so we decided to hoof it. For Melissa, this meant borrowing a wheelchair from the hotel and Travis pushing her to the restaurant. Sheinah caught a ride in the stroller with Rosie's little girl so the only Bumgardner who got any exercise was Travis. Surprisingly, Travis didn't get any pictures of Melissa in the wheelchair. Travis snapped a bunch of pictures of the girls in the stroller, but little Selah did not want to smile at him. After about 20 pictures, he finally got this precious grin.

We had a great time with Rosie, her husband Jose, and her daughter Selah. While we were walking down to the restaurant, we noticed that many stores had decorated mannequins in the planter in front of the store. There were all sorts of oddly dressed mannequins, but the one Travis liked the most (and took a picture of) was the coke girl. As lovely as this picture is, the best story of the night happened when Rosie left to change Selah's diaper. Melissa happened to take Sheinah to the bathroom at the same time so just the guys were left at the table. Somehow, they managed to let the waiter take away Rosie's plate even though she hadn't hardly eaten her dinner yet. When Rosie came back, she wasn't exactly happy with Jose. The story has a happy ending though...we just told the waiter what happened and the manager replaced Rosie's meal...just one of the many benefits of eating at a nice restaurant!

New Siding

2008-07-14T18:25:00.000-07:00

Last summer, all three of our properties were damaged in a crazy hail storm. We qualified for new roofs for all three and new siding on our current house. We got our old house roofed right away (in an effort to help it sell) but waited until this summer to do anything about the duplex or our current house. Since Travis' good buddy, Terry, does siding for a living, we thought it would be fun to fly him out to Duluth to do the job. He and Travis happened to be chatting last week and learned that Terry's schedule was open for the next few weeks. Just like that, three days later, Terry was on a plane to Duluth and the guys spent the fourth of July weekend siding the house. In addition to new siding, Travis added a porch to the front (to help it look less plain) and put an egress window in Sheinah's bedroom to make her room a legal bedroom. The two guys accomplished all of this in just SIX DAYS. Terry is a rock-star siding guy and one heck of a hard worker...can you say fourteen hour days in the Duluth humidity! Check out below for the before, during, and after photos.

front of the house (before) back of the house (before)

Terry set up the camera and took some silly pictures while we went to the hardware store. The house was previously a one room log cabin that they apparently built somewhat haphazardly. Terry and Travis added insulation and foam where previously there was nothing but siding.

Terry posing with Gene, our 84 year old neighbor, who picked up every piece of aluminum siding that came off the house. He's amazing!

The finished product. Notice the porch in front and the new window on the left side of the back of the house. Way to go Terry and Travis!

Baby prayers

2008-07-14T17:30:00.000-07:00

On the way to school today, Melissa noticed Sheinah had her hands folded (like in prayer) and asked her what she was doing. Sheinah replied "I'm praying for the baby in your tummy." After a few minutes of quiet whispering Sheinah said "now the baby stopped crying." Melissa asked her if that was because of her prayer and Sheinah said yes. How sweet is that?

Sheinah also told Melissa she had a baby in her (sheinah's) tummy and that she (Sheinah) was the mommy. Apparently, she's excited about the baby coming...

Week 20 Baby Bum #2

2008-06-29T11:45:00.000-07:00

We had our 20 week check-up and ultrasound on Friday. We were a bit disappointed because we didn't get very many pictures this time. The baby was just in a funky position making the tech use almost the entire time just trying to get the required measurements. The position did allow us to a get a clear shot of the baby's gender. For those of you who are not familiar with ultrasound gender determination, a "hamburger" (three lines) means its a girl, a "turtle" means its a boy. Based on the baby's gender, we will NOT need to have a big rummage sale this summer (if you don't get it, just go to the end of the post).

Enjoy the pictures!

These are the 4-D ultrasound pictures. The baby is all snuggled up against the placenta.

These are the regular ultrasound pictures.

Drum roll please...and the baby is....a GIRL! Sheinah is actually really excited. She had just told us on Thursday night that she didn't want a boy baby. We were struggling to explain to her that we don't really get to choose what we have. When we told her it was a girl, she was very happy! We do have an ultrasound picture showing the "hamburger" evidence. However, Travis made the point of the strangeness of posting a picture of our baby's "hoohoo" (as he called it) so we took the picture down.

Finally, many of you have been asking if Melissa is showing yet. She is, but she can actually still hide it pretty well. She has only gained a total of 6 pounds so far and she's half-way through the pregnancy! Actually, since she lost three or four pounds in the first two months of pregnancy, she is actually only up 3 pounds from her pre-pregnancy weight, but who's counting? Glad you asked...Travis is actually counting because we made a deal that he would lose weight equal to the amount Melissa gains during the pregnancy. Starting tomorrow, he's taking it seriously and going back to his protein shake routine. We are still debating on if he has to go by the actual weight gain or the physician-recorded weight gain :)

Magazine Contest

2008-06-25T17:55:00.000-07:00

So we finally decided to enter Sheinah in a photo contest. Parents magazine runs a contest every year to put a new kid on the cover of their magazine. We've always felt Sheinah was one heck of a cute kid but we really didn't want her to be a part of the modeling lifestyle (John Bennet Ramsey anyone?). This contest is a one-time deal so we figured it was pretty safe to enter her. There were 75,000 entries last night when we entered her and yesterday was the deadline so the odds of Sheinah making it to the top five are pretty slim. The two things we have going for us are (1) she's really cute (2) 34% of the judging score is based on the quality of the photo and Travis takes really good photos. The best part for us was going down to Canal Park last night to take some more photos since the photos we submitted had to be between certain dates. Sheinah had so much fun throwing rocks into the water and climbing on the rocks with her daddy that it doesn't really matter if she doesn't win the contest. Anyway, the photos we submitted are below. We'll know sometime in July if she gets to go to New York for a photo shoot.

These are the park point pictures from yesterday:

These are miscellaneous pictures from April and May:

Buzz off

2008-06-21T19:15:00.000-07:00

Sheinah has a series of movies called "Hermie and Friends" by Max Lucado that her Nama buys for her. The latest one she got when Nama came to visit involves a bumblebee called Buzzbee. His niece and nephew come to stay with him and they have bad manners. The point of the show (similar to the VeggieTales series) is to teach moral lessons in 30 minutes or less. The lesson of this episode is learning manners. The little niece bee in the movie tells her uncle Buzzbee to "buzz off." Sheinah decided that this was a fun phrase to say and started saying it frequently. We reminded her that the girl in the movie had bad manners and that it wasn't nice to say "buzz off." So, Sheinah started saying "the girl in the movie says BUZZ OFF" so that she could still get away with saying it. Who knew that two year olds could figure out a way around the rules?

Skee Ball

2008-06-16T19:21:00.000-07:00

Tonight after swim lessons we went to Grandma's Sports Garden for dinner. For those of you who are familiar with Duluth and the Canal Park area, you know that the Sports Garden has all sorts of games for the whole family. Tonight, Sheinah decided she wanted to play skee ball (click on the hyperlinked word if you aren't sure what skee ball is). Sheinah didn't quite grasp the concept of rolling the ball up the incline. She wanted to throw it like she throws other balls...and throw it she did. Of course, throwing a solid ball that weighs a couple of pounds is a bit different than the balls she normally throws, and a lot noisier too! She caused quite a ruckus with the skee ball game. We finally just let her climb up the incline and drop the ball in the holes so as to prevent any damage to the game or the other customers. :)

Baby moves

2008-06-14T19:13:00.000-07:00

Travis got to feel the baby move for the first time tonight. The baby has been "feelable" for mommy for several weeks, but it's hard for people on the outside to feel little butterfly motions. The baby is moving enough now that non-mommy's can feel it :) Travis was pretty excited because last time he couldn't feel Sheinah move until after week 20. Go Travis!

Sheinah-isms Part Two

2008-06-09T15:13:00.000-07:00

Sheinah has been proclaiming frequently how big she is getting...likely because Melissa says that every time she picks up Sheinah :) Today, this is what she told Melissa: "I'm getting so big...I'm a woman!" Honestly, we have no idea where she got this from. Later that afternoon, Melissa asked Sheinah to tell Travis what she said earlier. Interestingly, she knew exactly what Melissa was referring to! She proceeded to repeat her statement to Travis and then followed it up with the following comment "I'm a woman and mommy's a woman and daddy and Samson (our puppy) are boys." At least she has her genders figured out!

Sheinah-isms

2008-06-07T15:04:00.000-07:00

One phenomenon associated with being two-and-a-half years old is that your vocabulary develops at a rapid rate. Apparently, such rapid development isn't necessarily directly linked with words learned from mommy and daddy.

Today, we began our annual summer tradition of yard-sale shopping. One of our finds was a fisher-price doll house for $2. It comes with a few little plastic people. While playing with the doll house, Sheinah brought the little girl to Melissa, pointed between her legs and said "there's her pee-pee" and proceeded to laugh hysterically. Now, we are pretty sure that we have not referred to that particular part of the anatomy as a "pee pee." In fact, Melissa at one point referred to it as the "not bottom" for lack of a better word. We've also used Zach's suggestion of the Hawaiin word "punani" (not sure on the spelling). Thus, she must have learned "pee pee" from someone else. Now, Travis is a firm believer that only boys have "pee pees" but Melissa didn't think she needed to discuss that with Sheinah right now.

One thing we do know is we've been hesitant to teach her the real word yet after hearing Annetta's story about Grace. Apparently, Barney and Annetta had been teaching Grace the proper terms for anatomy. Grace was in the bathroom at church and Brenda (one of our pastors) called her pumpkin. Grace proceeded to remind Brenda that her name was Grace, not pumpkin. Brenda explained that pumpkin was a nickname and asked if her mommy had a nickname for her. Grace told Brenda that her mommy called her "vagina." Very funny story...as long as it's not you and your daughter :)

We're open to any suggestions folks might have for the best way to teach kids the proper names of body parts...

Talking Back

2008-05-24T20:11:00.001-07:00

We must apologize for the long delay in postings. With the end of the semester for Melissa and two back-to-back trips, we've just been amazingly busy. We'll be updating the blog in the next week or so as we get settled into our less busy summer schedule. We did want to take a moment to post a little something about Sheinah's latest stage of being two-and-a-half...the talking back stage.

Sheinah has been asserting her independence and her stubborn nature (wonder where she got that from) for a month or two. This past week, she really stepped it up a notch. Travis was gone to the store with David (Shannon's husband). Sheinah decided that Naomi had something she wanted so she just took it from her. Melissa told her that was not nice and asked her to apologize. She said no and yelled something (can't quite remember what). Melissa took her to the bedroom to deal with the issue. She told Sheinah that she can't talk to Mommy like that. Sheinah was sitting on Melissa's lap at the time, face to face. Sheinah looked Melissa in the eye, shook her pointer finger and said "No mommy, you can't talk to ME like that." What was Melissa's response? To laugh hysterically...because it was soooo cute! Needless to say, that kind of defeated the whole purpose of the conversation. Sheinah started laughing and then the whole discipline thing just went down the drain.

Ah, the joys of parenting a toddler...

New Ultrasound

2008-04-25T06:21:00.001-07:00

Thanks to the wonders of Travis' fancy phone, we were able to video the latest ultrasound. The baby is 10 weeks and actually looks like a baby now! Sheinah was with us and was facinated by seeing the baby. The baby actually moved quite a bit but the video didn't really catch the baby moving.

Enjoy!

Baby Bum Part Deux

2008-03-30T19:03:00.001-07:00

We are pleased to announce that somewhere near November 18, 2008 we will be welcoming a new addition to our family. For those of you who remember the adventure that occurred when Sheinah was born, we certainly will appreciate your prayers for the safety of both the baby and Melissa during this pregnancy. The doctor has assured us that it would be like "lightening striking the same place twice" to have all of those complications occur again.

Travis took a video of our first ultrasound with his phone. If you look at the small circle on the left, you can see the heart beating...at only 6 weeks gestation!

"Dr. B" makes the news

2008-03-25T19:33:00.000-07:00

Dr. B (as Melissa is affectionately know by her students) made the news yesterday as the Duluth News Tribune did a story on the Medication Therapy Management Clinic she directs through the University. The article was on the front page of the business section, complete with a very large color photo. You can check out the article at the following link (you may have to register to be able to read it though): http://www.duluthnewstribune.com/articles/index.cfm?id=62998

Go 'Lissa!

Where do big-girl underwear belong...

2008-03-17T18:52:00.000-07:00

...according to Sheinah, they go on your head! We moved Sheinah to big-girl underwear...permanently...on March 13th. We just decided that we were done with the potty training and pull-ups and Sheinah deciding whether or not she wanted to put her tinkle in the potty. We figured we would try those special training pants that have thicker cotton so that if she did have an accident it wouldn't be as big of a deal. Travis had the priveledge of dealing with her first poopie accident on that first day while we were at bible study. The funniest part was when Melissa walked in to help and saw "Daddy" slide Sheinah off the toilet and leave a 'trail' of poop down the toilet seat. Good times!

Our morning ritual includes putting Sheinah on the potty for her potty time while we go grab her clothes to wear for the day. Yesterday morning, when Travis returned from getting her clothes, he found what you see here.

It fits...kind of.

2008-03-13T19:13:00.000-07:00

When we got married, we made a deal that Melissa would wear her wedding dress on our anniversary for as long as she fit in it. Year 1 was easy...then came the pregnancy...and the post-pregnancy weight that didn't go away as quickly as a woman might like. Well, the other day, Travis wanted to weigh Sheinah (she weighted about 25 pounds, we think, but she kept jumping on the scale so it was hard to tell for sure). Of course, Sheinah wanted everyone to get on the scale. That's when Melissa realized that she weighed just 5 pounds more than she did when they got married. So...we decided to unbury the wedding dress and see if it fit. The good news is that it did! The bad news is that Melissa couldn't breathe...at all. We snapped a quick few pictures to prove that she did get back into it and then chalked up the lack of breathing ability to the influence of a previous pregnancy on the width of the hips! Sheinah watched the whole process and then demanded to have her turn. Enjoy the pictures. We're not sure if Melissa will ever fit into it again!

Bums Travel 4 Less

2008-03-07T18:04:00.000-08:00

Sooooo, we are pleased to announce that we started a new business. It's a travel business with an awesome website: http://www.mnbumstravel4less.com/ where you can find great deals on flights, hotels, cruises, etc. The website is powered by Travelocity so it is really easy to use. The best part is that you can get good deals on travel and support someone you know (instead of some big company). Travis went down to Minneapolis for a certification training session so Sheinah and Melissa decided to come along and hang out at the waterpark which was just down the street from the training conference. One of the perks of being a travel industry professional is the curtesy upgrades! We paid for a small room and got upgraded to a room with a bunk bed for Sheinah and a balcony that opened up to the waterpark.

To top it all off, Travis just got a super-wide camera lens to use in his virtual tour business right before we went down to Minneapolis. Of course, he brought it along to see what it could do. Travis took a picture from the balcony that caught more of the view than we could really see from the sliding glass door. It also has an amazing zoom function. The pictures below of Travis and Sheinah in the water are from the balcony (like 150 feet away).