Hagar Park

 Today, we went to Hagar Park for cousin Charlie's Graduation Party. This is where Nicolynn ate her first cookie (Thanks Aunt Julie). After dinner/the cookie we played at the park with the Holtrops. (I was going to list everyone's name, but we were all there)

My First Cookie

She must have been hungry because she ate the whole thing... (this was right after dinner, so now I know she's a picky eater)

We got smart and put a bib on her, but the Chocolate still got everywhere.

Goote Lake Party

Wheee....

Yes, Daddy just stands there...

Last week Saturday we had our annual Goote lake party. We went to Rachel's parent house and had a blast. Every year keeps changing because we either have a girl pregnant or a new baby around. This year we had 2 toddlers and one new baby. It's lots of fun watching your kid explore new places.


Nicolynn spent most of the day chasing Elise (Nick and Rachel's girl), or running straight into the water. You would think she would stop by the time she got pretty deep, but those swimming lessons must have paid off, because she is not afraid of the water at all.
Both girls loved going down the slide that ended in the lake, and for some odd reason, Elise likes to water peoples feet. :)

This year Josh and I wanted to go tubing. And Josh started taunting Nick like crazy. He started to make me a little nervous about tubing with him, but Mike also decided to join in the fun which made me feel a little better about it. I started out ok, but after a while I kept falling off every few minutes. (I feel so old...) So I sucked it up, and got in the boat and watched Mike and Josh tube. The next thing I know, Mike keeps falling off, and ends up in the boat with us.
Josh was the only one out there, and Nick gave him a run for his money. I could not believe how long Josh stayed on. Nick, of course, won the battle and Josh finally fell off, but I thought Josh was gonna loose an arm or his suit before he was giving up.
Needless to say, Josh is a better tuber than I am, but we both were so sore for the next few days. It was still worth it! I'd do it again today if I had the chance.

"Momma Said "there'd be days like this...""

  Ok, so it wasn't a bad of a day at all. We just had one very different part to our day.

About a week ago Nicolynn and I decided to play in her swimming pool in the front yard. It was HOT so I was in the pool with her, and we were having a great time. A great time until... I hear her grunting.

Now if anyone has a child they know what is coming next. (Yes, this means poop) The only problem with that was, I decided not to put a swim diaper on Nicolynn. (Not a smart mommy) I can be very cheap sometimes, and this was one of those times. So here it comes. Nicolynn and I are in the kiddie pool and I am begging her not to grunt. (If only the neighbors could here me now) Of course that doesn't work. So I jump out of the pool, grab her, and run for the bathroom as quickly as possible. We get to the bathroom, and if course... it's too late. So I start the cleaning process, which involves not thinking, just doing. Next thing I know, I hear a "splat" on the floor. Apparently she was not finished, and I interrupted. Oh, and yes, she had to tinkle afterwards too. What a fun moment...

Emerson Lake

So Sunday we tried to take a little vacation and visit my parents for a day at Emerson Lake. We always have such a good time there. And of course my parents love to play with Nicolynn, so Josh and I get a little parenting break too.
Now one thing you need to know about Emerson Lake, is that it's a fishing lake that we just can't seem to find the fish in. It's fun to try fishing, but the fish especially avoid Josh and myself. So this time we didn't even pick up a fishing pole. Instead we headed for the paddle boats and the swimming dock.

My dad and I had a blast jumping off the dock trying to do dives (that look like cannonballs) and flips (that look like belly flops) and back dives (that look more like back flops than anything else). But that was the highlight of my trip!!!

We also had so much fun playing with Nicolynn in the water. She is very comfortable in the water, but doesn't like to get dirty by the sand. She is 100% girl.

Nicolynn also went for a boat ride with Grandma and Papa. She really enjoyed her short ride, and they went pretty fast too. Soon she'll be fishing out of that boat with them, but probably not this year....

Busy Weekend

This has been another eventful weekend. Nicolynn and I have been keeping very busy while Josh and his dad worked very hard on the deck. It's almost finished, and I am very ready for this project to be so I can have my husband back again.

Saturday, we ended up picking Uncle Tony and Aunt Lindsey up from the airport. YAY!!!! They just got back from their honeymoon. Nicolynn and I really missed them last week, but we had such a good time at their wedding/reception that we can't complain too much that they were gone. :) 


Here is my beautiful Baby in the dress I made for her for the wedding!!
It was all Lindsey's idea
for her to wear a dress made of tulle. And it was a GREAT idea. It was so fun and everyone loved it!!!!

A Walk with the Borst Girls

This morning we went for a walk with Miss Marie, Lydia and baby Abigail. It was desperately needed. Abi is almost 7 weeks old, and because the girls took turns being sick and having colds, it's been much longer than that since we've hung out. So we had a good time marching around down town like we used to. Well kind of like we used to.... When it was just Marie and I, we never had a hard time fitting on the sidewalk before. This was a new challenge, trying to fit the 3 girls next to each other without falling of the sidewalk. We just need more practice.

 And yes, they did eat half a bag of animal crackers. :)

Another Beautiful Day

Today was another gorgeous day. We checked out the farmer's market this morning, and bought fresh strawberries for Nicolynn to eat. She has been such a picky eater lately. So when I find something she likes, I make sure to keep it around. Strawberries were the thing today. We'll see if she still likes them tomorrow...

Then this afternoon we went to a park with cousin Zach, Aunt Sarah and Aunt Bethany. We had such a good time. Nicolynn and Zach are just starting to want play together at this age, so play dates are even more fun.

A NEW POST FOR THE YEAR 2012

Ok world... here we go.

It's been a very long time since I've shared my life online. The last time I wrote, my baby Nicolynn was still in my tummy, and my life was about to change drastically. Little did I know how much my life was going to change, and how much I was going to change. One thing that changed is I became a protective mom, that is what caused me not to write about my life as much. I didn't want everything about my life and my daughter on the internet.  But recently I have wanted to share with everyone how great my life, my daughter, my husband, and my everything is. But I don't have the time to visit everyone or call up everyone as much as I would like to. So I am going to begin writing again.

Most everyone knows a little about Nicolynn's first year of life. How we struggled with her not eating well, loosing weight, having RSV and  some of the stresses I struggled with through that. Today I feel much stronger than I did before. And the past is the past, so I don't know if I'll end up writing much about that. We learn and grow from the past, and that brings me to who I am again today.

 Life is great!!! I enjoy waking up every morning to see my beautiful daughter. She always wakes up singing and babbling in her crib. She is the best gift from God. Josh and I are growing together every day. He is very busy trying to build us an awesome deck, so I don't get to see as much of him as I would like. But soon the deck with be finished and we will vacation in our backyard.

 Today Nicolynn, myself and Grandma went for a walk to find a new park. We had a good time walking on the paths and looking at the pond. Nicolynn loves to be outside. We play outside as much as possible. Yesterday we went to Timbertown and played on the swings, and then we came home and played in the yard. We just LOVE to be outside.

Santa's little helper

We went out the other day to look at vehicles, and we were not going to buy one yet. But the next thing I know, we are driving a 2008 Chrystler Town and Country home.

Yes, this is a mini van everyone. Lets hear it now, because we love it. And we actually fight over who gets to drive it. Thankfully this will be my vehicle to tote around Baby H in.

So we went to Harold Zeigler in Grandville after we had lunch. We knew we were only interested in a van and started looking at a few. But when we walk in the building there were no salesmen to be seen. All I saw was Santa, lots of green elves, and one silly looking man dressed in a reindeer outfit. So this guy with bells on his ankles and ears that needed some plastic surgery came up to us and wanted us to take him seriously. It was not going to happen. He must have figured that out on his own because when we went out to look at the vehicles he said he had to grab his jacket, and came out looking like a human. At that point I let him know changing was a good move on his part.

Next we drove a few vans, and then we started negotiations. This wasn't too intense for me because I knew "we weren't going to buy today". That was until Josh asked me what I thought about giving an offer. It sounded good enough to me that they wouldn't take it, so I said sure.


As they tried to negotiate, we got introduced to Santa. He was a jolly old fart too. (Santa if you're reading this, this is just a joke) Apparently we were working with one of Santa's little helpers. Our salesman was new and we had to go through the elf to get to santa to get to the managers. (I didn't catch what the managers code name was). Pretty soon the elf said santa wasn't going to come over any more because I intimidated him. But that was pretty sneaky cause I'm sure santa knew he intimidated me and he really wanted the sale.

So at this point we spent a few hours looking at vans, and then a couple more sitting and talking about the vans. I was getting tired and hungry. And then someone brought in a pizza. I knew we already made our offer. But with the smell of that pizza, it honestly crossed my mind to ask them to include that pizza in with our offer. I knew that wouldn't be right since the guy we were dealing with didn't even had lunch and now it was after 5. These are sales men though, and if I asked for that pizza to be written into our offer, I'm sure they would have negotiated at least a piece for me. Maybe even one for Josh. So I didn't dare ask. (They probably would have wanted us to up our offer too, and I was ready to go)

So this Christmas we did buy a van, yes a van, from an elf working under Santa, who worked under the managers. And I have never seen managers in the Christmas movies, probably because they don't want the children to know who santa works for.

Today we'll paint Josh's way.

Yesterday we decided to tackle painting again. Our baby's room was pink when we got the house. And as most of you know I love pink, but I don't know that I think it's a color that should be on the walls, unless it was chosen by a child. (For all of you with pink walls, I know you must be a kid at heart, and good for you.)
So the pink was leaving and the gray moved right in.

When I paint I love to do the cutting in. Josh on the other hand prefers to do the rolling, and this works out well most of the time. But this time I see Josh rolling right behind me with a very unusual technique. He rolls a line all the way up the wall and then all the way down the wall in one perfectly vertical line. I let him know, that isn't how I would do it, and my two cents weren't helping a lot. So we continued.

We are both working on wall #2 and we look back at wall #1. It looks like we actually tried to put vertical lines on the wall, one dark gray and one light. From there Josh decides to try the "w" idea. Which is painting in "w's". But by the time we get to wall #4, wall #1 is drying up pretty nicely. So Josh goes back to his own method but added a slight w to his up and down lines. We had a good time, especially when Josh was getting tired and I keep hearing this, "opps", "bummer", "babes don't look at the ceiling"... following my precision cutting in. We ended up just laughing at how tired he was after the second coat. And I pretty much kept quiet about his oopses. The key phrase is pretty much.

See the first time I tried to correct him, he was painting the ceiling. He made it look so easy, but he was not doing it the way I thought it should be done. So like any good wife, I let him know I could do it better. I grabbed the roller that was attached to a bar and pushed it onto the ceiling with two painful stroke. The next thing we hear is SPLAT! Loud as ever. You know one of the noises a dump-chicken (aka a seagull) makes when he just let loose of a major lunch experience? Anybody that has ever had this experience land on them knows what I'm talking about. That was the noise following a baseball size chunk of paint falling from the ceiling. Quickly I bend down, looking under the drop cloth to see if any of this 4inch diameter dropping went through. It did not!!!! So after this humbling experience I profusely apologized and let Josh finish his "phenomenal job" he was doing.

After that I left to use the bathroom, which I still do frequently. I was wearing a pair of pregnancy overalls that I was quite excited about. But as I unlatched them to get ready to pee and heard this sploosh from the porcelain throne. That's never a good sound right after you fling one end of you overall strap behind you. Thankfully I realized what the sploosh was all about before I added my bodily fluids. And this is one type of payback, I do believe. So be nice to your husband because there will be a time when you actually can't do it better than he can.

Christmas Letter

So Josh decided to write the Christmas letter this year. I thought that would be a wonderful idea, except that now I want to share my stories too. So here is my unofficial, not quite as cool as Josh's, Christmas Letter!!!!


This year started out great. Way back in January we had high hopes and dreams for this past year. Josh just finished up a masters in computer science. He was still working at DornerWorks in Grand Rapids and I was at MasterCuts. We were living in our little one bedroom apartment, and still growing out of it. There, now you're caught up with our last few years we didn't send out a chrismas letter.

Now for the good part...

We bought a house. YAY!!!! We found a place in Zeeland, right by the highway  so we could commute easily to GR. Who could have asked for more? But you should have seen the wall paper. If we would have sent the house pictures into a show like "modernize my house please" this place would have been first on the list. Wow. But after steaming, and scraping and a whole lot of, "oops" "that's not good" "did I do that?", and some other choice words, we were ready to move in. The late nights of our working on the house lasted about 3 weeks. We would work all day, sometimes get done with work around 8pm and run over to Zeeland (yes, from GR) to get a few hours of work in. That meant we were sleep deprived but very driven.

I don't believe at this time out neighbors ever thought they would meet us. The only glimpses they got of us were when it's after dark and we were running around outside. One day Josh and I needed to dig a hole in our yard. It was dark out so we attached a bright light to the top of our ladder as we dug our hole. People would drive in the neighborhood, and drive right back out. We were not helping estate sales in this neck of the woods. After more instances like this, a few neighbors dared to meet us. And we bonded quite well with many of them. (I don't know what this is saying about them though...).

Now from my previous posts, you got to find out that Josh and I did indeed get pregnant. What I didn't include was how quickly our neighbors found out. We are so close to our neighbors, they found out I was pregnant before any of our friends or relatives. Yikes!!!! We were all hanging out in someones driveway (yes, this is what we do) and everyone was drinking. Everyone but me. Awkward... And of course they all wanted to know where my boos was. After being asked if I was pregnant over 20 times, I confessed (since I never could lie to save my life). So, yup, we're tight with our neighbors. Now when I go out to shovel the driveway, I get yelled at from across the block to stop. And the next thing I know one of the neighbor guys comes over to plow for me. It's a nice gesture, but what am I supposed to do do while he plows? Stand and watch? So that's what I did. I stood there and watched but I also tried to look busy doing nothing. Then I tried to be nice back and get him a beer from the fridge. What was I thinking!!! Do I stand there and make him drink the beer in front of me, or tell him to take it home? I don't know how to be a good neighbor. So I made him drink it in front of me while i talked about who-knows-what. I'm good at that. I have to make 15 min conversations about who-knows-what all day at work.


Speaking of work, I am down to working 1 day a week. I put in my 2 weeks in and was asked to stay at least one day a week. So Thursdays are the only days I'm working. This is not a normal thing that MasterCuts does, so we'll see how long this lasts and if it works out. But this means I will have more time to plan for Baby H and get this house put together.

Ok I'm feeling better about sharing my stories too. There will be more, but for now this is all there is.

Read at your own risk. There might be TMI...

So it took me a while to get smart about feeling sick. I could no longer stand the smell of greasy foods. And Josh loves quesadillas. It's one of the only foods he can make. But those got banned after too many times of coming home to the smell I went flying into the bathroom.  Also I needed to plan ahead on my drives to and from Grand Rapids. One time I ended up dry heaving into a cereal box for about 10 miles. What? Yes a cereal box. It was the only thing I took to work that I could use.

But worst of all, are perms at the salon. (They still make me sick, even if I'm not the one doing the perm.)

The last perm I dealt with started around 2pm. I had a full day and one of the girls in the salon did a perm. By 4:00 I was running to the bathroom between all my clients. And I was booked till after 6. (There was no leaving early.) One mom came in with her two boys, and I ran to the bathroom between each of them. At first I think she thought I just liked the bathroom, but after the last trip I knew she caught on. And when I thought I was almost finished, I had to shampoo out a color, cut and style her hair. I puked 3 times in the middle of her services. She was so sweet about it. I left her nice and calm each time and let her know I'd be right back. At that time I still I thought I had everything under control until the salon was filled, and someone waiting for a cut decided she needed to use the bathroom. (I only had 10 min between each of my bathroom trips, but how long could she possibly take, right?) She took way too long. I told myself "puking (or in this case, dry heaving was more like it) is only a mind game. You can make yourself hold it. Really you can." And that's when I did one of those dreadful puke burps. The kind that tells you, you're not in control and the inevitable is yet to come. I quickly reassured my client I would not puke on her (yes I said exactly that), but the look on both of our faces clearly meant, we were not sure about that. Two seconds later the crazy lady was still in the bathroom, and I was dry heaving into a garbage can in the back room. I was mortified.

After talking to my doctor about this situation, he decided it would be best if I wasn't around perms anymore. And I'm sure if you'd talk to my client I almost puked on, she'd agree.

Trips to the bathroom.

It had been almost 6 weeks of pregnancy, and I thought I wouldn't have to worry about getting sick at all. My mom didn't get sick and I neither would I. That idea lasted a few seconds longer and then... I was sick.

Thankfully by this time our parents and siblings all knew what was going on, so I didn't have to hide my queezy feelings from them. But the girls at work did not know, and I wanted to wait a little bit to tell them.

I have always had to pee a lot. (And this saved me at work) While I was running to the bathroom to puke, they thought I just had an active bladder, which is also true. But with an active bladder, I don't know why they thought I always needed to turn the faucet on to hide the sounds of my tinkle. But they never questioned me and I wasn't about to share. Plus, coming out with a beat red face every time should have created some questions. But I was able to keep our little secret 12-13 weeks from the girls at work.

Lines in the bathroom...

So I have a few days of my pregnancy that totally stand out, and the first one would be the day we got pregnant. It's not the best story, but it was a great day.

We'd been trying to get pregnant for a few months now, and every month I had more anticipation than the previous month. So I did what any girl would do in that situation, I PEED ON A STICK!

Josh was around and all he got to hear was, "I think that's too lines, no I'm sure that's two lines, I have two lines!!! Dark lines! I'm sure it is..."

I don't know what he thought I was doing in the bathroom. I'm in there all alone, getting very excited, and shouting about some lines during an early morning pee. But shortly after that moment we both realized we were going to be parents.


That was back in July. Next came the fun part...

Christmas Vacation

So it doesn't truly feel like Christmas vacation yet, but it feels good. I won't be at MasterCuts for 3 weeks, and when I go back, I will only be working on Thursdays. I have lots to do, and this is on my list. I wanted to make a true blog for my first time. So here goes nothing...