Life Update (June 22, 2009)5 min read

Pregnancy

So, here we are about a week or so before Tanya’s due date. She is so ready for this pregnancy to be over with. Her feet are in pain from carrying so much extra weight. Some good things about it is that during this pregnancy her body tempurature has been warmer than normal, which puts her at being comfortable most of the time. Normally she is always chilly or cold, but not now, so that has been a nice change for her.

We are getting the emergency pregnancy bag together are making sure we have everything we need to get this scary and throroughly exciting new era of our lives started. We have most everything we need from a crib, bassinet, diaper genie and a whole host of other things mostly donated or given as gifts by the wonderful people in our lives. =)

My mother is excited beyond all belief, especially after fearing that I may never have children since I have waited so long. I am currently 35 =O and not getting any younger. =)

Hopefully, in the next week we will be able to post that our new daughter has been born.

Immigrating Family

Tanya’s brother and his wife have one a Green Card through the US’ Green Card Lottery and have been here for a few weeks. We have been able to get a lot done. We have their Social Security CardsNumbers and Green Cards, as well as having a job for her and a car for them, plus back accounts and debit cards setup. We have some thoughts on work for him. He is a mechanic and are working towards those jobs. We are currently working towards getting their divers licenses and finding and getting them an apartment.

The primary issue we have is their English knowledge. Neither learned a lot of English in school back in Belarus. They are now really  just starting to learn English so that is going to slow their progress down. They are learning it each day. They have MP3 based lessons as well as books that they are working with so things are progressing. Yea!

Father’s Day

Fathers day was a combo of 2 days. My father wanted to have a cook-out and fire so we arranged to have a cook-out at our house on Saturday. My parents brought over most of the food and stuff so Tanya would not have to worry about things so much. I had to work at First Weber in the morning until about 14:30 (2:30pm) or so. After that we prepared things for them to come over.

I have 3 used grills and will be looking forward to buying a new grill some day. My wife prefer’s the flavor of food cook over fire instead of gas or charcoal, so after talking with my Dad and Tanya we started the grill with charcoal and then added some wood on top of it. Now, of course the wood would put the flame right at the grills surface and cook/burn things too quickly and make it really hard to control, so I brought out the metal cooking griddle that I bought for camping and placed that comfortably over the grill. It fit right on the edge allowing the heat from the flame to more evenly heat the griddle to cook. That seemed to work really well. The only issues with it were that the mesquite chips we used were not effective in imparting their flavor and the griddle was too small to cook a lot quickly, other than that, it seemed to work really well.

We ate and drank and enjoyed ourselves. It was a good time.

Sunday, was more my day. We went to church at the Free Congregation where we discussed Evolutionary Creationism which is a pet topic of mine, so I found it really enlightening and enjoyable. Our speaker, Andrew Kerr is always a delight to listen to. He is quite intellectual and challenging.

New friends

After that we stopped by a couple that contacted us, since Tanya was Russian and so was the wife. We made plans to meet for the first time and it was a pleasure, especially for me. The husband was an American who was a geek as well as a former US Navy nuke, so we had a lot in common there. The wife was Russian, and was an English as a Second Language teacher and has a degree in Linguistics which I found interesting since I am reading a little bit about it due to my interest in Esperanto.

Dugeons and Dragons

D&D Sunday was great, We got together with the group and killed a few things but spent most of our time in an puzzle/trap room and a Skill Challenge with a long dead adventuring party. A good time. =)

All-in-all a good Fathers Day weekend.