All Hopped Up and No Place to Go

Well, it's 2:30 AM and I'm awake and hopped up on Sudafed, so I thought I'd do some blogging. Plus, Gwennan appears to be wide awake as well and re-decorating her womb, or doing yoga, or maybe just testing the walls to find a secret passageway out. Whatever she's up to, she's bugging the crap out of Mama. I decided that instead of tossing and turning and keeping Mark awake, I'd just get up and have an apple and peanut butter and catch up on my posting. So, moving right along ...

I didn't get a chance to post some stuff from last week. Our good friend Roger was in town for the holidays, and he came to our house for dinner with the Spoelstras on Wednesday night. It was great fun. Roger brought a roast, Mark baked some beer bread, and I baked some potatoes and made a salad. The salad would have had onions in it, only I managed to slice off a piece of my pinky finger while slicing the onion and decided not to risk someone getting a little "extra" in their salad. We had to re-bandage my finger twice and the thing just kept bleeding until the next morning. Evidently, I just need to stay away from things that cut. I wonder, have I learned my lesson yet?
Anyway, aside from the gushing wound, we had an amazing meal. Better than most restaurants. If there's anything Mark and I share a love for, it's good friends and good food.












Mark, the baker-man














The feast

On Thursday night we celebrated Dawn's 26th birthday with friends at Surin in Virginia-Highlands. Yep, Dawn's only 26 years old. The baby among us really. The cute, skinny baby. Sigh. I remember when I was a cute, skinny baby.

New Year's Eve was celebrated way up in the great metropolitan town of Jasper with Kathy and Mike. Kathy was telling me what it's like to live and work in a small town. She's a labor and delivery nurse at Piedmont Mountainside Hospital up there, and during a recent shift someone asked, "Where's the pediatricians' office?" and one of the nurses answered, "It's by the Burger King."
That's it. THE pediatricians' office. THE Burger King.

Kathy and I went to Ingle's together to get some soda for Catri and her friend Christa. While we were there we decided to pick up some "sparkling apple cider" as well, for the non-alcohol drinkers at the party to ring in the new year with. So here I was, a pregnant lady carrying a 2-liter Coke and a bottle of sparkling apple cider (which looks like a bottle of champagne), and a few young male customers commented loudly, "Look, they're gunna get drunk too, just like us!" Yep, the SO-FIS-TI-KAY-SHUN runs high in Jasper.
A few photos from our evening:

















Our hosts. Mike got all dressed up, complete with socks and Birkenstocks. See what I mean about so-fis-ti-kay-shun?


















No, it's not a two-headed teenager, it's Catri and Christa


















What do two teenage girls do at a boring adult party? Why write on each other with Sharpies, of course!

In other news ...
If you were wondering, yes, our house is still on the market. I haven't written about it in a while, but yes, we're still trying to sell the lovely 3 bed, 2 bath ranch home at ___ ______ - close to the highway, beautiful views, bring all offers!
We had a break from people coming to see the place between Christmas and New Year's, but expect it to pick up again this week. If we don't get a viable offer by the end of this month, we plan to let the listing expire and try again when Gwennan is a few months old. We're really praying, though, that God will bring a buyer soon. Your prayers on this would be greatly appreciated as well.

Okay, well I guess that's all for now. I'm still hungry, so I'm off to find a snack for Gwennan. Maybe it will calm her down and we can both get back to sleep.