Menu Planning

A month of trying to work off of a planned menu has just ended. For the month of January I decided to plan out all of our dinners and buy groceries  based on a very specific list. I didn't know how it would go, but wanted to at least give it a shot. We wanted to save some money (little trips to the grocery store always add up to at least $50) and I never know what to make for dinner so this seemed like the perfect experiment for our family.

Here are the results:

Cons:

• It took about two hours to plan our dinners for the month and make the grocery list.
• Our schedules often change, so on nights I thought I had time to cook, I really didn't, and that meant I didn't follow the plan and things got mixed up.
• Because of those schedule changes, we really didn't finish the month well.

Pros:

• I felt GOOD planning - I am a planner so it was a huge success to just sit down and write everything down.
• We saved a lot of money not  buying out as often and not making as many small trips for extra ingredients, etc.
• On nights we were able to stick to the plan, Sam was able to get things started before I got home and we ate dinner at a decent hour. This led to dishes getting done earlier, and us having our evening with David and then ourselves once he went to bed, without doing as much work.
• I tried new recipes! It was my goal to try 3 new recipes. It was really fun!

My plan moving forward is to create a list for about 20 meals (leaving room for some busy night where we eat leftovers or go out), and to just have the shopping done so that we can decide what to do the night before. That might help with the change in schedules. I think it was totally worth it - despite the initial planning time - because it saved a TON of time in the end. :)

Adventures in one parent land...

Summer has arrived! Or at least that is what the calendar says. Sam is off to drum corps. We are only 5 days away from getting him home for one night and I can't wait! I can honestly say that I don't know how single-parents do it. God bless them! David and I have been on our own for just over a week now and while we have definitely gotten into a groove (and discovered how I can take a shower with him awake - quite the accomplishment!), it is definitely a test!

Since Sam has been gone, I got pulled over for the first time (thankfully only because we forgot to put the new tabs on...didn't even get a warning ticket - phew!), cleaned up a gigantic mess from an upset/angry Dawg missing his dad, endured a night of sick Dawg - probably from the trashcan he devoured, have miraculously kept up on laundry and watering the lawn, and dealt with a scary solicitor. David is now sick and has a fever, and we are about to have record setting temperatures for the second time this year, forcing us to vacate our house because we do not have air conditioning.

But, despite all of that ;-), we did drive up to the camp to see Sam for a couple of hours and have lunch, which was awesome! This morning, before David showed a temp., we went with Leslie and the canines for a hike, and I am getting to spend a TON of quality time with him. I am LOVING that part! This is what summer is about! This is why being a teacher is awesome! Even though I have to go into work on Monday, and again on Wednesday for a couple of hours, I am getting to spend hours upon hours with our fun, sweet, energetic, absolutely amazing son. He is learning new things everyday and his sense of humor is just the best. I am so excited and thankful that we will always have summers together and that our schedules will continue to line up when he starts school in a few years (what?!). We are so blessed.

Even though I cannot wait for drum corps to be over so we can spend a few days as a family having all this fun before school starts back up, I have to say that I am enjoying the adventure we are currently on - David and I are becoming quite the team! But I also do not envy single parents. David and I are also blessed to have Sam in our lives and we really can't do it (well) without him.

*On a side note, our neighbor brought up the trashcan today. I can't even begin to describe how thankful I was for what seems like such a little thing, but was such a big help!

End of the Year Chaos!

Sam's principal made a comment to him the other day during his annual evaluation that really made me think about how blessed we are in the midst of the end of year chaos. She told him that she was wondering how we were still married after a year like this one. Between Sam teaching K-12 music (totally unheard of...he is literally doing the work of two teachers right now), my ever-growing music program at school, being in school this year, and having a toddler at home...I suppose looking in from the outside someone might wonder that. And it will only be crazier next year with my internship and applying for jobs again.

But coming from where we are, it doesn't seem so crazy to me. I mean...our lives are crazy, but being married still? It's because we understand and have understood from the beginning. Living the music life through middle and high school, we both saw the lives our our directors. And we signed up for it anyway. In college, our dates revolved around concerts we were performing, volunteering together, working marching bands together, and doing homework together. We established that from the beginning. I knew when I married Sam that he would have concerts, professional development, and lesson planning to do. As he knew about me. We are still married because we get it. I could never be married to someone who didn't. It just wouldn't work. We are passionate about what we do. It makes work/our job so much better - loving what we do.

Now throw into the mix a 19 month old toddler...the love of our lives. We treasure every moment with David. He is our everything. We work for him, we play for him...he is amazing. This weekend we left him with my parents so that I could help Sam drive 11 kids to a music festival in Portland. While we know we both needed the time together (after we dropped the kids off the weekend was ours), and it is important for us to have the time to reconnect, we missed David terribly. It was a little bit of extra sleep, a little bit of freedom, but a lot a bit of missing and talking about him. It is so hard to leave him, but we really do appreciate the extra time to reconnect.

So, as we enter the most busy season of the school year (two and a half more weeks!), it is with great pride that we say we are still married and that this is just our life. We are lucky enough to get to spend the summer, majority of evenings and weekends with our family. It just seems crazy for a couple weeks at a time, a few times a year.

Looking forward -
Heather

A student once more...

By "a student once more," I refer to being a student of many kinds, but mostly of life!

I haven't written since before David was born. Sam wrote once this summer. Boy have we been schooled! :) Having a baby has been the biggest blessing in our lives, but that boy sure does keep us busy! We are learning so much about ourselves, each other, the world around us, and of course, so much about our son, because of our son. Good thing we like learning!

I am a student in school again as well, learning to become a school leader...a principal. Just like student teaching, there is so much to learn from real-world experience! In short, and for the sake of a brief update, though, I am enjoying learning the theory of leadership, and am also enjoying the opportunity to lead some work at my building.

Now that David is a year old, and I *think* finally above water again, I am recommitting to this blog. Look for some exciting changes coming soon! I plan on changing the title to more accurately reflect the purpose of the blog, and also to  add some pages to separate and organize some things (Family, Home Improvement, Travel, etc.). Hold me to it!

Hope everyone had a relaxing Thanksgiving...we have so much to be thankful for!

~Heather

Summertime...and the living is easy.

David is eight months old. David is eight months old. David is eight months old.

I have to keep saying this to myself because it is all so surreal. It has been a while since the last blog. As Heather indicated in that one, "it might be a while until the next post because are having a baby." Turns out, she was right. I mean, obviously she was right about having a baby. I mean the posting. Between the new position, David (his name by the way) being born, Dawg being jealous (in a cute way...not "I'm going to bite someone" way), and both of us just adjusting to this beautiful little person in our lives, we've been...preoccupied.

David was born healthy as can be and is so adorable! I know, I know. You are saying "you HAVE to think and say your baby is cute." I understand that. But, really, this kid is c-u-t-e. If you know me, you would agree that I am a pretty honest person; I don't like to beat around the bush. My wife knows full well that if something comes out of the oven a little overdone, and she needs an honest opinion, I'm the guy to ask (and I say everything as lovingly as possible). If my kid wasn't the cutest kid on the block, I think I would say so. And that would be ok. Eventually, he would grow into his awkward features and be fine. But, really, David IS the cutest kid on the block (never mind that there are no other babies on the block...you get my point).

Parenting is very awesome. It doesn't hurt that David started to sleep through the night right after the two-month mark. David is a morning person, so that's pretty easy. When we wake him up, he is usually all smiles and rolling around his crib. He eats his breakfast without complaint, and settles right into his car seat to go over to Grandma's. (By the way, having two grandmas and grandpas in the area is probably one of the most amazing things in the world. Knowing what I know now, I think I'd pack up and move home to have this if I didn't already live here. It is a blessing to say the least....and free:).) David's grumpy time is right about the time he gets back home in the afternoon after we pick him up. This isn't always the case, but he can sure give me a run for my money when he is in his fits. I'm so lucky to have a wife that is such a natural parent. She knows things that I can only guess at. He'll cry, and she will know exactly what to do. When she isn't around it is way more stressful because I can't just tap into this encyclopedia. I'm working on it. I'm becoming more patient. Because of grandma's amazingness, his schedule is very convenient and predictable. He goes to bed at around 8, wakes up around 6. For our crazy schedules, this is perfect. And it sucks when he is off his schedule. Luckily, that is rare.

After buying our house, we've just been waiting for the weather to get better so we can get outside and do some work. The first big project? You guessed it: build a fence. This may seem like a bit of deja vu as that was the first thing we did to our last house. We are SLOWLY learning that we need to include this in our offer to whoever we buy from next. NO DEAL IF YOU DON'T BUILD A FENCE BEFORE WE MOVE IN. In the meantime, I'm getting wicked good at building fences. After the fence is done, we will put down some soil and drop some grass seed onto it. Finally, a place for Dawg to roam! He's been such a good sport about it all. It helps that we live right in front of a little park, where he can use his acid pee to kill the grass (shhhh....I don't think anyone suspects that it's our dog!). We have a long list of to-do's after this, but we can take our time with those.

Although we are busy people (by our own doing most of the time), we are seriously considering having a foreign exchange student for next school year. We are worldly people that never travel, so we figured, why not bring the world to us? In this case, Hungary. We have hosted a few Japanese students for weekends, and we have really loved to teach them about our culture and especially learn about theirs. Having a student for the year is obviously a much bigger commitment, but Heather and I roll with the punches well. I think this will be a lot of fun! We are excited about showing her around and teaching her what our country is all about (guns and freedom!). She will be going to Reardan with me and will be in the music program, so it will be convenient. She sounds like an outstanding student and will fit into our academic household well. If you have any advice, let us know in the comments!

Speaking of busy, Heather just began her schooling to become a principal. It's been several years since we were in school, so we are a little nervous about doing this and just getting back our study habits (and I say "we" on purpose...it's a family affair). Heather is excited about doing this so I think any fears or doubt will be overran by sheer will. She wants to be more involved with school environment and culture and wants to be able to help teachers become better at their craft. I think she has so much to offer; she is so innovative in her approaches. I'm looking forward to seeing her progress!

The job is going well. I'm spending a lot of time just trying to get it into shape with basic necessities. For example, I successfully added jazz as a zero hour class for next year. Another example? I bought a bari sax case that will actually hold the instrument without it falling out and getting damaged...yes, that basic. Jazz has been taught for free up until now. It's K-12 everything, so I figured the least they could do was pay me for doing my job. The kids are excellent. There is a little bit of a learning curve (ok...a big one) for the community and just recognizing that music is just as important as other academic classes, and especially the almighty sports programs. But, that's another blog. It really is a great place to be. I'm hoping that the support continues and the growth continues.

So, life continues. We are truly blessed by all the wonderful things that have happened to us in the past year and all the people that are involved. We could not do this without God's guidance. We pray and think hard about all things that we consider doing and things we do. Every time we are at a cross road, we have been lucky enough to know God, and have followed him as best we know how.

Thank you for reading! It won't be so long before the next post....SUMMER HAS ARRIVED!

I hope all is well with you!

Sam

Any day now!

I just looked at this blog and realized that we haven’t updated since July. Oops! In our defense, when this family does big things, we do a lot of big things, all at once! Bullet point lists seem to be the best option in times like this…but beware, following the bullet point list...a long baby blog!

• ·         Schlaich Family Camping at Lake Chelan at the end of August
• ·         Started school in the beginning of September (this includes Sam starting his new job at Reardan, which he loves!)
• ·         Closed on our new house (we love it…it is almost put together except for hanging stuff on walls and the garage…)

·         And of course Baby is well on his or her way!!!

Baby brings me to the meat and potatoes of this post. I know that with Baby coming, this blog may be put on the backburner yet again, so I wanted to take some time to go through the pregnancy a little bit.

My pregnancy has been easy in terms of not having any morning sickness, no major issues except for the one brief scare in the beginning (due to my being overconfident and moving risers by myself), and then my diagnosis of gestational diabetes at the beginning/middle of summer. I always thought my blood pressure would be an issue as my blood sugar was always great before pregnancy, but that turned out to not be the case.

I was tested for gestational diabetes around 24 weeks, much like every other pregnant woman. My mom had always warned me to make sure I fasted and to do the test in the morning. When my doctor told me I needed to take the test without any warning, I had already had a big glass of milk and a nice filling bowl of Chex Rice Cereal (FYI – rice has some of the highest sugar content of any carb…). I mentioned this to the doctor and she told me that it was fine…this was a non-fasting test. Guess what? My sugars came back abnormally high. I still have not figured out why we didn’t redo the test, or at least do a longer length test. In my gut, I still feel that I would have tested fine had I fasted before the melted otter pop drink like most people. But, alas, my opinion didn’t matter and it was off to the races for us with SO MANY extra doctor’s appointments and specialists and…and…and…

The past 15 weeks I have seen a diabetic educator, nutritionist/dietician, endocrinologist, perinatologist, and had more tests than I can count on my fingers and toes combined. I have learned a lot. Some of the most important things I have learned are about food. I am a carb eater. Big time. You don’t really know what all has carbs in it until you have to pay attention for medical purposes. Milk? Really? 15 grams of carbs??? Oh yea. Not. Fun. But…on the food thing…I have also established a habit of portion control, something Sam and I struggle with because we love food so much. I have also learned very recently to trust my instincts about my own health. I was put on insulin at night because my morning numbers were reading “high.” High for a pregnant person apparently…but not high for a normal person. The insulin made me feel sick to my stomach in the middle of the night regularly, and even after adjusting it 12 different times, each to a higher amount, still didn’t change my morning sugars. I took myself off of the insulin a week ago, feel much better throughout the night, and my morning numbers are lower than they were on the insulin. And Baby is not getting any “extras,” which I feel much better about. I am so glad to know that I followed doctors orders and Baby did not get too big too fast and we did not have to deliver early. My mind set about taking care of myself shifted from doing it for me, to doing for this other living thing relying on me. It wasn’t about me, but it is shifting back as I am becoming more motivated to lose “baby weight” after the pregnancy is done…more on this later.

Every week for the past 7 weeks I have had to see the perinatologist (a high risk pregnancy doctor) due to the gestational diabetes and the risk of Baby getting too big. I get an ultrasound and two non-stress tests every week. This was really cool at first. I got to hear the heart beat all of the time, and we (quite literally) have a photo album FULL of ultra sound pictures. So need to get to see our baby so often. I can officially say the novelty has worn off and the sheer number of appointments is overwhelming and time consuming. I am ready to be done. I know most pregnant women say that at the end of their pregnancy…but really…reporting blood sugar numbers once a week, seeing MY doctor once or twice a week, and seeing the perinatologist twice a week is adding up to a lot of copays and time in the car and offices. I am happy to report that Baby is DEFINITELY not too big and is coming in between the 35^th and 50^th percentile in size and appears to be very healthy. And super cute J.

Now onto the baby weight…I am VERY proud of the minimal amount of weight I have gained throughout this pregnancy. Because I did not start at a healthy weight, I was told that I could only gain 9 pounds. In my head I was thinking “But I weighed 9 pounds when I was born…that is impossible!!!” Well folks…never say never. I am happy to report that I have gained…nothing. Not a single pound. At my last weigh in at the doctor’s office, I had gained 4 pounds in a week, but my hands and feet were also balloons. I reweighed this morning as the swelling is down a bit, and I am even a pound less than where I started. And the last pair of maternity pants I bought? Those are a size down from the first pair. So in my head I am thinking that means I have actually lost about 25 pounds (the amount healthy sized people gain during a pregnancy) and within a few weeks of giving birth I can expect to weigh a bit less than when I started. I don’t know for sure that it will go that way, but I am very happy and proud of what I was able to accomplish with mostly healthy eating during the pregnancy. I am SO motivated to get healthy knowing that I can! Whenever I try a diet or exercise program I usually don’t see result right away. This is frustrating and I always end up quitting when I don’t see something working. Having to do this for 9 whole months has shown me that it takes time, effort, and that I CAN do it.

Baby is due in just over a week…I have had contractions off and on, some regular, some intermittent…Sam and I cannot wait to meet our son or daughter and welcome him or her into the world with our family and friends at our side. Thank you to everyone who has supported us these past nine months. We’ve certainly needed it! Next post…Baby!!!

~Cheers! Heather

It has been quite a while since our last blog and so much has happened! So, here is our list.

• Sold our house in late June
• Eagle Lake vacation with the Wisswell's
• New position...in Washington!
• 2nd anniversary
• In the process of buying a house (should be mid August)
• started working out again!
• I can feel baby...finally!
• Seattle trip to visit family
• Camping trip to Hayburn State Park, ID.

As of now, that is about it. Selling the house was a huge relief. When selling, until it was legally not ours anymore, we felt the deal could fall through at any time. It was nice to get that to go through. The house went to a young military couple who wanted the house for their growing family. Ironically, this is exactly why we moved out of the house. But, to each his own. We are happy, and they are happy.

Staying with the house theme, we are looking at purchasing our second home in mid-August. We CANNOT wait! There are many reasons for this, but mostly because we are excited. We actually plan on living here for more that a year, so it is exciting to know that we can really put some work into the yard and make this place our own, and know that we get to enjoy the fruit of our labors.

We went to Eagle Lake in northern California with the Wisswell's in late June. It was oh so nice to get out of town after what seemed like a never-ending last month of school. This year I was incredibly exhausted from school and really needed a break, so this vacation was very welcome. While down there, we fished a bit (fun fish to catch!) and Heather, Dawg and I visited Lassen National Park. Cool place, but Lassen does not have the majestic qualities of Rainier.

We celebrated our second anniversary (yes! already!) by going camping at Hayburn State Park near the southern end of CDA Lake in Idaho. It was 95 degrees the whole time, bugs literally sucked, and the whole campsite was located on a 30 degree slope that made doing anything a pain in the neck...somewhat literally. We had to belay down a cliff just to get to some water to cool off and, as Heather will gladly let you know, there was a bird nesting in the women's outhouse that "dive-bombed you every time you had to " take care of business (I'm not sure how she worded the last part). Needless to say, we cut off that camp trip after the first night. We capped it off the next night by going out to a nice dinner at The Melting Pot. Mmmmmmm....

So, baby news. I have been able to feel baby quite a bit, especially when we go to bed. Yes, it wakes up when we go to sleep. Sign of things to come? Anyway, feeling the baby is awesome! It makes me so excited! Heather and I, although we really have no idea, are thinking it will be a boy. This is based strictly off of the fact that most kids between the Schlaich's and Wisswell's are boys (5 boys, 2 girls). Really, we are just excited to have a baby:) So, related to baby is our new workout routine. It's more of a, "when I have some time to work out I do," sort of routine, but much better than my, "I should work out....ooooh! Beer!" routine. But I have been doing it everyday. I am starting this for three reasons:

• Heather has to, so I am supporting her efforts by joining in
• I need to ramp up energy for my new position
• I want to be in shape so I can run around with baby

Hopefully these reasons will keep me engaged.

And most recently, our trip to Seattle. We spent a few days with my sis and her husband. It is always a great time with them! We visited my brother, sis-in-law, and nephews. Miss them always! And, we met up with Heather's parents and some old Wisswell family friends who are always a good conversation:)

I think I might be caught up. Later this summer we are headed to the annual Schlaich Reunion in central Washington. And we start school at the end of August. Right now we are planning and prepping for the school year. With the new job I have there is quite a bit to do to get ready. I am very excited for this opportunity and look to make the most of it!

Enjoy the sunshine~!
Sam