No News . . . yet!

The latest update on the baby front is that we are still waiting. Occasionally Annette will have things that seem like contractions, but so far they are far apart. Hopefully we will see some progress soon as I am finding getting a good nights sleep it getting difficult (yeah, like I will get any sleep after the baby is born :) ) As of today I am completely beat. Only slept a few hours last night. The following picture probably best summarizes how I currently feel.

No Baby yet

The baby count up continues. We are now 10 days over-due. The waiting is starting to get to me. Although I sleep at night, I don't seem to get any rest because my mind keeps wondering when will this little baby come. The result today was that I was very groggy and grumpy. Hopefully the baby will come soon. Annette had an actual contraction yesterday, but that one was the only one. In spite of being tired I still got a fair amount of work done, but not as much as I would have liked. I am hoping that I get a good sleep tonight.

Still counting down

Today we went to meet with our mid-wife. Our baby is now 9 days overdue. The waiting is driving both of us somewhat stir crazy. Of course for Annette things are worse especially with the heat that we have been having lately. The best way I can describe it is it is like Christmas is coming, but we are not sure what day it will be. Every day we think, is this going to be it, and then it isn't, so we go through another day of waiting. Needless to say this starts to drain ones energy, so we are both getting tired. Top that off for Annette with carrying a full term baby, and you can imagine what it is like for us. As for the rest of things, everything is ready and looks good.

Baby seat

Today we made our final step in preparing for the upcoming birth of our baby. Annette's parents came down, and took us out for our anniversary. After a huge meal at the Mandarin buffet in London, we stopped as Sears, and they purchased a baby seat for us, for which we are very thankful. We installed it this evening, and it looks good. Now we just need to wait for the baby :)

Back again

It has been a while since I last posted. What can I say, life has been busy :) Since my last posting many things have happened. We purchased a new to us van ('97 Safari), and are expecting our first child. My hope is to post more often, but then my original hope was to post frequently. Only time will tell.

It Has Been a While

I have not posted for a while, but things have been busy and difficult. The biggest thing that has been part of this time and the most draining, was that my wife had a miscarriage. We were very much looking forward to having our first child, but two months or so into the pregnancy, something felt wrong to her. We went in to have an ultrasound done, and found out that the baby was dead. That night she had the miscarriage, and for the next several weeks she was quite ill. Even now after a few months have passed, she is just getting back to feeling more normal. Through all of this I continued to work, and now I find that I feel very drained. I don't think up to this point that I have had time to grieve since I have been so busy with work and concern for Annette. Thankfully, things are starting to slow down a little, and I am starting to get some time to contemplate things more. The other part of what has kept me busy was work. Not only have things been busy at the church I work in, but I have also been placed on a committee for the denomination I am part of and have been placed as the supervising minister for a congregation in our denomination that is currently without a minister. These two new tasks added to the regular work of my congregation and the miscarriage have keep me going and going. Hopefully I will catch up a little through the summer months and gain some energy. That about updates what has been happening to me over the last several month, at least in broad strokes.

Open House

Well we just finished having our first ever Christmas Open House. We had about 20 people come through, mainly from our congregation. We had hoped for more people to come, but we enjoyed the number we had. It turned out to be almost the perfect number for the evening. Next year we will probably do the Open House in the afternoon rather than the evening so we can run it a little longer. My perception of the evening was that it was not only enjoyable for us, but that all those who came enjoyed themselves as well. There was lots of conversations the whole time, and the people certainly didn't seem anxious to leave :) Unhappily, the dogs got rather excited when the people started to arrive so they needed to be put in the backyard. Eventually they started to insist on being let back in, so we set up the baby gate to keep them out of the living room, and they stood behind it with these mournful looks. Now we face one problem . . . What do we do with all the left over food?

Levies, levies everywhere.

For those of you who follow the RIAA quest to eliminate p2p file swapping you may know that in Canada we have this wonderful thing called a levy which is added to all blank media that could be used to make copies of copyrighted material. That means that if I purchase blank tapes, cds, dvd, and the like I pay a certain amount per item that goes to the various organizations like the CRIA (Canadian version of the RIAA.) This is bad enough as I work in a church where we record our services on tapes, CDs and on video for local television broadcast which mean we pay the levy on in house productions and backups of our computers. Just recently our wonderful government added this levy to mp3 players. Putting aside the idea that this assumes that the only reason anyone would want blank storage media would be to copy copyrighted material rather than assuming innocence and having to prove guilt, even this extortion of our money is not enough for the CRIA. Now they are intending to start a legal campain against those who are swapping material, although they are already getting money not only from those evil file swappers, but also from hundreds of thousand law abiding citizens who are using their video tapes to tape family gatherings, who are using their cds to back up their computer data and the like. Needless to say this is starting to annoy me. They CRIA either has to be happy with the levies, or tell the government to remove them and pursue people through the courts. They cannot have their levy and eat people up in the court system too.

Flu, fly away!

The flu has hit here. Annette was feeling sort of achy for a while, but then on the 11th, it turned into what we at first thought was a bad cold. The symptoms got worse, and we realized that she had the flu. It put her off her feet and in bed sleeping from Saturday until Monday, but at this point she seems to be getting better.

At this point my hope is that is will not get this as I really don't want to be put out of commisson during the Christmas season as it is one of the most busy seasons for me. I need to preach extra services and of course there is all the family and other Christmas gatherings. Although I enjoy them all, they still take a toll both in time and energy. Hopefully, the flu will fly away from here, and leave us alone."