10 Minutes to a Stronger Baby

JM has taken to giving Chloe's arms and legs a workout. This picture was taken while he was stretching out her arms to the music of Scherazarde. We're thinking of making a workout video for babies and selling it.... We should be millionaires by this time next year :)


ps. Chloe is wonderful and perfect! We are loving being parents!!

37 Weeks

So yea, I'm pretty fat these days.... and this picture was taken this afternoon after I got home from work so I look a little disheveled.

2 and half more weeks until I'm due, I wouldn't mind if it were sooner :)

Close Call

My laptop has recently become outrageously infected with viruses and such. We downloaded some anti-virus stuff to help clean it up. Well, it found all kinds of things but my computer was still running really slow. So John Mark decided that we should reload the operating system. He's been going around the apartment trying to locate all the discs for my computer and such. All the programs that you install are wiped off your computer when you do this. He assured me that all my files including my pictures would remain. Well I just wasn't sure, so I asked him to put as many of my pictures on my flash drive as he could before he started the process. I then left for Bible study at church.

I come home, and ask "Did all the pictures fit on the flash drive?" Well it's not a very large memory, so he says no, and that he only saved the wedding and engagement pictures to it. Well guess what.... We have those already on CD! So that was pointless. So anyway, he gets the computer reloaded. Goes to check on the pictures..... And they're GONE!!! I don't know what to say at this point. All I can think is all my pictures are no more. I do have the ones I want to print from about the past 10-12 months online waiting to be printed. That's some comfort.

At this point JM feels terrible, of course. He had assured me they would still be there. So he goes hunting on my computer. And somehow, he finds all the pictures!! They were hidden away. So he's out of the dog house for tonight :)

ps. I'm going to add some pictures to flickr from the baby shower this weekend in just a little bit.

Week 33

I'm sorry to say, but I don't like being pregnant right now. I have had a really easy pregnancy so far, but the past two days have been rough! I think Chloe grew like 3 inches and 2 pounds in one night or something, because I woke up Monday morning in pain! The muscles in my lower abdomen are stretched to the max and so it is hard and painful when I change positions especially going from sitting to standing or lying down to standing. Plus all the weight is pulling downward, I think she has either moved into the head down position or getting there, and my belling button feels like it could just pull apart :) So there ya go, being pregnant is no fun :)

Sorry for the downer post. I just wanted to vent. Week 33 isn't one I will look back on fondly....

Video

For those interested, who have been keeping up with the blog, thanks to Blogger's new capabilities, I have uploaded the video from the barber shop of the barber doing the "black thread of death" to Michael. Check it out on the original post.

I just added some new pictures to flickr from our baby shower in Alabama and our trip to Ft. Worth for our 1 year anniversary :)

25 weeks down...

and a lot more to go!

Here's a look at me right now. I'm ready to not be pregnant anymore! I got my first taste of being this pregant and teaching yesterday. I thought I had spent a lot time on my feet this summer, but was I wrong! I think I sat down for a total of an hour out of 9 hours yesterday. Being pregnant and teaching before the summer was not hard at all. But this is a whole other ballgame. I'm going to have to find the stool I had in my classroom last year.....

Chloe Grace Boucher will be here mid-November!

Barber Shop

Last night Michael and I went with one of our Arab friends to the barber shop. Michael wanted a hair cut, and I wanted to get my beard trimmed Arab style, so our friend took us to the barber that he goes to every week. Michael went first and decided he was going to go for the buzz cut, but as soon as the barber had made it a third of the way through, Michael realized he had requested it way to short.


The real adventure though comes in the care of the facial hair. This was the first time for me to get a shave from a barber with a straight blade, so that in itself was an adventure. I ended up with some Arab style sideburns and a short beard with some great lines. The only thing is my hair is too light to really pull it off right.


All this sounds normal, but the last step is the kicker. After shaving, there is always that little bit of peach fuzz on the top part of the cheek just below the eyes. I never bother to mess with it because it is not noticeable and it is very close to the eyes. But here they have a special way of removing that hair for nice, smooth cheeks all around. My friend who has lived here a while calls it the "black thread of death." What they do is they take a piece of string a make a triangle between their mouth and two fingers. Between the fingers it is a double string. He then basically rolls that part over the cheek bringing the two strings together and pulling back with mouth and fingers to pluck out the small pesky hairs. Needless to say, it can be a very painful experience. Because of this, when my Arab friend first told the barber to do it on me, he said "No, I think it will be too painful for him." But we convinced him in the end so that Michael and I could get the cultural experience. Of course it hurt, but it was not that bad. My Arab friend even said that he thinks I am strong because I did not flinch.


Now there is no way that words can adequately capture the process of the thread, so here are some pictures to help you get a better idea:

Typos

I would just like to note the importance of proofreading before publishing things online. The original version of the previous post had the title of "It's getting out in here..." and the first line of the post said, "It's not getting out, it is HOT." But thankfully for Jessica, she has a husband who pays attention to such things and within two hours of her posting, he was able to catch the mistake and lovingly correct it.

And to show that this is not a problem just for my wife, she has already made two corrections on my short little post during its composition, and I will make sure and run the spell check to catch any other mistakes that we might have missed.

I think the heat is getting to us.
Or maybe it is the city that sounds like a war zone outside. But don't worry, it is only fireworks, but it has been going on constantly all over the city for almost three hours now.

It's getting hot in here...

No wait, it's not getting hot. It is HOT!

I'm not sure what the temperature was today, but tomorrow it supposed to be 107. Today we went to the Balad which is the downtown area of the city where you can buy a lot stuff for cheap (for example: I bought season 2 and 3 of Lost plus a movie for 11 JD or about $15). Anyway it was really really hot walking around down there. I had planned to go eat with the rest of the group but it was just too hot and they were going to do more shopping afterwards and I just didn't want to be in that heat. So to escape the heat B and I joined up with our husbands in the nice air conditioned van and managed to find ourselves in a few air conditioned buildings like KFC and Safeway. JM and I considered going to Starbucks just to be able to sit in the air conditioning this evening, because our apartment is HOT, but we're going to brave it and watch a movie here. Anyway, thinking about missing air conditioning made me think of other things that are going to be really nice to have when we get home.....

real milk
the freedom of my own car that has air conditioning! ( a lot time the taxi drivers don't use their air)
time to cook a meal rather than eat fast food
not having to turn on the hot water 30 minutes before you want to use it ( but now that it's so hot, we take cold showers to cool down!)
seeing our families
not having to catch a taxi
having lines you actually wait in when you are paying for something or ordering at a fast food place ( this is probably my only pet peeve of this culture. They are impatient when it comes to waiting in lines! You could be waiting to order for 5 minutes and some person will just walk up in front of you.)

flushing the toilet paper (rather than throwing it in the trash, for some reason you can't flush it here)
no water restrictions

taking showers in the mornings because I won't have to be fresh to go out at night

Fireworks in the Sky

Last night Jessica and I got to bed rather late, sometime around 12:30. Just about the time we had fallen into a deep sleep, we were awakened by the sound of explosions echoing through the city up into our bedroom. Now the Middle East and explosions may not sound like a good combination, but without hesitation we knew that it was only fireworks. Arabs like their fireworks, and they like them loud. For example, on the fourth of July a friend and I sat on top of our roof and watched three or four firework shows going on all across the city. It's most likely these were in celebration of weddings. The unique thing about the fireworks last night was that they just kept coming and in great succession. So when I rolled over in bed to see if I could catch a glimpse, I quickly realized that this was not the typical small set of fireworks but rather it was something special. I grabbed my glasses from the bedside table and went to the other room to get a better view. Jessica soon joined me and we enjoyed watching the end of a wonderful fireworks show from the comfort of our extra bedroom.

Miracles in Packing (Revisited)

Greetings from the Middle East. It is great to be here again and to get the feel of the city, its sights, its sounds, and smells. In my last post I bragged on my wife for her amazing packing skills, and to what end? Our wonderfully packed bags did not make it to the Middle East with us. So, now instead of hoping for a miracle to get all our stuff into our bags, we are hoping for a miracle that our bags would get here, and get here soon, and a miracle may be our only hope.

picture update

I just added new pictures from this weekend....

I will hopefully have weekly picture updates throughout the summer, so check periodically for those.

Click on the badge to the right under "Our Photos" to go to our pictures.

Miracles in Packing

After traveling much overseas, or much at all, one soon learns the lesson of packing light. Just try carrying your luggage through the underground, on buses, and trains all over the city of London and you will soon find out the benefit of taking as little as possible when traveling.

This summer marks a new adventure for Jessica and I: traveling overseas together. This means we got to pack together (or rather I got to watch my wife put all the stuff in the suitcase and tell her what not to leave out, maybe I should have helped more). When planning on what all to take and how to get it there, Jessica's first suggestion was that we would both pack in her suitcase. But I, knowing how large her suitcase was, and not wanting to haul it all over the world, suggested that we pack in my suitcase because it was smaller and more manageable. Well, to cut out all the gory details, my wonderful wife, packed all our clothes and other travel necessities in that one suitcase and a carry on size suitcase. If it weren't for my love of books, we might not even need to take our backpacks, but at least they are full of things to keep us entertained for those long hours in cramped airplane seats. So in the end I am very thankful that we found a way to pack so light, especially since I have a pregnant wife and I will probably be deemed the family bellhop.

We leave tomorrow, fly for a few hours, stop for a few more, fly for many more hours and eventually we will be at our final destination. Please keep us in your prayers as we travel and hopefully everything will run smoothly, and the next time you hear from us, we will be on the other side of the world. What fun.

jm

Silence

I have been accused of not contributing much to our blog. Although this may be only my second post in the life of our short online forum, in my defense I must say that my writing energies have been consumed by more pressing and demanding projects. However, school is now over (at least for a few months) and papers are done (at least until next semester), so here I am typing away again, but this time for the pleasure of our faithful readers, and not the requirements of my professors.

I said at the end of the semester that I wanted to spend some time reading blogs, mainly for the purpose of catching up on the culture of the day. I've spent the last semester studying the importance of culture and thought that I would engage in some hands on learning through the world of online blogs. I have made attempts to live up to my ambition, but there is just something about books that draws me in. In the time that I had set out to read blogs, I have already read two books. So even when the semester is over I cannot seem to escape reading.

I have done better at escaping writing though. I did spend the week after finals fine tuning a paper to submit for publication, but other than that, this is the first thing that I have written since the semester ended. It has been a much needed break because April was filled with papers. It really is a good thing that I enjoy writing, otherwise I might not survive school.

I have learned, however, that I have an uncanny ability of filling up my time with activities. Just because the semester came to an end did not mean that I got to slow down. Instead I practically bumped up to full time at the paint store and worked over 4o hours a week. Although this took a lot out of me, the paychecks look much nicer than when I was putting in 25 hr/week. I have come to enjoy working at Sherwin-Williams and I have always felt it was the practical side of my education. Beside learning about paint, I learn about all kinds of people and what life is like for them. It teaches me many valuable lessons that are applicable for ministry. In fact, I often tell my wife that one day I am going to write a book called "All I Learned about Ministry, I Learned in a Paint Store."

Work is now over for the summer. As much as I hate to leave those guys and girls to fight the summer rush, I am looking forward to going back to the Middle East with my wife. There is nothing like eating falafel everyday for breakfast and hanging out with Arabs drinking tea and coffee all evening. And on top of it all, this time I get to take my favorite person along with me. (by the way she is reading over my shoulder as I write this). Hanging out with the wife in the desert sounds like great fun. So stay tuned for the epic adventures of the Bouchers as they travel the world over. JM

We leave in a week!!!!!!!!!!!!!!


and John Mark supposedly made some really good potatoe salad today.....we'll see in just a little bit. Jacob and Corrie may think other wise. I don't like potatoe salad so I can't say either way.....


that's all, have a great day!

School's Out!!!!!!!

Today was my last day with students! Hip Hip Hooray!

But it was pretty hectic.... yesterday after lunch, we were given the task of making a video to send in to Extreme Home Makeover. You see, we are moving into different buildings next year that are on the same campus of the middle school. Well the buildings have to be renovated. The main building doesn't need much, and renovations are underway. But the Math and Science building is a different story! It needs A LOT of work and we don't have the funding for it. So basically since I'm the math teacher, I don't have a classroom next year! Great! So we have made an attempt with the makeover thing. I'm not really sure that our video is that great, but we'll see....

After filming the video all morning, we got to go bowling and that was a lot of fun.... I actually scored better than the boys playing next to us! But they are 15 and probably have been bowling once in their life!


I really got on here to say we are leaving for the middle east in less than 2 weeks!!


We'll be pretty busy up until we leave.....

great deals

Don't you love it when you are shopping, you get to the check-out, the cashier scans your item, and it comes up for a lot less than you thought you were buying it for?! Well I do!

We did a little impromptu shopping tonight. My car has been in the shop over the weekend and it was ready today, so we drove down to Temple to pick it up. On the way back, JM wanted to stop in Barnes and Noble to look for a journal, and I suggested stopping by Old Navy to look for him a messenger bag for the summer.....

Well we get to the shopping center and as we are walking up to Old Navy, there is a Rack Room Shoes. I have been on the hunt for the classic grey New Balance shoes, and have had NO luck. So thought why not stop in? Of course they didn't have them either, but we looked around anyway. I came across another pair of shoes I had been considering getting for the summer, and they were on sale!! Woohoo! So I decide to get them. They were only $20 and that's half of what I wanted to pay for the New Balances. I'll just have to wear my old ones on our weekend trips this summer.... Anyway, we get to the check out and they ring up $11.99!! So with tax I ended up paying about $13 bucks for those shoes.

So we head on to Old Navy. At first we really didn't see any back packs or men's bags, so we kind of parted and looked at clothing. I come back to John Mark and he's found a great messenger bag! It's not on sale though :( But since he really needs it, and it's getting close to the summer he decided to get it. Well we check out and the bag rings up half off!! Amazing!

High five to me for suggesting a stop at Old Navy!

picture update

New pictures are up on flickr.

Sorry Cody, I don't have any pregnant pictures yet. I'm not really looking pregnant yet. :)