Who's is He?

My mom made me make my bed every day.

I don't know what James' mom's rule was, but even if it wasn't required, I have no doubt that each of her children made their beds every day anyway.

One day when Logan was 2 years old, we asked him if he would start making his bed. That's all it took. He makes his bed about 6 out of 7 days of the week with out being asked. And on the days he forgets, he acts devastated when he discovers his unmade bed that night.

In another story, all it's own, Lizzy has started acting scared of sleeping in her own room. The only way she would sleep in there was if we put the rail back on her crib. I wasn't comfortable with that since Siri's due date just a few months away. So, last night I took Lizzy shopping for her new bedding. We moved all of her stuff into Logan's room and made up the lower bunk with her new blankets. Last night was their first official night of sharing a room together.

Miracle that I hope continues: they slept great. Granted, they did wake up about 30 minutes earlier than normal, but I expected that.

Now the story gets strange. I got myself up and dressed and as I walked past their room, I decided to poke my head in just for fun. What I saw was that both bunks were made up.

I return to my question; who's is he? The answer is obvious. He's a Mickelsen.

(FYI, I make our own bed every morning. Not James.)

New Challenges

This cake was full of new challenges for me.  Luckily, I have good and understanding friends who will let me experiment on their cakes.  I'll walk you through it, ok?  Not that you care, but I do, and this is my blog. :)

Challenge number 1:  The hibiscus flowers.  If you google how to make those, they will tell you to special order special tools to make them. I didn't want to to do that, so I combined all of the ideas I saw into one I knew I could do. I realize that a professional baker would make them look more realistic, but since the rest of the cake hardly looks realistic, I figure it works.

Challenge number 2: Making the Happy Birthday sign. I just don't have enough experience with gumpaste/fondant to know the best way to make the sign.  Now that I've made that one, I have some ideas on how to improve it.

Challenge number 3: Making the girl. I have never made a person out of fondant before and really wasn't sure of the best way to go about it. I got to make this little gal twice because she was too long the first time.

Challenge number 4: Painting the sunrise on the top tier. I know you are all asking yourselves, "That's a sunrise"?  Yeah, that's what it's supposed to be. I'm not so artistic and don't know how to paint at all. I watched a bunch of tutorials on youtube, but they still didn't seem to help. (I plan on taking a painting class some time in hopes that it will help me with future cakes.)

Challenge number 5: Making the coral.  I'm kind of the most proud of the coral. Underneath all that royal icing are small grape stems. The coral took a lot of patience and faith that it would look good. I may have yelled at the kids a time or two while I was making it. They kept hovering waiting for me to give them a glob of royal icing to eat.

Not a challenge:  Even though it was a first for me, making the seashells was not a challenge. I just used a chocolate mold and I have used chocolate molds before. Just not a seashell one, but that makes no difference. :)

Overall, this was a very fun cake to think up and create. I hope the birthday girl likes it, because I sure do. I'm usually quite critical of every cake I make, but I really am proud of this one. (Don't worry, I can still  point out the MULTIPLE flaws with it, but as James always assures me, you probably won't notice them like I do.)

You Know You're Pregnant When...

you bake a cake one day, and the next morning, when you go to get a piece, you are shocked to realize you ate HALF of the cake yesterday. The day you baked it. All by yourself.

It was really yummy.

Western Carribean Cruise

A few highlights from our cruise:

 James and his brother Matt climbing the rock wall on the ship.

 The rock wall climbing champions.

 Me and my love feeling fancy on formal night.

 When we returned from dinner, this cute pup, wearing my sunglasses, was waiting for us.

 The view in Roatan, Honduras.

 A guide saw me taking the above picture and took pity on us. He took this picture for us.

 All harnessed up and ready for the zip line.

 This is me. I don't know how well you can tell, but the drop below was quite astounding.

 My sexy man going as fast as he can on the zip line. (You get to control your own speed.)

 Proof that we ate well, and had a great view while doing it.

 This was our ship docked in Roatan.

 I know you're all checking out my hot hubby, so you won't notice my crazy sunburned chest.

This was the beach we played at in Belize.

 A view of the dock in Belize.

 The other side of the dock in Belize.

 We found our own beach to play on in Cozumel. Do you see the little crab by the tip of nose?

 Here is little crab's close up. I liked following him around. I think he wasn't so fond of me though.

 Click on the picture for a close up. Matt had just pelted James with a sand ball.

 I was sad not to have any buckets to make a sand castle with, so I used the skills I had and made a sand cake. Don't you like the sea shell topper and sea weed "flowers"?

 A couple of monkeys. This is James' "must keep my eyes open for the picture" look.

 Queen of the world.

 King of the world.

Last night at dinner. Starting at the bottom left, moving from left to right, then up and to the left again:

Jenny (sister), Becky (sister), Scott (Becky's hubby), Mandy (sister), Jason (Mandy's hubby,) up, Me (James' wife) James (coolest person in the world), Roy (Dixie's hubby), Dixie (Mom), Matt (brother), Ramie (Matt's wifey), Doug (Jenny's hubby).

Man, what a trip. We had a lot of fun but we were glad to come home to be grown ups again. Believe me, sometimes we did not act like grownups while on this trip.

The highlights of our trip that aren't photographed include me and Dixie singing Karaoke, Jason becoming the ships belly flop champion, watching Mandy plow over two old women so she could win a point for the women in the battle of the sexes game, watching the love and marriage show and laughing till our sides hurt, holding a jelly fish, seeing dolphins, playing the Quest game which included James wearing lipstick among other things, and many more fun activities. 

When we got home, we compared notes with my Mom who had also just gotten home from a cruise. She's cruised a quite a bit, and we wondered if she had every cruised with Royal Caribbean. She hadn't. And from what it sounded like, Royal Caribbean is the way to go. James and I were blown away by how incredibly nice the whole staff was.  Too bad they haven't paid me for this free advertising, but I would completely and totally recommend cruising with Royal Caribbean. It was awesome!

Finally!

I think everybody that is really important in our lives, now knows that we are expecting baby number 3. Because of the 3 miscarriages that I've had, I feel like I should be pregnant with number 4... but I am so excited just to be expecting. Number 4 will come in time.


I now realize that the excitement of carrying a baby doesn't get old, no matter how many babies you have. Of course, that excitement is really strong for the first two weeks of pregnancy, and then wanes dramatically as you hold your head over the toilet bowl for the next 12 weeks. After that, the baby love returns with full force.

My friend, and ultra-sound technician, Tiffany, happily and willingly did an ultra sound two weeks ago. I kept my eyes averted from the screen so that I wouldn't know if it was a boy or a girl. She put the results in a sealed envelope and I went home. James and I had originally planned to give the envelope to Dixie (James' mom) over dinner our first night of our cruise.  We had determined that it would be the first and best moment with all of James' family to make the announcement. Only two of his siblings knew that we were pregnant, so it was a surprise for everybody else. Anyway, I say that was the original plan because that's not what happened. We were surprised to have almost everybody in our home the night before we left on the cruise, so we figured that would be as good a time as any. We were happy and excited to find out that baby number three is a girl.

It makes all the difference to know what you're having. I think James was slightly disappointed at first that it wasn't a boy (mostly because he LOVES the boy name we have picked out) but now that he can focus on the fact that we are having a girl, he is very excited. Lizzy has him wrapped around her finger, and he knows it, so the prospect of another little girl to love is exciting to him. James chose the name Siri Juliette. (Siri means, victorious beauty. Cool huh?) I completely gave him the choice because he really resisted the boy name that I had chosen for a while, but I was pretty insistent on the boy name, so he had agreed to it. (Little did I know how much he would fall in love with the boy name to the point that he REALLY wanted a boy so we could use it!)  Anyway, I would have chosen a different girl name, but thought it was only fair to let him decide.

So, there's the news that everybody already knew! We anxiously look forward to this summer, when we will finally be a family of 5!

Stay tuned for a post about our cruise.

"I Speak Chinese"

If any of us could understand Chinese, we might be able to understand Lizzy. 

Lizzy knows a lot of words, but she LOVES to talk, and this is how she talks. She does it the most when she is on the phone with her Daddy. She loves talking to him on the phone. He, of course, loves it.

Good News

Warning! Boring story to follow!

There is no doubt, and we won't deny it, that James is stuck in a dead end job. Installing cable for comcast hardly feels like a real career. Why doesn't he just quit then, you ask?  The money is too good. Even if that weren't an issue, James has no idea what he wants to do. He knows what he can't and won't do, but anything that sounds appealing to him just isn't a career type of job.

We're taking steps to get James away from this job, but if our plans work out, he still has to work there for another 5-10 years, which is fine to some extent. The problem has been that this last year, a lot of changes have been made at his job that has made it worse instead of a better situation. He's had to work mandatory over time for the last 9 months. His only day off is Sunday, except on the occasions that he hasn't had to work overtime, he also gets Monday off. (This is a pain in the neck for a few reasons, but mostly because any time there is service to be done within the church, it takes place on Saturday, a day that James works.) James has had to trade in his nice vehicle for a less nice vehicle. The way that their work is assigned out has changed in such a way that James gets less jobs done = less money, and he is gone for longer hours. Now they have completely changed the way they get paid and so far the result is less money. Overall, the changes made have not been beneficial to us and have had an overall affect of James starting to resent his job.

 For the last 5 years that James has worked for Pioneer, the only cable they have installed is residential. That means he gets to go into 2-5 different houses each day. (People aren't as clean as one would hope. James has put his knees into many a dog's pee and poop pile.) However, Comcast just informed Pioneer that they could choose around 5 of their employees to start installing for businesses. That means, for the technicians chosen: no dog pee or poop. Or smoke, porn, or druggies. No more being yelled at by customers, having neighbors call the cops because he is in their back yard, no more being accused of stealing prescription meds and marijuana, no more awkward feelings of installing cable while the girl who is hitting on him decides to use the bathroom right next to where he is working and purposely leaves the door open while she is doing her business.

James has always been the favorite of his bosses. I know James will be embarrassed that I'm bragging about him right now, but the fact of the matter is that he is the best employee they have, bar none. His bosses know it too, and James has the nickname of "Poster Boy" among the other technicians. I'm proud of him but I'm not surprised either. I married him because he's the best!

So, what's the good news you ask? Because James is the best, he had first dibs on being one of the technicians installing for businesses. He jumped at the chance and honestly can't wait.  The money is supposed to be better, he'll probably get a nicer vehicle again, he won't have to deal with mean, nasty people, and his favorite part of the whole deal: his new schedule will be working Monday through Friday!

He starts training on Tuesday, and it will last for two weeks. The draw back here is that he will only get paid $10 an hour during training. Oh well.  It will be worth it.  I'm so happy to see his spirits up and excited to do something new. He deserves every good thing that comes his way.