weekly appointments have started!

at 36 weeks in pregnancy, you start having to go to the doctor every single week! i'm not sure what all they do, but i do know they will check my cervix every week to see if/how far i'm dialated and how effaced i am. i have no idea what this means, but i do know if you are 100% effaced and dialated to a 10, that baby is coming. so, yesterday jimmy and i made our trek to first, the ultra sound to try and determine size and position and then to the regular appointment. the ultra sound was uncomfortable b/c i had to go to the bathroom the whole time! they make you come in with a full bladder and then she just kept pushing on my stomach the whole time. i couldn't really focus on the tv b/c i just kept thinking, hold it in, don't go to the bathroom here! we did learn some fun facts though. we're still confident she's a girl! she weighs 5.14 already! and it sounds like she has a lot of hair! which is no shock, but it was still fun to see the light sqiggles on the head, showing hair follicles. the pictures seemed to show that half of her head has barely any hair and the other side has hair already 1/2 inch long...so yeah, we're pretty interested in seeing just what this little girls head of hair looks like! we were suprised to find out she was almost 6 lbs already. just based off my stomach size, we really thought she was only like 4 1/2 lbs...so now i'm nervous that we'll have a fatty greeting us in late april. my doctor has given her word she won't be big though...i hope she's right! we also learned she is "head down" so that's a plus, as long as she stays that way for another month.
as far as the regular appointment went, dr. hall checked my cervix and it was a bit uncomfortable. she said i wasn't dialated at all yet. bad sign in my mind if jadeyn is already 6 lbs.
our nursery is almost finished! i'll be posting pics in just a couple weeks, i hope! we have a couple more showers to get through and then i'll be showing off the room : )

Spring Break

Jimmy had a great spring break trip! He took 11 or so students down to Port Arthur, TX to serve that community after the hurricane hit last year. They went down with a few other Oklahoma groups and worked with a missions project called Nehemiah's Vision. The first day they spent most of the afternoon pulling up weeds on a sidewalk and earned lots of blisters from that. However, the rest of the week was spent helping to renovate a family's home that was badly damaged b/c of the hurricane. He said the students were awesome - everyone got along, had some good laughs. Overall, it was a really great trip - quite different from his spain 75 mile walk last year though! It's so great to work in a church that serves Jesus through so many different avenues. We feel so fortunate! Here's a short write up Jimmy did that was posted on the church's website last week that describes in more detail the trip. And some pictures too!

Over spring break, we took a group of college students to Port Arthur, TX to help with the hurricane devastation from Hurricane Ike in 2008. Our students worked hard despite blisters, being eaten by fire ants and even stepping on nails! We spent most of our time helping a young family restore parts of their home that was damaged by the hurricane. When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, this family fled to Port Arthur, not realizing they would experience another devastating hurricane a few years later. On the family's home, we managed to redo the roof, paint the exterior of the house, plywood and sheetrock a weathered room, fix some other odd jobs and most importantly, minister to this young family by sharing with them God's unconditional love. The best part of the trip was seeing the friendship that was developed between our students and this family and knowing we made an eternal impact on them. The father considers us his family and will be vacationing in Oklahoma soon! Please keep this family of six in your prayers.

"deweeding" the sidewalk

youngest boy wanting to help

re-painting siding of house

Go girls! freezing boys boxers

the group with John's family of 6

a weekend of firsts!

Jimmy and I had a pretty fun weekend! First off, the college girls were super sweet and threw me and Jadeyn a baby shower. We played a number of different games, opened gifts, ate lots of yummy chocolate and had cake. Jimmy and I both feel so fortunate to be able to work with the group of kids we do. They are tons of fun, love Jesus with everything that is in them and have a huge passion to see the lost come to the Lord. Here's some pics of the shower last Friday. Some of the games consisted of smelling a "poopy" diaper that had different types of melted chocolate bars in them, smelling 4 different baby food jars and finally, tearing off toilet paper and trying to get it the length of my belly size. It was a lot of fun. Enjoy!

Our next "first" of the weekend was our childbirth class! We opted for the marathon, so we knocked out a 3 week class in one long Saturday. It's nice to have it over and done with, and although it was fairly boring...it was good information to have. Now I feel even stronger about getting an epidural because that video we saw of the birth did not look fun! We watched the delivery right before lunch - not sure if I would have rather seen it before or after lunch. Either way was not good. We learned a lot of the "hee, hee, hoo" breathing techniques and Jimmy got in lots of practice on giving good back massages. He can't complain too much - our teacher loved him and actually gave ONLY HIM a back massage to demonstrate! hmmm. It made for a long day, but then we celebrated by going to lobsterfest at Red Lobster which was a treat.

Be praying for Jimmy. He leaves next week to lead a trip to Galveston to do hurricane relief from last summer/fall.