Life in General

It's been too long since I've posted a non-pregnancy related post, but it's pretty hard when that's constantly on my mind! Last "normal" post was in February, I think...oops!

Anyway, we've been keeping extremely busy over the past few months. I'm pretty sure Tim started

nesting as soon as we found out I was pregnant. He's been a working machine! He completely refinished all of the hardwood floors in the house which look fantastic. He redid the ceiling (scraped the popcorn, sanded, added drywall and painted) in the living room and added a fireplace and mantel to the living room, as well repainting it all. The nursery is finished construction-wise, but still has lots of organizing and decorating to do once we get more baby supplies/furniture from our showers in June. We just had a new roof put on our house last week. Tim's also planning on adding a patio and pond to the backyard, as well as repainting the ugly blue siding on our house. And if he can get all of that done before August, I know that the kitchen is next -- which includes repainting the cabinets, extending our pantry, laying new hardwood floors, installing a new countertop and knocking down a wall...and he says there's not much to do in there... :)

I've tried to help out as much as possible but with being pregnant and not super handy, I've only done some of the painting, helped scrape the ceiling and helped move things when I could. Tim has been excellent at getting everything done even when he works full time doing the exact same stuff for work everyday...I don't know how he has the energy!

This last weekend we had our second Great Strides walk! Our team has raised around $1,200! We had gorgeous weather and had a great time visiting with all of Tim's family for the weekend. I did one of the opening speeches about my life with CF and how I had to kick my butt over the last few years to get my body ready for a pregnancy. The speech was a little scattered (pregnancy brain!), but I always enjoy sharing my story with others. Afterwards, I went to join my family and our almost 4 year old nephew gave me a high-five and said, "that was awesome!"

My biggest fan :-)

In other news, I've been pretty busy wrapping up the end of the school year with my little boogers and preparing for maternity leave in the fall. I recently learned that next year I'll be teaching Kindergarten again, so I'm really looking forward to that. It'll be much easier coming back from maternity leave to a grade that I've taught before instead of third grade like it was before. We're down to ten days of school left! This school year has flown by, thankfully, because my class has a couple (four to be exact) handfuls that I'm am definitely looking forward to getting a break from....lol. This summer I'll be moving rooms, again. Thankfully my principal and custodian are wonderful at accommodating all of the pregnant teachers who have to move this summer and doing our rooms first. I'm hoping to have all of my bulletin board fabric and boarders up the day after the last day of school. Then all I'll have to do when I come back after the room is cleaned is arrange the furniture, hang posters and organize. Anyone willing to come down this summer to help me out with that is more than welcome!

Speaking of summer, ours is full! Between baby showers, friends' weddings, family parties and a weekend trip to St. Louis for a Cardinals game, Tim and I will be super busy! Luckily I'll have still have weekdays to put my feet up and relax, :-), but my poor hubby is going to be going non-stop! Hopefully he'll get a few relaxing weekends this summer before the sleepless nights begin in three months! :-)

A Normal Post?!

Wow, it's been a long time since I've written a normal blog post. Things have been going very well for us this winter since finding out I'm pregnant. It's been a long time coming, and so fun sharing the experience with our friends and family! We've already had three ultrasounds and I'm now 15 weeks along with our little munchkin. I have my first CF clinic coming up since getting pregnant, and I'm so excited to see everyone there.

In other news, we've got two Great Strides events coming up this spring, in April and May. Those will be super fun this year, and next year we'll need a stroller! If you'd like to join my team or donate to either walk site, please go to www.cff.org/greatstrides and follow the very simple directions. They all have a free Great Strides app which is very easy to use.

Work has been going well. Teaching first grade is so different from Kindergarten, but I am really enjoying it. My class is full of personalities and they've been keeping me on my toes this year, but its been so fun watching them grow and progress.

Tim's been keeping busy between working, plowing, and continuing to work on our house. Currently he's working on refinishing the floors in baby's room, we just removed the popcorn from our ceiling in the living room, and we'll be painting in there soon. We've definitely had a busy, eventful, but wonderful winter. Sorry to keep everyone in the dark for so long, but we wanted to make sure everything was going well before we shared the news. Stay tuned for many more updates. :-)

2013

Here's 102 blog posts from this year summed up into one. This year was full of exciting adventures for Tim and I, the most exciting being that we finally purchased our first home!

• At the beginning of this year, I was presented with the possibility of having CFRD. Thankfully after meeting a wonderful endocrinologist in Chicago, he taught me how to adjust my diet to keep my sugars in check without having to have insulin injections, yay!
• In February, unfortunately I had to reset my compliance count due to lovely mail order pharmacy mix ups. I did, however, proudly complete 100% of my treatments for 352 days!! I reset my count on March 1st, which puts me at 312 days today!
• Also in March, we celebrated Tim's great grandma's 99th birthday, learned about the new CFF regulations (which caused a huge uproar and debate among CFers), and we got the ball rolling on the CF Living video phone interviews and plans!!
• April was a busy month! Tim and I shot our CF Living footage which was harder than I thought, but SO rewarding! I attended another Great Strides in DeKalb, the TOBI Podhaler was released, our kitten, Ozzie, was born, and I started taking the best thing ever = PROBIOTICS!.
• May was pretty uneventful, aside from me finishing up my first year of teaching! Tim celebrated his 27th birthday and we were able to spend some quality time with our adorable nephew, Isaac.
•  In June, we finalized our first house mess, and found a house that we both loved and went under contract on it. We traveled to Tennessee to meet our newest nephew, Liam, and spend time with family. Tim also kicked my butt in Brett's Run!
• July was a busy, fun-filled month! I attended my best friend's bachelorette party, spent lots of time with family, brought Ozzie home, went to Country Thunder and became a home-owner!!
• Our first chapter of our Day in the Life series finally came out and I was so surprised and humbled by all of the amazing and supportive feedback. I also started my second year of teaching - this year in first grade. And of course, started taking Kalydeco on August 30.
• In September, Tim and I continued to work on our house, we did our annual camping trip with his family which is always a great time, and we attended the most love-filled wedding I've ever been to - Jessie & Jeremy's wedding. :-)
• October is always special to me because its our anniversary month. We celebrated our third anniversary this year and we're not just married anymore, but we're now married home-owners! Tim and I also went to the Peoria Great Strides which was excellent! I was asked to speak there and we also met my blogger, CF friend, Cheriz. Finally, I had my first post-Kalydeco clinic visit where I gained 6lbs, my FEV1 increased by 5% and my small airway lung function went up by 18%!!!
• In November, Tim and I conquered 58 flights of stairs at our first CF CLIMB! Then I signed us up for the CF Rock Rivers 5K in Michigan in March, put on by the lovely Emily Schaller.
• December was full of ups and downs, and sadly ended on a very low note. We lost our great friend Jeremy on December 31. We celebrated his life in Ohio with Jessie and his family the first weekend in January, and I'm very glad we were able to attend to say our 'see you laters'.

I feel like things can only go up from here and I need to keep that positive attitude. Here's to a happy, healthy, productive and positive 2014!!!

Positive Thoughts Thursday: My Job!

Woah, look out! Two "positive thoughts Thursday's" in a row! I've been slacking on the blog posts this week, but I feel like I have a pretty good reason this time around...back to school!

• I am so thankful to have a job. I am so thankful to have a job that I LOVE, in an awesome building with the best staff! Yesterday was the first day back to school for our students (teachers started Monday) and I am just so happy. I'll admit that Tuesday I was feeling a bit frazzled, I felt like I was starting my first year of teaching all over again because I switched grade levels (and was doubting my abilities), but as soon as that first student walked into my classroom Tuesday night for Open House, it all came back to me so naturally! It made me so happy seeing their excited and apprehensive little faces coming into a school and/or classroom that they didn't know, but then leaving feeling a bit more excited and comfortable about the following day. :-)
• I received the best compliment, twice, on Open House night and once again yesterday morning at school! On Open House night, I had two parents of students I had in my class last year, express to me how happy/relieved/excited they are for me to be their child's teacher again this year!! *Made me feel so warm & fuzzy inside!* And then yesterday morning, I learned that I have a cousin of a student I had last year, and those parents told the parents of my current student, "Oh you'll love her, she's great!" Best feeling ever!!!
• And even though I am no longer kindergarten, I've already been keeping an ear out for hilarious things my class will say this year! I'll be calling them "First Grade Funnies". The hardest part is remembering them at the end of the day because I can't (usually) write it down when they say it! But I'll leave you with this one that I thought was cute: One of my little girls was leaving the room and she said, "Bye Mr. Grouper".....not quite, but she tried! :)

Positive Thoughts Thursday: Friends, Family & Kalydeco

Each week I've been trying to spend time reflecting on the positive things going on in my life and/or the world around me. I know I've been slacking lately, but I'm really hoping to get better. What are some positive things going on in your life right now?

This is a picture Tim sent me while
I was away for the weekend at Catie's
wedding. He's made a lot of progress.
I'll do before & after pics later.

• I am so grateful for my husband, Tim! He has been working non-stop since the day we have moved into our house! Between working his normal job during the day, driving an hour home and then going straight to work on the bathroom remodel until about nine each night, I don't know how he hasn't taken a day off! He is such a perfectionist which really helps when he's putting tile in the bathroom, and his work always looks good. 
• My friend, Catie, got married this past weekend!!! She couldn't have asked for a better day to get married, it was gorgeous outside and everything went very smooth. The ceremony was beautiful and the reception was a TON of fun! They had a Motown band which was amazing & had the dance floor packed the entire night!
• I'm so happy to have had this summer break! It was really nice to be able to spend time with a lot of my friends and our family this summer. Unfortunately, I did not stick to my exercise/eating routine like I should have, but I guess I'm not really surprised. So I am really looking forward to getting back into a routine next week. My first day back to work is Monday, and the kids' first day is on Wednesday! I'm a little nervous about teaching first grade this year because I've never worked in this grade, but I have two wonderful teacher-partners who I know will help me along the way. :)
• My doctor and I have decided to start the paperwork process on Kalydeco now instead of waiting until October. The more I thought about it after I left my last clinic appointment, the more I starting thinking, "Why wait?" The paperwork was submitted Tuesday and they said it typically takes about two weeks for the process, but depends entirely on insurance. So there's a very good chance that I could be starting Kalydeco in September! I'm looking forward to it and I'll keep you posted as I know more!! :-)

Enjoying My Summer

Linda & I after the musical :)

This is the first summer that I haven't worked since I was sixteen, and I'm loving it! I love that I'm able to create my own schedule (even though I'm pretty good about sticking to the one I posted about) each day and really do whatever I want. For example, I was gone from Wednesday-Sunday seeing friends and hanging out. Tim's aunt Linda & I went to see The Book of Mormon musical in Chicago on Wednesday night - hilarious! Then on Thursday we stopped by the sidewalk sale at the teacher's store to pick up some things for my classroom. Thursday evening I was able to hang out with my great friend Jessie and her fiance Jeremy (who has CF), who we met in college and Jessie was one of my bridesmaids. On Friday, I was able to see another one of my bridesmaids and great friends since middle school, Amanda! Her and her fiance just closed on their first house last week so I helped them remove some wall paper and help prep their home for lots of painting. Finally I finished up the weekend Saturday with my maid of honor, Catie's bachelorette party! :-)
It was so much fun to be able to see all of my awesome friends and spend some time with each of them! That's the hard part about living at least three hours away and the fact that we're all teachers.

This coming weekend is also going to be filled with fun and family. We're heading up to stay at Tim's grandma's house with his sister and her two little boys, and Linda & Roger, Thursday through Sunday! I'm so excited to be able to spend more time with our nephews this summer.

Then next week I have my next CF clinic appointment, where I should be able to try out the TOBI podhaler for the first time. And the week after that I'll be gone for another long weekend with my friend Karissa, at Country Thunder! Then...if all goes according to plan, the following week (the last week in July) we should be closing on our house and moving!

Looks like this month is going to fly by! I cannot believe that pretty much as soon as we close on our house, I'll have to get back into "school-mode" because I'll have to go move my classroom down the hall and start setting up for first grade! I cannot believe there's really only about 6 weeks left of my summer break...which sounds like a lot, but with how busy we'll be, I know it's going to be over before I know it.

Oh, and to follow up from my previous post, I finished the first Walking Dead compendium (issues 1-48) in about three or four days. It was awesome! Totally different from the show, but still wonderful! I'd recommend it to anyone...not children though, it's pretty graphic and raunchy at times. Now I'm on to Compendium Two (issues 49-96) which I started last week Wednesday when I got it from Linda. I had been reading it all weekend while doing my treatments and I have one more chapter to go which I'll easily finish today. Anyone know when the third one is coming out?! I think I have a problem...

Positive Thoughts Tuesday: Updates

 Switching it up a bit and doing my Positive Thoughts Thursday Tuesday, today. Thankfully, things are finally, slowly, starting to look up for us!

*A few weeks ago I posted about all of our house drama which is also starting to come together. We actually submitted an offer on a major fixer-upper a couple days after that last post, on a Wednesday, I believe. We offered low because it needed a ton of work and before the listing agent even presented it to her client, she told our realtor that she thought it was too low of an offer and was acting really rude. Then the sellers told us they needed to talk to their attorney about the offer and they'd get back to us by the following Tuesday - this just turned me off. I didn't want to deal with annoying listing agents, more attorneys and delays all over again. We ended up looking at a foreclosure in the mean time that we really liked, so we withdrew our offer on the fixer-upper to submit an offer on the foreclosure Monday or Tuesday. Before we could even get our offer in on the foreclosure, it had sold. :( This meant that we were back at square one with no house, again.
So we decided to just keep looking, and we ended up looking at four houses in one night on Wednesday of last week. The last house we looked at Tim and I both really liked! It wasn't an estate, it wasn't a foreclosure, and it's not even really that much of a fixer-upper! :) We ended up looking at it one more time Thursday night and submitting our offer on Friday! We negotiated a couple times with the seller over the weekend and accepted their counter-offer on Saturday!!! Yesterday I went in to initial the papers, so we're officially under contract with a house and we're both very excited about it! Right now I'm in the process of setting up our home inspection and getting our loan approval process underway, again. :-) Let's hope this one works out this time!!

*Last weekend Tim and I drove down to TN to celebrate our nephew, Cole's third birthday and also to see his new brother, Liam who was born in the beginning of May. It was so fun to be able to hang out with Tim's sisters and their husbands and their kids for the weekend. We had a great time, but I cannot wait until they are living in Illinois so we can do this more often!

Aunt Colleen & Liam

Uncle Tim & Cole

Aunt Colleen pulling Cole & Isaac in the wagon

Baby Liam :)

Aunt Colleen & Cole reading "The Pout-Pout Fish"

Cousin love! :)

*After we got back from Tennessee, we pulled our offer on the fixer-upper, saw those other houses and put in our offer on our current home. Then we left for the weekend again. Tim and I ran our first 5K together on Saturday, along with several of my old co-workers from DeKalb. We did Brett's Run, which was my very first 5K last year. It rained the entire morning while we were waiting for the race to begin so we were soaked before we even started running. Once the race started, the rain died down, but it picked back up again as soon as we were finished.
I had not been training for this run as well as I did last year, so I wasn't too pleased with myself when I had to stop and walk a couple times along the route. But, I am very happy that I was still able to finish in 35:29.7. Tim, on the other hand, blew right past me as soon as we started and finished his first 5K with an awesome time of 26:53.3, that's an 8:40 mile pace! It was really fun being able to do this with Tim and several of our friends this time! I hope that I can keep in shape and that this is something we can do annually together.

Tim & I post-race, drenched!

Our whole team pre-race, nice and dry!

Yay, we survived the rain! :) 

*The other big news of the summer so far is my job placement for next year. Long story short, the district messed up their numbers thinking there would be enough students for three kindergarten classes next year, allowing me to stay as a kindergarten teacher...well it turns out there are not enough students for three classes, so back to the original plan of me moving up to first grade in the fall. I will not have all of my same students from my kindergarten class because we mixed up all of the students at the end of the year, but I'll have a few of the same. I'm very happy that I'm staying in the same building because if you didn't know already, I love my coworkers & job! I will be moving rooms this summer (going from room 15 to room 9 - movin' on up!) which I wasn't planning, but that's okay. It'll give me something to do on those days when I'm bored out of my mind. So this fall will kind of feel like my first year all over again with a new room and new curriculum, but the first grade team is great (one of them is my mentor) and I'm looking forward to working with them. :-) Better start thinking of a clever name to go with their quotes this year, can't call them 'kinder quotes' anymore!

*Even with all of this craziness that's been going on, I've really had a lot of time to relax over the past few weeks, especially during the day while Tim's at work. I've been doing pretty good about getting in an extra treatment during the day - probably about 1/2 the time I do. I just finished up a few weeks of TOBI which really helped clean my lungs out and I've been feeling really good. I had a great workout today - did a 10 minute standing ab video and then a 20 minute medicine ball video that Tim and I did a lot over the winter. I've got about six more weeks until my next CF clinic appointment, so I'm really trying to get my lungs in great shape and really trying to gain some weight. My goal is to cut back on the running and to increase weight training exercises like these workout videos to gain muscle weight.

I've been watching a lot of HGTV & Dr. Phil, doing some cleaning and laundry, but I'm planning on adding more reading this summer. First on my list is The Walking Dead graphic novel! We've been watching the show since it started and I've really enjoyed it. Tim's aunt Linda read this already and said it was totally different from the TV show, so I'm excited to read it. This is the first graphic novel I've ever read, so I'm curious to see how I like it.

I'm also going to see "The Book of Mormon" with Tim's aunt Linda next week, too, which is supposed to be really funny. Then I've got a bachelorette party, bridal shower, Country Thunder, (hopefully moving into our new house), and my best friend's wedding all before the new school year starts! I love having summers off! :-)