Oh Baby, Baby!

I figured that since I had already announced it to my family, my church and Facebook, that it is finally time to announce it on my blog that Jennifer and I are pregnant!!!  Yay!  Probably most of you that follow this blog are Facebook friends with me, so this might be old news to you.  So, I thought I'd treat you with some visuals to give you a little better idea of what all is going on inside Jenn's belly...

This was just over a month ago, so that little baby is quite a bit bigger now.  If you don't know what you're looking at, I completely understand, but if you look closely, you can see the head at the top right, the legs folded up to the left, and in the middle of the yellow dashed line, you can even see the heart!  It's heart rate is 166bmp.  I think we need to work on that, little one!

This one was actually a week earlier, but I thought it was cool to see a leg sticking way up in the air.

Take a look at that strong leg.  Do I see a triathlete in the future?

They went ahead and grabbed a 3D shot which is kinda gross looking, but it was cool to see hands and ribs and legs...

Finally, here is the latest video of what our baby is doing.  Don't waste 7 minutes of your life on it, but you can really see some cool stuff around the 4:20 range...

The due date is November 30, and I can't wait till then!  We find out in the next 3 weeks whether it's a boy or a girl.  Hasn't 2012 been crazy for the Smith's?  A New job, a New house, a New baby!!!  Pretty incredible, and I'm just enjoying the journey...

Wordless Wednesday

Ok, just a few words...

I finally got to meet IronDiva, aka Colleen Kingery!  YAY!!!  We got to have lunch at Taco Mac at the Mall of Georgia in Buford.  Yup, she was just as cool as I thought she would be.  Blogger meetups are the best because it's like you already know the person before you "meet" them.  Too bad Tom was out of town, but that just gives us another excuse to hang out again.  Here's the classic self-portrait as proof...

And finally, have you seen the Treadmill Bike?  I think they made this especially for Emz.  Imagine what this could do for Triathlon!  Now you can do the bike and run at the same time!!!!!  Bring it on, Macca!

It's rough being homeless!

I could write an epistle trying to recap the passed couple weeks of life, and I probably should, but life moves on whether or not you blog about it.  I will say that I am freaking LOVING my job in Buford and am glad to be back in the South!

On the athletic front, I have been packing on some poundage, but it's giving me motivation to get back out there and really train again.  I got to reunite with my "ridin' buddy," Josh Woods for a weeks of good rides during campmeeting, which, if you don't know, is basically a reunion for all the Adventist church members in this conference.  Since he and I are both pastors, we are required to go and hang out with each other!  We had three days of solid riding which included a 48 miler that was cut short by rain.  Jenn was close by and picked us up before we washed away.  Another ride was a 58 miler that left me with some hot tan lines, and finally, a speedier ride on Sabbath morning of about 27 miles.  It was so nice to ride with Josh and have some quality pastor time at the same time.

But, I really wanted to write a blog about how close we are to not being homeless anymore!  Yes, ever since Jenn and I moved from Michigan, we've been sort of homeless.  It has been awesome to have the parents living an hour and a half away, but that's just it...they live an hour and a half away, which really puts a crimp in our style and makes it hard to do my job of working with my church.  Right now, I'm writing from the living room of one of my church members that went on vacation and graciously asked me to house sit and allow me to be closer to my church.  It has been such a blessing!  But, we have been staying at Jenn's parent's house in Dalton (2 hours away), and even staying at Jenn's step-brother's house down here in Atlanta.  We're vagabonds and tramps, it seems!

So, here's the deal.  After looking for a long time, putting an offer on a house and then backing out because it wasn't going to be perfect for us, and looking for other houses, we finally found one!  It's a 3 bedroom 2 bath house that seems perfect for us.  It's less than 15 minutes away from the church, 10 minutes away from the Mall of Georgia where everything fun is, and finally 20 minutes or so from Colleen and Tom Kingery!  We put an offer on it among 8 other offers, and OURS WAS ACCEPTED!!!  Yay!  A couple weeks later and after getting a clean report from our inspection, we are just waiting to close on June 25!  That's two weeks from this Monday!!  We're busy picking out carpet and appliances and dreaming like crazy about what we will do with our first home.  It's been quite a journey, but it looks like we're getting closer to the end.  Keep us in your prayers that nothing stops the process from going smoothly.

ON TO THE PICTURES

There she is!  

This is the view once you open the front door.  There the eat-in kitchen to the right.

This is the view from standing in the living room.  The first door on the right is the master bedroom.  The next door is my office, and you can see the dining room to the left of the entry.

This is my office!  This is where the sermon writing and planning happens.

We're at the end of a street, so we don't get much traffic at all!

That just gives you a little idea of what we're working with.  After we do some work to it, I'll give you some more pictures to see how it looks then.  It'll be so nice to move into our own home!  Maglee is really ready to be in one place instead of moving around all the time.

As life starts to get back to normal, I'll give you some more updates on what we're doing down here in the South.  Just a teaser, I'm looking at signing up this week for my first triathlon of the season coming up in July.  Don't think that I forgot why I started this blog...  Thanks for reading!