Changes

I’m not in school at the moment, and I couldn’t be happier about taking the summer off to recharge since this fall is gonna be busy with school, work and a new baby in the home.

With that being said, life hasn’t seemed to slow down. Cindy is now 22 weeks along with our little girl, Carter is almost 2 with every wonderful and terrible thing that comes along with that and, lucky me, I had major surgery on my ear about a month ago and the recovery time has been painfully slow (I should get complete hearing back in a few more weeks, they say). Combine all that together, and for some reason, the hours seem to slip away.

I have been able to steal a moment to change the blog layout to something more… summery (summeresque? summerish?). I’ve started on getting our family website set up, too. (http://www.burkmans.com)

You may notice that the blog address is different now. If you follow us at all, feel free update bookmarks, RSS feeds, what have you, to http://blog.burkmans.com. In the next month or so, I’ll have more content up to the website so you can have one more option in your internet browsing day.

As summer routines get put into place, I’ll have more time to blog, and more time to bug Cindy to blog, which I’m excited about- it’s fun to reread old posts and relive a moment or two from the past.

In the meantime, as Sam, Lori, and Addie (my brother and family), just relocated from Provo to Redmond, WA, here’s a picture I took a few days before they left at the park of the two cousins.

Update!

What’s happened in the last, uh… 5 weeks? Well, enough noteworthy moments to encourage procrastination of any blog updates. So, rather than try to blog about every update individually, here’s a list instead:

• I’ve decided to take the summer off from classes for the first time in a long time. With baby coming this fall, this is a good opportunity to get things ready and to recharge my batteries a bit so I don’t completely burn out before I graduate. The goal, of course, is to burn out as I’m graduating, so this break should put me back on track.

• Cindy is officially out of the first trimester, and is doing great. Today marks the 18th week of pregnancy, which means just a couple (22) weeks to go! I do realize it’s easy to be this optimistic when I don’t have a human growing inside me. But Cindy’s a trooper and is doing great as a mommy to Carter and house to new baby. Here she is, in all her 18 weeks of baby-tummy glory:

• Easter came and went. We had an Easter dinner with my brother, sister and their families. Tried my hand at baking a ham for the first time… turned out pretty good. Carter participated in his first Easter Egg hunt at Thanksgiving Point. 100s of 1-3 year old kids and parents running through a field picking up plastic eggs. It was scary and felt like a stampede. Carter liked it though, even if it was rainy and gross out.

• Carter got a massive haircut. As much as we loved that his hair was getting longer, it was getting a toupee look to it – long hair with a bunch of shorter newly-grown hair underneath. So, we leveled it and now his hair is full and luxurious… and short. Here’s a before/after look. First one is last month where Carter fully enjoyed a box of Styrofoam packing peanuts and the second is Carter with his Aunt Cassie at the park yesterday.

 

• Cold/Flu season came and went and we all got hit. Unfortunately, I got hit doubly so and after the cold/stuffiness passed, I got a nasty ear infection and my eardrum ruptured. So, I’ve been on crazy meds for the last 2 weeks and will schedule surgery with my ear specialist this Friday (yeah, ear problems aren’t a new thing for me, at all). Hopefully surgery will happen mid-May, with plenty of time to get better before baby comes.

• Lastly,  there were some pregnancy concerns a few weeks ago, so we went to the doctor to make sure things were ok. Listened to the heartbeat and all was well. But, to be doubly sure, we set up an ultrasound for the next day. Turns out that 16 weeks was just enough time to determine that the baby is healthy and:

  

  I still need to scan the ultrasound pictures and get them on here. I also have some videos that’ll creep on here soon, too. With school wrapping up for the summer, I actually have some time to take care of things and, as a result, we’ll be back in action in the blogging world.

Yee-haw!!!

4 posts in January led to nothing in February. But, that’s just what happens when life gets crazy, and last month was just that. Cindy is full-on 1st trimester pregnant, which is playing out similar to her pregnancy with Carter. Unfortunately, this means nausea and morning sickness all day.

We went to our primary care physician and we were told that there’s actually medicine to help with this. Cindy went on zofran and, sure enough, it worked just like it was supposed to, curbing her nausea almost immediately and allowing life to continue at a somewhat normal pace.

The other crazy part of the month was Cindy and Carter heading off to visit her parents in California for a couple weeks. I seriously underestimated how long 13 days is when you’re home alone with only work, school and a couple of cats to keep you company. I survived the ordeal, but only barely. They had a great time and took lots of pictures; none of which I’ve uploaded yet, so I’ll leave Cindy to blog about that some other day.

Aside from that, it’s business as usual. I’m still working and going to school, and Cindy is at the house all day with Carter; running the show here at home. It’s been working great so far and we’re definitely lucky that this is even an option for us at the moment.

Carter is 19 months (still blows my mind when I stop to think about it) and starting to talk more. Multi-word sentences? Not so much. But he understands what we say and he even listens and helps out whenever we ask him to. Will this last? Who knows, but we’re taking full advantage of it.

Carter got himself some new toys recently. One of which is a horse on a stick (thanks to Carter’s California trip and his new obsession with all things horses). He absolutely loves it:

And two more:

 

**(Click on any of these pictures to see the whole set. There’s some good ones in there.)

There’s video of him tearing up and down the hallway on his trusty steed, too,  but I’m better off posting this now rather then hoping I find time to edit the video in a timely manner.

4 Posts in one month!

This hasn’t happened since June of last year… I don’t even know what to say. Does this mean we’re committed to our HUGE fan base (sarcasm included) to post once a week? Possibly. Will it happen? Yeah, I dunno either.

Two noteworthy events for the week. I’ll let you choose which one ranks higher.

First: It was off to Wal-Mart  yesterday. That is not noteworthy, Wal-Mart visits happen all too often. I don’t care for Wal-Mart; never will. But man, it’s cheap. And it’s so close to our place. Usually it’s crowded, I can’t park anywhere, and the whole experience makes me a little more disappointed with the entire human race.

Yesterday though, there must have been something in the air, because parking was a cinch and that place was dead quiet. Cindy and Carter were with me, and Carter, as usual, insisted that we look at all the toy machines that beckon to little kids as we entered. He saw the grabby-arm-claw machine with little stuffed animals and proceeded to identify some of ‘em by pointing and grunting (he’s a genius, I know). I had a dollar on me and tried my luck. And wouldn’t you know, I landed Carter a new toy on the first try. Combine that with a $3.00 Cars book (he’s obsessed with Lightning McQueen) and this is how he felt about the whole trip:

Second: Aside from my extreme crane-toy skills, here is the other noteworthy event. Carter’s vocabulary is increasing, and we caught it on video. He’s bit grumpy, but the video is most definitely worth watching (and under a minute; you can handle that, right?)

YUP! How great is that?! I couldn’t be more excited, and Cindy feels the same way. Carter has no idea what’s going on, but he will soon enough and he’ll love it. End of September is what it looks like, but we’ll know more in a few weeks.

HOORAY!!

Video Time! (#3 is my favorite of the bunch)

I have a junk load of pictures I need to upload, catalog and then toss into Flickr, but why upload pictures when videos are so much better?

First off, as Cindy mentioned, she has graduated from “working-at-a-job mom” to “stay-at-home mom”. Guess what? She’s really good at it. No surprise, but this house is functioning a thousand times better then when I tried to be in charge of cooking, cleaning and taking care of Carter.

Cindy’s got Carter doing fun things during the day, and his favorite past-time as of late is making COOKIES. In fact, “cookie” has replaced “ball” as the word of choice and when in doubt he’ll just call something a cookie.

Here’s Carter making cookies with Cindy:

 

We got him to make some animal sounds, too:

 

Lastly, and my personal favorite, is Carter’s bath time. I really think he only eats dinner because he knows he gets a bath afterwards. If life was just bath time, Carter would do just fine. With that in mind, during his bath tonight, we tried capturing his splash sessions and cannonballs, but ended up with this instead:

 

Yo Gabba Gabba taught him funny faces and he rather enjoys them from time to time. So do we.

Everyone should try this

**Update**

This post was actually written by Cindy but she seemed to have posted it from account. So, there you have it. This wonderful post was created by my loving wife.




So this is really fun. Our friends did this and I couldn't believe how real the kids look. So I tried it out. It's really fun. So for those of you who didn't know we had a little girl before Carter, here is a picture of her. We had to put her up for adoption though. We just weren't ready to start a family yet! :)

Stay at home mom!

Well, unfortunately the poor economy took it's toll on us, because the construction company I worked for ran out of work, and therefore, I no longer work there as of the end of December.

Although this isn't ideal for us, it has been kind of nice being able to get a taste of what it will be like to be a stay at home mom, which is such an awesome job.

I love being able to have more time and energy to work on our house, fixing healthy meals, budgeting and especially taking care of Carter. We have been having so much fun together. He's such a great kid. I appreciate him so much more now, and don't get frustrated with him as easily now. I'm really glad I've been able to have a little time to enjoy Carter at this age rather than have it fly by because I'm too busy and realize too late that his fun experiences went by unnoticed.

Also, this time has helped me not get so discouraged as a wife and mom. When I was working full time, I was always frustrated because I just couldn't do everything at 100% which made me a failure at everything. I kept telling myself I needed to find more time and more energy somehow. It had to be possible because so many people are successful. Of course, all this thinking ever did was cause me to get sick every few weeks, which would put me further behind my self-imposed perfection schedule and this cycle continued.

Well, even though I still stress a little at the need to find a new job, taking care of myself, my home and my family has finally become more doable.