Male Bonding

Daniel and James have been spending some quality time together watching television on Daniel's HD TV.


They also got to some horse play. Daniel was the horse, of course. James wasn't too sure about his new vantage point on Daniel's shoulders but I'm sure that as he gets older it will become a favorite activity.



Daniel made a very manly meal of homemade potato chips, hash browns, sausage, biscuits, and gravy. It was horribly tasty and terribly fattening. I was just happy not to be cooking. I told James that he needs to learn to cook too because his wife will really appreciate it, I know I sure do. (We do eat healthily most of the time.)

Spring is here.

Here is me taking out the trash.

Charity is doing really well in our final days of not having any dependents on our tax return. We have been cleaning up the house and taking it easy. We are giving our well-used pillows a heart-felt victory lap before we say goodbye to our sleep. We have packed our "go bag" for the hospital, which has just enough stuff in it to carry us over until I can come back home and get whatever we missed. I have begun to getting teary-eyed looking at the babies on the magazine covers at the doctor's office. It must be time for baby.

So, what am I thinking as a soon-to-be-father? Well, I am thinking that the baby is lucky to have a very healthy, extremely beautiful, and eruditiously smart woman for a mother. OK, I made "eruditiously" up, but that just goes to show that words cannot describe how great I think Charity is.

I have not really thought much about what baby will do when he grows up. I have no expectations for him being a star athlete, president, or national hero... yet. Instead, I have been dreaming of the small moments I will have with him over the course of the next few years. Here are a few that make my heart melt:

• Holding him at 3:00 am in the morning as he drifts off to sleep
• Hearing him laugh as he discovers how to run around in a circle
• Seeing his eyes widen at the site of an animal he has never seen before
• Watching him mash his birthday cake in his little fist as he tries to take a bite
• Helping him on his homework
• Teaching him how to draw and paint
• Tucking him into his bed after reading in the Scriptures
  
• Taking him to the park to ride on the swings
• Seeing his smile as I walk in the room
  

Anyways, I can go on, but these are the little moments that I am looking forward to with lots and lots of anticipation. These are the truly gratifying moments in a prideful father's life, aren't they?

My Hero

This morning didn't start too well. Cold, tired, and feeling especially large as I tried to gracefully get into my car, I managed to get settled, get the seatbelt fastened and then I turned the key. Nothing. When I removed the key my car alarm went off. I put the key back in and it went off... but again no ignition. This was repeated a few times, much to the annoyance of the neighbors I'm sure. My car problems usually end up being for unusual reasons and my spirits plummetted as I began to replay my past car disasters in my mind.

Luckily for me, I have a handy husband. Daniel jumped my car. It made it about twenty feet then died. Typical.

He (by himself) pushed it back into the parking spot for further diagnosis of the problem. He drove me to work and then began to try to solve my car conundrum. After a trip to the store he discovered that the battery was fine. After another trip, he discovered that it wasn't the alternator. He was suspicious of the ground wire from the alternator and checked that out. No luck. So then he pinpointed the actual problem by cleaning off the excess oxidation on the battery and replacing the connectors. Yay! My car has been revived and my involvement was minimal. I think this has to be one of the best things about being married. I really dislike dealing with car issues and heavily relied on my dad's expertise when I ran into problems in the past. It is great to have Daniel step up and take that worry out of what is usually a very stressful situation for me.

Yay for handy men, especially when they are married to you!

Provident Living (and Spending)

Saturday marked the culmination of months of planning and the beginning of a new era of food management for our family.

Charity has spent countless hours building a database of information that has tracked how we eat food and how much it has cost us. For example, over the last 3 months, among other things, we have eaten the following vegetables:

• 1 lb cabbage
• 17lbs carrots
• 5 stk celery
• 2.5lb corn
• 1 cucumber
• 10lb broccoli
• 5lb peas
• .5 lb garlic
• 3lb lentils
• 12 lb onion
• 15lb potatoes
• 18 heads of romaine
• 2lb split peas
• 48 tomatoes

What can I say, we love our vegetables.

Through careful research and analysis (Charity is an engineer, of course!), we have done a cost comparison of all the major grocery outlets, online stores, bulk food suppliers, and other foodstuffs venues, and discovered where the good deals were. For example We can see that on December 14th, 2007, we paid $1.50 for 2 lbs of carrots. What a deal!

From that information we have gained an understanding of what food typically costs, how much we eat of it, and where the best prices tend to be. At this point, I sense a lot of you may be raising your eyebrow at our "enthusiasm" for detailing our food consumption. All I can say is that it's been real fun and informative.

We discovered that the Home Storage Center at the Bishop's Storehouse was the cheapest place to buy bulk Beans, Oats, and Wheat in the area where we live. So we set up an appointment to go in and serve at the Bishop's storehouse and also placed our order. You can see what they have here on their order form.



The Piscataway Bishop's Storehouse is located at
121 Ethel Rd W Ste 7
Piscataway, NJ 08854-5952

There phone is
(732) 248-7606

They are open from 5-9pm on Tuesdays and 8am-12pm on Saturdays if you wanted to go and help fill orders. The people that work here are some of the nicest you will ever meet. I highly recommend serving there.


Upon seeing the warehouse, Charity commented that she would love to own or run a place like this. I agree. When we were there, I couldn't help but feel that this was a wonderful gift to so many people. It is a place where I would like to find myself often.


After serving, we loaded up the car with our bulk foods. Photoshop you say? I don't know what you're talking about. That was all muscle!


Our food storage here is taking up the bulk of the back seat.


This is our food storage shelf, only slightly smaller than a warehouse.

The great thing is that we already know that we are going to be eating the foods that we bought. No mystery meats or exotic dehydrated menus for us! What a blessing it is to know that we have one more safety net in place in case of hard times. The prophets' counsel is truly inspired.

If you are interested in learning more about how we are planning our food storage system, we would be happy to share some of the results of our research.

Listening to That Little Voice

Last night, Daniel and I decided to go for an exciting date to various locations, such as Fedex, Lowe's, and then Shop Rite. As we were about to leave, I remembered that we had forgotten my thumbdrive which had the file we needed to print at the Fedex shop. Feeling blessed for remembering, I had Daniel park, put his hazards on, and I summarily took his keys to get into the apartment.

The thumbdrive was in my purse on the couch and as I searched for it, I had the thought that maybe I should just take my purse. 'No' I thought, ' then I'll have to lug it around or leave it in the car.' I had the same thought come to mind again as I grabbed the thumbdrive but once again didn't listen. As a last ditch effort, another thought came saying that I should at least take my phone. This being much lighter than my purse, I agreed. Putting the phone in my pocket, I skipped out the door, which I of course locked behind me, thinking of nothing more than heading off on my exciting date.

Unfortunately, when I got to the car Daniel looked at me with a look that seemed to say, 'Okay, great, so can I have my keys so we can go now?' To my dumbfoundment, I realized that his keys were on the couch with my purse and my keys were in my purse. Someone was looking out for me though, because that very morning Daniel had put the emergency number out and I had put it in my phone.

We called the hotline and waited in the cold car, hazard lights blinking and illegally parked. As I got colder, I had him call again to apprise them of the urgency of the situation, as he had been very nice to them the first time and I wasn't sure if they understood the gravity of the situation. As you can imagine, I was praying for forgiveness for not listening to what I then recognized to be the Spirit, when I hear Daniel say 'So, it will cost $50 dollars just to get back into the apartment and that might not be for another hour?'. The horror. Not only had I risked my warmth level, stranded us in an illegally parked car, and made our date uncertain, but now my carefully planned budget would be trod on. To make matters worse, in my stupor I watched a UPS man walk back to his truck with a large white box. As he drove off, I wondered if it could be my much-awaited sewing machine.

It was. We found the note he had left on the door.

Daniel decided that he had about an hour to save us $50. I decided to brave the cold so that any passerby (or our neighbors, who have a habit of opening their door to see who it is when we are on the step) would have an obstructed view of Daniel's skulduggery. Daniel once again proved his manliness (or skills) by opening the door with only his AAA card. Once again, AAA saves the day and saves money! :)

All in all, I have learned to listen and pay more attention to that little voice. Call me crazy, but it just might help me from going crazy.

For all of those who were wondering, we still had a very nice date at Fedex, Lowe's, and Shop Rite. (Where Daniel deserved a very nice chocolate treat for being so good about everything.)

Windows of Heaven

We have been very blessed. Each week that we have paid our tithing the windows of heaven have opened for us. Whether we are intending to pay that week, had only just written the check or were just about to, some necessary part of Baby's infrastructure literally falls in our lap.

For example, we had just turned in our tithing when a sister in our ward asked if we needed a stroller and baby carrier. Her friend has finished having babies and was looking to give hers away. She even had two carrier seats to go with it that she gave us. (By some weird twist of fate, Daniel's company was the one to design this very stroller.) It is also interesting to note that although we did not know it then, we did need a blue stroller.:)


On another occasion, we intended to write our check and Daniel found an unassembled crib on the side of the road with a sign reading 'Free Crib'. It is a tribute to his manliness that he was able to put it together without any instructions. It is beautiful and now sits ready to welcome our son when he arrives.

Two Sundays ago, a brother in our ward asked Daniel if he wanted a bassinet. Daniel replied 'What's a bassinet?'. The brother came to me and made the same offer just to be sure we knew what we were getting. :) Daniel put it together yesterday and it is perfect. We have it set up next to the rocking chair that my grandfather left me. (A chair that was made for my grandfather's mother when he was born and which now his great-grandson will be rocked in.)

There must be someone very special coming for the Lord to help us prepare so well for his arrival. We are so excited and grateful. We know we aren't going to be able to do this alone.