January:
Manda and I closed on our first house! It was so amazing! The house was a fixer-upper, but it was ours, and we were able to spend the entire month doing just that!
- Kitchen:
- We tore up the floor and laid new tile.
- We replaced all of the handles and hinges on the cabinets
- We painted all of the cabinets
- We painted the walls and ceiling
- We replaced the light fixture
- We repaired a hole in the ceiling
- We installed baseboards
- Living Room:
- We painted all of the walls and ceiling
- We installed baseboards
- We replaced the front door
- Office
- We painted all the walls and ceiling
- We replaced the carpet
- We installed baseboards
- Bedroom
- We painted the walls and ceiling
- We replaced the carpet
- We replaced the ceiling fan/light fixture
- We installed baseboards
- Bathroom
- We tore up the floor and replaced the tile
- We replaced the toilet
- We removed the vanity and installed a pedestal sink
- We removed the tub enclosure
- We replaced the shower head, faucet, handles, and pipes, in the bathtub
- We tiled the shower and installed a niche
- We removed the window and replaced it with glass brick
- We painted the walls and ceiling
- We installed a fan/light
- We installed baseboards
- 2nd bedroom
- We painted the walls and ceiling
- We installed carpet
- We installed baseboards
- We also replaced all of the windows in the house, had the stucco redone, replaced part of the fence, and are currently working on building a laundry room onto the back of the house.
During this time we also got a new little puppy! He is a black lab, pug mix we think, and he was 6 months old when we got him. We named him, his full name, Ricky Bobby Ricardo Martin Downing. We weren't really planning on getting a dog, but he really needed a good home so we took him in, and he quickly became a part of our family! :)
However, as exciting as all of this was, none of it compared to the most exciting part of it all. We were introducing the 2nd bedroom of our house as "The Baby's Room." We were going to have a baby! We actually found out Christmas of 2008, but we'll count it as 2009. This was one of the most exciting things in our lives! Everything was going great! We had a house, a dog, and a baby! It was wonderful!
February:
However, things quickly went from great to tragic. In February we had our first doctor's appointment for the baby, who we were calling "Shrimp." We were told that everything was looking great, and we scheduled our first ultrasound, but it never happened. The next day we lost Shrimp... This was probably the hardest time I have ever had in my life. I know that some people don't understand, afterall, we were only 2 months pregnant, it's sad, but not the same as losing someone who is born, but it was. It was terrible and sad, and Manda and I both went through an extreme time of grief and questioning of how and why God would allow this to happen. We changed our minds back to the idea that we weren't going to have a little kid running around, and "The Baby's Room" changed back to "The Game Room" or "The 2nd Bedroom." While, I still do not really understand why this happened, we both made it through, and I can say that I learned a lot through it and my faith and trust in God grew through everything.
March:
I got in a car accident, and completely smashed up the front of my car...I still haven't fixed it.
April - May was pretty much life as normal, going to work, going to church, things of that nature...
June:
We came home one night to discover that Ricky was not in our back yard. He had dug under the gate and gone off to explore the neighborhood. Now this was not really a new thing. He had started getting out of the yard on a regular basis, and we would get calls from kind neighbors who had taken him in. That night, however, we received no call. We looked all around for him, drove and walked up and down the streets of our neighborhood, but we couldn't find him, and he was a black dog on a dark night. Manda finally asked a neighbor if they had seen him, and they told us that they had seen a black dog run out into the street and get hit by a car. The neighbor told us that the person that hit the dog got out, picked him up, and drove off.
We were devastated. We started calling vets all around the city, and we found one that said they had a black dog that had been brought in earlier that night that had been hit by a car. I went to go see if it was Ricky, Manda couldn't come because she was too scared they would tell us he had to be put down. When I got there I found a bruised, battered, road rashed, and limping, but ok, Ricky. He looked like he'd been hit by a car...he had. They took a bunch of X-rays, but in the end he came home with us, and after a few weeks of healing, was just fine!
July:
This is when things started to get better. We found out we were pregnant again! Now we were very excited, but also extremely nervous. We were hesitant to tell anyone, we were hesitant to get excited. What if something happened? So we had doctor's appointments, and many ultrasounds, and everything was going just fine. We named this baby "Koopa Troopa" or just "Koopa" for the time being. The "2nd Bedroom" was once again going to be "The Baby's Room!"
Manda and I also went to Seattle at the end of this month for our 3 year anniversary. It was a lot of fun, despite being the hottest it had ever been in Seattle, and we got to go see a bunch of whales out in the wild, which was completely amazing!
The second 1/2 of the year has been pretty good all around. Koopa has been growing just as she should, oh yeah, we found out we were having a little girl :), we have painted her room pink and brown, and have collected many picture of her!
November:
Manda's car started acting up, it would randomly decide not to start. So we decided, not to spend time and money trying to fix it, but rather, to buy a new car. We sold her 1998 Honda Civic to my cousin and bought a shiny new 2007 Honda Civic Hybrid to replace it! It is beautiful!
December:
The main thing of note in December was our T-Mobile fiasco, which you can read about in my last blog, but that is all fixed now so everything is wonderful, and today looks to be a great day as well, ending out the year on a positive note! :)
So this year has definitely been full of both joy and sorrow, but through it all we have come to see how God works in the good and the bad, and we have learned, on a much deeper level, what it means to trust in Him and lean not on our own understand. Faith is not always the easiest road, but it is always the best, and God is faithful to stand by our side through it all, love us through it all, and bless us immensely!
May God Bless You, and Have a Very Happy New Year!
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