Husband

This is Rachel. I just wanted to make a quick blog to record a little bit about how good my husband is. Rob is the best ever, and I don't want to forget the little things that he does for me to make me comfortable and happy, especially during pregnancy. Here are just a few examples of the ways Rob takes care of me:

• Last night, I couldn't fall asleep for the longest time, and couldn't get my mind to relax. That has happened almost never since being married, but when it does happen, it's super frustrating and the frustration makes it harder to relax. Finally, around 2am, I woke him up and told him I couldn't sleep. He got out of bed, turned on the AC, got me an extra pillow, and scratched and rubbed my back and head. Then, he kindly rambled on about boring things like video games and Lord of the Rings (at my request) until I fell asleep. It took about an hour. 
• Woke up this morning to him cooking me breakfast, and right after we were done with that, he made me a lunch, too. 
• He is doing basically ALL of the packing and cleaning to get ready for our move while I'm at work, following detailed to-do lists from his control freak wife.
• He taught our lesson by himself on Sunday when I wasn't feeling great, and he's just so good at teaching-- he's way into the Old Testament and knows so many extra things about each lesson. He's definitely an entertaining teacher and has really good insights. He is a good spiritual leader in our home.
•  Every morning, he wakes up early and lets me sleep longer while he gets ready, then comes and wakes me up. I don't think I've had to set my own alarm clock since we've been married.
• He rubs my feet and belly with cocoa butter every night.
• He humors me when I tell him to "look at my belly!" Usually by the time I can say that, my belly has stopped moving, but I still tell him to look all the time.
• He goes walking with me even though it's not a workout at all for him.
• He also surprises me with treats!
• He's always willing to do whatever he can to make me comfortable when I'm not feeling great, by giving massages and taking care of things so I can relax.

Anyway, hope that wasn't TMI, but I am just so lucky to have such a loving and giving husband!

Yellowstone and Stuff

So, Rachel has been writing all of the blogs for a while.  I guess it's my turn.  I'll give a short update and then some pictures (the reason people read blogs).

Well, Rachel has been working hard at her job.  She's got a lot of kids that are holy terrors, but it was worth it so we could learn some of the things we definitely didn't want to do as parents.  She'll be really glad to be done.  I just finished my semester today!  I'm excited to be done with this school.  Not that I have anything against BYU-Idaho, I will just enjoy something different.  Also the break will be relaxing, I hope.  Now that I don't go to BYU-Idaho anymore, I can grow a beard (Rachel shakes her head).  This semester was eventful.  I took a lot of marriage/family/parenting type classes and got a lot of good books.  That's what's new with me, I guess.

We went to Salt Lake for the 4th of July weekend.  We spent Saturday morning up at a lake in North Ogden on the pontoons and canoe.  It felt good to soak up the sun.  At least it did, until I got burnt, then it just hurt.  I really got burnt on my left arm, which coincidentally is the arm exposed to the sun when you drive.  We went to Sugarhouse to see fireworks.  It took us a long time to get out of there.

On Sunday we went to Music and the Spoken Word.  It was really great.  Rachel and I went down to Provo to visit our friends one last time before we move.  We visited Dane & Bridget Smith, then Natalie Christensen, and then Taylor & Valerie Jackson.  It was good to visit all of our friends.  We planned to stop and see Kayla, and Jeremy & Emily Brown on the way home, but Rachel got sick, so we headed straight back to Rexburg.

Now, let me tell you about this crazy sickness that came upon Rachel.  I've never heard of this before, but now we're pretty well informed.  It started Friday night when Rachel started getting a little discomfort under her jaw every time she ate.  As it turns out, one of her salivary glands had something blocking it (we think it was some kind of stone).  All day Saturday and Sunday the discomfort turned into extreme pain and swelling under her jaw every time she salivated.  This made eating not very enjoyable for her unfortunately.  She had to eat really fast, take Tylenol, and sit with an ice pack held to her jaw/neck until the pain went away.  By Monday it started getting infected and instead of just the pain happening during eating, it was constant.  Any movement or talking made it hurt worse.  She says it was worse than when she had a dry socket.  We considered going to an urgent care center, but decided to wait.  We finally got her an appointment with her doctor in Rexburg, who told us to try sucking on lemon drops (which was probably the last thing she wanted to do) and massaging it to try to force the stone out.  The lemon drops were the magic cure, because in a couple of hours the pain was gone and the gland slowly drained for the next two days.

So, last weekend we went with Thomas and Lindsey Giles to Yellowstone National Park.  It had been maybe 12 years or so since I last went there.  We saw a lot of Thermal Pools and Hot Pots.

There was a really cool one that was called a Paint Pot.  It was just a lot of molten clay bubbling and spurting from the ground.  That was cool.  Here's a picture of one.

We went to Old Faithful after looking at those.  As it turns out, much to my dismay, Old Faithful is not really that faithful.  The geyser blasts every 40 to 126 minutes.  That's kind of a large gap in time.  Don't count on Old Faithful to tell you the time, because he will probably be off by a whole bunch.  Nevertheless, he did explode, as predicted (I guess he's a little faithful).  It was pretty cool.  

Here's us with the old geyser in the background.  It was calming down by the time we got a chance to take a picture.

We went and got ice cream at the gift shop afterwords.  Yellowstone was fun.  

We took a picture of Rachel's pregnancy at 30 weeks last Sunday.

We had our good friends Chris and Nicole Davis over for dinner on Sunday.  This will be the last time that we see them for a long time.  It's sad to leave all of our friends behind and to not have any where we're moving to.  We'll survive.

Our plans haven't changed.  We're moving to Portland for Chiropractic School.  We've got a place to live (almost).  We're moving in two weeks.  It's going to be super stressful getting packed and making that long drive.  I hate long road trips.  What makes it worse is that Rachel and I will be driving each of our cars.  That's pretty much what we've got going on.

Here's a cute picture of my wife!

Great House of Grothaus

     Last week, I took the week off work and went to Salt Lake, since some of my sisters were there visiting at my parents' house. Rob still had school, so he didn't come until Thursday and stayed the weekend. It was the longest we'd been apart since we've been married and it was way hard, but we both kept pretty busy. Danielle and Derek were there with their family and Lindsey came with her kids. Katie came down for the weekend and Liz came with her kids as well. It was a pretty full house.
     We did some shopping, made trips to Antelope Island (in the Salt Lake, where there were bison and other wildlife) and the Kennecott copper mine, went to the Salt Lake temple, ate tons of food, and did some car shopping. I had done some car searching before Rob got there, then when he showed up, we made the decision to buy our Chrysler Pacifica. We were planning to get a safe and reliable car before moving and having a baby, and this one had everything we wanted and more, and was in our price range. We like it a lot. I know it looks like we just buy cars all the time, but really we don't! :)

     It was nice to have a break from work, and fun to see some family members we don't see very often. I didn't take tons of pictures with our camera, but I have a few. I don't have the group picture of everyone there, so maybe I'll add more when someone sends me theirs. :) I am convinced that between the cute kids on my side of the family and the cute kids on Rob's side, our baby will obviously be really cute!

Halfway There

We've hit the 20 week mark, so 20 more and our baby will be here! We had our ultrasound on Friday and everything looks great. And it was pretty clear that we are having a boy. . . Rob and I could both tell before the tech said anything! I think we both had a feeling it was a boy. At the beginning, I thought we'd have a girl, but lately, I'd been thinking boy. For one thing, every time I've had a dream about our baby, it's been a boy!

We're really excited to have a little boy. He's pretty active too. I've been feeling little kicks for a couple of weeks now, and today, Rob felt a big kick already! The baby was kicking a lot so Rob pressed down a little on my belly and after a while I felt the biggest kick ever, and so did he! I didn't think he'd be able to feel anything for a few more weeks, but there was no denying that distinct push. It was probably a high-five actually. We like our baby.

We've been busy with work and school. Rob is working at the campus bakery every evening, and even though he is taking a bunch of fun classes, he has tons of reading and homework. In other news, our favorite summer treat shack, Snoasis, is open again after a long winter of craving it daily. That was our recent excitement, second only to our ultrasound, and our baby is probably going to be born a shaved ice addict. Did it snow enough to stick here 3 days ago? Yes. Did we go to Snoasis that day anyway? Duh.

We're getting really excited to move to Portland and have a little break before having our baby and starting chiro school. That's all the updates we have today!

Baby deets

So, we thought we'd give a few more details about our baby! Our due date is Sept. 26th. We had our 16 week appointment this morning and heard the heartbeat again. Our next appointment (May 8) will be our second ultrasound, where we can hopefully find out the sex! We're super excited.
I've been really lucky. . . no morning sickness, symptoms few and far between. I'll document a little bit about the first trimester, mostly for myself.

• Tons of sleeping, of course! Average 10 hours a night.
• I wasn't very sick, but I couldn't eat anything with strong flavors. 
• Sometimes a food would sound really good to me, so we'd buy it because everything else sounded horrible (example: cheetos). I'd have my little share and then never want it again. We bought a lot of random things that Rob ended up having to finish off. 
• Staples of my diet: rice, cereal, and cottage cheese! Probably the only things that never repulsed me.
• Ew, I had acne for like a week.
• I had a metallic taste in my mouth for 2 days, and read on a pregnancy website that it's semi-common.

There are probably more things that happened, but now that I'm in the 2nd tri, I think I'm getting a little more absent-minded! Maybe it's just that we have a lot on our mind lately though. I feel pretty good now, other than the aches and pains I feel from my growing abdomen.
The thing that has plagued me most: worry. Since I haven't really "felt" pregnant, I am constantly worrying that there isn't actually anything growing in there at all. I was certain there wasn't until our 8 week ultrasound. Then, each time another appointment comes around I can't relax until we hear the proof of a heartbeat.
Anyway, we are really excited. Our current plans now are to move to Portland at the beginning of August, to give us time to settle in and figure out insurance before our baby comes, since our current health insurance won't carry over. Rob is going to school this next semester and taking some fun classes he didn't have the chance to take before, like parenting, eternal marriage, guitar lessons, and weight training!

We had fun in Salt Lake last weekend with my family. We went to conference Saturday morning and spend a lot of time relaxing and visiting. We also bought a new car! We found an excellent deal and decided we'd better go for it, because we know both of our cars need to be replaced before we move to a bigger city. We got a 2005 Hyundai Accent. It is really small (compared to our huge, and really comfortable Olds) and it has some imperfections, but it runs well, has low miles and good gas mileage, and the price was affordable enough to just pay in cash without worrying about payments. Also, it's a little more age-appropriate for us, considering that our current cars are a grandpa oldsmobile and a minivan! Not to mention. . . even though CD players are getting outdated, this is the first car either of us has had that actually has one!! haha.

Our red car, with a crazy person in the background

Happy Easter. . .

Happy Easter. . . 

From the three of us!

Fitness!!

This is a picture Rachel and I took back in January '08, when she was living in Miller Apartments. It was a while ago. But, in addition, it's been a while since I've regularly exercised in my life. I'd say that the last time I regularly exercised was on my mission when I biked all day long. I was on bike for almost half my mission. After I got home, not much working out at all. So I've been pretty sedentary since then.

Anyway, I've been taking this Fit For Life class this semester. I talked about it in an earlier post. Back in January when I had just began running and stuff, I took a fitness assessment that assessed how "fit" I was statistically according to my age. I just finished my followup fitness assessment. I thought I'd report my successes!

• BMI: To start off, they took a waist to hip ratio. This test isn't super accurate, but it's much more expensive to do the better ones. So for my BMI, I burnt an inch of fat on my waist and an inch on my hips for a score of 19.2, which is normal. It puts me at low risk for cardiovascular disease.

• My Heart Rate and Blood Pressure: pretty much the same. But, I'm not sure how accurate their reading was because my heart rate was a little high when they took it.

• % Body Fat: They took a skin fold test. Once again, not incredibly accurate, but not as expensive. I lost 4mm of fat on my thigh, which was good. Overall I lost 1% body fat. I'm now at 12%. This is really good. For men, you must have at least 3-5% body fat to survive, but an athletic man can have anywhere from 5-13%. So this was good!

• Flexibility: They had me sit and reach, pushing a standard along a scale. Before I didn't do so hot, but now I've improved by 5cm. This is good. Even still, I'm pretty average.

• Push-ups: Before I could do 22 before I got pooped. Now I can do 32. That's good, I guess. According to my age group 19-24 is average (50th percentile). 32 is excellent on their scale (80th percentile). I've decided to do more push-ups to build my muscular endurance now.

• Curl-ups: These are like crunches, where I reach my hands about two inches past a line on the floor. I was given 1 minute to do as many as I could. Before I could do 47, which was in the 80th percentile for men my age. Now though, 59! Which is in the 90th percentile!

• Bench Press: I increased my max bench by 10lbs! This was a great success for me, because I've never really been super muscular. But, I'm going to keep working on it!

• VO2 Max: this is a measurement of how well I utilize the oxygen I uptake into my body. Before I was average, now I'm still average, but I did improve a bit. According to the test, I'm up-taking about 2ml/min more oxygen than before. I know it doesn't really mean anything to most anyone. That's good though.

So in conclusion, I improved in all my areas. It doesn't sound like much, but I think it is a drastic improvement! I'm proud of myself and hope to keep myself Fit For Life!!! That was cheesy.