| M | T | W | T | F | S | S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| « Jun | ||||||
| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | ||
| 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 |
| 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 |
| 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 |
| 27 | 28 | 29 | 30 | |||
Well so ends another weekend in the household of the Dillers. We have sadly come to the resolution that we are going to commiserate with our fellow Iowans and spend the winter here. We’ve already had a couple of inches of snow just this week, and I don’t think we’ve had any days that have been above freezing (I don’t track this too well so don’t quote me). So BLAH. Christina and I decided this after much thought, the trip wasn’t going to be long if we did go, so what is the worth of going to good weather and coming back to crappy weather. I have about 2 wks of paid time off at work so I think we’ll make use of those during this winter and get some stuff done with our business. yay !!
Bouncing the subject… I was so glad to receive a package of yummys from the church matriarchs!!! I guess they made some time to take care of our kids and make food for the parents!! I have to admit, this is one of the reasons why Iowa just rocks, nowhere in my travels have I encountered such a loving church family. I was blown away when we had Maeve, cus for 2 weeks we ate like pigs, because people in the church made meals for us, and now this! Sooooo… for those of you that don’t live in Iowa, stay where you are!!! Once mid-March comes along, THEN move to Iowa (I hope Kirk & Karla read this …).
I guess there’s not much more to tell. I’m proud of us because our house has had a good semblance of order for the past week. It’s amazing how much nicer and less stressful life is with a clean house.Well got to go!! Oh a funny!! The other day we were praying for lunch and we were going to watch “the office ” and so I finish, and Maeve adds her little tag “an Gamma (grandma), an Tapaw (grandpa), an Michael!!!!” hee hee I guess if you don’t watch the Office then sorry, and you should really come out of the cave and get some fresh air! Apparently she knows who he is!! ha ha!! Have an awesome week!! For those of you in IA, pray for God to have mercy on us.
David for the Dillers
I think we spent our week trying to “reeecooop” from spending the weekend with the Adams family . We had an awesome time just hanging with the bros and Grandma and Grandpa. I think some small person really liked all the special attention ,and it was cool cus she provided added entertainment. We fished , and traipsed through the undergrowth and heard a guy try to lure the fish into his boat with country music , and Bob lost about a dozen hooks and bobbers ( there were many many underwater snags and such). We caught 3 fishes though and they were readily devoured that evening. Needless to say , lots of fun was had by us . I do realize now though that I, at 29 years of age (this is David in case you didnt notice by all the extra spaces between words), am an OLD FART. We stayed up late on friday , and i had the chinese disease the rest of the week (Dragon”draggin” Butt ) .
On another note , Maeve had a major-ish spill on thursday . She managed to get two ugly scratches on her face and managed to chomp her tongue a bit . I guess she learned that little girls cant fly . Poor baby , on top of that she’s been teething , so she is drooling constantly . I think she is doing better now , the patch on her shirt is only 2 inches wide instead of 4. Anyways I will try to salvage some ZZZZZ’s and hit the hay now.
If you click on the little pictures of Maeve on the sidebar you will get to a place that has the pictures you have been bugging me about .
Blessings
David and Tina , and Maeve
I think this is the first time possibly ever that we have thoroughly cleaned and organized our house/stuff that wasn’t motivated by someone coming to visit. And frankly, those times were always last minute, so there were always those random assortments of things that didn’t fit anywhere at the moment that got thrown together into a bag or box or corner or whatever. This time we are actually doing something about all that random stuff. So far. We still have a decent sized pile that is waiting for organization, so it remains to be seen if there will be any random bags or boxes. Truth be told, there have been numerous instances that I wasn’t aware of this phenomenon happening until later when I couldn’t find something… and it was still later when I found said object together with many other random things in one of those boxes or bags that the pieces came together… but I can’t really complain too much because he did come through for me many times when it was down to the wire. Anyway, after Maeve went to bed last night we kicked butt and took numbers. The kitchen and bathroom are done and our room and the storage/Maeve’s room are close. In the living room by the new desk is the largest pile yet to be assigned a location. So there is a light at the end of the tunnel and it might actually happen on time! Do you think this means we’re officially adults?
In other news, I’ve been trying to compile the words and phrases that Maeve is now using at 15 months. My current favorites are “buh be” (belly button, LOL) and “happy”, which she doesn’t know the meaning of, but loves to say for some reason. Other words that she’s added to her English vocabulary are: up, more, all done, yish (fish), bread, poppy (popcorn), mel (milk), eyes, nose, teeth, ear, elbeh (elbow), I don’t know, toes, shoosh (shoes), baby, trutch (truck), hot, hat, light, grandma, Tita (Titus), oh man!, oh no, oh dear, woah!, home, puppy, ow/owie! (which is a funny one because sometimes she’ll pinch you and say ow! for you, little punk), cheerios, amen, bed, bah (bath), appee (apple), duct (duck), hop hop hop (for a bunny). I’ll probably try to come back and edit the list as I think of more, cause it’s a good record to have. Most kids start out learning the same basic daily words, but it’s always funny to me what random ones they latch onto. That, they have as uniquely their own. I’m going to try to stick a few pictures in here, since who knows how long it will be till we have the gallery back up. I don’t really like putting pictures directly into the blog, but oh well, I guess.
Thanks for any prayers you might have sent our way for good weather, cause those were answered wonderfully. We just forgot to ask for people to actually COME. Whoops. Location, location, location. Argh. If we had been somewhere more populated, we all feel certain, we would have sold a lot more stuff. As it was, we personally made just over $100, which wasn’t that bad for how much stuff we actually have left. Oh my. I think our apartment is heaving a sigh of relief to see it all go. Unfortunately our van is now bearing the weight of it all. It’s about bursting at the seams, and it doesn’t need any help in that department as it is. We’ll be taking a good majority of it to a household consignment store, so we’ll still get some good money out of a lot of it, but this just happens to be the time of year where stuff keeps flooding, so that store is currently trying to figure out how much damage it has. Hopefully they will start accepting stuff again soon. Or maybe we can just buy another car quick.
Fast forward to today: we could not really have imagined a better outcome! We ended up being able to take our stuff to a different consignment place right by the other one that wasn’t accepting stuff. And they took all of it!!! Anything they don’t think they can use there they will just take to the Crowded Closet for us. Woohoo!!! Then we found a great file cabinet there and a half-price couch at the other place. We are so happy for the way we started out. We’ve been ghettoing it for so long that getting a couch is moving up for us =) We had a futon for a while, but then we started using that to sleep on (with a conglomeration of mattresses, which I think I might have detailed in the post about our new bed) but for the last while, kind of by default because we just need to return the futon mattress that we borrowed from my brother, we’ve been sitting on just it in our living room. We’re very unassuming =) So we are really feeling special getting such a decent couch for only $68. I can’t really find the words to explain how cool it feels to be able to appreciate these things. For example, we spent a few summers going to some drastic measures to keep from turning on our air conditioning so that we could save money. Our main method of cooling off was to get ice in our bellies =) That really does work quite well. Also, sleeping under a wet towel, which you have to get up to rewet in the night. Learned that lovely trick in China. (combined with a fan blowing on you, it’s actually quite effective) Once or twice we even hung out in our bathtub filled with cold water. We knew we would rather do those kind of fun, memory making things before having kids. Though come to think of it, Maeve did hang out in a baking sheet of water when she was a wee bit last summer. I think that was more for something fun for her to splash in than for her to keep cool, though. We turned our air on a number of times last year. This year we are, too. It’s super nice and luxurious. I don’t ever want us to take these things for granted or forget that we don’t really need them. We very much believe in living simply, and it’s really a fun challenge. We will continue to upgrade our “stuff”, so to speak, but we won’t ever be excessive. Today we bought a few upgrades – a new desk, a new table thing for our living room, some toy bins for Maeve, and a new shelf thing for our kitchen. Everything doesn’t match really wonderfully, but it’s not bad, and it is certainly a step or two up. We truly feel unbelievably blessed. Today was one of my favorite days in a while, cause God really overwhelmed me. I realized on the way home that the bed we were able to buy was actually covered by our Christmas gift money. We had talked in Costa Rica about using it for that, but I didn’t think we’d actually find something good for that price. Then the couch and file cabinet from today were covered by what we made in the garage sale, and the rest of the stuff will likely come close to being covered from what we make from the consignment place. So all the tax money that we got back this year should be able to go toward a car. Wow.
Maeve was so precious in worship this morning. She was clapping and raising her hands. Priceless.
…a fresh cloud of smelly methane gas, particularly with one’s mouth open mid-inhale, is not a fun experience. No. Not an optimal situation at all. I think I tasted it.
Maeve looks more like me (Christina) when she smiles, and more like David when she frowns. Since he’s the one who taught her to frown, it’s really only fair. Yesterday when we were all getting ready to leave for work she went to one of her drawers and got out a hat, said “hat!” and put it right on her head. It was rather cute. 
decluttering is sooooooooo fun!!!!!!! We are very excited to be making more room in our little space. I find it a fun challenge to make the most out of small spaces. We did a reorganization before Maeve was born, and now that she’s bigger, it’s time again. We’ve decided to get rid of many things, some of which are really very nice, but that we really don’t NEED. And it’s kind of sad really, but even after making the decision that some things should go, we’ve found ourselves waffling a bit on certain items. It all really depends on our mood at the time. Anyway, I’m sorry that we will be selling some of our wedding gifts already, but it’s no offense to anyone because we really did appreciate and enjoy everything we got. We’ve just realized we’re simpler now, in lifestyle, and as has already been mentioned, we need more room. The difficulty we’ve found is in thinking that some of the items would be so nice to have in the event of such and such or someday in the future, but the reality is that if/when we actually do need something in the future, we could probably either borrow it or buy it then. We shouldn’t be so attached to stuff because God has been extremely faithful and giving. You can pray that the weather is not as predicted for today and tomorrow. It would be more optimal for selling things outside if there weren’t 35 mile/hour winds, nor floods of rain.
David checked our blog in Internet Explorer the other day, and for those of you who read it in there, we extend our apologies for the less than stellar appearance. Everything was working correctly on there back in the day, but we hadn’t bothered to look since making the recent changes. IE is not web standards compliant, and therefore it is like a magic show getting different components of some websites to function properly within that browser. You have to trick it 
someday David will work his magic, though the first order of business is definitely to get the gallery back up, and really, to do a bunch of actual business that we are behind on and actually pays 
In the meantime, you might find Firefox a better option anyway. We never looked back. Admittedly, I am a bit of a sucker for customizing, and Firefox has so many fun options 
in closing, our favorite quote from Everybody Loves Raymond last night: (Ray and Robert were driving along together and Robert, who is known for his smelly feet, had just taken off his shoes to annoy Ray) Ray: “We musta hit a skunk that crawled outta the (butt) of another skunk!”
