Monday, August 4, 2008

July 2008 Update

Okay, so it’s been a month and a half since updating our blog for very good reasons. One, we were out of town for a month…and secondly, our computer crashed while we were gone and Rhett just got it up and running again. Thank goodness!!!

I have lots of fun and exciting things to tell about this month. First and foremost, we will be adding another member to our family in January. I am 15+ weeks along now and feeling great (other than the tiredness of course). The baby is growing well…actually about a week bigger than it should be, making my due date January 16th. I’ll have another scheduled C-section of course, so that means more like around the first week of the year. Rhett is rooting for the end of this year for the tax stuff! We don’t know the sex of the baby yet, but are all hoping for a girl. We’ll let you know when we find out.

The next exciting news is that we just added another member to our family. Wow, our family is growing rapidly! While the kids and I were in Idaho visiting my mom, Rhett decided to buy the boys a dog for their birthdays (we were on vacation during both Logan & Austin’s birthdays). We came home to the most beautiful, nice, calm, quiet, 2 ½ year old female shepherd-mix. Her name was “Sharon” from the Humane Society, but the boys renamed her “Queen Adelaide” after Carson’s favorite movie character (Lightning McQueen) and where Rhett served his mission in Australia. Rhett and I went along with that only because we convinced the boys that we’d call her “Addie”, so that’s her name. She has been a lot of fun and the boys LOVE her. It’s kind of fun to have another female around. If the baby turns out to be a girl, we will almost have caught up to the males in this family!

Our summer vacation consisted of the following saga: WARNING! This is kind of a long story!

We left our house on Friday, June 27th at 5:00pm and arrived in Denver at Rhett’s parent’s house at 8:30am the next morning. We spent a week there visiting with his family at the annual Zimmerman Reunion. Rhett and I won the men’s and women’s family races…even with me being pregnant!!! We went to a speedway and watched car racing, spent the day at Elitch Gardens (an amusement/water park), we were FINALLY able to take a tour of the Denver Mint and then enjoyed an evening at the stadium for a “Rockies” game. Lots of fun piled into one week.

We left Denver on Saturday, July 5th and drove to Layton, UT to stay with our friends Heather & Jared Andersen. It was fun to catch up with them since they moved from San Antonio a year ago. On Sunday afternoon I took Rhett to the airport for his flight home. He called me about ½ hour later saying that his first flight was delayed and wasn’t going to make his second, so he ended up staying with us that night. We visited with my friends Amy & Russ and their families that evening. It was so good to see them again! Rhett ended up leaving on his flight at 6:00am Monday morning.

Later that same morning the boys and I packed the car (again) and headed for Rexburg, ID to spend 2 weeks with my mom. It had been 2 years since I had been “home” and it was so nice to be there again. We kept busy while in ID also. My mom and I went to the new Rexburg Temple, we visited Yellowstone Bear World…thanks to Mike & VaLene who always let us in for free!!! We all got the chance to feed the baby bears this time, which was such a neat experience. We visited with my brother Gary & his family in Idaho Falls one evening, we drove to Boise to visit with my brother Brian & his family one weekend, we went to the splash park & carousel one day…and visited “Taco Time” a lot! YUMMY!!! We ended our time in Idaho at the 2008 Stewart Family reunion, which is all the descendants of my grandparents. We camped from Thursday, July 17th (our 10th wedding Anniversary) to Sunday, July 20th at Heise Hot Springs near Ririe, ID. Rhett flew into Idaho Falls on Friday, July 18th and was able to spend some camping time with us, but unfortunately our time had come to an end and we had to leave on Sunday morning, so that we could make it to Denver that night. We were hauling a U-haul trailer filled with stuff (my mom’s piano included…Yeah!) and about 3 hours into our trip, in the middle of “no-where-ville” Wyoming, the car broke down. (I failed to mention that we had traded cars with Rhett’s sister Melissa for the trip. Mainly because of the built-in DVD players and the hitch for the trailer). Anyway, it ended up that the Suburban’s muffler pretty much almost fell off. It was hanging precariously close to the road. After talking to my roadside assistance people and a towing company in Pinedale, WY, we decided to try to make it to Pinedale for the night. We drove about 25 miles at about 20-30 MPH and luckily made it there safely. Our problem now was that we were in a small Wyoming town on a Sunday afternoon where no auto repair shops were open. We were lucky to find a reasonably priced hotel room for the night…$75 as compared to $165 (the going rate). The next morning Rhett took the Suburban to the shop and by about 1:00pm they had determined the following: we needed a whole new muffler assembly, which would have to be ordered from Salt Lake City and brought in the next day…and cost about $500. We decided that if we could make it to Denver we could get it fixed quicker and for less, so the guy removed our entire muffler and tail pipe and we threw it in the U-haul with the rest of our stuff and we were on our way! It was a loud trip to Denver, but we made it there by about 11:00pm Monday night. Rhett’s dad had made an appointment for us at 7:30 the next morning at MIDAS to get the muffler replaced, however after really looking at the situation, it wasn’t the muffler after all…it was the catalytic converter causing the problems. So we went quickly from a $200 situation to a $1000+ situation. By about 5:00pm on Tuesday afternoon the car was fixed and we left Denver at about 6:15pm. We hadn’t planned on driving through the night again, but we also hadn’t planned on having car trouble. We arrived home in San Antonio at about 11:00 the next morning (approximately 73 hours after leaving Idaho, instead of the 27 it should have taken). Rhett went straight to work as we had planned on him missing one day of work (no pay), but not 3!!!

Since arriving home it has been a mad dash to get the house cleaned up, 17 million batches of laundry done, 2 months worth of ironing to do, OB/GYN Dr. visits, getting our hard drive transferred to another so that Rhett could wipe ours out and start over. It’s so nice to be back up and running again! I’ve also been gone so long from my Primary calling that I’ve been trying to get everything updated and myself back in the “Primary Secretary mode”. This past Saturday we also had to do a quick cleaning-out of our deep freeze, since Carson had left the door open overnight and everything was defrosted. We were able to save some things, but many ended up in the trash. We also spent some time in the garage rearranging things so that we could finally park the van in there again. We spent the rest of the day at Sea World with the other 7 billion people that were there. It was the most crowded we’ve ever seen it!!!

Needless to say we’ve had a crazy July, but some fun and exciting things to report. The next exciting thing to happen in our family is that Austin will be getting baptized a member of our church on August 16th. We hope all is well for you and your families. We will update you again soon on the happenings of the Zimmerman family!

Love you all –
Rhett, Maren, Austin, Logan, Carson & Baby-to-be

P.S. A lot of you have been asking about our niece Grace and how her cancer treatment is going. She’s a little trooper is about all I can say! They have a blog at http://rmcluff.blogspot.com/ if anyone wants to check on Grace’s progress. Thanks for the thoughts and prayers you’ve sent our way on her behalf!!!