I am blessed.

We successfully made it through our first marriage conference. I've been on plenty of women's retreats, but I think this was the first "retreat" sort of thing that I've had Jason with me. It was really nice! We attended Weekend to Remember, and I do recommend it, although it was a LOT of sitting! When you're in your ninth month of pregnancy with sciatic nerve problems, sitting for that long is torture, and may have caused the hours worth of contractions yesterday! But enough about aches and pains.

In trying to remember a lot of the topics that were covered this weekend, the ones that stood out to me were on conflict resolution (i.e. how to deal with anger), recognizing our differences, sex (of course), my roles and responsibilities as wife and mother, and even how to get back into reality and try to put all this into practice. There was so much covered, and I'll be wading through it for awhile trying to remember everything I need to and want to. The speakers were excellent this weekend, and one of them is a stand-up comedian - we could tell. :) They provided time to work through "projects" with our spouse, and my favorite of these was writing love letters to each other. I'm excited to see how our marriage grows as we WORK at it. As we stop trying to change each other, and try to change ourselves. As we show appreciation and respect and love for each other instead of holding grudges and griping about the way things aren't. As we receive each other as a gift from God. Easy? Um, NO. But necessary if this is going to keep working. And there's so much I want the kids to emulate and retain as they grow up, but there's always so much messiness that we have to sift through too. They learn everything from our marriage, the good and the bad.

Jason and I enjoyed a wonderful date at Casablanca's, a Latin restaurant here in downtown Appleton. Probably one of the most expensive meals we've eaten together, but SO good. He practically had to roll me out to the car between my contractions, back pain, and extremely full tummy. I was walking at a snail's pace. We got to stay in a hotel last night, which was really nice. It kindof made the "weekend getaway" more of an experience.

The kids apparently did pretty well too! They got to stay with our friends in Neenah, and we are SO thankful for their offer to take the kids. The warmer weather helped a lot too, so they could get outside and make snowballs with the apparently ultra-cool snowball maker. I haven't seen it yet.

And the other joy of this past week has been the tulip shoots emerging from the ground by the back door! LOVE IT! Spring is around the corner! We planted our first seeds indoors this evening, starting with Brandywine tomatoes and sunflowers. I hope it's still not too early. I'd like to get a flourescent light to hang somewhere to help these little guys grow straight instead of leaning against our one little south-facing window.

Anyway, that's the run-down. And so we begin another week, eagerly awaiting a new baby as well!