thespicelands.com

So sorry it’s been so long since we’ve written anything here! It’s been very busy this last month or two. We had a great Christmas. Papa and Nana Spiceland came to visit and celebrate Christmas and Tru’s birthday, then Papa, Missa, Ally, and Kerri came. We had a wonderful time with everybody. We were supposed to travel to Memphis to spend Christmas evening and the following days with Bama and Jessica, but all six of us were sick. We had an interesting but effective Christmas over Skype video conferencing.

Tru had to have two fillings last week and has to have three more in the coming weeks. Her dentist says that the location of the cavities tells him that better brushing could not have prevented these cavities. She’s just inherited Mike’s teeth and may have issues her whole life. I sure hope that Heidi inherited mine! I’ve never had a cavity in my life. Her experience was hilarious, though. We’d told her ahead of time that she’d have to smell some yummy-smelling air during the procedure. Somehow she’d gotten the idea that they were going to stick things in her nose to make that happen, so she was very relieved to find out that it only involved breathing from a small red nose covering. The dentist called her Rudolph the whole time! She got very relaxed and very happy on the nitrous. She kept saying funny things like “Mommy! I looooooooooooooove yoooooooouuuuuuuu!” and “I’m DIZZZZZZZYYYYYY!” After we went home, she bit her lip pretty badly, so it’s all swollen in the only snow pictures we managed to take this year.

We had half an inch of snow the day before her dentist appointment, and amazingly, some of it has stuck around. I believe today is day 6 with snow on the ground. Many lakes iced over, and the temperatures were in the teens and twenties many days. Tru had a blast playing in it. Check out the pictures section of our website for new pictures.

The first half of the Christmas pictures are up! The rest will be put up on 12/31 after Christmas with my family in Atlanta.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. If you are seeing this from facebook or some other site, click on the link to watch the video on our site.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. If you are seeing this from facebook or some other site, click on the link to watch the video on our site.

Pictures here.

Christmas portraits are up!

It’s been quite a while since we’ve updated everybody about our lives! Christmas was hectic. Mike’s maternal grandfather passed away on Tru’s birthday this year (the 21st of December), so we had to cancel all our Christmas plans and go to Memphis to help Mike’s mother make funeral and legal arrangements. The funeral was a small, private affair. We had a nice Christmas with Mike’s mother and sister and also visited with Mike’s father and grandparents while we were there. Mike and I went out to a nice 5th anniversary dinner on the 28th while Bama and Jessica babysat. Tru had a blast. We were all glad to be home though, when we pulled into our driveway on New Year’s Eve!

I’m 4.5 months pregnant now (18 weeks), and I had my routine pregnancy bloodwork last week, including the initial screening for gestational diabetes, which I was diagnosed with with Tru. The recurrence rate for gestational diabetes is 85%, so I expect that I’ll fail the test again this time. My next doctor’s appointment is on January 22nd, and we should be able to update everyone with the baby’s gender at that point! We think that it may be a boy, but we’ll know definitively in 2 weeks.

We’ll be putting up pictures from Christmas soon, but in the meantime, you’ll have to make do with these portraits I took for our Christmas cards before Christmas. More updates, including video from Christmas, coming soon!

Video: Christmas 2006 (better late than never)

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Better late than never, right? At least one of us has been sick from Thanksgiving until now. Now, as I am typing this, I am sick again having gotten a virus that brought on an ear infection and bronchitis and possibly pneumonia as well. I can’t wait to be well again Anyways, that is my excuse for not getting these videos out sooner (along with always being very busy at work).

Here are some clips from our Christmas this year. We are using the flash video format like YouTube and so many others use. Hopefully this will allow all of you who have had issues in the past be able to view our videos. If you want the high quality version of any of them, I can get them to you in HD.

The three of us have been sick on and off for 3 weeks now, thus our month-long hiatus. I got a stomach bug first, then Tru got a cold, which developed into an ear infection and virus. Mike got a stomach bug, and then I caught it back from him again. We are just now starting to get better.

Here are the long-awaited Christmas Pictures! Missa and Grammer have been bugging me to do Christmas portraits of Tru, and I’ve finally gotten some decent ones after three different photo shoots. Tru was in a good enough mood this morning that this last shoot was more successful. None of these are extremely good, but they are good enough!

Check them out here!

Merry Christmas!

Ok, so its a bit early. But for us, Christmas already started and won’t end until late Sunday night. My Mom and sister came in town for Tru’s birthday and we decided to do a local Christmas together before they left. Things should stay exciting for Tru all they time until we wrap up things with my Dad on Sunday night!

We’ll be updating the pictures throughout the rest of the season.

The pictures are here.

Merry Christmas!

We don’t need anything for Christmas. We ask that those who would have bought us a Christmas present, if you haven’t already bought us something but were planning to, please give to someone in need instead. You could sponsor a child through Compassion International. We have sponsored a little girl from the Phillipines a while back and it seems to be really good.

Erin