Nursing School Graduate
By Brad SchvaneveldtDecember 16th, 2011
I probably should’ve had Danielle write this one, since it is such a big deal for her, but I wanted to spend some time and brag about my wife a little. Danielle graduated from nursing school after 2 long years of stress, long hours of studying, tears, frustration, more studying, test after test, more tears, and juggling how the kids were going to be taken care of. Not to mention all the school she had to take before getting into the nursing program (that dang Math 1050 nearly killed us, and I say “us” because it was a group effort). It has finally come to an end, and we are both so excited that it is over! All that is left now is to take the boards which will be sometime in January. Anyhow, I just wanted to say how proud I am of my amazing wife, congratulations!
Thanksgiving time was nice and relaxing. I took a couple extra days off so I had a 6 day weekend. Thanksgiving Day was pretty busy, we went over to my parent’s house in the morning and spent some time there, and had dinner #1. About 2 pm, we headed over to Danielle’s family and had dinner #2. Danielle’s sisters Amity and Ann (and her family), were in town, so it was nice to spend some time with them. We ate too much and lounged on the couch when we weren’t chasing Brody around making sure he wasn’t breaking something. The rest of the weekend was spent avoiding having to do anything with Black Friday, I’d rather spend more money that deal with crowds of crazy people. I saw this video of people going crazy over a pallet of waffle irons because they were $2. Pushing and shoving, grabbing 5-8 at a time. Nothing says Merry Christmas, and “I care so much about you”, than a $2 present from Wal-Mart.
Boy am I behind on blogs once again. Well, way back in October, we celebrated a little holiday called Halloween. Last year was a little rough because Brody was really sick, so this year was quite a bit better. We did our annual Halloween party with Danielle’s family which was as fun as ever. Brody dressed up as Spiderman, and Josie was a little bat. The kids had a few activities and we roasted hot dogs, ate homemade doughnuts, and watched our Halloween movie that we made a couple years ago. Hopefully we can find some time to do that again!
It seems like every year around this time, we have the hardest time staying up on posting things on our blog. Maybe it’s because Danielle is back in nursing school, and suddenly we are too busy. Anyhow, we took the cutest pictures of Josie for her 4 month pictures that I just had to post them. She is growing so fast, yet she is still so little. At her last checkup she was in the 50% range for both weight and height. She smiles all the time, and has started doing the baby talk quite a bit now. I think she likes to hear herself, so once she gets started, she’ll talk forever. She has been sleeping through the night for quite a while now, Danielle really appreciates that. Every once in a while she’ll wake up in the middle of the night, but that’s not too often anymore. She has been better at grabbing things. It started by her grabbing her own hands and then sticking them into her mouth, but now she’ll grab at her toys in her car seat, or anything else you put in front of her. We sure love our baby Josie.
Last year we went to Yuba Lake with some of Danielle’s family, so this year we wanted to continue the tradition and were able to get even more of the family to come. We also invited my sister and her family, my mom, and Megan & Tyler and their family. Yuba was even more windy than it usually is, which pretty much made us put the wakeboard away, but we still had some good times on the tube. This year we decided to camp in the “boat in” camp area, which was really nice. The other beaches get crowded with all the trailers and motor homes, so we were able to get away from all of that. It’s a little more effort to boat in all the people with all their stuff, but we made it work. Good times!
So the other day I went over to my brother’s house to pick something up. We went out in his garage to get it, when he starts looking through this big pile of stuff that he has (bikes and toys and such). He says, “you want this?” and points to Tristan’s old bike. I had thought about getting Brody a little bike, but thought he was too small for one. Anyhow, Brody loves the bike! He can’t quite get the pedaling down, but he fits on it and loves to sit on it while we push him around. Thanks Todd!
For Independence Day this year, we had plans to go to the pool, but the weather was not too good, so we had to bag it. We ended up spending quite a while over at Danielle’s parent’s house, while Brody went wild in their yard. At one point we look over to see him climbing the tree, and he was about 7 feet up. It freaked me out a little bit, that kid is such a monkey. We ended up having a BBQ at our house that night, had a fire, and did some fireworks later on. We started off with our little wimpy fountains and at the end Mark busted out the big fireworks that he got. I couldn’t believe how crazy they were, it was awesome. Brody got a little scared when we lit off the big ones, they were pretty loud, but I think he really had a good time watching them.
Josie’s baby blessing turned out to be a very memorable day. The morning was very hectic trying to get ready for church, while making all the preparations for the luncheon afterwards. We tried to take some pics at that time because we knew how busy it would be later on, but Josie wasn’t the most cooperative. We got a few good shots though. The blessing turned out great, and was quite an emotional experience for me. After church, we had our family and some friends come over for lunch, and man was it hot. It was the hottest day of the year, over 100 degrees. At one point, I went outside and it looked like everyone out there was melting, even in the shade. We just wanted to thank everyone that came, for their love and support.
Josie has been sleeping in our room, but we have been anxious to move her into her own room to help us sleep a little better. It was a process because we had to move Brody to the room downstairs which was full of all our miscellaneous junk. We took it as an opportunity to do some cleaning/rearranging, and ended up taking a bunch of stuff to the DI, or threw it away. Anyhow, Brody is now downstairs, and has been fine with the transition, and we moved Josie out of our room into her own, and we have been great with that transition. 
Our little baby Josie is now a month old, and boy has time been flying by. Half the time, Danielle and I are getting through the day like a couple of zombies. It makes it especially hard when Brody is so active, which is pretty much his everyday mode. Josie is still sleeping in our room, in the pack-n-play, and it is a little tough. She makes the strangest sounds in her sleep which have kept us up. It almost sounds like she is choking or something. It made us a little nervous at first, but have been assured that is a normal thing, and we have gotten used to it. She has some good nights, and some bad nights. The bad nights, she is up all night leaving a cranky Momma the next day. On her best nights, she’ll only wake up one or 2 times to feed. She is starting to get the baby acne quite a bit, just like Brody did at that age. At her 2 week appointment, she had gotten back to and exceeded her birth weight—she has been a pretty good little eater. Brody crawled into her crib while we were taking some photos, I just had to put this one in.