the weekly 'what's up.'

this week was one of those weeks that was really busy but full of a bunch of nonspecifics, so there are only a few highlights worth noting.

 

first, we went on a walk, during which we saw an excavator hard at work and had to take a very long observational break.  (ironically, atticus had brought along his beloved excavator toy, so he was in heaven, holding an excavator and watching an excavator.)

 

 

 

sorry for the photo quality; it's a picture of a photo captured on todd's phone, which cost us one cent, if you can't tell.

i turned 34 weeks, and also failed to do my hair or makeup or put on glasses (and i'm developing a lazy eye! there must be something in the van voorst water!) so i'm going to let someone else do the glamorous smiling for me:

  just to prove it really is me from the shoulders on down, here's a realtime photo of me.

now, to undo any progress i had made in allowing you to think that i might possibly look like angelina jolie in real life, here's a photo of me, apparently telling everyone at the table whom i will be eating first.  (i'm pretty sure you can see each one of my teeth, which is a pretty amazing feat for a profile shot):

yesterday was the fourth of july, so i'll be telling you all about that next week.

i spent the week getting to order rugs and lighting and art for the new house - so. very. excited.  it's all coming together, people.

and in our biggest news this week, finneas is finally starting to walk a little further and much more frequently!  yesssss.




that was our week.  what was up yours?  ahem.  i mean, what was up with yours?

we're going to hand out magnets like it's thirty-twelve tonight...

seriously, y'all.  watch this before you read the rest of this blog.  i'm now in the business of posting teaser previews.

on saturday we got the opportunity to be in a parade as part of our new church.  todd played guitar on a float (and by 'played guitar,' i mean, did an amazing choreographed dance with six other guys and won us a 'people's choice' award), and the kids and i walked behind (and by 'walked' i mean, i waddled slowly and uncomfortably, and atticus ran desperately from the band of john deere tractor collectors driving behind us).

but let me back up:  the day started out like this:

 yes.  we were all crowded under a tarp because it was POURING down rain.  we had 4000 icy pops to pass out.  the odds were not in our favor that there would a) be people even out watching the parade and b) they would want an icy pop.  not to mention the 4000 magnets with the church logo that we were hoping to pass out that didn't hold up well to getting wet.  the day was looking bleak.  metaphorically.  also literally.

it was still raining when we started, but luckily there were tons of people out anyway.  those 4000 magnets would not return void!  (that's a lame bible-speak joke that means there was nary an onlooker that went home magnet-less.  we marched to the tune of 'no fridge left behind!!') and shortly after the parade started, the rain stopped.  it was like the sweet, sweet opposite of the story of elijah calling down rain from heaven.

the candeo guys put on quite the show.  here's a teaser, and there is a video at the end for those of you who are in the mood to swoon.

 

 

and finally, a full-body shot of the float and all her sweet features people who walked next to the float:

as you can see, the boys and i are straggling off to the side.  my swollen pregnant feet were all like, 'i know the photo's happening over there, but this is where i land.'  if you can find penelope in this photo, i'll do that creepy thing where i set a place for you at our table next time we sit down to dinner even though you won't be there to enjoy it.  maybe i'll light a candle in your honor.  good luck.

so without further ado, here's a video of the actual routine for you to enjoy:




*update: here's a newspaper article about the parade, along with a great photo of the guys on the float.

video vednesday: i don't know why i'm crying, i'm just crying...and watching soccer...

thanks for the video, jes!

hopefully it's reassuring...?

i have been preoccupied lately with planning how to decorate our new house.  i'm getting to pick out rugs and lighting and paint and throw pillows and oh. my. word. it's seriously fun.  and overwhelming.  but mostly fun.

however, i am starting to suspect that todd has a different opinion.  he comes home most days to me all bleary-eyed from staring at pinterest and the pottery barn website all through naptime, and i'm foaming at the mouth over some rug or something, and i think it has him a little scared.

don't worry, husband.  it will all be okay.  some of it might be pink.  but i promise it will be okay.

the year of the womanly arts...not so much.

i almost titled it, 'the year of the womanly farts' because it's going so poorly, but i realize that doesn't really make any sense, it's just funny because it includes the word 'fart.'  ...maybe i should have just gone with that; it's worthy of a low-brow chuckle at least.

anyway.  the year of the womanly arts.  i am failing.  miserably.

i forgot to pack my tweezers, so i haven't plucked my eyebrows (or, if i'm being honest, my rogue chin hairs) in like two months.  there was that one time i tried to use hot wax to deal with it (yeah, i remembered the hot wax but not the tweezers.  i'm paige van voorst and i'm impractical) but i got a bunch of wax in the hair at my temples and had to cut it out... since then, i've developed a delicate balance of ignoring my wonky bert-and-ernie eyebrows and carefully cutting off my chin hairs with baby fingernail clippers. 

i have three skirts that i rotate between since they're the only thing i find remotely comfortable.  so they're always dirty or wrinkled, and they only sometimes match my shirt.  my shirts are all covered with grease stains on the belly, because that's what maternity shirts do for some reason.  i tried wearing jeans the other day, but they pinched a nerve in my leg so badly that i swore i had a blood clot and was about to die of a pulmonary embolism.

i have nail polish on one thumb and that is all.

my hair got rained on at a parade on saturday morning (ironic) and i haven't showered since then, so i've been walking around looking like erykah badu for the last three days.

but on the bright side, we live in a basement, where the light is always dim, so maybe no one has noticed.  also on the bright side, i'm about to have a baby and everyone will just chalk up my haphazard appearance to sleep deprivation and remaining lumps of baby weight!  that excuse is one of the reasons i love having a newborn.  (todd loves having one more reasonable person to blame his in-public farts on.  and there you go: back to farts and we've come full circle.  my job here is done.)

wutupdate.

this week has flown by, which is good because i'm counting down the days until we can close on our new house (14 from today!).

as i mentioned earlier this week, we spent saturday moving most of our big stuff and unloading it, sunday moving most of our smaller stuff, and monday unloading our smaller stuff into storage and returning the u-haul.  i have never been so exhausted in my whole life.  the kids took a hit with it all, too, seeing as how they basically went feral on tuesday for some otherwise-inexplicable reason.  it was seriously like their nervous systems were shorting out.

 

eating their last meal in this house.  we have pictures of them eating their FIRST meal in this house, also on the floor.  i wish i could put them side-by-side for comparison, but the other photos are on a different hard drive.  also it would probably make me cry.  so i'll avoid that.

 

 

 

this photo really communicates nothing specific about our week, but he's just so stinking cute, right?!

i got to spend time hanging out with friends, getting to know our new connection group, and cooking dinner in a microwave.  (i have a whole new range of culinary skills, as apparently must be developed when you have no oven, and no cooking knives or scissors other than plastic disposable butter knives.  i seriously maimed myself trying to cut an apple the other day.)

i turned 33 weeks pregnant and had a bit of a meltdown when the heat, exhaustion and moving-induced delirium had me convinced that all the packing and lifting i had been doing had caused the cord to get tied into a knot and that my baby would be born prematurely with all kinds of problems.  cheery.  also in preggo news, we chose a name for the baby.

and lastly, we're closing on our story city house today!  it's such a relief that, after these many months of waiting and drama, we will be closing that particular chapter on this whole moving debacle.

happy friday everyone!

INTRODUCING...

we decided on a name for the baby!  at 33 weeks, it's about time.  i think the process probably gets harder with each kid, because you don't have these names just waiting in the years-long queue, and you have to weigh anew whether each possible name is worthy of your kid having to tote it around for the rest of their life.  which is why it took so long.  (that, and i hate the naming process and probably procrastinated more than i should have and was more trigger-shy than i could have been.)

anyway.  on to the juicy part.

our daughter's name is lauren schaeffer van voorst, and we'll call her schaeffer.

lauren is my sister's name, and if you know my sister at all, you'll know she's the awesomest human on the face of the planet and definitely worthy of a 'junior.'  and we just knew that she's humble enough not to name her own offspring in her honor, so we wanted to be the ones to get to preserve the legacy.  lauren is one of the most godly, servant-hearted, intentional, compassionate, creative, funniest people i have ever known, and if our daughter grows up to be anything at all like her, we will be grateful.

schaeffer is the last name of edith schaeffer, wife of francis schaeffer, who was known for being incredibly hospitable, creative, and family-oriented.  her grasp on doctrine and 'the true truth,' as she called it, was incredible and inspiring.  i wish she was my grandma.  and what do we do with our grandmas?  we name our kids after them.  (and also play scrabble with them and steal their past issues of 'country living.'  but that's neither here nor there.)  so here's to hoping that schaeffer takes after her great-grandma edith.

so there you have it.  babygirl now has a name to call her very own!

video vednesday: starbuck!

the gays!

the movingvan voorsts.

last thursday the kids and i headed down to the old house to finish packing up.  my friend kristy took the kids to the park for a couple of hours thursday morning so i could focus.  (she even packed lunches and water and sunscreen for them!  she was more prepared for their survival than their own mother would have been, but it's good for them to be spoiled every once in a while.)  i buckled down and started packing and cleaning out the garage.

after two very full days of packing and wrangling the kids, todd came down, and on saturday morning he pulled the moving van up to the house.  and we, along with some awesome friends, got ready to move our lives out of that house

holy hot steamy chaos.  first of all, it was like 95 degrees.  (that's not one of my typical exaggerations.  i'm being dead literal.)  second of all, we had tons of stuff to move, including a fifty-million pound upright piano that i couldn't bear to part with and an embarrassing number of boxes labeled 'decor.'  and third of all, it was like 95 degrees.

 

they CARRIED this down two sets of deck stairs.  insane.

i'm not going to dwell on just. how. long. it took to pack that truck, or how i became a swollen-footed, back-spasming, useless lump of a human about halfway through the day, or about how i forgot to leave out drinking cups for the selfless and languishingly thirsty movers. (i found some mason jars for them to drink from, so at least that upped the ambience of the day to that of 'pinterest-worthy moving party.')  i'm also not going to ruminate on the fact that we couldn't fit all of our stuff onto the truck in the end, so we had to go back sunday (with the kids!) to load up the rest of it by ourselves and how it took us close to five hours.

all i will say is that, after a very, very long stretch of exhausting, emotional days... after todd and i both cried on the way home out of sheer discouragement and utter defeat... after leaving our old house and old life entirely behind for good... i watched as a tiny baby raccoon got run over by a semi, and also i got a bug bite between my butt cheeks.  and that is how our weekend moving saga ended, and i think that pretty much sums it all up.

what (was) up (last) weekly.

in last week's news:

 

atticus found a dime.  it is the first money that has been entrusted to his care.  he takes the responsibility very seriously.

 

 

i turned 32 weeks.  pregnant, that is.  coming down the home stretch.  i'm a bit terrified, as i have done virtually no planning or mental prep.  we still don't have a name picked out for her.  this is all very fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants, which if you know todd or me at all, you know this is not how we prefer to roll.

we had our first opportunity to worship with our church body, which right now is a house church.  which means kids were there.  which means finneas was glued right here, at the feet of thaddeus, our worship pastor:

 

also, we moved out of our house for good.  which made me want to die.  not because of sentimentality, but because i'm pretty sure that moving is somehow involved in the bag of tricks used iranian prisons.  i'll talk more about it later this week, but i will say that we have some amazing friends.  friends who loaded our crap into a stifling hot truck on a 95-degree day.  it kind of made it harder to move, just having that one last reminder of how great our friends are.

 

on that cheery note, HAPPY MONDAY.