Our athletic endeavors...

Here we see 2 pictures of Quinn at her "jumping kwass". She is an enthusiastic gymnast, and demonstrates her abilities at home by jumping on the couch and attempting to help the cat learn tumbling tricks. Really, it's been a lot of fun taking her to this little class---her confidence and her willingness to try new things has increased quite a bit since she's started. Plus, check out the little dress! So cute. She loves wearing this dress and is always sad when it has to go in the "wondwee".

The other picture is of the three of us when we "ran" the Lindstrom Loppet a couple weeks ago. This is a local 5K, and I put the word "run" in quotation marks, because if you saw us, you'd understand how generous it is to call what we did "running". I've tried really hard to keep up with running during this pregnancy, and I'm pretty pleased that I'm still able to do it (although not with this heat this past week!) but our times show that we were burning up the road with a 14 minute mile! Not that I was very fast before being pregnant, but at least I could do a ten minute mile. Whatever--I'm still proud of us. Geoff stayed with me and earned the distinction of being the very LAST person in his age category as a result. What a guy! Even going 14 minutes a mile, I still managed to beat 10 people in my age category...I'm thinking they might have been clinically dead people being pushed on stretchers? Maybe people who only have half a leg.

just another manic monday

not really much to report, but i'm trying to get better at writing more often...you'll see that geoff uploaded a bunch of pictures last night--if you're interested in seeing more, click on the link that says "our web photo albums" to the right...

Quinn seems to be starting to understand that this baby everyone keeps talking about is actually a real baby. when we see babies in the store or at the park she wants to touch my stomach and talk about her baby "stister". oh--we picked a name! i think this is something else that's made the whole thing a little more real for Quinny--being able to refer to her sister as baby georgia. the full name is georgia carrie archibald (geoff's mom's name is carrie). we'll probably call her georgie when she's little, but i really like the name georgia too. we had originally ruled the name out, even though we liked it, because geoff's business partner has a dog named georgie, and we thought we cared. but we decided that we don't care. and the dog won't live forever...morbid i know. but in any case, baby georgia is the name!

what else is new...oh, we got a new car! well, new to us, anyway. this news in and of itself might not be so blog-worthy, but the way in which we obtained the car is a funny story--we had decided that the mazda 5 was the car we'd really like to have, and i'd even gone and test-driven one. then we started looking online for one, and realized how hard they are to come by. the mazda 5 is a cross between a mini-van and a car--it has 3 rows of 2 seats each, with sliding doors like a van, but it is sized more like a car, and gets better gas mileage than a minivan. (about 29 mpg). mazda only started making them 2 years ago, so there aren't many for sale, and we wanted a stick-shift, which apparently lots of people don't like (WHY??? i don't understand). so the end result is that these cars are hard to come by, and consequently, out of our price range...or so we thought!

the plot thickens!!

2 weeks ago geoff came upstairs with this funny look on his face and said, "i just did something." of course i was instantly curious, and then he told me he's spotted a stick-shift mazda 5 on ebay and he'd gone ahead and placed a bid. i was kind of annoyed at first until he told me that he'd only bid 9K and there is NO way the car would go for so low a price. we had a good laugh about it and forgot the whole thing.

UNTIL--a week later, i was up at a girlfriend's cabin for a few days and geoff called to tell me that there were only 3 hours left on the auction and the price was still pretty low--well within our price range. We decided to go for it, and we are now officially People Who Have Bought A Car on E-bay and Lived to Tell the Tale. unfortunately the car was in san antonio TX, but fortunately, my awesome dad was up for an adventure, so he and geoff flew to TX on the 4th of july, made the transaction and were back on the road an hour later...did you know that you can take highway 35 all the way from san antonio TX straight to our house? i guess the gps wasn't really necessary. :) i think the best part of the whole story was geoff's mom's reaction when i called and told her we'd bought the car on e-bay. she said, "geoff? OUR geoff?" it is a pretty un-geoffish thing to do, but apparently e-bay actually has a good history of protecting the buyer. and we did get a good car, so it all turned out. but watch for us on the people's court in case we end up having to sue the seller...i love people's court!

Here are some more pictures including some pictures of the new car.

Some pictures of when Grandma Archibald came to visit:

Helping Grandma with the vacuuming.
Doing some reading with Grandma.

Helping Daddy make some bread.