Week 23

Week 22

Its Time for the Gender Reveal!

We wanted to reveal the gender to ourselves in a more intimate manner than the dark ultrasound office. A lot of people use cakes to reveal the gender through either blue or pink interiors, but cake is not our favorite. We thought pie would be a great change up! We picked up a pie at Marie Calendars and showed them a note from our doctor with the gender on it. We asked them not to tell us whether it was cherry (girl) or blueberry (boy) and then took it home. Our friend Jon agreed to document our reveal with his camera. 

Thanks Jon!

It seems as though cherry (girl) was a big favorite from the Facebook poll.

Let's see if you were right!

Wonder what the pie could be!

Here we are ready to cut the pie.

 What is it?!

Blueberry! Its a boy!

Thanks for sharing in this happy moment with us!

Week 20

Week 19

Week 18

Week 17

Week 16

Week15

Week14

Here we go into the 2nd trimester! 

Thanks Mom for the Giant's t-shirt. Go Giants!

Baby News!

Most of our family and friends have seen our latest announcement that we posted on Facebook,but I am going to post it again here. It is so cute! 

To explain the images, from the top (left to right): rock-paper-scissors, Harry Potter, Hermione and Ron, the Three Little Pigs, and R2D2, C3PO and R5 (for those of you who watch HIMYM; also R5 is the droid that Uncle Ben purchased before he purchased R2D2). We might be a little bit nerd...

For those of you that requested more images as we progress through our first pregnancy, we will be posting them here on our blog. We hope to keep up with them week to week but please be patient with us. The holidays are soon to be upon us and things sometimes get hectic.

Please feel free to leave comments through these Facebook posts, it is a little harder to leave them on this blog.

We are very excited and looking forward to the changes and challenges ahead!

Our first weekly belly update:

Dog Bed

If you have ever been to the town of Orange, California, you would know that it is known for its antique stores. 

We explore them ever so often in search of treasures or for items to try out a new pin on Pinterest.

A while back, we decided that our pups, Bacon and Daisy, needed a dog bed.

We found a few pictures on the internet that got us very interested in doing something ourselves.

With so many antique stores in our area, we decided to go looking for a suitcase to turn into a bed.

We wanted it to be big enough for both dogs, just in case they felt like being snugly.

We found this great suitcase for only $40 right in town.

For the cushion inside the bed, we found some old pillows that we could sacrifice to the dogs and a very cute dog/cat print from Joann's that matched the coloring of the suitcase.

My husband got to use some of his power tools to cut an opening in one of the sides of the suitcase. We wanted to use the entire depth of the suitcase for the sides, rather than have the dogs possibly rolling right out of bed.

He started with a small cut with a utility knife.

Then started in with one of his power tools.

Any chance to use a power tool!

We marked out the opening so as not too cut too much.

We cleaned up the edges a bit with some scissors.

While Brian did his thing creating a great bed frame, I went about making a pillow case with our new fabric. I went ahead and used an invisible zipper to make the pillowcase removable (and washable!).

Once I stuffed the pillows in, everything was good to go.

Here is Bacon, testing it out.

What a cutie pie!

We love the stitching, handles and clasps, which is why we chose to open up the side rather than removing one whole side.

During the summer, Daisy loves having a soft bed in the shade outside so she can enjoy the outsides while still feeling like she is inside.

Berries berries berries!

It is berry season at the Wenzel homestead this month!

At the beginning of the year, we invested in two varieties of blueberry bush for our garden. Though they are both still under two feet in height, one of them is actually fruiting!

If you did not know, blueberries need an minimum number of “chill hours” or total hours during the year between 32 and 45 degrees Fahrenheit. And being in Southern California, we don’t get as many of those hours as other parts of the country. Heck! We had triple digits for a day or so around this last Christmas. Yikes, I know! But there are a few varieties that will work in our area. We chose Jewel Blueberry and Sunshine Blue Blueberry, which work with only 150-200 chill hours.

So far we have picked about 2 of the smaller clam shell sized containers of blueberries. Yummy!

To better our chances of being able to eat our berries, rather than the birds getting to them first, the hubby built a bird net cage for our blueberry bushes. It was cobbled together out of left over PVC pieces and bird netting. I think this was actually our most successful attempt at keeping out the bigger critters from our bounty.

The blueberry bushes also need a more acidic soil mix, which is why they are in their very own wine barrel planter. No native soil at all.

We have been trying to cultivate our strawberry patch as well, but we have been waylaid by crabgrass at every turn. Hopefully this last effort will have gotten the bulk of it out. We are so sick of digging and ripping this stuff out! Ugh!

Another addition to our garden has been our boysenberry vines. They were dropped off one day last spring by our neighbors! What a nice surprise! We had no idea how to grow boysenberries, but when has that stopped us? In the ground they went! They grew all year, creeping into our paths and climbing our garden fence. We were wondering if it would ever flower! After consultation with the neighbors and the internet, we realized that we needed to get these vines off of the ground, lest they start to go back into the earth again and re-root. So we created this trellis. We wanted it to be sturdy enough to hold the vines, but also open enough not to be affected by the strong winds we have in this area (Santa Anas!). A month or so after installing the trellis, we started to find flowers on the vines! Yeay!

Now, a few months later, we are barely able to keep up with the berries that have been produced. I have already made a berry-vanilla-oatmeal crisp ice cream and have been eating them with yogurt for two weeks now. We have already started to freeze them, so as not to waste them. This last weekend alone, we have already picked about 6 cups of boysenberries from the vines. We have enough still on the vines to keep us happy for a month or more (and beyond since we are freezing them).

Hopefully next year, we will have the berry trifecta! If we ever get the crabgrass out of our garden (in a safe, organic way of course).

If you have any tips on getting rid of the crabgrass, we would sure love to hear them! Or if you would like our ice cream recipe, all you have to do is ask!