sorry no pictures this time around.

a while ago, i blogged about our dream to one day open a bed and breakfastand do all the gourmet breakfast cooking/baking ourselves. while that dream is still a-brewing in the back of our minds, the forefronts of our minds are being bombarded by bigger and better dreams. like raising our family. not to say that the two couldn't go hand-in-hand, but it's just not something i want to do together. right now. i was just re-reading the comments to that entry and everyone seemed so excited and full of great advice (thank you!!!). i hope i'm not letting you down by saying it's not something we're going to do any time soon. BUT...the house that we're buying (as soon as our house sells) has great B&B potential. a lovely 100+ year old house on 6 /flat acres. so we've taken the first step at least. :)

i also blogged about a "christian sitcom" named [I]Pastor Greg[/I] and since then, a friend of mine, Ken Champion, made an acting appearance on the show. Kenny and I were amazed when we saw his named scroll across the screen and waited to see if it was the same Ken Champion that we know. it was! he was a delivery guy of sorts and seriously, was the best actor on the show. but the show is still horrible. at least Ken agreed with me. :)

rowan update: he's 2 1/2 years old. i swear he was just a newborn. he has entered an extremely cuddly stage. he loves to play with playdough. he loves his babysitter, sue, who comes to see him once a week while kenny and i are at housegroup. when she showed up this week, he got so excited and immediately said, "Bye Bye, Mama and Daddy." he is singing a lot and loves to put on the living room stereo and dance with Sawyer.

sawyer update: he's just under 1 1/2 years old. again...where has the time gone? he is talking more and more. his favorite words are "hat," "baby," "kitty," "eat," "ro-ro" (rowan), and "ball." he is extrememly attached to me and cries the moment i leave the room. he also loves the living room dance party with rowan but his dancing consists of jumping and falling over and over and cracking himself up.

baby3 update: we still don't have a name for him. we have a lot of suggestions, but none that we both really like. at least we've narrowed it down to boy names now and don't have to worry about coming up with a girl name.everyone is asking, so i'll reveal that our girl name was Violet (no middle name). he kicks around a lot more this week than last - he must have grown so much this past week!

house-selling update: we're going to be signing with a real estate agent perhaps in the next week or so. we're frustrated with the FSBO process and think that by selling it ourselves we're turning away a lot of people who might normally buy it if we had it listed with an agent. keeping your house clean for a month is HARD and we want to begin our new life in our new house, so we're willing to sign now.

the Steelers!!! how exciting that we're going to the Superbowl!!! the last time the Steelers were in the Superbowl was 1996, and I was living in London, so I've never been in Pittsburgh when we were in the superbowl. well, i was during the 70s superbowls, but I didn't even know what a football was then. Kenny tells me that he watched the 1996 game in an Oakland bar with his brother, Wayne who was visiting. Wayne was a Dallas fan at the time (who we played then). he now lives with his wife in Seattle - the competition for this year's superbowl title. i hope this isn't a sign.

go Stillers!

in light of this week (or January 22) being the 33rd anniversary of Roe v. Wade, I wanted to share a web site of an organization that has recently caught my eye.

my whole life i've been pro-life, but only in the last decade i've been turned off more and more by pro-life propaganda and protesting. i always felt as though there was a better way to demonstrate against abortion than to hang signs of bloody masses around your neck and stand on a busy street corner.

Feminists for Life is an intelligent source of information on the pro-life feminist movement (but men can benefit from the site as well!).

we had our midway ultrasound yesterday and the fabulous micky, who was our ultrasound technician for rowan and sawyer's ultraounds as well, told us that we have a healthy baby!

she also told us what we pretty much already knew from the get-go...it's a BOY!

without further ado, i give you, "fothird" (pronounced, faux-third), the third Kenneth Smith. He looks like a Laughlin this time...

[pic(pics/jan_06/third_baby2.jpg)]

So we're smack dab in the middle of a crazed city.

Steeler mania is going a bit wild. Our most popular grocery store, Giant Eagle, is stocking their shelves (not fast enough, apparently) with black and gold tortilla chips, the Jerome Bettis "the bus" helmet sheetcake, Big Ben's beef jerky, Hines Ward 86 steak sauce, Bettis' long list of condiments (peanut butter, salsa, mustard, pickles, etc...), and geronimo blitzburgh medium super salsa. (I think they have taken all the "Tommy Flakes" off the shelf, however). There is even a restaurant that has created the "roethlis-burger."

Eat-N-Park's famous smiley cookie (which is given out free to any toddler after ordering a meal) has gone from icing them with it's original white and pastel colors to black and gold.

Even our favorite bagel shop, The Bagel Factory, is selling it's famous black and white cookies as...you guessed it...black and gold cookies.

We had an impromptu gathering of 12 people in our living room for last Sunday's game. Rowan thought all the cheering was hilarious - so much so that he asked to watch "fooootball" a few times yesterday. A few years ago, Kenny and I went to a football party for the AFC championship game and I made a football field cake. Since we lost that game, I won't be making it this year. I guess I can be a bit superstitious sometimes. Or perhaps the Steeler-fan supertitious nature is rubbing off on me.

I never used to be a fan of football. When I started watching it, the year I started dating Kenny (who has been a Steeler since the third grade, even though he moved to Pittsburgh just over 10 years ago), I thought each team had 4 "tries" to make it the entire length of the field for a touchdown (not 4 downs to go 10 yards). See, I can admit this, because now I can tell you about 60% of the rules (the obscure ones I still need assistance on). It makes the game a lot more interesting if you understand the rules.

However, if I hear one more horribly thick-Pittsburgh-accented round of "Here we go, Stillers, Here we go!" I might be tempted to move to Nova Scotia.

this is a mini shout-out to my online friends who i know through another web site, but who sometimes also comment here at our family blog.

for the past three christmases, i have had the privilege to meet up with two of my friends, holly and susie, and their families. the first year, rowan was 5 months old and was the only child so we met at the church brew works for dinner. last year, susie and JB brought along their 4 month old son, will and our sawyer, also 4 months old joined the clan. so we met up at our home. this year, holly and mike brought their 2 month old daughter, makenna, so the house was full with little kids. we've grown and have had three great years of catching up, watching our husbands bond over glasses of wine and scotch, and see our kids begin to play with each other. we're looking forward to next year when we will have two more babies added to our numbers, and are (hopefully) settled into our new home where our kids can go sledding on our 6 acres of hills. :)


kenny gaga over baby makenna; me, holly, and susie and our kiddos; mama with boys in hats; rowan bonding with greymalkin, the matron cat of the house.
[link(pics/k_makenna.jpg)][thumb]pics/k_makenna.jpg[/thumb][/link] [link(pics/girls.jpg)][thumb]pics/girls.jpg[/thumb][/link] [link(pics/boys_mama.jpg)][thumb]pics/boys_mama.jpg[/thumb][/link] [link(pics/rowan_grey.jpg)][thumb]pics/rowan_grey.jpg[/thumb][/link]

Merry Christmas, everyone! And Happy Epiphany (Friday, the 6th)!

We had a lovely familial holiday. Christmas Eve was spent preparing for the infamous Christmas pagaent at our church. I won't go into all the details, but my dad was Santa. He said he only did it because his son-in-law was involved and he'd only do it for Kenny. Or probably one of his other kids or kids-in-law.

Christmas morning was something I've been looking forward to for a while. Rowan and Sawyer had no idea what Christmas was, but did they ever love it. It took a good two hours to get through all their gifts (and they only had 6 or 7 total to open!) because they wanted to play with everything that was opened. They crawled through a tunnel, jumped and danced in their new pop-up tent, played with their race cars, and were amazed by their circular saw and chain saw (with realistic sounds and saws!). And if that wasn't enough - they got to eat breakfast in the living room...on the floor! What a morning. We showered and dressed just in time for church and then spent the afternoon trying to get them to take a nap (which didn't work) and then just headed over to Nana and PopPop's house where they had MORE presents to open. We dined on filet mignon, potatoes and fresh asparagus - a menu much more preferred by me than our traditional leg of lamb, which will no doubt return next year when all the Laughlin boys, who do like it, will be there to eat it.

We traveled to Kenny's parents on Monday, where we had a turkey dinner with all the trimmings. We visited with a few relatives and opened even more gifts! The boys are still asking for more presents. :) The boys came down with a few minor viruses, but have since recovered.

I became violently ill on December 30th and didn't come to consciousness until Monday afternoonish, January 2nd. Okay, so that's a bit overkill, but strep throat is NOT fun to have, especially over a major holiday. I don't remember the New Year. I still don't believe we're actually into 2006. It was the first year I "slept" through it in a medicated fog. I was seriously out of commission and was stuck in bed from Friday night until Sunday morning. Kenny had the kids for two whole days without my help. He was amazing. The boys were absolutely loved and pampered and so well taken are of. And not once did he complain of being tired.

I am happy to finally "blog" our good news that we are expecting Smith child number 3 in mid-June. I'm 17 weeks along - just a few weeks away from the big ultrasound where we will find out if we're having another boy, or introducing more estrogen into the household. We'll be thrilled with either. To add to our joy, two of Kenny's brothers are expecting their first babies this summer as well. We're SO excited to have three new little Smith babies running around the country.

How blessed are we? Happy New Year!