Wednesday, May 6, 2015

**Spoiler Alert** Baby Adkins Gender Reveal!!

We are so excited to announce that:
 
WE ARE HAVING A GIRL!!!
 


My goodness we are excited!!  And are you ready for the next reveal?

Her name is:  BLAINE AKLEY ADKINS

Here is a full description describing how we came up with her name.


What’s in a name?

When first deciding on a name, we wanted it to be meaningful to us.  It was also important for us to have a strong name. After much deliberation, we finally decided on 2 names, both of which could be for either a boy or a girl.  This time around, we decided on Blaine Akley!  I bet you are wondering how in the world we came up with this!
One very important thing to me is to honor Scott for being in the 75th Ranger Regiment, 2cd Battalion. I’m so very proud of his service and I know that his time in Battalion means so much to him as well.

Scott introduced me to an HBO TV series called The Unit which is based on an Army Special Operations group (Scott’s group was also a Special Operations group).  One of the characters on the show is Jonas Blane.  This is a name that Scott and I both finally liked except we decided to alter the spelling slightly to ‘Blaine’. 

 While in Battalion, Scott was a staff sergeant in charge of lots of great guys that made a lasting impact on him.  Brandon Akley is one of those guys. For that reason, we chose Akley as Blaine’s middle name.  You may be wondering how to pronounce it.  It’s pronounced with a long A and is sounded out like this:  Ache-lee. (Brandon and his family live just one state over from us in South Dakota!) 
Now there is one more fun aspect with Blaine’s name!  When Scott and I first moved out here to Wyoming (and still currently a year later), we didn’t have TV or cable, but we did have movies, DVDs of TV shows, and even some VHS.  One of those DVDs that Scott has is of an older TV show that I had never heard of before called the A-Team.  Well, I quickly fell in love with it!  One of the characters on the show is called B.A. (also Blaine’s initials!!).  If you are not familiar with the show, B.A. happens to be the Mr. T. character that says, “I pity the fool!”  We both think it will be fun to nickname her B.A.!

Finally, if you weren’t aware, in the beginning, we decided to also nickname our unborn child Daryl and said that if we found out we were having twins (we are not) that they would be Daryl and his other brother Daryl – from The Bob Newhart Show (Scott watched this when he was a kid).  Blaine will no longer be referred to as Daryl, but since that was her first unofficial name I thought I’d mention it!

I hope this better explains the meaning behind Blaine Akley Adkins!  We are so excited to meet Blaine!
PS, a fun side note – Scott has NEVER held a baby before!!  Blaine will be his first!!

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Here is a picture of Blaine from my second ultrasound.


House Progress Updates (from this past weekend!)
Scott was really busy this past weekend working on house projects.  Unfortunately, I was not able to help because of being overly cautious and because I was also really really sick (I'll get to that later).

On Friday a.m., we had scheduled the delivery of an excavator to dig the trenches for our water and electric lines as well as our  cellar that would house our cistern and pressure tank.  After Scott flagged down the delivery guy (who didn't know how to get to our house apparently), we realized they didn't bring the excavator we needed! They delivered this dinky little thing that probably would have taken Scott an entire week to dig everything.  Well, that put us behind because within an hour we were expecting the delivery of all our cinder blocks and bags of concrete mix where we needed the excavator to help unload it all.  When that delivery guy/truck arrived, they had over loaded the truck by 5,000 lbs (what the driver said) and he was basically refusing to help unload the truck. Scott asked him several times to move it so he could get a better angle on rigging up the pallets to unload them, but the guy was just really lazy and didn't even want to do that.  In an effort to not get on a negative rant here, I'll explain the short version of the rest.  Scott hand unloaded part of the truck himself, then sent the guy back because he didn't want to waste the entire day when we were paying to rent the excavator.  We will just have to make multiple trips with the truck/bronco up and get the remaining materials that way.  After that we headed to Cody and told the rental place they sent us the wrong machine.  Luckily, right away their driver loaded up the correct one and brought it to our place.  Thank goodness!!  Just to give you a visual - Scott had spent 1 hour digging with the little excavator and was able to dig about 4' deep and 6' wide area.  When he got the big excavator, with about 4-5 scoops he had that same area dug out!  Having the right equipment makes all the difference!

Our neighbors felt bad about what happened and Helen made us an amazing dinner that night so we'd have something good to eat!  That started the rest of our weekend off positively!

Scott worked till I think about 8-9pm Friday night and got part of the well trench dug.  Then on Saturday, he spent nearly 11 hours in the excavator doing the rest of the digging.  Sunday we had a rough start but it was quickly fixed.  Scott started unrolling the 2" water line (it had been rolled up) and because it was so tightly wound, it didn't want to unroll very easily - not a job for just one person.  By this time I was very sick and wouldn't have been any help anyway, so our neighbor boy, Brian, came over and helped!! He literally saved the day!  He worked really hard next to Scott and the two of them unrolled all the water line, and then they also laid out the electric line AND encased all of it in (I think) 3" PVC conduit pipe.  Putting it in the pipe was a little crazy but they figured out if they tied a rope to the end of the wire, fed the rope through a few pieces of the PVC (PVC came in 10' lengths), then they tied the rope to the hitch on Brian's truck and pulled the wire through the PVC - this worked great!! Plus I think Brian had a lot of fun using his truck too!

By the end of Sunday, everything was in the ground and covered up!  As of today (Wednesday), Scott hasn't yet hooked anything up, but he has been getting the wire ready to feed into the house so we can hook it up.

Part of the reason he hasn't had time to work much since Sunday is because of me.... I am currently getting over a severe sinus infection.  Sunday night it got so bad that I actually went to the E.R. because I was having a hard time breathing and all the drainage was causing me to continuously get sick.  The problem is I'm pregnant - meaning I can't take the antibiotics they'd normally prescribe.  So I'm stuck taking Benadryl, an alcohol-free cough syrup, and a prescribed acid reflux medicine.  I've felt bad since last Thursday and I can actually say that today is the first day I'm finally feeling some relief!  Through all of this, Scott has been amazing.  He took me to the E.R. at 3am, stayed home from work on Monday so that I could also see my regular doctor and get all my prescriptions and medicines, then continuously checked on me to be sure I was ok, was eating (when I could) and drinking enough water.  I'm so very thankful to for him!

We are so close to having official (not temporary) electric hookup it's starting to get really exciting!!!  All that is left to do is for Scott to drill the hole into the house, hook it up at the house and hook it up at the pole.  I believe he's planning on doing it all himself, but there is a chance he may have the electric company hook it up at the pole (not positive what he's planning at this time).  But I do know that he is going to have the electric company turn off the power at the pole before doing any of it, just to be safe!

Now it's going to take probably another month till we get our running water in place.  We just received our well pump, the float and controller, but he still needs to get the plastic 500 gallon water storage tank, the pressure tank, and eventually the hot water heater for the house.  And he will need to start on making the cellar.  The primary purpose of the cellar is to keep everything air tight over the colder months of the year so the water doesn't freeze.  So this can be a summer long project if need be, but just as long as it's completed before October we will be good!

Now comes the exciting part - once the electric is hooked to the house, WE GET TO BUY A REFRIGERATOR!!!!!  You have no idea how excited this makes us!!!  Now the rest of the appliance will probably wait at least till June or July till we buy them (because we need to save the money for them).  An entire year+ so far with no kitchen appliances, makes you really excited about the little things!!

I hope you all have a great week! And as soon as I start feeling better I'll get to town and upload the pictures from the past few weeks.

Thanks!

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