Thursday, September 25, 2008

Wednesday, September 24, 2008

FREE

SARAH PALIN!!



PAUSE THE MUSIC ON THE SIDE!

Sunday, September 21, 2008

First Haircut
















I have been pretty bad about posting about our family life lately, so here's a quick update. Things have been going very well in the Spence household. Jack and I have become social butterflys, which we LOVE! I joined a stroller exercise class here in Greenwood (don't laugh, it is actually a good workout) on Mon, Wed and Fri. We also joined a mommy and me group on Tuesday mornings and have story time at the library on Thursdays. I have started meeting a lot of nice, new people, which is really exciting.

I have class on Tuesdays and Thursdays and I am LOVING IT! I am meeting many new and interesting people and starting to learn a lot. Much of the class is just about becoming more introspective and better critical thinkers, I am liking it a lot. I only have in class work for a few more weeks, then the second eight weeks of the semester will be a Human Behavior class that I will be taking online. I am not thrilled about taking an online course, but it will be ok. Luckily Luke has gotten most Tuesdays and Thursdays off and we have only had to use our babysitter once so far.

As most of you saw, we had family pictures taken last Thursday and they were GREAT! I strongly recommend Rachel Vanoven for anyone in the area, http://www.rachelvanoven.com

We are excited to see all of the photos and order them.

Our good friends Dustin and Nichole got engaged last weekend so we went out with them the other night to celebrate. Nichole and I went wedding dress shopping today and saw some BEAUTIFUL dresses, it was really fun. If only I could buy another dress...there are so many pretty ones now....

Luke has been working a decent amount lately. Luckily he has most of the week off and his parents are coming to visit for a couple days. Friday, Jack and I are flying back to Iowa to visit for a few days, I'm sure everyone there is excited to see him.

On Saturday, I finally gave in (people have been telling me to for awhile, paired with people calling Jack and girl and seeing his pictures) and got Jack's hair cut. All of his little curls are gone, we'll see if they come back, but I'm not too confident. Hopefully they will though. I told the girl that I wanted a trim but liked the length, I guess she disagreed with me because the next thing I knew, she was chopping all of his cute blonde hair off. Oh well, he still is as cute as can be. He just looks like a little man now. I am going to grow his hair out though, because I like long hair on little boys....and I am his mom....so, I can do what I want!

Jack has been pretty good lately, we did have to go to the emergency room a couple weeks ago (on a friday of Labor day, in fact) because he was breathing funny. Luckily he just had an ear infection, he had a really high fever for a while, but he is all better now.

He is getting bigger and bigger! He is almost exclusively walking. He is pretty good at sharing at Mommy and Me. He was a bit of a loner at first, but he is starting to play with the other kids. He is teething again and has almost 6 teeth. He is completely weaned and we are working on weaning him from a bottle....ok, that was a total lie, I'm not working at that, although I know that I should be, maybe this week?

We went and visited my friend Erin and Baby Tripp on Friday. We had a GREAT TIME!! It was nice being around a friend (I think Erin had fun too) and it was nice holding a little guy, and he is LITTLE! How quickly we forget how tiny our babies start out. He was sweet and let me hold him for quite a while. Jack was good for the most part, but then he was interested in seeing the baby. He pet Tripp like he does the animals, which, I guess, is pretty good for a 1 year old. Hopefully we will be able to have another play date soon!!

Overall, that has been our life up to now. Of course Luke and I are really into the political season and are pulling for Obama, we went to get a yard sign the other day and they are out, which is good and bad, I guess. We're hoping that he heads to Indy one of these days, but we're not holding our breath!

Our friends the Timbies are doing well in Africa, please say a quick prayer for them if you think about it. I think that they are adjusting and I've been able to see a few pictures, Noura is already growing, we miss them a lot and look forward to them getting home.

Feel free to comment, I CHALLENGE YOU TO COMMENT!! That is what it is for! Sometimes I think that I am writing this for myself (well, the political stuff is for myself, but this kind of stuff is for all of you!!)

Lots of LOVE!!

Thursday, September 18, 2008

Pictures






Today Luke, Jack and I went to Ft. Harrison State Park and an AMAZING photographer, Rachel Vanoven, took pictures of Jack and of our family. They turned out GREAT. Visit her website:

http://www.rachelvanovenphotography.blogspot.com

and anyone in the Indy area, seriously consider using Rachel, she is GREAT!!!

Luke and I have been pretty bad about taking and posting pictures lately, hopefully that will change this week!


There are more on her website, so GO THERE!!!

Also, leave comments so I know what you think!

Friday, September 12, 2008

Sexy and Smart



I'm crushin Matt Damon!!!

Pause the music on the side!

Thursday, September 11, 2008

Remember

Remembering 9/11 today. The interesting thing is, on 9/11/2001, I was a freshman in college. I knew that everything was sad, but I thought that it affcted "them" not "me". So much has changed since I have grown......



Click on the picture to read it....it is so telling of our world today....

Hilarious!






THIS IS WHY COMPREHENSIVE SEX EDUCATION IS NECESSARY..... IF YOU DON'T HAVE IT, YOU MAY END UP ON STAGE AT THE RNC.

Thanks Stacy!!!!!

Tuesday, September 9, 2008

Insightful

From the Los Angeles Times

Opinion

Palin: wrong woman, wrong messageSarah Palin shares nothing but a chromosome with Hillary Clinton. She is Phyllis Schlafly, only younger

By Gloria Steinem
September 4, 2008

Here's the good news: Women have become so politically powerful that even the anti-feminist right wing -- the folks with a headlock on the Republican Party -- are trying to appease the gender gap with a first-ever female vice president. We owe this to women -- and to many men too -- who have picketed, gone on hunger strikes or confronted violence at the polls so women can vote. We owe it to Shirley Chisholm, who first took the 'white-male-only' sign off the White House, and to Hillary Rodham Clinton, who hung in there through ridicule and misogyny to win 18 million votes.

But here is even better news: It won't work. This isn't the first time a boss has picked an unqualified woman just because she agrees with him and opposes everything most other women want and need. Feminism has never been about getting a job for one woman. It's about making life more fair for women everywhere. It's not about a piece of the existing pie; there are too many of us for that. It's about baking a new pie.

Selecting Sarah Palin, who was touted all summer by Rush Limbaugh, is no way to attract most women, including die-hard Clinton supporters. Palin shares nothing but a chromosome with Clinton. Her down-home, divisive and deceptive speech did nothing to cosmeticize a Republican convention that has more than twice as many male delegates as female, a presidential candidate who is owned and operated by the right wing and a platform that opposes pretty much everything Clinton's candidacy stood for -- and that Barack Obama's still does. To vote in protest for McCain/Palin would be like saying, 'Somebody stole my shoes, so I'll amputate my legs.'
This is not to beat up on Palin. I defend her right to be wrong, even on issues that matter most to me. I regret that people say she can't do the job because she has children in need of care, especially if they wouldn't say the same about a father. I get no pleasure from imagining her in the spotlight on national and foreign policy issues about which she has zero background, with one month to learn to compete with Sen. Joe Biden's 37 years' experience.

Palin has been honest about what she doesn't know. When asked last month about the vice presidency, she said, 'I still can't answer that question until someone answers for me: What is it exactly that the VP does every day?' When asked about Iraq, she said, 'I haven't really focused much on the war in Iraq.'

She was elected governor largely because the incumbent was unpopular, and she's won over Alaskans mostly by using unprecedented oil wealth to give a $1,200 rebate to every resident. Now she is being praised by McCain's campaign as a tax cutter, despite the fact that Alaska has no state income or sales tax. Perhaps McCain has opposed affirmative action for so long that he doesn't know it's about inviting more people to meet standards, not lowering them. Or perhaps McCain is following the Bush administration habit, as in the Justice Department, of putting a job candidate's views on 'God, guns and gays' ahead of competence. The difference is that McCain is filling a job one 72-year-old heartbeat away from the presidency.

So let's be clear: The culprit is John McCain. He may have chosen Palin out of change-envy, or a belief that women can't tell the difference between form and content, but the main motive was to please right-wing ideologues; the same ones who nixed anyone who is now or ever has been a supporter of reproductive freedom. If that were not the case, McCain could have chosen a woman who knows what a vice president does and who has thought about Iraq; someone like Texas Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison or Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine. McCain could have taken a baby step away from right-wing patriarchs who determine his actions, right down to opposing the Violence Against Women Act.

Palin's value to those patriarchs is clear: She opposes just about every issue that women support by a majority or plurality. She believes that creationism should be taught in public schools but disbelieves global warming; she opposes gun control but supports government control of women's wombs; she opposes stem cell research but approves 'abstinence-only' programs, which increase unwanted births, sexually transmitted diseases and abortions; she tried to use taxpayers' millions for a state program to shoot wolves from the air but didn't spend enough money to fix a state school system with the lowest high-school graduation rate in the nation; she runs with a candidate who opposes the Fair Pay Act but supports $500 million in subsidies for a natural gas pipeline across Alaska; she supports drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, though even McCain has opted for the lesser evil of offshore drilling. She is Phyllis Schlafly, only younger.

I don't doubt her sincerity. As a lifetime member of the National Rifle Assn., she doesn't just support killing animals from helicopters, she does it herself. She doesn't just talk about increasing the use of fossil fuels but puts a coal-burning power plant in her own small town. She doesn't just echo McCain's pledge to criminalize abortion by overturning Roe vs. Wade, she says that if one of her daughters were impregnated by rape or incest, she should bear the child. She not only opposes reproductive freedom as a human right but implies that it dictates abortion, without saying that it also protects the right to have a child.

So far, the major new McCain supporter that Palin has attracted is James Dobson of Focus on the Family. Of course, for Dobson, 'women are merely waiting for their husbands to assume leadership,' so he may be voting for Palin's husband.

Being a hope-a-holic, however, I can see two long-term bipartisan gains from this contest.
Republicans may learn they can't appeal to right-wing patriarchs and most women at the same time. A loss in November could cause the centrist majority of Republicans to take back their party, which was the first to support the Equal Rights Amendment and should be the last to want to invite government into the wombs of women.

And American women, who suffer more because of having two full-time jobs than from any other single injustice, finally have support on a national stage from male leaders who know that women can't be equal outside the home until men are equal in it. Barack Obama and Joe Biden are campaigning on their belief that men should be, can be and want to be at home for their children.

This could be huge.

Gloria Steinem is an author, feminist organizer and co-founder of the Women's Media Center. She supported Hillary Clinton and is now supporting Barack Obama.

Sunday, September 7, 2008

Saturday, September 6, 2008

HAPPY GRANDPARENTS DAY GRAMMY AND GRANDPA WAGS!!!




I LOVE YOU A TON!!!!!! THANKS FOR BEING SUCH A WONDERFUL GRAMMY AND GRANDPY. I CAN'T WAIT TO SEE YOU AGAIN!! I LOVE HOW YOU LOVE ON ME SO MUCH WHEN I AM THERE. I'M GLAD I HAVE SUCH COOL GRANDPARENTS.

LOVE,
JACK

HAPPY GRANDPARENTS DAY GRANDPA AND GRANDMA WELDER!!!



I LOVE YOU SOOOOO MUCH!! YOU ARE SUCH FUN GRANDPARENTS! THANKS FOR HAVING ME OVER ALL OF THE TIME AND PLAYING WITH ME. YOU ARE PURRRRRFECT!!! I HOPE THAT I GET TO SEE YOU SOON!!!!

LOVE,
JACK

HAPPY GRANDPARENT'S DAY GRANDMA AND GRANDPA SPENCE



I LOVE YOU!!!! THANKS FOR BEING GRRRRRREAT GRANDPARENTS! I LOVE COMING TO YOUR HOUSE AND PLAYING WITH YOU AND ZEKE! I MISS YOU, I HOPE I SEE YOU SOON!

LOVE,
JACK

Friday, September 5, 2008

All better





Top Pic - Jack is ALL BETTER with Daisy

New baby Tripp

Cute picture of Jack on his birthday, thanks Ryan!



Just wanted to let everyone know that Jack is ALL BETTER! Thank God! He was really sick for a while, but he's back to his 1 year old antics. Luke was home Tues-today, it was great having him around. We went to the farmer's market downtown, it was HOT, we also went to the War Memorial Museum downtown, it was actually pretty cool. Luke really liked it. I had class a few days this week, it is going well. I got an A on my first paper, WOOHOO! I have another paper due Tues and a presentation on Thursday, hopefully they go just as well. The Spence household is getting really riled up about politics right now, it's an exciting time!

Congratulations to my friend Erin and her husband Rick on Richard Carlson III, aka, baby Tripp! He is a BEAUTIFUL baby, we're excited to meet him!

Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Stephanie wasn't........

Very interested in watching Sarah Palin preach to the choir tonight!

GIVE ME A BREAK!!!

Monday, September 1, 2008

Stephanie is thankful.....

That Sarah Palin's 17 year old has proven that abstinence only education does not work!