28 weeks

Well, tomorrow I'll be 28 weeks, and just thought I'd share the latest 2 belly pictures.

We've been hard at work on the nursery, but won't post pictures until it's done. Get ready, my dad's working skills have been paired with my sewing skills to make the perfect nursery for us. Much more to come!

Babymoon Pacific Northwest (stop 3 of 3 Victoria)

The trip from Vancouver to Victoria was a quick 30min plane ride, which was much better than the 4 hour ferry ride that we were going to take.  When we arrived in the harbor we saw what Victoria is known for the historic Fairmont hotel:

When we booked our trip we had no idea that we were going to be there during one of the historic yatch races in town called the Swift Sure. The Swift Sure brings in all kinds of beautiful boats that were also parked in the harbor for us to drool all over: 

Because everything is surrounded by water there are a lot of house boat communities. Literally people are living in boats which they've built to look like houses. Patrick and I checked out the prices on these and the cheapest we could find was $450K. Needless to say the cost of living is higher than Austin: 

Victoria is known for 2 things: 1) the Burchart gardens 2) whale watching. We ended up doing both, and were very impressed. The gardens were beautiful, and were created by a family over the last 100 years. What started out as a rock query ended up becoming this beautiful space.

Major highlight of the trip was seeing Orca's out in the wild. The first picture was our first spotting, and then we were able to follow them for about 30 minutes. It was so neat to be able to see these guys outside of Sea World: 

Babymoon: Pacific northwest (Stop 2 of 3- Vancouver)

 We arrived in Vancouver via the train:

Along the train ride, we noticed that there were eagles everywhere, and it continued when we arrived in downtown Vancouver. These guys were just hanging out in the bay while we were out exploring: 

With Vancouver holding the last winter Olympics, the amenities in downtown Seattle was fantastic. They had the most incredible convention center and cruise ship terminal. It provided us with a great photo op:

Throughout the whole trip, we only had one day of bad weather and it happened to be while we were in Vancouver.  So we decided to head to the aquarium and hang out with these guys:

The oldest section in Vancouver has this clock which is powered by steam. There's a homeless man that collects tips for him informing everyone on the street that the clock is about to chime. We hung back and avoided having to pay the guy for stating the obvious: 

Just north of Vancouver is Grouse mountain, which has 2 rescue grizzly bears. I wasn't quite sure what to expect, but we got some fantastic views of the bears. Don't worry, we weren't as close as it appears. Thanks to a great telephoto lens, I was able to get  a great shot: 

 There was still a ton of snow up in the mountains. There was still about 14ft of snow on the ground, and it was definitely much colder!

 Along with the bears, there was an animals of prey show. I was able to get some great shots of the owls and the eagles while we were up there:

 We're off to our next stop, Victoria, via this sea plan. All of our luggage was loaded in the hatch in the landing gear for the plane. Not to worry, they wrapped our luggage in plastic before putting it down below.

Babymoon/Trip to the Northwest (Stop 1 of 3- Seattle)

We decided that this year we were going to explore the Pacific northwest, so in our planning we decided to visit Seattle, Vancouver, and Victoria. We literally ended up taking planes, trains, sea planes, ferries, and automobiles to travel through the Pacific northwest. Stop 1 was in Seattle, where we were lucky enough to visit our friends Danielle and Logan who had just moved to Seattle within the last year.

First stop was the space needle and the Chihuly gardens. Whole crew at the top of the space needle:

Followed by Pikes Market to check out all the fish and beautiful flowers:

Also at Pikes is the original Starbucks, which had a ridiculous line, so we just enjoyed the outside view:

 One of the most disgusting things at Pikes was the gum wall, which was just walls and walls of gum. Danielle successfully through her gum on one of the windows:

It was a quick visit with our friends, but so great to catch up. We boarded Amtrak to head to stop 2 Vancouver.

News from the Kainer house

Well, it's been a while since I've done some blogging. A lot has happened in the 9 months since I've written anything, but we're starting the blog up all over again.

Today's big news is that we're expecting, and this week we found out that it's a little girl.  Here's the first of many belly shots at week 18:

Here's a preview of our little girl:

From sweet shop to sweat shop

I've always had a passion for baking and cake decorating , but lately I've been looking to learn a new craft. In my last post I talked about getting back into sewing, and in the last couple of months I've taken it to a whole new level. Our poor dining room was converted into what my mom coined a Chinese factory to produce hand made grocery bags. At this point, I think I've made about 15 in the last month and a half. Here are some photos of the factory and one of the finished products:

Last night, my mom and I took a class on oil cloth & laminated cotton, and we made a doc kit and 3 nested makeup bags. I really enjoyed working with the new fabric and zippers, and absolutely love how these turned out. I think the factory is going to reopen for the production of more of these guys:



Final product

My first applique project is complete, and I'm pretty proud of how it turned out. Now I have a backlog of projects that I want to work on, but I guess that's a good thing.