Snow Day!

After weeks of feeling like it would never happen, the boys finally had a SNOW DAY! Even though it was absolutely freezing they spent a great deal of time outdoors! Brrr....

Slackers!

Ok, so we have been total slackers in updating our blog! We won't totally beat ourselves up because ok...5 kids, but from this point on we would like to have a once a month blurb about life with the Sandstedt Clan!

So we left off with the news of our baby girl. Well, joyfully she has arrived, healthy and it is hard to imagine our family without her. We have survived the newborn days and are loving seeing her personality unfold. She is almost 20 weeks old and 19 pounds which took her off the chart at the pediatricians. At what point do thick chubby thighs create a complex for a girl? We are blown away by how much growth takes place in such a short time.

The school year started out well with 3 of the boys at Calvary Schools of Holland. They are all doing great. It is hard to believe that Jakob will be in middle school next year!

The holidays flew by. We traveled to Sand Lake for Thanksgiving where we filled Nate's Aunt Lyn's cottage with lots of food and little ones. It was a great time!

We stayed close to home for Christmas (which seems to make sense for a family of 7). We enjoyed having Jenni's brother and sister and families here early December. We also had Nate's brothers family and parents here for Christmas eve and the kids were thrilled to have grandma and Papa stay for a few days after. We followed up Christmas with a 6th birthday party for our little Brayden. We had 15 five year old boys at a bowling alley. It was a really special day for him.

We rang the New Year in with our good friends Dan and Sarah from Traverse City. It is hard to believe that we have reached that age where our kids stayed up as late as us. We had a great time, just value sleep a bit more than a ball of light in New York City!

Nate will be celebrating his 32nd birthday this Sunday. Is it just me or is it odd that his wish list includes a skateboard and a new electric guitar? It is obvious that God knew what he was doing when he gave him 4 boys!

We are excited for what is in store for our family for 2008! Stay tuned.....

It's a.....

We had an ultrasound yesterday that was very unlike any we have had in the past. We discovered that our boys are going to have a baby sister! Everything looked great and we are all looking forward this "sweet complete" to our family.

Basketball Star

Jakob has found the sport that he loves! If he isn't outside shooting baskets (even in the snow), he is indoors watching The Pistons on T.V.

He can tell you pretty much anything you need to know about the Pistons players, and even chose to do a major school project on the team.

He just finished a short season of basketball with 3rd, 4th and 5th graders through school. One highlight was making a basket while scrimmaging during the high school varsity game on "the big" court.

We have had a good time watching his passion for the sport grow!

Glasses Galore!

It is hard to beleive that with dad having 20/20 vision and mom needing glasses just for reading that we had another child with a pretty major vision issue! After Logan had his routine vision screen and school, it was brought to our attention that he was unable to pass it...3 times! We took him for an eye exam and discovered that he has Amblyophia and also is far sighted in each eye. The big shock was to realize that he has very little or no use of his left eye, leaving him legally blind in that eye. We started patch therapy to try to re-activiate the vision in his "lazy eye", and also fitted him with his first pair of glasses. He is doing great with the glasses, however is not crazy about the patch, which we can understand.

Although he showed no struggles with it before, we are excited to see how the glasses with help him with reading and other school work.

We think he looks pretty handsome!

Ultrasound Pictures

Christmas Surprise!

After the gifts were all opened and the paper was cleaned up, Nate and I sat back and enjoyed watching our boys retreat to their own world playing with all their new Christmas treasures. With another Christmas behind us, we started to look at the calender and anticipate what God may have in store for us in the upcoming year. As we were looking at the calender, we realized that in the holiday busyness my 28 days had become 39 days without me even noticing. Although we were both very certain that it was due to stress of the season, we thought we would sleep better after a trip to Walgreens to confirm our certainty. Well upon opening the box, we barely even looked at it and we had 2 red lines brighter than Santa's suit! For those of you who are not following, we discovered that next Christmas we would have a new little bundle in our Christmas card photo. Upon absorbing the shock for a few weeks, (which we still have our moments) we are quickly embracing this new reality and "Christmas gift" planned only by God.
We are now 12 weeks along, just finishing our first trimester. We will add our addition mid August. Aside of fatigue, I have felt really well, which is a huge blessing. We had one ultrasound at 7 weeks and one at 10 to monitor a few things and everything looks great at this point. We will attempt to post those.