Yay! We finally got our exam results from December. I passed all my exams! Yay! It was the as yet unknown Nessie that helped me along, since s/he was conceived sometime around then.



I am a vet school master!

In the first part of our story I recounted how Jeni and I had to come through some hard times together when moving to Scotland and how Jeni first let me know that she wanted a baby. As you can imagine, I was quite surprised by this turn of events. I have always wanted to have kids at some point in our marriage. Jeni used to be dead set against the idea. She claimed that she didn't really like young kids and that young kids didn’t really like her, and that life would just be easier without dealing with them. She also said that she was scared of taking the responsibility for a new, fragile life. Jeni felt that we could probably have kids sometime down the road after she established her career, but that instead of having our own we could help pull older kids out of the foster care system through adoption. This had been Jeni’s position since before we got married and I did my best at every opportunity to try to change her mind.

I’m not sure if anything I ever said to Jeni had any real effect. Thankfully, I received backup to help advance my cause in the form of our new neighbors the Burnses and the Roths. When we met them the Roth family had one kid about a year old, and the Burns family had two toddlers with a new infant on the way. It became clear immediately that Jeni’s claim that no kids liked her was completely unfounded. One-and-a-half year old Isaiah Burns went absolutely crazy for Jeni. I even felt a little slighted, since I was the one who sat down on the floor and played with him and his sister every time we visited. Now don’t get me wrong, he liked me too, but if I ever came up to their place alone, the first word out of his mouth was “Jeni?” Jeni had found a little kid aside from her nephews who really liked her, and she found out that she really liked him, too.

We also got to experience the birth of the Burns family’s new baby. Jeni and I both learned a lot more about infants and their needs. Primarily we learned that they’re not as fragile as you’d think at first. We each got a lot of hands on time holding, feeding and burping new baby Micaiah. Emma was more than happy to answer all our baby related questions with her wealth of knowledge as both a mother of three and a pediatrics nurse. Most of those questions were about how to keep the baby happy and healthy and how to know what he wants and needs when he can’t even talk yet. Emma assured us that even though they can’t talk, they can still communicate. One of Jeni’s biggest fears had been that of responsibility for the baby’s physical needs, and Emma helped her put many of those fears to rest.

The experiences listed above were enough change Jeni’s mind about having children someday, but she didn’t feel the desire for children someday; she felt the desire for children right now. The final influencing factor was God. She prayed about her new feelings as she became more comfortable with the idea of having children. Her time in prayer grew into a feeling of conviction that this was the time to have children. Perhaps sometime after Jeni is feeling better and is caught up with the school she missed she could add her own perspective on this. I have obviously given a straightforward retelling of the bare facts and glossed over the very real and very personal experience of entering a prayerful dialogue with God and being convicted about how to live.

Even though I had been an advocate for children at some point in our marriage, I wasn’t ready to do it right at that moment. There were still a lot of things to think through. Could we afford it? How would it fit in with school for Jeni? What would it mean for my own identity and my plans? Are we doing this just because our landlord won’t let us have a cat? At this point the decision to have a baby or not was up to me. If I said no, Jeni would be disappointed but life would go on. If I said yes, every thing would change in a big way forever. The next post will go into how I came to the decision to have a baby, and what I think it will mean to me.

All is well! We saw the wee Nessie in all his/her glory- 10mm long, yolk sac, placenta, etc. And, get this- WE SAW A HEARTBEAT! Yay!

Nessie is exactly as s/he should be in size for the expected due date. The sonagrapher calculated his/her age at 7 weeks, 2 days. One of the reasons they wanted to see us was a little spotting I had noticed. The bleeding I had turned out to be a little late appearance from ye olde implantation bleeding- she showed me the bruise on my uterus. So I'm healthy, Nessie's healthy, everyone is healthy!


Thanks for all your prayers and kind thoughts, everyone. They mean a lot to us.

Jeni was pretty sick for the last week or so. She, along with about half of her class, contracted cryptosporidium, a parasite commonly found in cattle. The symptoms are similar to a bad stomach flu and last for up to two weeks. The only danger to the baby's health would be severe dehydration since the parasite can't be passed to the fetus. Jeni has been staying hydrated and is feeling a lot better that she was a few days ago. However, because it is an unusual bug to catch during pregnancy our doctor wants us to go in for our first ultrasound a few weeks ahead of schedule. Our appointment is tomorrow at 2 in the afternoon (6 a.m. west coast time). Please keep us in your thoughts and prayers.

Kayla's famous!

By now it is likely that you’ve heard the news that Jeni and I are having a baby. In fact, you’ve probably even heard that we are having a baby on purpose and are really happy about it! Following that, you probably wondered why the heck we’ve decided to do this. Well, it’s a long story...

It started back in October of last year. Jeni and I had been in Scotland for almost three months, and we had definitely felt the strain of moving halfway around the world and into a new culture. Oftentimes we each wondered if we’d made the right decision. Jeni wondered if she had been selfish for bringing me along to Scotland, and indeed I wondered from time to time if I should have come along. To make things worse, Jeni found the Scottish school system difficult to adjust to and wondered if she had made the right educational choice.

“Come on Matt!” I can hear you saying, “We want a heart-warming tale about having a baby, and here you are telling us this sob story!” Alright, calm down now, I wouldn’t be telling you all this if I didn’t think it was important. This time of trial was extremely important in bringing Jeni and I closer in our marriage. This was the first time that either of us thought that our marriage might be in trouble, and so it caused us to really be honest with ourselves about why we are married and what marriage means.

We came to realize that above and beyond all else, marriage is a promise. Marriage is a covenant we made with each other in the eyes of God, and with his active approval and participation. In times of ease or in times of trouble, like we certainly found ourselves in moving to Scotland, the strongest bind between us is God’s blessing. He was the one who brought the two of us together into one flesh, and through this trial we learned what that really means. Selfishness would drive us apart, but submission to each other would keep us together.

We had come to the lowest point of our hard times and saw that things were going to be ok. Jeni then told me one of the reasons why our hard times had been so hard on her. For the previous few months she had found herself filled with the overwhelmingly strong desire to have children. Now for those of you who know Jeni, you know how unexpected this was. Jeni is (or at least was) famous for her denunciation of “ugly, screaming foodbags.” She was scared that our marriage was falling apart right when she realized that she wanted children.

At this point we’d discovered, or rediscovered, the foundation our marriage is built on, and brought Jeni’s desire for children out into the open. This experience planted the seed of the possibility of children in our future. Of course, this seed had a long way to go before it would sprout, much less bear fruit. Over the next few days I’ll recount how we went about making this big decision, and why we think it’s the best decision we’ve made since deciding to get married.

We're having a baby! That's right, Jeni and I are on our way to becoming very proud parents. We're very happy about this decision which we have been thinking over and praying about seriously for several months. We're not very far along yet, just about 7 weeks, and the baby is due in early September. (For those of you keeping track, that means that August through October is going to be birthday party central at the Prices'.) Jeni will continue vet school as I take on the responsibility of caring for our new child, who goes by the pre-natal nickname 'Nessie.' This means that in addition to being your source for news about Jeni's adventures in vet school, Scotvet.net will also be the place to get all the updates on our journey to parenthood. Over the next week or so I will write about how we came to the decision to try to have a baby and what our plans are now that we're having one. We hope this will be a good way to share our lives and experiences with our friends and family, even though most of you are half a world away.

Jeni and Matt's quad-screen MacBook Pro/Nintendo DS rig.

Thanks to Jeni's parents and GPs who funded all but the DS and the mouse. I'm posting this basically to give Andrew something to drool over, and to remember how far I've come from where I started my computing life.

Hey all, I'm sorry I've been so entirely off the ball with posting lately. I think the exhaustion of finals never quite got resolved. Bleh.

Anyway, my week at the pig farm was fabulous! I was in Berwickshire, which is on the very Eastern edge of the Scotland/England border. If you've ever read The Hobbit, the Shire is a good description of the sweet, green village. The farm I worked at was run by C (the guy I've been pestering for ages, and who has been quite patient) and D (his wife, who is amazing in about 500 ways), and there is a variety of farm staff who help out.

Upon arriving at the several hundred year old farmhouse, I was informed that they were just about to start Christmas dinner, which had been postponned due to Christmas being a crazily busy time for pig farmers. People eat ham for Christmas? A lot of ham? Go figure.

So I sat down with the farmer couple, their grown son, and their friends from Holland. We had about 60 delicious foods, including:
Glazed ham
Roast goose with pork sausage stuffing
Roast parsnips and carrots
super buttery roast potatoes
lima beans and peas
braised cabbage
vegetarian haggis
and etc.

It was delicious! I had never had goose before, which tastes like rich dark turkey meat on crack, or vegetarin haggis, which is full of oats and spices and good things.

After lunch, we fed the sheep by driving a quad which pulled a feeding device called "the Snacker". It deposits wee piles of grain (aka "snacks") at intervals along the pasture, and I still laugh thinking of all the sheep running pell- mell toward us, baa-ing loudly. Then we fed the "weaner" pigs (about 8-12 weeks old), and the cattle. The rest of the afternoon was devoted to curling up in the living room digesting.

That night nobody really ate supper (just a few digestives and slices of cranberry Wenslydale cheese), but D made a treacle pudding for everyone. Now, I had only ever heard of treacle in Harry Potter novels, and knew it as basically a desssert based on corn syrup, which doesn't sound particularly appealing to me.

Oh, was I wrong. It was SO amazing. Delicious. Incredible. So much so that when I learned they were making another the night after I left, I almost stayed an extra day just to taste it again. Man.

Anway, The next morning we set up fencing for the weaners to move into the field for the first time, since they spend the first few weeks of life inside to help them stay warm. I never knew that stringing fence for Dr. Mike would be such a useful skill! We set that up and did the morning feeding, then had a bit of lunch. At this juncture C recieved a call from the other person who was supposed to be doing EMS (work experience) with me, who cancelled. So I promptly called Nell and told her to rock herself over to Berwick-upon-Tweed to play with pigs. We then went and moved the weaners, then put the newer weaners into the shed that we had just emptied of the others. I seriously love little pigs.

So, we went and had supper (goose and pheasant stew), and I started working on EMS forms while C picked up Nell. Yay!

Thursday, C and D went with their son A to a friend's estate for a day of shooting, so Nell and I were at the mercy of their main farm hand. Lucky for us, he was exceptionally patient and skilled and taught us a lot about driving the quad (much bigger than the Wuelfings', Lacey!), feeding older pigs, and moving pigs around. We moved some soon-to-farrow sows up to the farrowing pens, some newly weaned sows down to the field, and some new baby piglets (aww!) and their sow to an ark. Did I mention that baby pigs are really cute? Since D wasn't there to fatten us, we had porridge for breakfast, bacon sandwiches for lunch (after I figured out how to use their old stove), and some bread and butter for dinner.

Friday And Saturday were much of the same, though the quad was busted so we drove the Land Rover instead. Yay for driving a cool old stick shift on the opposite side of the car! it was a lot of fun. A bunch of the pigs had escaped (the battery on the fence wore out), so we shuffled some of them around. Food those days consisted of the usual breakfast (porridge), but lunch on Friday was tomato soup with game stock and cream (yum), and dinner on Friday was Cumberland sausage and mashed potatoes, while dinner on Saturday was pheasant with mustard and cream over rice. Yes, we were spoiled.

As a side note, they didn't have the same compunction for refrigeration that you or I do. Milk styed out until it was drunk (2 or 3 days), pots of leftover hung out on the counter, etc. It really freaked me out, but I didn't get sick, so I can't really complain.

Sunday morning, I went out and fed pigs and cows, then packed up my stuff and went back. All in all, it was an amazing trip. Everyone down there was awesome, helpful, encouraging, and hilarious. They invited/agreed that Nell and I should go back for lambing this year. I can't wait!

I put some pictures up here, in the pictures section, so you can see the cute little pigs and etc.

Matt here. Jeni was gone for a week at a pig farm, leaving me here all alone. In the next day or two Jeni will put up some pictures and recount some tales of her trip. To hold you over until then, here's a video I made while she was gone. I wrote the music, too. Enjoy!



The Food Movie on Vimeo

I am leaving this morning for a week on a pig farm down in the Scottish Borders county of Berwick-upon-Tweed. Hopefully, I will return on Sunday with a million pictures!