Our Lives, Loves and Adventures: Catching up

It's been a while since I've updated the blog with actual writing, so I thought I'd take the time to do that today, and also add a bunch of long overdue photos.

I can definitely see now why they make cameras with WiFi connections on them, because almost all of the quick updates I do are from my phone, and it takes longer for me to get photos downloaded to our computer and then uploaded to the blog.

We've been busy with many things over the past month or so since I've actually written a post.

I fell behind blogging in March getting ready for D's adoption day and other things we had going on. We had icky weather the day before the court hearing so we weren't even sure what would happen if they cancelled court that day.

However, the weather cleared and the we had the hearing; D officially and legally became a part of our family on March 11th. Almost all of our immediate family were able to join, us, and all made it home fine after driving on some not so nice roads.

D was awake and happy before the proceedings and serious
during the proceedings. He doesn't usually wake up that
early in the morning, so he did really well for having been
woken up our of a sound sleep to make it to our court hearing.

We celebrated with handing out chocolate cupcakes with white frosting with sprinkles and going out to eat at IHOP afterwards.

We took a belated 10th wedding anniversary trip to Paris - it was nice to get away and have a special vacation. We didn't go to place we'd been to before, but picked some new places to visit. We were in town for the V-E Day celebration; evidently the Polish president was in town too. We really enjoyed the military museum and barely scratched the surface there.

There are still plenty of places to see there and other day trips to do also. We probably won't be back there any time soon as we have other countries we'd like to visit. For our next big trip, we plan to go to Scandinavia -- maybe with D coming with! That will definitely be an adventure!!

Fontainebleau Palace

Tuileries Garden

We celebrated our first Mother's and Father's days as parents this year. We were home for Mother's Day and visited Chris' dad and step-mom for Father's Day. It's been hard to believe how quickly time flies when you have a little one around. We were thinking about D's birth parents on those days and hoping that they were doing OK.

We've snuck in two trips to North Dakota - once for a cousin's confirmation and for another cousin's high school graduation. It was fun to hang out with everyone, just too bad the trips had to be so short!

D was 10 months old in June and he was 29 lbs, 9 oz and 30.5 inches tall.

Chris has had his usual work traveling and volleyball tournaments to go to for the past few months. D and I went with to a volleyball tournament a few weekends ago. Evidently D and I were talking to Hugh McCutcheon and we didn't even realize who we were talking to, which Chris and the other coach thought funny. :)

10 months

We also had our annual trip to see the Saint Louis Cardinals play the Texas Rangers with my family. It was D's first time at a ball game. We had an hour rain delay and the Cardinals lost, but D did really well and it was mostly a nice weekend getaway. It was also Grandma Nea's birthday, so D got his first taste of angel food cake - he seemed to like that a lot better than the chocolate cake he's had before, so maybe I know what his 1st birthday cake will be. :)

Through all of the usual daily stuff, we've been in the process of buying an acreage. It's actually one I mentioned back in April... yes, April. We first saw it on April 7th, and put our first bid in on April 13th. We wrote an offer that was accepted on June 4th. We listed our house on the market June 12th and have had a few people look at it.

10 months

We thought stuff was going well with purchasing the new house, but the home inspection had a few issues come up that we weren't anticipating, so we're still not sure if we're able to come to an agreement on purchasing it. We'd hoped to have all of this figured out by now. :( Thankfully our house hasn't sold yet, so we're not homeless! There are still not a lot out there for houses we're interested in, so who knows what will happen.

Mother's Day

Father's Day

I can definitely say it's a little harder to baby-proof a house when I want to have stuff looking nice for showing it to potential buyers. I will be glad when this process is over and we've found our new home and sold our old one (even if we don't get the house we're currently in negotiations on).

I've enjoyed living close to family and having good neighbors, so leaving to go to a new house further away (20 minutes, so not really that far away), is something I'm not looking forward to adjusting to, but we are ready to be done with the ups and downs of looking at, buying and selling houses!

D has been really busy and a few pictures below show that. He's investigating things and it's fun to see his looks when he's trying to figure something out or has discovered something new...