Fun in the park (April 26, 2014)

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...

Eating is such hard work.

Photoshop fun...

Helping me with laundry... it would have been nice to unload
the folded laundry basket upstairs in our bedrooms instead
of in the basement. ;)

He's supposed to be on the other side of the
Exersaucer -- he crawled through -- little stinker!

Window washer -- the window was so wet from spit,
it was running down the front door

Window washer -- notice the wet shirt from drooling/spitting

Fun with Aunt Cara at the Cardinals game

 

10 weeks & a mini vacation

D was 10 weeks old on the 15th, so here he is posing for the camera again.

We also took him on a semi-vacation. Chris had a training class in Dallas and D and I came with. It was a really long drive on Sunday as we had volleyball games to go to Friday and Saturday, so we couldn't spread out the trip as much as we would have liked. We made a 10 hour drive on Sunday in 13 hours. D did really well, with the exception of the last few hours, but who can blame him -- who wants to ride in a car that long?!

Wormy - sing to me again!

We also visited the Dallas Cowboys' new stadium on Monday and took a few pictures. Chris and I had visited the old stadium years ago, and it was neat to see the new stadium and amazing all of the money that they spent on different things!

Chris had to be in class Tuesday through Thursday 8-5, so D and I were on our own for the morning and afternoon. We made sure to have lunch with Chris before we headed 'out on the town.' We shopped at a few stores that we don't have back home (BuyBuyBaby and the Container Store), and the Galleria Mall.

I'd never been to a Container Store before, and it was a good thing that we didn't need anything at home for storage. I made it out of there with only buying two things for D's room! That is definitely a store I'd go back to - they had an amazing variety of stuff in there! We had fun and spent a little too much money on our shopping trip. ;) We were back to eat supper with Chris each night.

One funny thing, D had about had it with travel when we were coming back home on Friday night (we were about 30 minutes away from home), and as he still won't take a pacifier, but wanted to suck on something, I stuck my finger in his mouth to see if that would calm him down. Well, it did and he vigorously sucked on my finger and promptly fell asleep. Not something I really wanted to continue, so we've been on the quest for a pacifier he'll use. He is now tolerating the MAM pacifiers and will suck a little bit on the taggies blankets we received at the baby shower. So, we're working on him taking the MAM pacifier, which seems to help... I think it's our 4th or 5th pacifier to try?!

Changing Plans & Adoption

It's been a crazy day today! We've been waiting to share our news personally with some extended family members that we planned to see in the upcoming week, but they might find out sooner, don't be mad you haven't found out yet, we were waiting to tell in person!! :)

We were picked by E and D to parent their baby boy, due August 12th. We got to meet them June 18th and we were really nervous, but excited to meet them. Well, this morning at 6:30, Chris calls and said that D had let him know that E was in labor as of 1:30 a.m.!!! I really wasn't awake when Chris called me, so I was confused for a moment before it clicked which E & D he was talking about. I think that's the fastest I've gotten out of bed at 6:30 in the morning.

Chris has been in Ohio for the USA Volleyball Juniors Nationals competition since Tuesday and was supposed to come back late Saturday. So, he's making plans to be back in Iowa late tonight or early Friday morning. Good luck on your remaining matches girls! He was able to catch a ride back with some other competing team's parents from Iowa. Thanks a bunch!!

I was going to go with my parents for a long weekend to visit New York City, driving to Chicago today for my flight to NYC tomorrow (Friday) morning... well, that obviously isn't happening now!! I hope they have lots of fun in my place!

I spent the morning doing a lot of frantic, last minute changing plans and planning for being gone for baby boy's birth! I was definitely scrambling to get everything done and packing/re-packing for the soon-to-be 3 of us... oh yeah, and getting the child seat in the car... did I mention there were heat indexes in the upper 90s to 100s while I was installing the child seat? Hmmm... do they make air conditioned garages?? ;-)

The doctors were able to stop E's early labor -- she's about 33 1/2 weeks -- so, now we have to wait for the little one to decide when he wants to make his appearance! :)

Hope everyone is able to keep cool and hydrated.