Review of my trip to Oregon

I never got my vacation post up. Since Isabelle is taking her nap and Tim is working from home today (therefore hogging the internet and blocking my recent LOST addiction), I thought I’d get a post that at least highlights our fun time on vacation. Since this was one of the few times we’ve visited my family without it being a holiday or family reunion we were looking forward to just relaxing.

Once we got to my parents house the first thing Tim wanted to do was go see the ocean.

It was pretty windy so we didn’t stay long, but it’s always fun to get your feet wet (I did not get my feet wet- that water is COLD!).

A couple days later we took this family picture:

Tim made sure we could see Isabelle’s shadow.

My mom had decided that we were going to do a craft project and got supplies for these fun beach bags. We had enough leftover supplies that I made a bag that was Isabelle’s size.

We got to see two of Isabelle’s friends- my now-way-overdone-joke is that they’ll all be at camp together someday and we have a picture of them as babies. Unfortunately we didn’t time the picture session that well and Isabelle was sound asleep, so much so that one baby was putting rocks in her carseat and throwing them at her (don’t worry, she didn’t get hit) without her even moving. Here’s the picture that will provide evidence of friendship in 11 years.

Finally, I’ll leave you with a picture that makes me laugh out loud. This is on the beach at 6:30 in the morning. She did not like being on sand.

Better uses?

Somedays when I read articles like this one I wonder what would happen if Obama was around to raise money for good causes.

I know quite a few places that could use money like that.

vacation, vacation, vacation!

I’ve never been able to successfully blog while on vacation- but I guess that’s what vacation is for! I know you’ve all been on pins and needles waiting for the exhilarating post on all the great fun we had at the coast. I may even end up with multiple posts for the all the exciting stuff we did! Once I get all my pictures loaded!

We came back and headed straight to our friends house for a pool party.

We’ve been home for two days and are getting back into our routine. You’ll get to hear all about our trip the rest of this week- I need to go puree the peas for baby food.

Happy 4th of July!!

We were a “real family” today, complete with our matching red, white, and blue! Thanks to my many years of buying Old Navy flag shirts it wasn’t hard for us to do that.

We went to the parade today and we discovered the real reason for the arm rest that connects our outdoor chairs:

blog wars

Apparently my mom thought it was necessary to “get back at me”. Check it out and I can actually hear my brother laughing all the way in PA! The funny thing about posts about things like cleaning is that all of the sudden you have this giant accountability network. Two people, TWO PEOPLE, asked me yesterday if my house was going to be clean (no one ever comments to me in person about my posts!).

I hosted our play group yesterday so guess what. My house is clean!!! Well, at least our main floor is. Which is a step in the right direction. Those moms never know what my house looks like during the week! Which got me thinking, I have no idea why my grandma worried about her house being clean when they traveled. It was clean ALL THE TIME!!!!! That’s the real trick people. I was laughing to myself that I having people over was the only way it got done.

But enough about boring stuff like cleaning and repressed mom/grandmother issues. Tomorrow is a Holiday!!

We’re going to take Isabelle to see her first parade and have a BBQ with our Sunday School class and then get ready for a 3 AM drive to the airport. I think we’re a little nuts. That means we probably won’t see any fireworks, but we wouldn’t have anyway with a baby that has a 7 pm bedtime.

It’s my mom’s fault

I don’t really feel that I have too many issues from how I was raised. I have a fairly laid back family and we’re pretty close so I don’t spend my days sorting out things from growing up. Until this week.

We traveled a lot as a family, first from living overseas and second from having family in another state. While that has made me a very flexible traveler, I realized that my mom taught me one thing that practically gives me panic attacks every time I travel. It’s this: Your house MUST be spic-and-span before you go on vacation.

I know why she always did it, it is really nice to get back from being gone and not having to spend time cleaning up from a mess you left. But it doesn’t really work for me so I send myself into a mental frenzy for weeks at a time. I bring this up now because we are leaving town for a week on Saturday. And I’ve been worried about making the house clean for over a week now.

So will the house be clean, you ask? No. Has it ever been clean when I leave on vacation? Not a chance.  But I’ll have my fair share of running around the house making lists of what I need to do and start the dishwasher as we head off to the airport. All thanks to my mom.

Castle shoot

I stopped by where I used to work yesterday to talk to my old boss and decided to bring my camera along. It turned out to be a good day for some pictures.

This is her new form of smiling- I think some teeth are trying to get through. I think I’m going to try and use these pictures to play around in photoshop.

First Baseball Game

Isabelle’s 7th month is proving to hold a lot of firsts when it comes to outings. After her first trip to the zoo, we ventured out for her first baseball game! We only made it through 3 innings before she was done being there. It probably didn’t help that she was up late the night before while we were getting a new cell phone.

I did get photo documentation of the event, although I didn’t get any pictures of the actual game!

Here’s one of her happy moments (which turned out to be a pretty good family pic):

First trip to the zoo!

Today our play group ventured out and went on a “field trip” to the zoo! We picked a great day to go because there weren’t a lot of people there so our 5 stroller caravan didn’t get in anyone’s way (well, most of the time).

I didn’t expect much from Isabelle as far as actually paying attention to the exhibits- she liked the fencing better than the animals most of the time.

Here are a few highlights of our day.

The zoo lets guests feed the giraffes- I don’t think Isabelle realized what happened and probably wanted to play with the crackers instead.

Giraffes are greedy little fellows. I was holding the cracker just below the camera and this giraffe begged a couple of minutes. It’s kind of weird to be this close to them.

She couldn’t take it any longer and finally decided that her nap would take place in her stroller. Therefore, she didn’t get to see the hippos or monkeys (mommy did though!). Incidentally, this was her very first nap sitting forward in her stroller. Not too exciting, but I may think it’ll be fun to read this someday and have it documented.

She was out like a light for most of the afternoon and quickly for the night. I think the zoo is taking some good steps to make it more fun for kids so I think we’ll frequent the zoo. For now, I need to go to bed because I feel that I’m blog rambling. (Is there blog word for that? blambling? blombling?)

Two weeks before we take a family vacation to visit my parents. This may be our first non-holiday-or-family-reunion-or-graduation trip together since our honeymoon. It’s about time!

Father’s Day!

I meant to get this up earlier- but just got my pictures downloaded this evening.

Sunday we celebrated Tim’s “first” Father’s Day (it really was his third, but for some reason people don’t do Father’s Day when their wives are pregnant). We decided to make the trip up the mountain and go to his favorite donut place for breakfast! We left bright and early at 7 am, made it to the store, had our Starbucks (first time in a while- we don’t have a Starbucks envelope category so we are hardly there, unimaginable, I know!), drank them while eating the delicious donuts and headed back down to make it in time for church. It was a really good time, Tim hadn’t been up there since we worked at camp so he liked the chance to get away.

Doesn’t sound like much, but it was a great day!

Happy Father’s Day Tim!