Because what's cuter than a baby in a hat? Nothing.
This picture doesn't show it very well, but Isaac is wearing his special camouflage hat given to him before his birth by my good friend Autumn who correctly noted that no grandson of my dad's is properly equipped unless he has some camouflage in his wardrobe. It is a particularly timely photo in that my dad and brothers just returned from their annual man-trip to deer hunt in West Texas. All my memories of my dad and brothers hunting together when the boys were little involve Aaron and Ryan talking so much that if you stood on the porch of our cabin in Duck Hill, Mississippi, you could hear their voices echoing through the trees while the sun came up in the early-morning cold. Somehow this stealthiness failed to snag them even a single deer in what I would estimate was a decade of childhood hunting trips. The fact that dad kept getting up at 4 a.m. and taking them out anyway tells you a lot about my dad.
Apparently, his patience has paid off, as I gather that the boys are much better hunters than they used to be. Last year, Ryan got a big buck, and Aaron's son Clark is the only baby I know who has the taxidermied and mounted head of a prize buck on the wall of his beautifully-decorated nursery. (No really. Kelly wrote about it here in what is quite possibly my favorite blog post in the entire history of her blog except all the ones with pictures of Clark.) This year after the first day of the hunting trip my sisters and I received an ecstatic Facebook message from Aaron recounting how he got a monster buck, the kind people would pay big money on a professional hunt to find. (I am just quoting directly here. It is beyond me why anyone would do any of this, much less pay to do it, but I think that may be about gender.) I am sure Kelly is still hearing about it.
The guys better enjoy their hunting awesomeness while it lasts. I have a feeling that when Isaac and Clark start joining them on hunts, their kill number is going to drop right back down to zero for a while. But the boys have that coming. And they will get to hunt with the cutest deer hunters the world has ever known, so that makes up for a lot.
Kate shows off her big girl tennis shoes and back pack before preschool this morning. When I picked her up a few hours later, her teacher said that Kate had informed her that she did not need to use the bathroom at school because "I already went potty at my new house." Alrighty then.
Lately every time I look at pictures of her I think she looks like such a big girl. Don't you think?
Today Kate, Isaac and I made our first trip to the San Antonio Zoo with some folks from a church we are visiting. It was a balmy 74 degrees out and it could have been pretty laid back except for all the stress I went through trying to make sure Kate didn't wander off. We used to go to the zoo in Albuquerque all the time, and maybe that has given Kate a false sense of confidence about her ability to navigate other zoos. Whatever the reason, it seemed like every 30 seconds I would look up from a conversation and realize that Kate had once again charged off on her own. And there is nothing that makes you look more like a good mother to people you've just met than sprinting away to retrieve your child from the gorilla exhibit.
In between chasing her down and telling her for the 30th time that I didn't know where the giraffes were, I managed to take a picture of her. You'd never know she was up to so much mischief from this sweet picture, would you?
When I took that photo I thought we were just in some kind of really large fish-related exhibit. So I felt pretty dumb when I realized that what we were actually there to look at was hippos. This isn't a great photo, but see if you can find the two GIANT hippos I was missing.
Self portrait with the i-Phone while putting Isaac to bed. Any day now he's going to crawl and then he'll spend all his time trying to get out of my arms and go. But for now he is content to snuggle, and I love that.
Posted late, a photo of my dessert from a Christmas party we attended last night on the Riverwalk in downtown San Antonio. This was a fancy s'more -- a rich chocolate mousse on a graham cracker crust topped with a fluffy marshmallow meringue. I looked like a dork taking pictures of my food, but such is my dedication to dessert.
This is what my kitchen looked like today. At one p.m. After Isaac reached out from his perch on my hip and grabbed a glass of apple juice off the counter and it shattered all over the floor. I took this photo before I began the hour-long process of cleaning up glass shards and apple juice spray. Yes, that is glass on my floor. I'm just trying to keep it real, lest you think all we do around here is gab around to fabulous parties.
Isaac recently discovered the joys of wooden blocks and will sit for huge stretches of time taking them out of a box. I have no idea why that is so much fun, but he loves it. When Dan showed him that a tower could be made with blocks and that the tower could then be knocked over with another block his joy was complete.
On Saturday we celebrated Christmas with Dan's parents. My sister-in-law Hannah is due with a baby right around Christmas, so my in-laws will be traveling to Florida then. We're headed to Mississippi on the 22nd, so we exchanged gifts early. This is a video of Isaac playing with his first Christmas present. Or at least playing with the box. Why do they always like the box so much?
And of course, curly ribbons must go in the mouth.
I took a few photos today, but none of them are as entertaining as this video Dan shot tonight of Kate dancing at my in-law's house. They went over there to pick something up and Kate used the opportunity to bust out a keyboard and put on a show for Grammy and Grandpa. Before you watch this video I want you to understand that my child does not view MTV or any other television channel that could possibly have taught her to dance like this. She just makes this stuff up. Recently we were at a restaurant and Kate was doing a dance routine very similar to this. An older gentleman walked by and commented that "someone is getting dance lessons for Christmas." I think he was right. I just hope she won't be bored in dance class.
Bonus round: When we were posting this video, YouTube pulled up our video history and we watched this video of Kate getting a tutu from my mom and dad just one year ago and we both almost cried looking at how much she looks and sounds like a baby. One year!
I fell off the DPP wagon there for a couple of days, but for a great reason: My sister Audrey is here visiting with us! So here are a few images to catch up on the project and give you an idea of what we've been up to:
December 9:
The Bride has a snack. One day when Kate gets married for real, I am going to be armed with enough photos of her dressing up as a bride to fill an entire slideshow.
December 10:
Dan and Audrey and I went downtown last night to look at Christmas lights on the Riverwalk. And to take the obligatory photo in front of the Alamo.
December 11:
Today we went on an outing that I'll probably post photos of tomorrow (cheating!) but in the meantime, here is a photo of a nativity scene we saw that seemed to be missing a rather important feature. See if you can figure out what's missing.
It's possible that this was intentional and symbolic, like the rest of the nativity scene characters are waiting for Baby Jesus, who will be born on Christmas, but the effect was still mostly comical.
One of the things we did over the weekend with Aunt Audrey was visit a children's museum near where we live. It has all of these separate play areas including a kid-sized grocery store, farmhouse, camping ground, rocket ship and even a newspaper office. (Not sure how that made the list of dream destinations for children, but it was cute.)
Kate was especially enthralled with the grocery store, which had miniature carts, money and cash registers with conveyor belts that actually moved the groceries along. She kept insisting on paying me twenty dollar bills for boxes of mac and cheese, so maybe we need to work on that.
And here we are camping. I am hoping that if we spend enough time in this museum, I can get out of ever having to actually take Kate camping. That is how I feel about camping.
Kate wrapped up the day by playing in the yard with Aunt Audrey and giving detailed instructions about the family portrait she wanted drawn in sidewalk chalk on the patio. Audrey delivered.
Today before Audrey got on her plane to go back to Mississippi, we went to Kate's preschool Christmas program. It was very low-key. The kids just sang a few songs and then there were cookies. But they did make some great crowns to wear. Here's Kate.
Isaac and Audrey waiting for the kids to take the stage. They got very snuggly over the course of the weekend.
Afterwards there were cookies. Audrey wanted me to take a photo of her with both kids, and I think it's hilarious how it turned out. Kate is totally fixated on her cookie; Isaac is making a play to swipe her cookie. Audrey is really the only person who is working on being in the photo.
We're sorry Audrey had to go home. But we'll see her again in a week when we drive to Mississippi. More on that in my post tomorrow.
If I had to pick one word to sum up what it was like to get ready for Kate when we were expecting her in 2007, it would be "expensive." I realize there are prettier, more motherly words. But the truth is that getting all the stuff you need for a baby in the modern age is like being on a weird retail scavenger hunt for crib bedding and bouncers and pacifiers, and it adds up. I know that a lot of this is due to the fact that we don't really need all of this stuff, but when you're expecting your first baby it feels like you do.
So when I was pregnant with Isaac, Dan and I could not stop commenting to one another how great it was that we already had all the stuff we needed. Aside from a bassinet for the swanky nursery we prepared for him in our walk-in closet and baby boy clothes we were given by sweet friends and family, we needed almost nothing. At least not for the house.
The car was a different story. When Kate was born, Dan and I switched cars. I took his blue four-door Saturn and he got my silver Nissan Sentra, a car that was great for commuting but not so great for a car seat. In making this trade, Dan was doing a very sweet thing. The Saturn is much more comfortable. It's bigger, and the Nissan is tiny. When you consider that Dan is a big guy, the sacrifice is even more apparent. I am not sure I have ever seen anything more noble than my sweet, extremely tall husband folding himself into that little car every day to go off to work so that Kate and I could ride in space and safety to the park and the zoo -- but it was also kind of a comical sight. His head almost touched the ceiling.
This arrangement was fine until Isaac was born, and then we had a problem. When all four of us are in the Saturn, Dan usually drives. This means that the driver's seat has to be put allllll the way back, too far to allow for a rear-facing car seat behind it. That wasn't so hard; we just moved Kate's forward-facing seat behind Dan, and while it gave her a really good vantage point from which to kick Dan's seat incessantly, it worked. Then we put Isaac's car seat behind my seat, and, well, the results were less than great. I am not nearly as tall as Dan, but I'm not short either. Basically I had to move my seat so far forward that my knees were almost touching the dash in order to install Isaac's car seat at the right angle. You add a diaper bag and the inevitable pile of stuff that accumulates in the cars of people with small children, and we pretty much looked like we were falling out of a clown car every time we got somewhere.
We were willing to try to make this set up work for the sheer beauty of the fact that both of our cars, while small, were paid off. It's hard to beat no car payment. We agreed that we would keep the Saturn as our main family car through the end of 2010, and would start looking for a larger car then. Thus began the conversations about what we should buy after that.
From the get-go, it was clear we had a problem. I was pretty strongly of the opinion that the only purchase that made sense for us in light of the fact that we now have two kids and could have more was a minivan. It's not like I was happy about this. I realize that a minivan is the height of unsexy pragmatism. But I am now at a place in life that makes an insulated lunch bag a more practical accessory than a cute purse. The ugly purse I do own has Band-Aids, hand sanitizer and 62 receipts from Chik-Fil-A in it all the time. Unsexy Pragmatism is my home address. While I have been making my peace with that, I have scoped out a lot of minivans in the zoo parking lot. Yes, they are ugly. But that whole thing where you click with the keys and the doors just open by themselves? That is magical. That makes me misty-eyed just thinking about it. I heart that.
Dan, of the two of us, is actually the more practical one most of the time. So I was shocked when we totally did not agree with me about the gloriousness of minivans. Not only didn't he agree with me, he flatly refused to consider owning a minivan. Started going around telling people how he was not under any circumstances going to be buying a minivan. Kept talking about how we could just buy an SUV with a third row instead. To which I was like "And then what? We can throw our third kid over the bench seat and just see what happens?" Nothing. He was not having it.
Apparently, back in high school, Dan drove his parents' old minivan and Hated. It. I say it was their old minivan because at one point they owned two. They still own a minivan as a matter of fact, even though now it's just the two of them most of the time. Kate finds this to be part of the magic of Grammy's house. She climbs in the minivan and rides around town on leather seats with her own air conditioning controls, watching Finding Nemo on the in-car entertainment center and loves it. But to Dan, owning a minivan is all tied up with driving that beat up clunker minvan they owned 15 years ago, and he just cannot get over it. As far as he was concerned, it was SUV or 15 passenger van. No in between.
We were at an impasse. Then this summer when all the stuff about the new job in Texas started coming up, the car conversation got moved to the back burner and then rescheduled entirely until after the move. Which brings us up to a few weeks ago, when we arrived in Texas, closed on the sale of our house in Albuquerque and returned to the topic of cars.
In the months we took off from having this argument/thoughtful discussion, Dan had done a lot of consumer research to back up his position that we could buy a non-minivan vehicle that would meet our current needs and leave room for guests or future children. Specifically he was impressed with the GMC Acadia, a crossover-type vehicle that has bucket seats in the middle row, making the third seat more accessible than a bench-style second row. As it turned out, Dan's sister Dinah and her husband Chris recently bought one of these. Even better, Dinah was going on a trip shortly after we got to Texas and said that we could put the kids' car seats in her car and drive it around while she was gone. Meanwhile, Dan's parents were also going to be out of town and offered us the use of their minivan for the same period of time.
This is how we basically embarked on the week long test drive of our two front-runner vehicle styles -- crossover third row SUV and minivan. It was perfect except that ten minutes into driving the Acadia, I found myself waffling on my Minivans are the Best position, because that thing is fun to drive. Having once owned a Chevy Malibu that couldn't get through an entire tank of gas without breaking down, I have not been the biggest fan of domestic-made cars, but that Acadia rocks. And it looks cool too. I could feel Dan's evil plan working. Then we drove the minivan and I swooned every time I opened the door with a clicker. It was not going to be an easy decision.
Two weeks later, we bought a new vehicle and I'll tell you what it is in my next post, in which I will also relate what it was like to shop for a car with Dan. (Preview: At one point I turned to Dan in a car dealership and said "Do we need to leave right now before you do something we're going to regret?" True story.) Feel free to guess whether we bought a minivan or an SUV in the comments section in the meantime and no fair spoiling the surprise if you've already seen us in our new ride. I hope the suspense isn't killing you.
As of this week, Isaac is mobile. Like my sister-in-law Kelly wisely chose to do, I seriously considered not putting up a tree this year, but decided that since Isaac couldn't crawl yet I should go for it. Well, the tree has been up for less than a week, and apparently it was the last little bit of motivation Isaac needed to make a breakthrough on his army crawling skills. Now he can crawl to the tree, the DVD cabinet, and he can get his own toys when he wants them. Moreover he can get to Kate's toys without her permission! She is not going to be pleased, but look how happy he is.
Kate was watching Sesame Street, blissfully unaware that this was happening, or you would have heard the shrieking all the way from Texas.
This one is blurry and shot with the I-Phone, but here he is going straight for the tree. I might as well have dangled a giant baby snack in front of him. I have to go now. It's time to cover the electrical outlets.
I've decided to put the big reveal at the start, so to see what kind of car we bought, watch this video of Kate seeing it for the first time. Dan brought it home after she was asleep, but we had told her there might be a new car in the driveway when she woke up in the morning. It was the first thing she asked about, as you can tell from the fact that she's still got her jammies on in this video.
Yes, after all of Dan's opposition and even after my brief love affair with a GMC Acadia, we bought a minivan. A Honda Odyssey, to be exact. No one is more surprised by this than me. After months of disagreement on the subject, I figured I should do my best to visualize our lives as SUV owners because I was certain Dan would never purchase a minivan. I really did like the Acadia. It was fun to drive and roomy, and Kate loved it. And in perhaps the shock of my life, after having argued for buying a minivan for months, I really didn't enjoy the Chrysler minivan we drove that week.No offense to Chrysler owners, because I loved the automatic doors and features, but I couldn't get comfortable driving it. It felt too big and I couldn't park it to save my life. I was ready to give the Acadia serious consideration and I told Dan so. But before we ruled the minivan out completely, I said I wanted to test drive the top two foreign-made minivans -- the Honda Odyssey and the Toyota Sienna. Dan agreed, and since we had a date night already scheduled with babysitting from Dan's mom, we headed out to the Honda dealership a few nights later.
I have seen my husband fall in love a few times. Once with me. Once with Kate. Once with Isaac. Once with a Nintendo Wii. And five minutes into that test drive, Dan was in love with the Honda Odyssey. I laughed at him until I drove it and then I couldn't laugh because I was too busy LOVING THAT MINIVAN. We intended to just do a quick test drive and ended up on the lot for over an hour talking with the salesman about options and prices. Well, OK, that's what Dan was doing. I was sitting in the back seat, lying down in the bucket seats and trying to figure out if Kate could possibly kick me in the back of the head from what would be her seat. (No? I'll take it!)
On the way off the lot, we walked up to the main dealership building and viewed the brand new, just-arrived 2011 Honda Odyssey. It was pretty, but we didn't have time to test drive it that night. Besides, when we were getting ready to car shop, one of the few things we could agree on was that we would definitely not be buying a brand new car. Used was the way we would be going, no questions asked, end of story. If you could see what the inside of our Saturn looked like after three years of kids riding around in it, you would understand our commitment to not starting out with anything nicer than we can keep up. It's just too heartbreaking when it ends up encrusted in goldfish cracker crumbs. But over the next week Dan kept mentioning going back to the dealership to drive the new Odyssey. The 2011 one. The one with a model year later than the calendar year that isn't even over yet.
Earlier in our marriage, this would have made me nervous. When we were newlyweds, I used to get all worked up over stuff that Dan said in passing, but that was before I realized an important fact about my husband -- he is a verbal processor. I am not. I still forget this some times, and chaos ensues. We'll get up on a Saturday morning and over breakfast, Dan will say "I think we should go to the zoo with the kids today. We could leave by 9:30 and be back by noon." And I'll say "OK!" Then I'll spend the next hour getting out picnic blankets and sunblock and strollers. As I'm getting ready to put the kids in the car, Dan will wander back into the room and say "So what are we going to do today?" And then my head explodes because what do you mean what are we going to do? We are going to the zoo. GET IN THE CAR. It's a moment that is totally my own fault, because I have forgotten that as a verbal processor, when Dan says "I think we should go to the zoo," it is because that thought just entered his mind for the first time ever. Maybe he doesn't even want to go to the zoo. Maybe he wants to go to the movies. If he's still saying he wants to go to the zoo an hour later, and I have gotten him to sign several documents stating his intentions to go to the zoo, then it's time to get out the backpack. Until then there are no plans, just a man talking.
As an internal processor I cause a different kind of problem, the kind where one day after weeks of thought and zero verbal expression, I announce over dinner "I am going to paint the dining room purple" and Dan chokes on his green beans trying to ask when we decided we were painting the dining room. Dan really gets the worse end of the deal in all this because whereas he knows he is just trying his thoughts on and can easily be talked out of them, I have invested in my thoughts in all the time I have been not sharing them. By the time it comes out of my mouth, I really think that painting the dining room purple is the right and holy thing to do. For the children. Try to talk that down.
The way this played out in the car buying scene is that when Dan started talking about wanting to drive the new Honda minivan, I immediately chalked it up to verbal processing and quit listening to him. After all, we had agreed in multiple previous conversations that we were in the market for a used car only. So I just said "Uh huh?" and "Mmm" while he looked at the new Odyssey online and read me interesting facts about it. When he started saying how it was really hard to find used Odysseys with low mileage and recent year models and maybe we should consider just buying a new one, I smiled and nodded. Because I am not taking the bait! That man is just talking! Nothing to see here. Move along.
Well. A week later when after arranging for a babysitter so that we could attend an event hosted by the church we are visiting, the event got canceled at the last minute. Since the babysitter was coming anyway, we decided we should still go out. The Honda dealership had emailed Dan that day to say that a used Odyssey that we might be interested in had arrived on the lot that day, so Dan said that we should swing by to take a look at it and maybe, just maybe, we would test drive the 2011 Odyssey while we were there. This was when I started to worry a little.
Twenty minutes later, we were test driving the new 2011 Honda Odyssey and it was awesome. Of course it was. They don't make newer models to achieve less awesomeness. They make newer models to achieve higher expensiveness, and let me tell you that they have definitely met that goal with the new Hondas. Yikes. The mere mention of the price tag was enough to send me straight to "How about that used one y'all called us about? Where is that?" But Dan was still talking to the salesman about the new one. Not in a casual way, either. In a way where suddenly it was nine o clock at night and the dealership was closing but the manager was out taking a look at our Nissan so they could tell us what they would give us for the trade-in if we drove a new one off the lot that night. That was the first time they left us alone together all night and I could hardly wait for the salesman to get out of earshot before I whipped around to Dan and whisper-screamed "What are you doing? We were going to buy a used car! Do we need to leave right now before you do something we're going to regret?"
Maybe if I had car shopped with Dan more I wouldn't have gotten so worried. Truth be told, we've bought one car together in the course of our marriage, and even that wasn't really a joint effort. In 2005 my lemon of a Chevy Malibu, in what can only be described as a merciful act of providence, was hit with hail damage twice within 24 hours and totaled. When the insurance company cut us a check, Dan did a ton of consumer research and narrowed it down to a few cars that would work for us. Then I gave him helpful suggestions about the things I care about. In that instance, I think my input was "I think silver cars are pretty." I never set foot on a car lot until it was time to pick up the silver Nissan Sentra we were buying.
In a calmer moment, I might have reflected a bit more and remembered that with no involvement from me, the car that Dan bought on that occasion was perfect for what we needed at the time. The Nissan got great gas mileage and never once broke down when I was driving it on the 45-minute daily commute I did every day for two years. I probably also would have remembered that Dan has never once in the course of our marriage made any decision, financial or otherwise, that was irresponsible. But I didn't reflect on any of that, and I freaked out. I do think the relentlessness of car salesmen was a factor. I felt like Dan and this salesman were playing a weird game of poker and I was supposed to be playing too, but I couldn't figure out if my hand was any good. Come to think of it, that is how I feel when I play real poker, which is probably why I don't play poker.
After my little meltdown, Dan assured me that he mostly wanted to go through the negotiation process and find out if they would give us a deal that would make a new model feasible. They made their best offer, we said we'd think about it and we walked away. We talked it over for a couple of days and ultimately decided we'd keep looking around for a used one, and within a few more days one showed up online at a dealership a half hour from where we live. Dan drove out there that night, looked at the car and bought it. There was very little drama, possibly because I wasn't there. Clearly I do not handle high pressure situations well.
Now that the saga is over, we are quite happy with our minivan, even Dan, who put a Texas A&M bumper sticker on it about 20 minutes after we got it home. It really is easy to drive, there is so much more room, and loading the kids up is easy now that I can just open the doors remotely and let Kate climb into her seat. Kate, incidentally, believes that the doors are voice-controlled. This is something she picked up from riding with my mother-in-law, who would let Kate say "Doors open!" and then hit the keyless entry button on her minivan so that the doors slid open as if on command. I don't even want to know what the option package that includes voice-activated doors would cost, so I just hit the button when she says to and let her think she's in control.
Come to think of it, we should have taken her with us to the dealership to negotiate. Three-year-olds take no prisoners. After a few hours they would probably have given us a new van just to get us to stop asking about it.
Maybe next time.
This post is dedicated to all of our friends in and formerly in Albuquerque, who listened to this argument play out for months and never once suggested that we might need an intervention more than we needed a new car. We love and miss you all.
While I was writing my opus about the car, I got behind on the December Photo Project. Here are the catch up photos. They were both taken today, the 17th, but let's pretend they are for the 16th and 17th, OK?
Kate and I played with Play-Doh this morning. She would only play with the blue Play-Doh, but she gave me elaborate instructions on how to make things for her with the other colors.
In the days -- only days, mind you -- since Isaac got his army crawl perfected, he has built up a lot of speed. He puts that speed to good use, like making it halfway under Kate's bed and then making me drag him out by his fat little cankles. Life just got a lot more complicated to say the least.
Apparently I have decided that the December Photo Project is an every-other-day kind of deal for me this year. But I have some cute baby photos to make it up to you.
When I watch Isaac scoot himself across the hard tile floors I am so sure he must be cold and miserable.
But then he makes faces like this and I think he must be OK.
And our cousin Mercy came by today to show Isaac how to do the real thing crawling-wise. She is an expert. And she also likes to get under tables.
Two new babies and a new sister-in-law since last year, everyone in one place, and an amazing photo by my brother-in-law Daniel Meigs. We had a great Christmas and I hope you did too.
All photos are by my brilliant brother-in-law Daniel Meigs. Special credit belongs to my sister-in-law Kelly Rice, who jumped around behind Daniel waving her arms and singing songs and just generally making a fool of herself to get my kids to look at the dang camera. Someone had to do it.
On Wednesday when we returned from our trip to Mississippi for Christmas, I was putting together a grocery list to get us through the remainder of the week. After staring into the distance for a good five minutes trying to come up with something to cook for dinner on Friday evening, I remembered that tonight is New Year's Eve and therefore something of a festive occasion. I turned to Dan and said "Hey! Friday is New Year's Eve! What do you want to do?" I meant this mostly as a question about menu choices, but Dan apparently thought I was asking him to go clubbing as judged by his response, which was, and I quote, "Are you actually going to stay up until midnight?!"
"Oh no, of course not" I said. "I just mean do you want to make guacamole and watch a movie or something."
I have been thinking of sending out change-of-address cards, but clearly I should just wait until next week, when we will be moving to The Home.
Allegedly a person gets one year older every calendar year but after 2010, I have decided that some years age you by a minimum of five years and other years, like this one, make you feel like a senior citizen at the ripe old age of 30. It has been a doozy, 2010. This was the year in which we surveyed the upcoming challenges of having a new baby and a three-year-old and decided that it just wasn't going to be crazy enough for us. No, you know what would really be great? If we put our house on the market three months after the baby was born and then two months after that moved to a new state! That would be exciting.
Boy, was it. I am never going to recover from all the exciting. My sincere hope for 2011 is a little boredom. A whole lot of normal with a side of average. Some sleep would also be amazing. But even though 2010 has thoroughly worn us out in every way, it has been a year of God's overwhelming blessing and provision in our lives. So here, in the form of blog posts, are a few of the highlights of the year for the Wachdorfs. It's definitely the closest thing I'm going to do to writing a newsletter. Pretend you just got this in the mail:
Kate turned three this year. She is very very three. (Three will be the subject of an entire post at a later time. Like in ten years, when I can laugh about it.) And it really was a big year for her.
She got a baby brother!
She got potty trained in spite of my best efforts to fail at that.
She continued channeling her inner diva.
On my list of accomplishments this year are the continued survival of the kids and then a series of screwups and fiascos: Isaac was born.
His main accomplishments so far have been getting born, being adorable and doing the usual baby things. So he can get his own category next year. Back to me:
I almost lost the monkey.
I called roadside assistance for the first time ever.
And survived more flying with small children including the Chicago Incident.
Dan and I celebrated seven years of marriage in April. I read somewhere that moving is one of the top stressors on a marriage. Also on that list? Having a new baby. Hahahaha. Ha. Ha. While surviving Year Seven of being married to me, for which he deserves a medal, Dan also managed to:
As you can tell, we have a lot to be thankful for this year, and on that list are the wonderful friends and family who have loved and supported us through all of this change. We are so thankful for all of you. May our great God bless and keep each of you in 2011. If you find yourself in Texas, come on down and see us.
