Wisconsin is a State, Adrienne!

Back in August, we moved from Alabama to Wisconsin. It was the craziest move we have had yet, just because of family reunions, rent contracts coming to an end, and Cody's work responsibilities, none of which seemed to line up very nicely. So we packed up, cleaned our home, and left Alabama at the end of July (leaving Cody behind to finish his residency), flew to Washington to spend a couple weeks with my family and attend our family reunion, and then flew to our new home in Wisconsin. Our stuff arrived the next day; we quickly unpacked, Cody flew in for a quick visit, and then flew back to finish his residency). Then he finally finished and drove up here to be with us for good. I am glad that whole period is done. It was pretty tough.

But. . .we are LOVING Wisconsin so far. First and foremost, we have loved the colder weather. I am meant to wear cardigans and jeans always. We also live in a more rural town and love the space, the fields of corn and soybean, the beautiful trees and old barns. Love it all. Our backyard butts up to a corn field and it is a little slice of heaven to sit back there on a cool evening and feel the wind blowing off the corn. The kids have been playing outside almost non-stop and are loving our new house and yard.

We have really lucked out with the neighborhood. We have two families on either side of us that have eight year old girls, and other young kids. So Claire is constantly playing with one or both of the girls. It has made the adjustment of the mood so very smooth.

It is always interesting to see the differences in culture amongst all the different areas we live in. First of all, Wisconsin accents rock. Seriously fun to listen to, though Cody insists he's not a fan. I feel that out of all the accents in the world, I am most susceptible to this one. I can already hear the change in the way I say 'soda'. Awesome! The people are so very talkative and friendly here. It is a very warm, frank vibe that I get from people here. So I have high hopes for our future here.

 

Because of the cooler weather, we have been taking advantage of the outdoors. We went to the beach right before fall blew in, and had such a good time. We are excited about next summer and all the beach time we'll be sure to fit in. We also live close to a bike path, so we have been going on family bike rides (for the first time ever, may I add). We have also been raspberry picking (heaven!) and have gone to a pumpkin patch.  We live right between Milwaukee and Chicago so I know we have a lot of exploring to do.

 

Church has been really nice. This is the first move where I have really felt how small our world is getting. I discovered after I moved here that my good friend from Virginia, Amy's sister is in my ward here. Also, one of the first Sundays here I noticed one of the missionaries looked just like this teenage kid from my Alabama ward. When he introduced himself to me, I thought it a funny coincidence that he had the same last name as the kid. Then I found out he is cousin to this kid from Alabama. Small world. I love that it is a small world. And I guess the more we keep moving the smaller it will get.

First Day

It was a big first day of school for both of my girls. For Morgan, it was her first day of Kindergarten, first day in a big school, and first day riding the bus. She was worried (the night before in bed she kept crying for her old teacher Miss Sally, and she said she was scared. But by morning time, it was all forgotten and she was up, dressed fast, and ready to go.

Claire's big day was starting 3rd grade, at a new school. She was also worried about it the night before and started crying when she was telling me that she was scared about not knowing anybody (which wasn't entirely true, because she knows two girls that live next door to us that are in her grade). But, for her too, in the morning, all visible worry was forgotten and she was also dressed and ready in time to wave goodbye from the bus!

So far, I think both girls are having a good time and it is going well. The week before Morgan started Kindergarten, we went to open house to find out that she had been placed in a K/1st combined class. This was a last minute addition, because of the additional number of students registered this year. Morgan's teacher was hired the day before open house. So I left feeling very conflicted on her class. With the first week of school under her belt, I still feel a little anxious about it, only because we have heard nothing from her teacher. No notes home, no worksheets or school work sent home. Soooooo, I'm a little worried.

Best thing about the school year so far, they don't have to catch the bus at 6:45, like last year! We get to sleep in and believe me, it is better for everyone in our house!

(Morgan, little sweetheart, blowing me a kiss)

Labor Day

 

 

     
 For Labor Day, I took the kids to a nearby beach on Lake Michigan. It was beautiful and fun! The lake looks like the ocean, since it is so enormous and you can't see the other side, and the sandy beach was just perfect. Claire loved playing in waves, Luke didn't even want to touch the water, and he and Morgan had a good ol' time playing in the sand.  We shall be back!

 

 

Mourning What Once Was

My poor neglected blog. I miss it. I miss what it once was and what it no longer seems to be. It was once a creative outlet, a connection to friends and family, and a journal of all the small and big things in life that make it colorful. Now I just feel pressure to journal and by journal, I mean put pictures up of my kids with captions. Which doesn't sound very creative to me.

And it's not just me. What was once a bustling cyber-city of blogs, with cute new headers every two months, and blog lists running down the sides with blogs from practically everyone you ever met, is now a ghost town. I mean, sure the professional craft bloggers are still abundant and proceeding on as plentiful as always, but the blogs I really care to read, those of my friends and family, are being abandoned, with posting spaced out to every few months, to being slowly forgotten altogether. It makes me sad.

I'm not one to talk, obviously. It has been four months since I posted and a whole, whole lot has happened in my life since then (oh, you know, like moving states and all) and yet I can't get myself to sit down and actually document it. I still do often stop mid-blog-worthy-event and think about how I would write about it, but when it comes to sitting down in front of the computer, laziness, lack of enthusiasm, etc, etc, intervenes.

 I miss the banter in the comments section, the inside jokes, the inside knowledge I had of my friends lives, even if I haven't seen them in years. I miss the way I use to feel more connected. I miss the enthusiasm for blogging that everyone use to have. What happened?

Facebook, instagram, pinterest?? I do enjoy getting snippets of your lives from these, but that is all they are. Snippets. Give me feeling, give me humor, give me more!! Ah, I have started the desperate begging, which is my cue to wrap up before I look too needy (too late).

I don't know if I will ever get back to the golden days of blogging, but I am going to try a little more. I hope you do, too.

PS. I still have a handful of friends who update their blogs pretty regularly and to you I say this: Thank you! You are the highlight of my googlereader.

Mouse in the House

One dark night, as the kids were tucked snugly in their beds, and Cody and I sat in on the couch watching a movie, we were introduced to the little mouse who resided in our house. We were watching the movie, Contagion, which will make you want to constantly wash your hands and wear masks everywhere, when Cody suddenly said, "What was that?"
I had been watching the TV, so I told him is was Gwyneth Paltrow dying.
"Is that what I think it is?" he said, ignoring my uber-smart commentary. I didn't know what he was talking about. "I think I saw a mouse run underneath the TV hutch." Groan.
We got up to check and the startled mouse ran out from under the TV hutch directly under the door into the closet under the stairs. Trapped.

At this point, I was pretty calm but majorly grossed out. A mouse in the house. So disgusting. We haven't had any mice in any of our houses (that we were aware of) since we had been married. Cody, however, is grossed out, afraid, and suddenly all reason leaves him. "What do we do? What do we do?" he asks, hopping around gingerly like a Nancy. He insisted that he had never had mouse in his house before, ever. Baloney. He probably has, he just didn't know about it because his parents took care of it.

Now we were the parents. We needed to take care of it. To me, the answer was simple. There was no escaping the closet except back out under the door, so we stuffed a towel under the door and lined it with heavy ammunition buckets to make sure the mouse couldn't push his way out. He was trapped in there. Now, to me, the next step seemed simple. Cody needed to go the store to buy mouse traps. We'd slide the mousetrap in the closet and wait for the mouse to catch himself.

But to Cody, the solution was not quite as simple. Cody has a little bit of Clark Griswold in him, so he decided he didn't want to drive all the way into town at 10 o'clock at night. He is a make-it-happen kind of guy so he goes out into the garage and comes back in a couple of minutes with his big, tall fishing boots on, a fishing net, and a five gallon white bucket in his hands.

"So. . .watcha gonna do, Codeman?"

I think his plan is to capture the mouse inside the white bucket, but I seriously didn't think that would happen. First off, Cody hopped around every time he saw the mouse, squirming like girl. He wasn't going to get close enough to catch that mouse. Second, that mouse was in the closet under the stairs, which had a bunch of boxes for the mouse to climb and hide in. I told Cody my doubts immediately. But that wasn't Cody's plan.

He was going to go in there, with his big, rubber, protective boots to keep his toes mouse-bite free, and smash the mouse with the bottom of the white bucket, while I stood outside the door with the fishing net to catch the mouse if it ran out. Now, tell me that isn't straight up Clark Griswold. I told him he was too big of a Susan to go in there with that mouse hiding in the boxes, but the use of a girl name seemed to steel his resolve to prove me wrong. He peeked in the closet, saw the tall piles of boxes, and allowed himself to be talked into going to the store to buy mouse traps.

He came home from the store 30 minutes later with about 10 different kinds of traps. And by golly, we caught the sucker.

As a side note, Claire has decided she is an animal lover, therefore she fights daily for the rights and safety of all animals. So when she saw the mouse traps in our house, she started in with an impassioned plea to burn all the mousetraps because it wasn't right to kill the mouse. It even ended up with her in tears when I refused to get rid of the traps.

So I guess she isn't going to be her dad's hunting partner, after all.

Halfs

A couple of years ago, living in Virginia, the idea of a runner's second wind got stuck in my head. I have run pretty consistently since I was in High School, but always with 3 miles being the max. I really didn't think I could do much more. . . or really want to do any more than that. But then I began thinking about that runner's second wind, that long distance runners swore was real, and I wanted to find it.

So one day, last April, I ran my three miles and felt pretty good so I kept going. I ran four. I felt pretty proud of myself and it wasn't as hard as I had thought. I roped my running partner, Adrienne, into trying longer runs with me and we started going four and five miles at a time. Then in June, my friend came to visit and she put the bug of running a half marathon in my head. She insisted that it really wasn't that hard and that I could totally do it. She insisted. So, again, I roped my running buddy into the idea of training for a half marathon.

I remember the night before a five mile race I was running, I was dreading it. I knew I could do it but I worried that it was going to be a painful run. But it turned out feeling good. I loved the way I felt when I finished, surprised that it wasn't harder. Each weekend after that, Adrienne and I would dread our long runs, thinking how are we going to do this? When we had to run our first 7 mile run, we were dreading it. We stood outside saying to each other, are we crazy, why are we doing this? But then we did it and it wasn't that hard. So the next week when we ran nine miles, we were kind of looking forward to it. Once we finished that run, we knew we could do the half marathon, no problem.

We ran our first half marathon back in November in Huntsville. Our goal was to run the entire time, no walking, no stopping. We were doing really well until the last two miles, when we suddenly hit our wall and really had to push ourselves. So it slowed us a little but we kept going and finished in 2 hours 10 minutes.

About ten minutes after we finished, Adrienne's husband asked if we were going to run the Mercedes Half Marathon in Birmingham in February and I said, "Yes, Let's do it!" Adrienne, who was still remember the last two miles, said she wasn't quite sure. But it only took her a day or two to commit to the race three months later.

So we trained again and ran the Mercedes Marathon in February. We have had a very mild winter this year, especially January and February- lots of weather in the 50s and 60s. The two coldest days of the year happen to fall the same time as our race. It was 22 degrees as we started running. We had to slow down in all the water stops because the water from people's cups that had fallen on the street had frozen slick. But we had bundled ourselves appropriately and we felt good during the run. It was a fun course, through the city of Birmingham, through the downtown areas and through historical areas with beautiful, old mansions, up hills and down. I really enjoyed it. This time, Adrienne and I felt good and strong the whole way. We finished in the exact same time as our first, 2 hours and 10 minutes. I think we ran this race faster than the first, but we had to slow down every time we went through water areas where it was iced over.

I love training for half marathons. I love the weekly long run. I love the feeling of accomplishing 13 miles. But I don't think I would have enjoyed it as much or even have been able to accomplish it if it wasn't for Adrienne, my running buddy. It made the 11 mile weekend runs flash by, as she is an excellent talker. But she is moving and I am moving, so I don't know what I am going to do?? Running long distances by myself is boring. Boo.

November

I want to get to a point where blogging is part of my life again. I just finished reading My Life in France, by Julia Child, which she co wrote with her grand-nephew at the end of her life. She wrote the book about her time in France, because it was one of the times she was most happy. There was so much detail in the book that I kept wondering, how does she remember what she ate 50 years ago, how does she remember the events so clearly? In the forward, the co-author said they went through years of letters and pictures kept by Julia Child and her husband, that detailed all these memories for her, so she could recall with exact detail what they ate.

I want to be able to remember a lot of the small details of life now, but I am not writing them down, so they will drift away as my children and I get older. I don't write letters to anyone (who does?) and I actually do save my emails (I have like 3000 of them in my inbox), but those don't capture the kind of details I am interested in remembering forever. That is what my blog was doing for me, but life has gotten in the way of recording it. One day I will get back into it, the way I use to love it. When it was a creative outlet.

For now, I will just keep posting pictures of things I don't want to forget. Like the month of November and December. So busy, and so much fun.

Girls Trip 2011- Rosemary Beach, Florida
To start off November, I went on our annual girls trip for the Pittsburgh Girls. This years destination was in my neck of the woods, Rosemary Beach, Florida. This is a small beach town on the gulf of Mexico, with white sand beaches and beach homes that look like a West Indies beach resort. It was a little like heaven. Beautiful!

We rented bikes one day and drove all around the cute little village, and to the beach. This was one of my favorite things we did.

It really was hauntingly beautiful there. I came back dreaming of those white beaches.

I love these girls so much. I had such a fun time, and am counting down the days until I get to see them again!

All the Rosemary Beach pictures were taken by my extremely talented friend, Libby Jones, who is a photographer in the Phoenix area.

Nutcracker

I took the girls to their first Nutcracker performance. We went to a "tea party" before the performance where they had lots of candy and treats for the girls. They also got to meet many of the performers in their costumes. The girls really liked the nutcracker, especially Claire.

Morgan is a photo stinker.

One real treat was when the Sugar Plum Fairy came up to us and said, "Hi, Claire!" She had taught Claire's dance class last summer and had remembered Claire. It made it a little more special to Claire to watch her dance.

We actually ran into several people we knew at the Nutcracker. It was such a neat surprise for us. It's one of the things you take for granted when you live in the same place for a long time- seeing people you know at unexpected places. Being that we have lived in three different states in the last three years, it is a bit of luxury to recognize people you know when you are out and about. It has been fun to finally get to this point here, though we will be moving in the summer and we will have to start this whole thing over again. Oh well.

Christmas

The opening of the Christmas Jammies!

The reading of the Nativity Story!

Cody's favorite gift (well, favorite because he only got two gifts, and the other one was book) was this poster I made for him. It is his pyramid of greatness. I copied the idea from Parks and Rec (the show) but personalized it just for him. He took it to work to hang in his office. He got a good laugh at it. If you want to read the pyramid up close, click here.

My favorite gift, maybe ever in my life, was a Kindle Fire. I love it soooooo much. I had my doubts about whether I could ever betray my love of paper-bound books by going to an e-reader, but the Kindle Fire convinced me. I love being able to get library books just by the click of a button on the computer. LOVE IT!! Plus, I can read it in my bed at night with no lights on. Hot Diggity!