The Princess Diaries: Too Busy To Blog

Sorry fans. While it's great to be home, it is hectic. We're both working full time, carting the kids to daycare and back, catching up with friends and family, and catching up with life in general. There's just not much left in either of our tanks at the end of each day! So, I'm going to keep this kind of short (but with a picture or two or 20 of course!). What have we been up to the last few weeks? Here are some of the highlights...

First week back
We moved Ava into a new bedroom - what was our guest bedroom on the main floor. Before I went back to work, I bought bedding, a rug, and some shelving (all at Target of course!) and painted the walls. It is supposed to be a light key lime green, but it looks kind of yellow in these pictures and when the overhead light is on.

Reese is now in the nursery - all I did was add wooden letters to spell her name on the wall, otherwise I didn't change any of the decorations. And if I'm being honest, it still says "ees" as I used the nails from Ava's name and still haven't added another two. But she seems to be OK with all of it. :-) Actually, knock on wood, she must love it because she is finally sleeping through the night! Well, most nights. Or at least until 4ish and then back to sleep again for a few more hours. We'll take it.

July 11-12
Our first Saturday back in town, we met up with friends J-squared and K-squared (that would be Jess, Jared, Keira and their niece Kallee) at Teddy Bear Park in Stillwater...the weather was gorgeous! Just like our sweet girls.

On Sunday, we hosted "Kid Fest 2009"...because we're getting to the point in life where most of our friends now have kids and keep having more! We added 4 (!) to the mix just since we met up last summer: Grant (1), Bennett (6 mo), Reese (6 mo), and Izaak (3 mo). So, 9 kids in all and somehow we forgot to get a picture of them all together! We had a great time - we even rented a Bounce House so the bigger kids could burn off some extra energy. Lots of good food, drinks, and commiseration. Kudos to Aunt Julie who is not a parent and came anyway :-)

July 13
I went back to work. Ick.

July 18-21
On Saturday morning, my friend and old coworker Sheila invited Ava out to her place in Monticello to ride her pony Nuttie. We had a great visit and Ava had so much fun! She was pretty tentative to ride at first, but was a lot more confident when she tried again later. We'll definitely try to get out there again before it gets cold. Does it get any cuter than this?

On Saturday night, Scot and I went out to celebrate our 11th anniversary. I've now been married exactly one third of my life. Yowza. We had dinner at W.A. Frost in St. Paul, which was wonderful. They greeted us with 2 glasses of champagne on the house and Scot even had roses delivered to our table! Aunt Julie was generous enough to babysit AND see to it that we had dessert (chocolate cake for me and creme brulee for Scot - man, she knows us well!) and Moscato D'Asti. After that we went to see The Hangover, which was hilarious. I can't remember the last time we did dinner AND a movie, so it was quite a treat! It wasn't Hawaii...but it was still pretty good. Here we are acting like we like each other.

On Sunday we looked at 7 houses. We're thinking a little more seriously about taking advantage of the low prices that are out there right now so we can move into something bigger and in a nicer neighborhood (though we wish we didn't have to worry about selling our current house). We haven't fallen in love with anything yet so we'll keep looking and see what happens. It's stressful and exciting all at the same time. Thanks to Grandma Di and Aunt Marilyn for watching our napping children for most of the time we were gone - we treated them to a nice cookout upon our return!

On Monday morning, Scot went to a Honda dealership and bought us a 2007 Honda Pilot. A few days earlier, we learned the transmission was probably going out on our Explorer (which was especially annoying considering it only had about 85K miles on it). We considered our options and decided to get a newer used vehicle, so we combed the internet (oh, how I love the internet) and found a great deal on this particular Pilot. Scot did some haggling, got a great trade in for our Explorer, and came home with the Pilot...even made it back for an eye doctor appointment at 1. It's fun to have a new vehicle! Hopefully we can get a year or two more out of my car before we have to worry about that again - buying a car is so stressful!

As I read this over, it is no wonder that I have been sick since Tuesday with a whole gamut of symptoms. Too much. All of that and my job is in limbo as my department braces for a reorganization. I have been assured I will have a job, but it will likely be different than what I'm currently doing (supervising). I told my boss today that it wouldn't break my heart if I weren't a supervisor anymore. Something has to give and it might as well be the job that I don't always like. To be determined. On a related note, another full time job at the Guard base posted on Thursday and Scot already has his app in. Wish him luck!

And some "just because" pictures.
Reese. Who is crawling. As of 6 months, 8 days. About 3 weeks earlier than Ava did. We were actually hoping she'd "underachieve" on this one. Oh well...