So, I inserted my memory card to find the perfect picture for this week's FFF theme. And, I found it! Pea had managed to color all over his face and hands with a green marker. It was priceless. And now...it is gone. Forever. Sniff. Sniff. Sniff. I have no idea what happened, but somehow I managed to delete my entire memory card. Gone in an instant. All 500 pictures. Luckily, I recently uploaded a vast majority of them, but I lost all of November, December, and the few I had in January. Yes, that means Christmas. I have maybe 3 or 4 pictures saved from Christmas Day at our house. How depressing!! Sigh....
So, here are two pictures from LAST January since I don't have any from THIS January to share. Sniff. Sniff.
It's amazing how much he has grown! These pictures were also taken with my old camera and they look awful compared to the quality of my current camera! Who knew?!?!
It's official! Our house is on the market and we already have a showing scheduled for Friday! Of course, we realize this could take awhile so we are not getting too excited, yet. We spent the entire weekend cleaning, organizing, and decluttering. My parents were a TREMENDOUS help! Our house looks amazing thanks to them! Now we just need to figure out how to maintain our clean and organized house with a wild two year old who enjoys destroying the house in under 2 minutes. So, we busted our hineys over the weekend and now we wait......
Adoption news...or really, lack of news. We are currently reevaluating our choice of agency. We have not been getting the warm fuzzies from them and we also received some negative feedback from someone on an adoption forum. Granted, that is one person's experience, but we have already been starting to feel a little uneasy about our choice. So, we're thinking our gut feeling may be pointing us in another direction. This feels all too familiar because this is exactly how pea's adoption journey started. And, it worked out perfectly. So, we are going to be calling a couple of the other agencies that were on our initial list and then make a decision. And so it begins!
It's Friday! Woohoo! This week's theme is close-ups, but I am going to do my own thing. A couple months ago, my siblings and I arranged a family photo shoot as a Christmas gift to my parents. We all went to the park for the afternoon and the photos turned out great, though pea was not very cooperative so we only have a couple good shots of him. There was just too much space to roam in the park and he was not at all interested in sitting still, or even walking for that matter! Even so, it was a lot of fun and my parents ended up with a beautiful photo book of our photo shoot. Check out some of the other FFF posts on Hannah's blog HERE.
I know. I know. It's been pretty quiet and boring in our little corner of the blog world. But, a lot has been happening and we recently made some big decisions. Jason and I have been planning on moving for several years. Not just moving across town, but moving from our current town. Away from family. Away from the place where I was raised. In fact, I never, EVER, imagined that I would even move back to the town where I grew up. I couldn't wait to go off to college and get the heck out of dodge! And, I did for about 10 years. Then, on a whim about 9 years ago, Jason and I decided we were tired of only seeing our families 2 or 3 times per year, at the most. So, we moved back to my hometown, to the place I had vowed to never live in again. But, after a couple of years, we were feeling the itch. The itch to live somewhere else and that became our plan.
Then, suddenly, things started getting in the way of our master plan: jobs, graduate school, building a family, the timing just didn't feel right, etc, etc. Through it all, however, we always talked about moving and our conversations would often be, "well, maybe we shouldn't do x, y, or z because we may be moving next year." Consequently, we have never really felt fully settled where we are because we have always planned on leaving. What we have slowly started to realize (yes...I said slowly!) is that our master plan (the plan that never seemed to materialize) has been holding us back. We stopped pursuing other goals and plans because we were so focused on this other plan and uncertain of our future. It was keeping us from building roots, making connections, and feeling grounded where we are. And, we realized we were growing weary of waiting for something to happen that may not happen for a long time, or may never happen. In many ways this realization was a great relief, in other ways it was a bit stressful because this is something we have been thinking about and planning on for a long time. Suddenly, our "master plan" seemed to be evolving...significantly.
We have finally admitted that our "master plan" no longer feels right and it's time to let it go...for now. So, what does that mean? We have a new plan! Ha! We have decided to stay we where we are and settle in for awhile (notice the noncommittal time frame!). In fact, we are getting ready to list our house so that we can look for another house to build some roots, a house with room to grow. Truly, this has been a huge decision for us and one we have been deliberating over for a few months. As you may remember, we were going to list our house last spring with the "plan" of moving away. Well, the market just wasn't in our favor so we decided to wait. And, during that wait, we did a lot of soul searching and it led to this recent decision. With that in mind, we are ready for a different kind of change. Sort of like a new beginning.
So, we have been busy getting our house ready and hope to have it listed by next week! We are excited, though we realize there are no guarantees in this market. My parents are helping us this weekend with a power clean so that everything will be ship shape! Wish us luck!
So, I am trying to clean off the video camera so here is another video of pea! He has been taking swimming lessons for the last few months and has come a very long way since our first day in the pool! You may remember he screamed and had a death grip on me for the entire lesson! No more! He absolutely LOVES the water. For the most part, he doesn't really care what the rest of the swimming class is doing. He just swims around doing his own thing most of the time, testing out his new skills (including beating daddy with the noodle). Enjoy!
