Making Memories

Spring. It’s here now. We’ve been busy making memories leading up to spring 2010. We said goodbye to Auntie Hannah shortly after we moved. It was sad to say farewell, but we will see her again in a few months. Yay!

Unpacking has been a treat and a chore. Doing the move during the first trimester of pregnancy #3 has proved interesting & far less productive than I had imagined. I recently had a flash back to 1st trimester of pregnancy #1 (just 2 months after we were married) of me on the couch unable to move. Nathan stood over me in disbelief and asked, “Don’t you want to get up and do something productive?!?” My response: “No!” I then immediately fell to sleep. I am one of those pregnant women.

Getting acclimated to the new house and the new neighborhood has been such fun. The girls are really enjoying it here. They LOVE our new “little town” which is the main street a few blocks from our new home. It’s lined with shops and restaurants most of which are unique to this area. We’ve done lots of walking on non rainy days hunting out our new favorite spots. During the rainy days we’ve spent quite a bit of time spreading out in our new space.

Mateja celebrated her sixth birthday with dinner and cupcakes with Grandma Betty and we later threw her a costume party! She created the guest-list this year. I sent the invites to her guests (and their parents). It was so wonderful having space to being able to host people in our home again. The kids all wore costumes to celebrate and ate mini-cupcakes. The games sort of never fully developed into anything and somehow most of the boys’ goodie bags were still here at the end of the day. I’m not sure what happened there… Arielle keeps asking for her birthday party now. Maybe I will manage the next party a little better.

About a week after the party, my cousin Myriah came for a visit with her two boys. Her oldest is three years old. He and Arielle had a BLAST together. It was so wonderful having them here for a visit. Now we owe them a visit! Unfortunately for Mateja, she ended up not feeling very well while they were here. We took her to Urgent Care a couple of days after Myriah and the boys left. That was a first for our family. It was so sad and frightening. She had her first ear infection. A dose of antibiotics did the job and left me feeling extremely grateful to live in a country where we could take our daughter to urgent care, have a prescription filled hours later and be administering medicine to help her. She was a different person the following morning. We are just ending her antibiotics, praise God, and she is back to herself. Now spring is here and she can enjoy making more memories with the rest of us! (I will have to post our most recent memories from the beach soon.)

Big News

So if you follow the regular happenings in our lives, you know we recently moved again. We’ve been looking forward to this move for quite some time. The girls especially have been excited about the move back to a house for the simple fact that they are free to run and jump and stomp without hearing the hiss of Mom & Dad’s “Ssssshhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! So now we are in a house again and they are free to be loud. It’s wonderful. And once the torrents of rain cease and the sun begins to beat upon the concrete, we will slather ourselves with toxin free sun block and spend hours out back in our pool! I am foreseeing some really great naps this summer. We spent many hours and days at the apartment community pool last year. It was never enough for the girls. We enrolled both girls in swim lessons during the spring and summer. It was an incredible pay off to see them progress during that time. Now they are fantastic swimmers and will have lots of opportunities to continue their skills with (and without) more instruction.
The move really was our big news until we found out my sister Hannah was on her way to California for a surprise visit! That was fun and exciting! She had fun surprising Mateja (who didn’t recognize her until she said something) and her good friend Jenn. It was a short visit since she had to get back to China to start her new job as a Professor at an International Business University. Very exciting! She knew before heading to California that we were in the midst of a move. As per usual she rolled up her sleeves and helped me pack and wrap and purge and juggle the kids.
AND (more big news) she even brought birthday gifts for our SIX year old! Can you believe our green eyed girl is six years old? Technically because of the leap year thing her birthday isn’t on the calendar, but we celebrated on Sunday the 28th of February and will have a little party with her close friends sometime in March. We’ve had lots of planning to do for all of the festivities around here. And we’ve had to purchase new furniture to fill space in this house since we got rid of all of our furniture before we moved into the tiny apartment. It’s been fun and exhausting. I don’t know how I would have managed if Hannah hadn’t been here in all of her awesome sister-ness because that’s when the biggest news of all surfaced: Nathan and I found out that we are pregnant again!
So we are now preparing for another person to join our family at the end of September. Nathan and I are very happy. Our happiness pales in comparison to the excitement our girls are sharing. They are convinced that they will be having a baby brother. My brother Jared and his wife are expecting a baby boy this summer. It would be pretty cool if we had a boy too. Arielle is particularly excited because this will be the first time she experiences being a “BIG sister” like Mateja. There is lots of baby buzz in our home. I am doing well other than the steady bouts of nausea that hassle me daily and the exhaustion which levels me every other day. That should all end in a few weeks though and being in the new house is certainly adding sunshine (literally) to my perspective. Ari is back in preschool two full days each week while Mateja and I work through home school.
Our lives are about to change in a major way all over again. I think I have one box of baby things left from the girls (some blankets and booties and onesies) but I have NO baby furniture or other paraphernalia (actually I did keep the breast pump – sorry – TMI?). So we really will be starting all over again. It’s exciting and a little daunting. I feel confident though. Nathan and I are a great team and we’ve got mad love for each other which keeps growing! Yay! He’s really the hero of this household. The girls couldn’t have a better Daddy nor could I have a better husband. We’re a blessed family in every aspect and it just keeps getting BETTER! Life is beautiful.