We moved! After we spent time in Texas...

So, we went to Texas and had a blast. My kids played with my friend and her kids, and her baby came and he was perfect :D We got to visit my in-laws, and Tim even got to come after he signed a new contract to work for Palm. (He quit his old job two days after kids and I left, then spent 2 weeks in job interviews before settling on Palm. The offered the best pay and the fewest hours, and an exciting job with a great work environment. 2 weeks in, he's loving it!) We got to visit friends and family and spend lots of time with SHARE, the homeschooling group there that is water to my parched soul.

We came home October 30th because Tim needed to get started at his new job and my friend was ready to take over her house and home again :D Tim's new job in Sunnyvale was a half-hour commute from our apartment in downtown Palo Alto, so we started house-hunting close to his work. I decided pretty quickly that I needed a house with a yard, so I declared I didn't care how much I spent on rent and just started looking at houses. Luckily, Tim insisted on trying to keep our rent payment low, and we found the PERFECT house. It's 2.8 miles from his work and it has 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, 2-car attached garage, and a fenced backyard. I've never loved a house as much as I love this one; I don't hate California anymore, though I do still miss my friends and family.

We moved lickety-split. We have only 2 boxes left to unpack; we have a few boxes of books and such that will be unpacked once we have more shelving on which to unpack them to, but I don't count those! Problem with moving, though, is that the lease wasn't up on our apartment yet. So we're still responsible for the rent there. So even though Tim's making more than he's ever made before, we are still broke! The manager of our old apartment is advertising it and hopefully it will get rented soon; we are in talks with a realtor to sell our condo, too. That will be so great when that's all done!

My kiddos are growing up so fast. Yesterday I realized how much Jack loves to act out the one story we've ever acted out (the story of Samuel the Lamanite calling the Nephites to repentance). I was getting tired of doing the same thing over and over, so I showed Jack that we can do other stories, too. That opened up the floodgates! He watches Book of Mormon stories, begs me to watch them with him so I'll know what to do, then we each take a part and start acting. It's so much fun to watch him learn the stories with such enthusiasm!

Lily is so much like her brother. I was expecting her to be so different, and she is in some ways, but she is so much like him. Jack was a late talker, but I wasn't worried. Boys talk later than girls, and Tim was a late talker, so I just knew it would work out, and it did. He started talking at 20 months and just exploded with words, and had a full 2-year-old vocabulary in just 2 months. But Lily being a girl and being so different from Jack as a baby, I was expecting her to talk sooner, but she's 18 months now and still doesn't talk. I've decided not to worry b/c she DOES communicate, with whispers, gestures, and non-word vocalizations. She points to what she wants, she nods her head for "yes" and shakes it for "no" (and she's even started saying "no"), she pats her diaper when she needs a change. She's learning to catch her food in her hands when she spits it out, she's using a spoon and a cup pretty well, and she puts her shoes on by herself. She helps clean up messes, both by wiping up spills and picking up toys. This morning she even showed patience by waiting for me to get dressed before I nursed her :D She's decided that baths are fun again b/c she loves to play with the water, and this is another reason I love my new house: the bathroom with a bathtub is off of the kitchen, so the kids can play in the tub and I can cook/clean while they play and I can still keep an eye on them to make sure Lily doesn't drown! (When the water gets deep, she loses her balance and falls underwater. That's what happened months ago and she decided to be terrified of baths from then on, until now.)

Yesterday, Jack helped me cook broccoli casserole for supper. We had so much fun! He dumped the broccoli into the boiling water, poured the milk for the sauce, stirred up the sauce and poured it in, and helped me pick the seasonings to use. And then, when the casserole was done, HE ATE IT. Yes, Jack ate BROCCOLI casserole. With no fuss. Hallelujah! Then he helped me make cookies by dumping in ingredients and helping to stir; then he rolled balls of cookie dough in a plateful of sprinkles to make beautifully colorful cookies :D Then we had Family Home Evening and finished the night by watching the first Harry Potter movie and eating cookies; Lily spent about an hour shrieking and jumping on us, and Jack conked out with his head in my lap. Good times :D

So Thanksgiving is coming up and we don't have money for plane tickets :( We decided we'd drive to Utah to visit Tim's family up there, but there are mountains between here and there that are covered in snow. Tim has to work the day before Thanksgiving, so if we went we'd be driving overnight, and I just don't quite feel safe about driving overnight through snow-covered mountains. So it looks like we'll be celebrating our first ever Thanksgiving at home. We worked hard to get our unpacking done quickly and I feel at home here, so I'm really quite excited about it! I'm making a menu and trying to keep it short and simple so I can spend more time playing with my family; I'm planning on doing the grocery shopping today so I can possibly do some cooking tomorrow. And we might even go take the kids to the mountains Friday or Saturday so we can play in the snow!

Pictures!

Packing to go to Texas!

Lily went to Malina and didn't let go of her for about 15 minutes! I wonder if Lily remembered Malina? She did the same thing with her Grandma (Tim's mom) and with Vickie; Vickie and Malina were there when she was born and we spent lots of time together while we lived in Texas.

Lily and her Nanna, my mom :D

All the grandkids together! (And Jessica, Tim's older sister and mother of the two little girls in front of her.) This is marginally the best picture of the 60-something I snapped. Trying to take a photo of 4 little ones is fun!

Road Trip to Utah!

We took a road trip to go visit Tim's grandparents in Orem, Utah, the first weekend in September. We planned it as a trial run, so that we would see how Lily might do on a road trip to Texas later :D

Packing up was an all-night event. I decided that this time, I was going to have a clean house before we left, gosh darn it! (We always have goals to do all the dishes and laundry before we leave on a trip, but we NEVER do, and we always have such a let-down coming home!) Between cleaning and packing and that ever-present feeling of forgetting something, I didn't go to bed at all the night before we left. And we left early in the morning, 4:15am! (The plan was to get a few hours of driving done before the kids woke, so we might make it there faster. It was the best compromise between driving overnight and not leaving until dawn.)

The kids were so excited; we warned them the night before that they'd wake up in the car. (Jack sometimes has a hard time handling surprises, so we warn him beforehand whenever we think a surprise might upset him.) So, they felt us lifting their sleeping bodies up to put them in the car, and they woke right up! Luckily they were happy, and ended up going back to sleep after an hour.

We stopped and breakfasted as soon as we got to Nevada. Got back on the road and Lily threw up her breakfast. YUCK! Took off the carseat cover, changed her clothes, got back on the road. She threw up again. Oh no, this girl gets motion sickness! (She threw up on the way home from the beach, both of the last two times we went, and both times I attributed it to other circumstantial factors.) So we made more frequent stops, and tried to put easily washed blankets down under her, and made it to Utah with only one or two more incidents, at 8pm.

We had so much fun hanging out with Tim's grandparents :D I love Tim, who happens to be just like his mother, so I love his mother too. Well, she's not too much unlike her own parents, so of course I rather like them too! We cooked and cleaned kitchen together, we toured the garden again, we chatted, we saw Tim's aunt and uncle that live right next door and another aunt and uncle that live across town, and we spent time with Tim's sister who just had a baby.

(And I am disappointed in myself that I never thought to go take care of her postpartum like I'm planning on doing for my friend in Dallas. I think it was just that the friend DID live just around the corner from me when she got pregnant, and so the plans were laid before we ever knew we were moving away. But next time a sister-in-law of mine has a baby, she will have the option of my help after the birth!)

Jack and Lily enjoyed playing on the steps in their house, and the movies they have there that Tim got to watch as a kid. Jack enjoyed the jacuzzi bathtub, and got his first-ever bubble bath. Put regular baby soap into the water right in front of the jacuzzi intake, and you get a MONSTER bubble bath!

We left at about 5am to come home. We turned Lily's carseat to be facing forward, and Tim sat next to her and helped her to look up and forward instead of down inside the car.We made great time, stopping once in Utah and once or twice in Nevada. But the entire state of California was a traffic jam! It was Labor Day weekend, and there are lots of state and national parks there at the eastern edge of the state that people were driving home from. We stopped multiple times, and had a pretty cranky toddler by the time we got home, but we got home by 9pm and were so happy to have a clean home! And, turning Lily's seat around and helping her look up, worked, and we made it home with no vomit :D

And then I bought a plane ticket to Texas :D I arrive at 5:35pm on Saturday, October 2nd, and will hopefully go straight to visit my in-laws in Texarkana. I'd like to get 2 visits in before I have to come home, and Malina doesn't want me too far from Dallas when her baby is due, so I'd better get that first visit in as soon as I get there so I don't manage to miss her baby's birth :D Then I'll go visit again after the baby is born and before I come back home.

I am SO excited to go see my best friend and see our kids play together again. I have to be careful not to talk to Jack about it too much, b/c I don't want to make him as homesick as I am, but when I do ask him if he's excited to see Lorn and Hal, he says "I want to see them RIGHT NOW! I can't wait!" I worry that I won't be very helpful while I'm there; I want to do all her laundry and dishes and help her to welcome her newest child in peace and joy, but I'm barely hanging on to my own duties right now. But that's a whole nother post ;)

Picasa album of road trip pictures!