House update

Candy requested some pictures of the house with table so I took some pictures to share.

Kitchen: cozy but it works. 

The wallpaper will go sometime. 

Kitchen table!!! Craigslist is great.

The piano fits! It takes up about a third of the room, but I have noticed that a grand piano makes any space look elegant. 

The sun room. This is a great space.

Candy's favorite part about the house is the butterflies. 

Alex managed to put in a little garden before he started. 

Blackberries and raspberries. 

gooseberry and currant bush

Peach tree

Apple tree

There you have it. We are blessed to have a nice big yard and hopefully we will get a lot of use out of it over the coming few years. Most of the backyard is shaded by some large trees which is why the garden is on the side yard and the fruit trees are in the small front yard.

Alex started his residency officially. The first night he got home at 1:30 am. He didn't have a key to the house so he tapped on the bedroom window to wake me up. It has gotten better since then but he worked really hard last week. (Harder than he has ever worked in his life, according to him.) The commute is longish too so he has really long days. Most days Cecily is asleep when he gets home.

During church I took pictures of Cecily. There is another baby Cecily in our ward. The first week we were at church the birth of a second Cecily was announced over the pulpit and Alex and I were so surprised! Luckily, the other family is very sweet so we don't mind. The two Cecilys will grow up together in the ward (our Cecily is only 2 months older) but probably won't know any other Cecilys.

Motherhood: from the trenches

Cecily turned 3 months old a week ago and to celebrate we did two of the things she hates the most: put her in the car seat and in the baby carrier, each for a very very long time if you are a baby. (See the previous post.) Anyway, I digress. The point is, I have been a mother for a few months now. What have I learned?

This: Cecily's fingernails grow super fast. And her hair and toenails don't grow at all. Why is that?

What have I not learned?

This: how to get a baby to sleep. All you moms out there, tell me how to fix this - from about 2-3 months of age, Cecily was sleeping like a charm, 6-7 hours at a stretch. For the past 5 days or so though, when she gets up in the middle of the night to eat, she stays up. For two hours. And she has always been a hard one to take a decent long nap during the day if it is anywhere besides me holding her. I am afraid she has inherited my tendency to have a hard time falling asleep.

Motherhood in a lot of ways is about what I expected, in some ways is greater and more wonderful than I imagined, and in other ways is so much harder. (I expect my friends with four and five kids to be rolling their eyes right now.) I think I knew it wasn't going to be blissful all the time, and it isn't. I don't feel guilty about having a hard time sometimes and often wishing to have an easier baby. I have learned to lower my expectations for each day. It is an accomplishment if I eat a decent lunch, brush my teeth, and am not in pajamas all day long. It is a really great day if I bake a batch of cookies and sweep the floor. Every now and then I take a shower. This is kind of a hard thing for me to accept. I just can't get nearly as much done as I would like to. Anyway, motherhood... I still have so much more to learn and experience!

Alex started his residency officially yesterday. Woo hoo!  (or boo hoo, depending on how you look at it...)

Here's a video for you. Nothing exciting, just a cute baby. Thanks Aunt Janelle for the adorable onesie dress! I have decided I really like onesie dresses because they have all the advantages of a onesie with a built in drool rag.

Mountain adventure

Alex and I joined his incoming class of interns for a hike in the White Mountains this past weekend. Cecily decided to come along even though she wasn't looking forward to the 2.5 hour car ride there and back (yeah, she hates the car seat) and claims that no one told her that she would be strapped to daddy's sweaty chest for the whole 2.7 miles up and back. No one told me that this was not an easy stroll through the woods! I was huffing and puffing all the way up the mountain and I didn't even have an extra 14 lbs of baby on me. We spent the night on bunks in a lodge with 7 other people in our room and luckily Cecily slept really well once she finally went to sleep...

Unfortunately I don't have any pictures of the trail, which was beautiful, because of the hassle of getting to the camera under a rain poncho... not a good excuse... but here is a picture of baby and daddy almost ready to trek back down the mountain.

What have I gotten myself into?

I tried putting Cecily in the mei tai today and she screamed bloody murder... twice...

Happy Father's Day!

Alex and I have great fathers and fathers-in-law and we love them both a lot. Cecily is lucky to have such wonderful grandpas. She wanted to share a little note with them today.

 A couple of videos:

The Olde Towne

Yesterday we had a little adventure. We took Cecily on the subway into the city and did a walking tour of some historic sites. Boston is a good city for a historic tour. Seems like there is an important building on every corner, someone famous lived on every other corner, and famous historic things were happening everywhere.

Cecily did great. She slept in her mei tai for a lot of it, woke up, ate (we bowed out of the tour at this point), and refused to go back in the carrier so we took turns carrying her for the rest of our walkabout.

Changing baby in the backyard of the Old North Church, which is where Paul Revere had two laterns hung.

 We were quite popular with passers by with this cute thing in tow.

Boston skyline

We are settling into our house bit by bit. This is what the kitchen looked like a few days ago:

Alex tore out the floor cabinet by the stove to fit in the new fridge. The hole has been replaced with a stainless steel shelf and looks decent. We never intended to have to tear apart our new used kitchen to fit in a new used fridge but when life gives you lemons...

I feel a need to post a few pictures of Cecily.

Favorite sleep position

 Don't look, grandma! Hanging out with Lucy.

Only lasted for so long

We had no bouncer, swing or rocker when we moved in so we had to make do... The peacock is taped to the end of the ironing board. 

Hi from Massachusetts

We made it!

Let me tell you about the last few days of our life.

Friday a week ago: big packing day. I had been packing stuff up for months, even before Cecily was born. Friday was the day that the rest of the house got packed up. Some of our friends helped us out and we couldn't have done it without them.

Saturday: I went to work all morning and Alex got the moving truck. That afternoon we cleaned and packed the truck with help from tons of people. Thank you so much to those that helped - there is no way in the world we could have done it without all the help we received.

Sunday: A week ago today I went to work in the morning for a little bit, went to church for sacrament meeting, cleaned the house from top to bottom, finished packing, said goodbye to our sweet neighbor Gisela and drove to Cincinnati. Looking at my wonderful house for the last time might qualify as one of the saddest times of my life.

Monday: This was the day I dreaded the most. I was alone with the baby and the dogs and I was most afraid of Cecily screaming her head off and not being able to do a single thing about it. That did happen and I pulled off when I could but once I made sure she was dry and not hungry there was nothing I could do but hold her for a few minutes, put her back in the (dreaded) car seat, and carry on. It was hard. I cried along with her. But we can do hard things.

Cecily on my lap on Aunt Candy's porch after a very long day of driving. She looks like I felt.

We pulled into Philadelphia totally exhausted and were grateful for...

Tuesday: a day to sleep in, tie up a few odds and ends for the new house, and relax with family.

Wednesday: we left Philly very early to try to make it to our new home for a walk through before the closing. Guess what. We didn't make it. Stopping multiple times to feed a baby and a GPS that doesn't anticipate a moving truck not being able to make clearance under certain bridges are what doomed us. I arrived just in time for closing and Alex was a half hour late. The closing went as expected and we are proud homeowners in Medford, MA. The drive to the new home from the bank was frustrating (traffic, crazy roundabouts) and left me wondering to myself about what I have gotten into. Old friends now living nearby took the time to bring us dinner and help unload the truck and I was never more grateful to see friendly faces. I was (am) feeling transplant shock as a country girl coming from a relatively small town in the Midwest to a humongous city at the end of weeks of not a lot of sleep because of a brand new baby, working part time, trying to sell and purchase a home, and all the stress and work of moving and I about melted into a puddle of tears when we finally made it. Thank you Quinn and Tiffany for being there at just the right moment. There were also a couple people from our new congregation that helped us unpack the truck.

Thursday: The piano movers moved the piano in and we started to unpack. Candy and Tony came to spend a couple days with us and help watch the baby and unpack.

Friday/Saturday: unpacking, trying to make our home our home, and lots of craigslisting. We need a kitchen table still. We got a beautiful fridge but just found out it won't fit. I won't say which one of us didn't measure correctly.

Today: happy anniversary to my wonderful husband!

From now into the future: make friends, work on a few small home projects we will take a bit at a time, and enjoying the short amount of time before Alex starts as much as we possibly can.

The recurring theme of this post is that a bajillion people helped us to get here and we couldn't have done it without them. I am so grateful for all of their help and kindness. I will miss Urbana incredibly but look forward to this new adventure and chapter in our lives.

T minus 3 days

We sold our house!!! I hope the couple moving in loves it as much as we have. We have loved living in our house and in Urbana. Let me list a few of the things that have happened during the past 6 years while we have lived at 7 Weaver Pl:

- I graduated from vet school.
- I started my first job as a veterinarian.
- Alex graduated with his PhD and three years later his MD.
- We brought home our beautiful baby Cecily after waiting for her for years.
- Alex (with just a little help from me, my dad, and my mom) transformed this house from a fixer upper to a beautiful fixed up.
- Alex planted a garden each year and very fruitful blackberries, raspberries, grapes, and a peach and pear tree. I learned how to make jam. Lots and lots of it.
- We tried our hand at having chickens and rabbits.
- We had many friends over for dinner/games, etc and grew to love so many people here.

I could go on and on. We have cherished this house and I cried the day the for sale sign went up. While it is a huge relief to have it sold, we will always look back fondly on our time here.

Just a few pictures of our house:

The slate floor turned out great. The bathroom was one of the last things we did so I haven't had a lot of time to enjoy it...

Alex put hardwood floor in about half of the house. 

 The kitchen originally had two different types of linoleum. We decided to tile the dining room, kitchen and laundry area. That was the first major project after the kitchen cabinets. I helped quite a bit with the tile project. We will never tile 600 sq ft again. It was so much work!

original kitchen

Dining room. These walls used to have nasty painted paneling. 

We painted every wall in the entire house. 

I did very little of the painting. I don't really like to paint. 

Here are a few more old pictures of the house:

The floor was half done for quite a few months...

We tore up lots of carpet.

The bathroom...

What is that, officer? You want to pull me over when we have our screaming baby, our mewling cat, and our two dogs in the car and just left the house in a huge hurry to get out before people arrived to look at it with the Realtor? Is there any chance you heard me talking to my husband about 10 seconds earlier about how funny it would be if we were pulled over right now? I just may have uttered the words "I dare that policeman to pull me over."