Getting my cardboard on

Not too much to report here. I have spent the last 3 days packing, and 40 boxes later, here we are. When Ingrid moved to her new place over the weekend, she rented a U-Haul which we used to get our stuff out of storage that we had moved in order to show our house. Our things in storage nearly filled the entire U-Haul truck! I was in shock. One car-load at a time sure adds up! I would say we now have somewhere around 80 boxes total packed up. So the packing seems to be on schedule. I have to say that it is certainly easier to be at work! I'm filling in for the director at school the next couple of days which is a welcome break from the work in the house for me. Lily has continued to go to school which has been immensely helpful. I know that I could not have accomplished as much over the past few days with Lily in the house. It definitely would have been a lot less fun for her too.

I think that this will be the story for the next couple of weeks - packing and more packing. We have exactly two weeks from tomorrow until the movers come to take our things away and head on down the road. Crazy! That day will start the action for us. We have one pre-commencement function on Thursday to attend, and then another on Friday before the big event later that day. Carl's family will arrive on Thursday to be a part of the celebration. We are really getting excited, although it can be hard to focus on the fun stuff when we have to wade through the sea of details related to moving. We haven't even touched on notifying all parties of our change of address, turning off cable, phone, internet, etc here and turning it on there... So much to do! But, first - sleep. Goodnight all.

Congrats Ang & Zach!

My little sister, Angela, is now engaged to be married! We are so excited for them both! I can't think of a more perfect, fun-loving, all-around great couple! We are looking forward to the fall '09 wedding and so happy that Zach is now going to be an "official" member of the family!

Moving Day for Aunt Ingrid

The guys get the light stuff...

...leaving the girls with the heavy stuff...

...while Lily supervises.

All locked up and ready to go!


Congrats on your new place Aunt Ingrid!!

A family update amidst the chaos

LILY

• Adorable as ever. I'm enjoying her everyday-use of words like probably, actually, and maybe. Also, she talks with so much facial expression that you just have to smile.
• She has gotten so tall and so strong recently. Today she surprised herself (and me) when she opened the refrigerator door on her own.
• She tells everyone that she is moving to St. Louis. When asked by one of the teachers where St. Louis is, she answered "far, far away". She also loves to tell everyone about her new purple room. She seems to kind of understand what is going on, although she tells us that her teacher is going to hide in her bed and come with us. She also doesn't quite understand that Aunt Ingrid and Irie are not coming with us.
• Lily went to her first movie last weekend. Carl wanted to take her to see Horton Hears a Who before he started his last rotation (a little daughter and daddy bonding time). She did really well. Carl had mentioned before the movie that it was about a purple elephant. She had to correct him several times during the movie by exclaiming, "It's a gray elephant, daddy!" She then enjoyed turning around and looking at all the people behind her, who she no doubt thought would much rather watch her than a silly old movie. About a half hour into the experience, she simply told Carl that she was ready to leave. And that was that. Her report to me was that "it was dark, and there was a gray elephant."
• Lo and behold, Lily has taken to watching a tv program: Mickey's Clubhouse. It is the new pacifier for us. It will calm her down, distract her, etc. anytime we need it. Woo-hoo! She will also sometimes watch Clifford in the morning, which affords me an extra few minutes to get myself ready for work. We are lucky, though, that tv is not always required for distraction. Lily is very good at keeping busy, usually with either reading or playing with dolls. When Carl and I played tennis on Sunday, we took her to the courts, and she played with the balls, their containers, and the leaves for almost an hour! Rock on!
• Lily likes to wear several pairs of pajama bottoms all together at night. She also is becoming more opinionated about what she wears during the day, but her idea of "matching" is not entirely accurate.

CARL

• We think that Carl has missed his calling as an actuary. He has an uncanny ability to think of every possible thing that could go wrong with the sale of our current house and the purchase of our next house.
• He started his LAST rotation as a med student this week. This is a three-week rotation and so far it is not too bad, considering that it is one of his more intense sub-i's this year.
• It is hard to believe that 7 years has now come down to a few weeks. Graduation is May 16th!

ME

• My last "official" day of work is this Friday. I will sub for the director a few days in the upcoming weeks since the person lined up to take my position probably won't start there for another few weeks. I can't really say any more about that. Too sad.
• I will spend the next few weeks tackling the monumental task of packing our entire house. One word...daunting. We are having movers come to take everything out of the house, move it and bring it into our next house, but we have to do all the packing/unpacking. I think that it is like most things: it will be much less scary once we actually start.
• I'm trying to make a mental list of all the places I want to visit before we leave. Hopefully we'll get to at least a few of them before we go.

HOUSE(S) UPDATE

• If we could get a service person to come to our house for a simple repair and not cause a major repair to be done, it would wonderful. By far, this has been the cause of the most stress in all of this.
• There seems to be many "Oh, by the way..." s. The latest is that our house in St. Louis is on a flood plain and is required to have flood insurance, which has been quoted to be anywhere between $1000-$4000 per year - a pretty wide range. Carl informed me tonight that it may not be true that we are on a flood plain at all, our real estate agent is in contact with FEMA, and a surveyor must come out to determine the house's exact elevation. At this point, we just go with the flow, so to speak.
• A word of advice to everyone out there: choose a house you really like and NEVER move.
• We actually expected to a buy a house that we would only be in for the next 5 or so years, but we really like the house that we are set to buy in St. Louis, so we hope that this will be a more long-term property for us.
• We're excited for moving day when all this work is behind us (...and then the work of unpacking begins)!

Dinner on the deck

Last night, we had dinner on the deck for the first time this season. Carl and Ingrid put together a full spread that was totally delicious! Lily decided to combine dinner and dessert in a truly disgusting way by crumbling up bits of hamburger and putting them in her watermelon slice. Gross!

Lily in motion

Gymnastics

Signs of Spring

Firsts!

First school field trip and first school bus experience

So little, yet so brave - she wanted to sit all by herself!

Lovin' her big girl status

First visit to the Pediatric Dentist - fun sunglasses provided by the office

Going to the dentist is so much fun!

The Pediatric Dentist is located across the hall from her Pediatrician on the second level of the building directly above her school/my work. Have I mentioned how I love the convenience of that place and how much I am going to miss it? I was quite impressed with the dentist's office. He had 3 flat-screen tvs with game controllers and a large play kitchen with lots of dolls and other toys. Lily was having so much fun playing, but she strutted right back to the examination room when her name was called, was very cooperative during the exam, and then came out smiling, handling yet another new experience with ease.

Indoor playtime

2 years 5 months

9 months

Now

Then


We were highly disappointed when our first gymnastics class was cancelled today, but I guess that's just the chance you take when taking classes from the rec center. We decided to go to the mall's play area for some release of energy on this chilly day, and we actually had a great time. Hopefully, we'll be able to start gymnastics class next week because Lily is really looking forward to it.

Truckin'

So we're moving right along with our family relocation plan. The latest update is this: We have a contract on our house, with an inspection on Wednesday and appraisal on Thursday. ALSO...we have an accepted contract on a house in St. Louis!!! That inspection is also scheduled for Wednesday. It's all happening so quickly now. The major hurdles right now are the inspections - fingers crossed that all goes well with both of them. We have slowly been able to exhale more and more, but I think we will really be able to breathe easier on Wednesday night. So, that's where we stand right now. We are very excited for all the next steps!

Silly Lily

One of Lily's recent "Twos Daily News" reports stated that she was playing with the toy trucks and fell out on the carpet and said, "Oh, no! I'm stuck in the muck. Call the tow truck."

We are naturally working on Lily's manners and often remind her to say "please" and "thank you". Lately when I ask her where her manners went, she responds by saying that they went to the doctor's. Where she got that, I'm not quite sure. That's our little ham!

We have officially accepted a contract and are set to close on May 19th, which means we will be back in St. Louis by May 20th!!!

I think that it is all due to the awesome bouquet of roses that I made for our Open House ;)

Happy (late) April Fool's Day

I'm not really great when it comes to pranks, but with Carl being back in his old lab to do research this month, I knew that some practical jokes were inevitable. When Carl got home last night, I got to hear all about them. There were the usual pranks like hiding favorite items and such, but I had to share two of the best. The first one was pretty elaborate and involved taking a picture of someone's desktop on their computer, then hiding all their icons in a hidden folder, then using the picture of the desktop as their background - which meant that the icons that they tried to click on weren't icons at all because it was just a picture. Pretty clever. But my favorite joke was the one played on Carl. His friend set the default language on his computer to Japanese. It took him an hour to change it back to English because the directions for resetting the language were, of course, in Japanese! Love it. I have to give it to you, Jean, that was a good one. Luckily, Carl did not go through with his plan of setting Jean's dissertation to a read-only pdf file. Not funny.