Well, I have almost all the photos up-to-date. There are a few on the camera still, but they'll have to wait.
I was prepared to post a lot of photos a couple months ago, but then things came up with our photo program (updates, new formats, etcetera). So that rather deterred me. I had spent several days going through hundreds of pictures and labeling them, only to stop dead in my tracks, so to speak. But now I have renewed my efforts and finished, and hopefully all is organized properly.
So here's what we've been up to that is different than normal:
In late September, we took some "vacation" time for the family. Josh took a week off work, and we kept busy! We took Annabelle apple picking for the first time - she loved it! She did a great job, and we got a ton apples! Yummy apple crisp! :-) We also got word from Disney that their "A Christmas Carol" Train Tour was coming. It was on a weekday, so we went earlier in the day to see it to avoid after-school crowds. It was awesome! They had the train that toured the country to talk about the movie and how they made it, and to show some artifacts from the Charles Dickens Museum. They even had a blow-up theatre where we got to see a sneak peak of the film (think bounce-house, only with a theatre screen and chairs). And it was in the new 3-D style, which was our first time using it, and it was awesome! And the best thing: everything was free! Disney did a great job on this. Free parking/rides to the rail station, free admission, free giveaways... everything! It was a neat experience, and Annabelle didn't stop talking about it for a long time!
Then we took a few days to go down and visit the Langhorne, PA, area. Our sisters (Annie and Allison) are at school there, and we decided to go see some sites and see the campus they have called home for a few years now. While we didn't make it to all the tourist sites we'd hoped to see, we did have several packed days. We arrived on a Wednesday evening and checked in at the hotel before going to the girls' dorms to drop off some goodies for them and chat. The next day, we headed over to Valley Forge to see the National Park and several historic buildings therein. It was pretty warm that day, and very humid, but it was a wonderful, very large park. We spent a few hours there, looking at the museum, walking around the grounds, and seeing Washington's Headquarters. Our final stop there was the gift shop, where we got several souvenirs. Annabelle got one of her many treasures of the trip there: a spinning light up wand that says "Valley Forge" inside. When we got back to the hotel, she actually wanted us to turn off the lights so it was pitch black and she could light it up!
The next day we ended up changing plans to go into Philadelphia to see historic things and headed to Bucks County instead. First we went to PBU to meet Annie and see the campus, and then we headed up to Peddler's Village. When we got there, we located our target: Giggleberry Fair. It is a big "arcade"-type place for kids, along with a large obstacle course for all ages. After determining how late it was open, we headed back through the village in pursuit of something to eat. We decided on ice cream (none of us had eaten lunch, and by this time it was too late for a full meal, especially with a planned trip to Pizza Hut that night). We went to a wonderful shop called Pigadilly's (with Pigs everywhere inside!), and had some fabulous ice cream! Annabelle and Daddy shared a big sundae, and Annie had a yummy sundae on her own while I enjoyed cake-batter flavored ice cream with vanilla sauce and bright pink jimmies. It was wonderful! After that, we headed to the Fair, and bought a bunch of tokens to use in the arcade. Annabelle had a blast running around and playing the games. We got a ton of tickets to redeem, and she got some more treasures: a toy snake (!), a large button that said "Giggleberry Fair" on it, a bracelet, and four mini dinosaurs. She loved them so much, she didn't want to stop playing with them that night!
That night for supper we took Annie and Ally out to eat at Pizza Hut and had some yummy wings and pizza before heading back to the hotel. Then it was Saturday, our last full day in PA. We went and picked up Annie and Ally, then headed (bravely) into Philly by car. Our destination was the Philadelphia Zoo, something I had long heard described as one of the best zoos in the world. It is also the oldest one in America, I believe. Anyway, we got there safely, and then we spent the next few hours going around and seeing a ton of animals. Annabelle has decided her favourite (right now, anyway) is the giraffe. We didn't see them until the second half of the zoo, but they were fascinating, and we spent quite a while watching them. Josh seemed to like the hippos a lot; I am not sure what my favourite was, but I very much enjoyed being only a couple feet away from a tiger! :-) It was a wonderful place, but it was a loooooong day and we were all pretty tired at the end. After the drive back to the hotel, we took the girls out to Uno's for supper, where Josh happened to be positioned to watch the Yankees game (against the Red Sox, of course!). He even had a kindred spirit one table over - another Yankees fan! They were strangely out of place, seeing as not too many in the area cared about either team. :-p
The next morning we took off for home. We had decided a couple days before that we might be able to detour on the way home and go to the Crayola Factory in Easton, PA. It was a little out of the way, but we thought Annabelle would have a blast there, and I have fond memories of Mr. Rogers showing us how crayons were made there. So we went, and it was great! Annabelle's favourite part, however, was "the boat part". The upper two floors of the factory are actually the National Canal Museum, and they had a fantastic model set up where the little kids could push boats through a canal complete with the lock system. Annabelle loved moving the barge around, and then seeing the train room and some of the building activities. She got another treasure or two at the gift shop for her collection: a little plush purple crayon she promptly named "Cranny" and a magnet and a ring. For the first few weeks we were home, she showed all her treasures off and played with them constantly.
It was good to come home! The following weekend we had house guests: my parents came for a few days. We were supposed to go to Cooperstown with them, but weather didn't cooperate, so we decided to go to the NYS Museum (again!). We've been there many times now, but this was the first time for my parents. We have tried in the past to arrange a visit there for them, but it has never worked out. We spent a long time there, and of course we rode the Carousel. Annabelle had a blast! And we even explored the kids' section, which Annabelle was never old enough to be in before. So there was something new for us. Oh, and the very interesting Henry Hudson exhibit, of course! That is new for us, since it is a "temporary" exhibit. Happy 400th Anniversary, Hudson Expedition! :-)
My father had to head back to NH after a couple days, but my mother stuck around to help me out with a sewing project. I'd been planning this for a long time, so it was great to finally get working on it. We made a bathrobe for Annabelle - and it came out great! A little tricky at times, but it was fun! And Annabelle loved it!
During that week, Josh and I got to go see Bernie Williams play at "The Egg". It was a good concert, and we were in the 5th row, and Bernie was probably about 30 feet away at the most! Unfortunately, we have no pictures of it, as we weren't allowed to take any, and they didn't even sell any! But it was good, and our ears were ringing for a couple days afterward. :-p
The next day my mum had to go back to NH, so we drove to Hogback Mountain in Vermont to meet my Dad (it's about halfway between us). It was quite windy, but there was some foliage to see on the way. It wasn't quite "peak" yet, but it was still nice.
The next weekend, Annie came to visit us for her Fall Break. We didn't get to do much besides a little shopping, because we all got sick a couple days before she came. Fortunately, she didn't catch anything from us! And after that, we've kinda just been doing the normal busy stuff. I'm sure there was more in there, but I really can't think right now.
Our only other "big" thing to happen was our camera starting to act up (as you will see noted on several pictures). So Josh did some research, and he ordered a new camera which arrived only this past weekend. We got a great deal on it, and it is a really nice camera. So now we might take more pictures again. :-) (Aren't you all just so excited?!?) It's great timing, now that we have the holidays coming up and we'll need a reliable camera.
So there are lots of new pics to see. The Pennsylvania ones are all under "Family Outings", and there are updated pics in the Annabelle sections and the Apartment sections. Too many to list here, so you'll have to follow the indicated links for "New!" and "Updated!" folders.
And I have spent most of my day working on this site (uploading pics, labeling pics, checking links, and writing this), so I am done. Sorry it's so long - I'll try to update more often. And please forgive any spelling errors - it's getting late. :-p
Until next time! And Happy Thanksgiving!
-Katherine, 19 November 2009
It's been a few months, so there are lots of new pictures for you all to see. We've been keeping busy with summertime fun and even some visitors. I can't even remember all that's been going on! So you're going to have to rely mostly the "New!" and "Updated!" marking next to the folders as well as the captions to figure out what we did.
I can tell you this much about the past couple months: we got to see Matt and Heather and the kids VERY quickly (a late-night overnight) on their way to Maine in early July, and then again on their way back to Ohio in early August. The second time they came, we got to spend some more time visiting (a whole day rather than just a few hours). We were afraid the weather was going to be bad during their visit since it had been raining the days before they came, and it was supposed to rain the days after. We ended up having a beautiful day! We packed a picnic lunch and headed to The Crossings, a huge park a few minutes away from us. We had hoped to entertain Annabelle and Hannah on the large playground there after we ate lunch. But first we walked in the maze and walked a trail, and we noticed no one was really using the playground. We figured that it was too hot, since most of the equipment was a darker color metal or plastic, and it had all been in the sun all morning (and the ground around the equipment was that black rubber stuff or something). So we told the girls we would take them back to our place and they could play in the kiddie pool. And after they both took quick naps, that's just what we did! We had a Slip-and-Slide that we hadn't used yet (got it on clearance last summer), and Josh got it out and hooked it up, and Annabelle loved it! Mason also enjoyed it, and Hannah, after much persuasion, tried it and had a blast too. :-)
That day was also Josh's birthday, so at the end of the day we got to eat our traditional homemade ice cream cake! It was delicious! It was also a perfect way to cool off after a hot day. :-) Annabelle and I had given him our cards and a present that morning, so he got to try out his new toy that afternoon: juggling pins! Josh is pretty good at juggling, and he's always wanted something more challenging than the little bean-filled balls. I had looked into pins for him before, but nothing sounded good. A year later, I looked again, and I found some promising ones, and that's what I got for him. :-) So far he's pretty good, and he keeps getting better. He has a lot of fun with them, and Annabelle loves watching him. You can see pics of him with his pins in the Fun Stuff folder on the Apartment Page.
We haven't taken any trips this summer except a weekend visit to NH for the Fourth of July. It was a nice, relaxing, and fun time. Annabelle loved seeing the parade, and she did much better at the fireworks this year. She still covered her ears, but she actually watched them!
We have enjoyed visits from most of our siblings this summer. Like I said, we saw Matt and Heather in August, and when we were in NH, Annie got to come home for the weekend to visit with us, but only for a day or so, because she was off working at Camp Good News this summer! So she wasn't able to visit us, but we got to see her real quick. And we have enjoyed visiting with Ally several times while she was in the area this summer. And Jordan was just up from Texas for a couple weeks and we got to spend a little time with him as well. So we've had lots of people coming around this summer!
So we've been keeping busy, like I said. I just spent a few days captioning all the photos and now uploading them. There are new pics to see everywhere, so please check them out!
I hope the rest of your summer goes well - enjoy the weather while you can!
-Katherine, 16 August 2009
I just finished adding a bunch of new pictures for you all to enjoy. :-) And I only have a couple of news-related things to share. So this post will be much shorter than the last one! :-p
First, on May 14th we celebrated our four-year anniversary. It's hard to believe it's already been four years, and at the same time it's hard to believe it's been only four years! Does that make sense? Hopefully you get it. We feel like we've always been together and can't believe that it's actually been so short. Time flies! To celebrate, I cooked a very yummy turkey dinner with everything but mashed potatoes (I ran out of time). It was wonderful! :-)
A couple days later, my family stopped by on their way home from picking Annie up at school and stayed overnight to break up the trip. We had a nice visit, and we went out to eat before they headed back to NH. On our way back to our house, we saw one of those Little Tikes outdoor playhouses at the end of someone's driveway down the road from our place. We stopped to look at it because it had a big "Free" sign on it. Annabelle was asleep and didn't see it, but Josh got out and inspected it, and we decided to take it since we've been looking for outdoor stuff for Annabelle the last couple years. It was dirty, and it turned out it wasn't going to fit in our van (especially with three adults in the back seat!). So Annie got out with Josh and helped him carry it down the street to our house while I drove the rest of us home. Annabelle stayed asleep for a while and didn't see the house being carried down the road. :-) We got her inside, then I grabbed the camera and went out to take a picture of Josh and Annie, becuase it just seemed amusing. When Annabelle woke up, we took her outback to see her "surprise present." She was still sleepy, but in a minute it sunk in what she was looking at, and she happily checked it out. After saying goodbye to Grammy, Grampa, and Aunt Annie, she kept begging us to go clean the house (we had told her she couldn't play in it until it was cleaned up). So, she was on her best behaviour all evening, and, despite the very cold weather, we all went out to clean it up. Josh did most of the cleaning, and Annabelle just supervised, and I made sure Annabelle didn't get too close. Josh used some car cleaning stuff, and it brightened up beautifully! It was a couple days before she could go out and use it, since it was cold and rainy for a few days. But she loves it and is always asking to go out and use it. :-) You can see some pictures of all that in her 38-39 Month folder.
So that's all that's really "new" right now. I would like to point out that it has been almost a whole year since Josh graduated (yay! Still happy that he doesn't have to go to classes anymore!)! Other than that little bit of trivia, I don't have much more to say. There are new pictures in the Apartment (2 folders updated), Holidays, and Annabelle Pages, marked accordingly.
Well, it's Friday night, and I'm ready to go relax on the couch with my hubby, watching - what else? - something Yankees-related. :-p It's that time of year! (Go Braves! Hehehe...) Or maybe we'll watch something else. :-)
Until next time!
-Katherine, 5 June 2009
I have an excuse for not updating - really! I know I said I would try to update right after Annabelle's birthday, but that's about the time when things got crazy. Let me tell you all about the last couple months...
To begin, we had Annabelle's birthday, and the next day was her birthday party. We had lots of family crowd into our small place! We had both sets of Annabelle's grandparents, her great-grandfather, a great-aunt, one aunt who was able to get a last-minute ride up from school, and a great semi-surprise set of visitors: her Uncle Matt and Aunt Heather brought her two cousins all they way from Ohio! A few days before the party, Matt and I were talking about it, and he told me that they would be able to make the long trip to spend the weekend with us. We were very excited, as we hadn't seen them all in several months (early August, I believe), and we knew the girls were eager to see each other. So they drove in Friday night (Annabelle's actual birthday) and we got to visit with them for a little that night before they went to a motel for the night (my parents had come and were staying in our guest room that night), then we saw them again on Saturday before the party. The girls had a blast playing together, and Mason joined in, of course. :-) It was a really nice "reunion" of sorts, having my parents and my brother and his family all here with us. We only missed my grandmother (who can't travel long distances) and my sister (she couldn't get away from school for the weekend). We all had a good time catching up and watching the girls renew their friendship. :-) It was very neat to see Hannah and Annabelle interact after several months apart; there was a great difference in how they played now that they both have developed so many new skills and can talk to each other so much!
The day before (Annabelle's actual birthday), my parents came (late afternoon/early evening), and we all went to Toys 'R Us for a quick visit because Annabelle belongs to "Geoffrey's Birthday Club". We went in and went straight to the customer service desk, and Annabelle got a birthday crown and a balloon, and then the lady announced over the loud speakers that she was in the store and it was her birthday that day! Almost as soon as we left the desk, some little girls saw Annabelle and told her "Happy Birthday!" :-) Annabelle had a blast looking at all the toys, trying to decide which one to get (as part of the club, they sent her a gift certificate for $3 - I assume because she turned three). We looked all over the store, and even stopped to try out the bikes and trikes, but then we decided on a very nice kaleidoscope. Annabelle loves it so much - her first one of her own! She couldn't stop playing with it for several days. :-)
Then, like I said, that night we had her cousins for a short visit, and we had a couple cupcakes available for people, and we sang her "Happy Birthday" and let her have cake on her actual birthday, even though the next day was the big party. We did give her a couple presents, too. Grammy June and Grandpa Mark gave her a little present that night (a couple of fun animal pop-up books!) and saved their big gift for the next day. Then Josh and I gave her some presents: a couple of Disney movies, and a Wall-E electric toothbrush (which she happily used that night). :-) We also gave her a box of Princess dress-up shoes, which she loved and couldn't wait to try on. It took a few tries, but she has, for the most part, learned to walk in them (they have little heels, which makes them a little dangerous and wobbly).
The next day was the party, and Annabelle had a blast with Hannah, weaving in and out among all the people (I believe it was 11 adults, 3 kids total) and throwing balloons up in the air. The food was good, and of course Annabelle loved all her presents. :-) Annabelle had also decided a month or so before her birthday that she wanted a "Kitty Cat Cake" for her birthday, so I tried my best to make her one. She loved it, and everyone said it was yummy, and it went quick! You can see all the pictures from the party here.
That night and the next, Matt and Heather and the kids stayed with us (my parents had to head back to NH after the party). All the kids were pretty worn out, so we decided to let them sleep-in the next morning instead of going to church. Later that morning, we headed over to the New York State Museum. Obviously, Matt and Heather had never been there before, and we, as you know, have been there several times now. It was a nice way to spend a day with family, doing something "tourist"-like and still being together. The girls had loads of fun seeing everything together, and they loved the carousel ride at the end. :-) After that, we went to Friendly's for a late lunch - we took up two booths (one on each side of the divider wall) for all of us! We ate yummy food, with yummy ice cream at the end; then we headed home for a relaxing evening. The kids played for a while, then when they were in bed, we adults decided to watch a movie. We let Matt and Heather pick, and we ended up watching "The Game Plan" - a great movie! The next morning they had to leave to head back to Ohio, so we had to say goodbye. :-\ Hopefully we'll get to see them again sometime soon!
So, I had every intention of getting all those pictures from that weekend uploaded within a few days, but time got away from me. The tale goes on...
We finally decided that it was time to get a desktop computer. We'd been talking about it for a couple years, but never got around to it. Well, our laptop was starting to show signs of being worn out, so we got into researching it more. (And by "we", of course, I mean Josh). :-) Josh talked to some guys at work, and in the end, he decided to build the computer himself. He searched for and ordered the parts he wanted, then spent a few evenings after work putting it together. It turned out great! In fact, I am using that computer right now to do this update. :-)
Of course we needed a computer desk to put the thing on, and so we went shopping. After a few tries, we found a very nice desk (which was actually big enough for our wide monitor) and got it along with a matching bookshelf for a good price. (You can see a slightly messy version of the computer and desk here - we were in the middle of packing for a trip when I took the picture, thus the mess). And so we lost the nice open space in our living room corner. :-p But we have been squeezing the space here a lot lately: we had another addition to our room in the form of two end tables. We've been needing those for several years now, and we finally found some decent ones (at the Christmas Tree Shop of all places!) for a decent price. I'm not sure if there are any clear pictures of them, but there is one of Josh putting them together here.
And somewhere in there (sometime between getting the new computer together and buying the desk for it), our laptop screen died. So it was very good timing getting the computer when we did. And this also explains the delay in updating: all the website stuff was on the laptop, and we hadn't had a chance to install it on the new computer until recently. And then, when it was installed, I didn't have time right away. But now I'm doing it. :-)
Shortly after getting the computer desk, like I said before, we packed for a weekend in New Hampshire. We went there for Easter this year, and it was a nice weekend for us to catch up with my sister and grandmother. We hadn't seen either of them since right after Christmas, and we never know when our next chance to see them will be. Annie is finishing up her school year, and we don't know how busy summer will be. And seeing Grammy is always a special treat for all involved. :-)
And this year was the first time things were somewhat "normal" for Easter. We had planned to do an Easter Egg hunt for her last year, but things were crazy with schedules and Josh had to fly out on a business trip on Easter Sunday, so we just didn't have time. So this year Annabelle finally got to do one! It was fun watching her find all the eggs - she loves games where you have to look for things in pictures and stuff, so this was loads of fun for her. She looked for a bunch of them at Grammy June and Grandpa Mark's house after church, then we went to Great-Grammy's for Easter Dinner and then she got to look for some eggs there. She had so much fun, and she looked beautiful in her new dress (her birthday present from Grammy June and Grandpa Mark - she calls it her "Easter Wedding Dress"). :-) She also had gotten to help dye eggs the night before - another first. :-) I hadn't done them in so long, and my Mum had decided she wanted to do them this year, so we got some pictures of Annabelle being amazed as she checked out the process.
Finally, we have a new "project" going: Annabelle and I have planted some seeds in planters inside as part of a gardening project. I love radishes, so I planted some of those, and we got some sunflower seeds for Annabelle. Since the weather is a bit unpredictable still, we have them inside to start, and we will transfer them to the garden once we're sure it's safe. We planted them the afternoon/evening of April 18th, and within a few days we saw them growing, slightly ahead of schedule. Annabelle had a blast helping me plant them, and she loves checking on them every day to see how much they've grown. Hopefully she'll get to see the 12-foot sunflowers grow really tall, as well as the smaller 4-foot ones. We're having fun with it, and I can't wait to eat a bunch of radishes! :-) You can see the progress of the project here, in the apartment pages.
And that just about catches us up. You can see all the "filler" details I might have missed by looking at the pictures. I'm sure you'll see stuff there that I missed. Including some of Annabelle's newest talents, like her ability to use the computer mouse to play a couple preschool games we got her. :-) Josh is sure she will know more about the computer than we do within a year; I'm not so sure, since I don't plan on letting her use it all the time. ;-)
So now it is spring, and we went from still feeling like it was winter to suddenly feeling like it's the middle of summer. We hit temperatures in the 90s the other day - it's a good thing we already bought Annabelle's new bathing suit for the year, because it was definitely a pool day! Those pictures aren't up yet, but will be in the next batch. She had lots of fun splashing and keeping cool. And today it's almost as hot, but we're doing just fine. I even got to put laundry out on the line - a sure sign of the season, along with the beautiful flowers in our garden! :-)
And I think that's about it. Time flew by, and then various things delayed me, but I finally got this update done. I'm sure, as I always am, that I forgot something. Maybe I'll remember and post more sometime. :-) Until then... Enjoy this lovely Spring weather!
-Katherine, 27 April 2009
Happy Birthday to our beautiful three-year-old girl! Annabelle, 
we love you more and more each day and can't believe how much you've grown. Happy birthday, sweetheart! We love you!!!
-Mommy and Daddy, 27 February 2009
Things have been pretty quiet the last month or so. Quiet, but busy with the everyday stuff.
We have a few new pictures up to share. I put more in our Christmas Decorating 2008 folder to finish up photos from last year. There are also photos from Valentine's Day - nothing special, just some good food. :-) We don't really celebrate Valentine's, because we prefer to wait a few days for our "anniversary" - February 19, 2002 is when Josh and I became a couple, and we still celebrate. :-) So we just celebrated 7 years together! We went out to eat at Uno's, and had some wonderful food. Good stuff!
There are, of course, new "Annabelle" pictures, and some new shots on "Our Apartment" pages, as well.
We are excited that Annabelle's birthday is coming up - we can't believe she's going to be three on Friday! So I'm sure we'll have some new pictures to put up after that. :-)
Annabelle is still very adorable - every day she gets cuter! She says the funniest things sometimes, and she is very creative. The last couple months she has been practicing writing her name - that's a lot of letters for a little girl to write! She's picked up on the letters quickly, and I'm sure it helps that there are so many "repeats" in her name. ;-) But she loves pointing out "A" whenever she sees it, and now she also points out the other letters from her name. And she does really well writing them legibly! I'm amazed at the mind of such a young child. :-) She absolutely loves reading, and learning, and pretty much everything else. I hope she always has such passions!
Things are pretty much the same for Josh and me. He's always busy at work, and he very much looks forward to his days off (even though weekends end up being pretty busy). I have been getting into some craft projects - I'm still working on a HUGE latch-hook rug my grandmother gave me for Christmas 2007! It's huge, but I have taken a couple months off on it, so it's not exactly like I've spent a year straight on it. More like I've been working on it on and off for a year. :-p So I'm probably almost halfway done with it, but I'm trying to pick it up a lot more in my "free time" (whatever that is!). I also have started a Yankees quilt (like the one I made for Josh for Christmas) for Annabelle. We bought some pink Yankees material several months ago, and this past week I took Annabelle in to pick some other colours for it. She chose some nice purples, and I threw in some white, and she picked a darker pink, so I'm hoping they will all look good together! So I'll be photographing my progress on that and posting it in my "Craftiness" section. ;-) I have most of the pieces cut for it, but still have to cut some more, choose a layout, and start sewing. It's going to be a little smaller than Josh's, but big enough that she shouldn't outgrow it - ever. :-p
I am quite eager to get going on that project, but I know I'll have to take a break this weekend for Annabelle's birthday - I've got lots of planning to do!
Oh, and of course there's the weather: our snow is mostly melted (at the moment), but we did get out to make a snowman one day (the only day the snow worked for us!), so please check out those pictures - very cute, and very fun!
So yeah, not much to report this time, but I'm sure we'll have some new pictures after this weekend, so maybe another update will be coming soon. :-) Until then, have fun, enjoy the everyday, and please forgive the randomness of this post (I'm feeling like it's a bit scatterbrained). :-)
-Katherine, 23 February 2009
Post Script: Tomorrow (the 24th) is my dear friend Martha's birthday, so I just want to say, "Happy Birthday, Martha! I love you so much, and I hope you have a fantastic day!" :-)
Happy New Year to All!
It has been a bit longer between updates that I had anticipated, but what a busy month and a half it has been!
We had a quick trip to New Hampshire for Thanksgiving - so quick that we only took two pictures the entire time we were there. :-p It was a nice time to see family and relax a little. My father even went out to buy something on Black Friday! That is unheard of for my family, but there was a really good sale on a GPS he was getting for Christmas, so he went and got it (and Josh went with him!). We got to use it on Saturday while we ran some errands and did a little Christmas shopping (not much, since the shelves were empty at most stores due to the sales the day before). I named the GPS "Tina", and it was kinda fun trying it out. :-)
As soon as we got back to New York, the Christmas season got into full swing it seems. It's such a blur to me now, but I know I was non-stop busy for quite a while! We made cookies for Josh to bring into work one day, and they didn't last long! We do this every year, and we usually do twice as many as we did this year, but they were greatly appreciated as far as I know. We kept a couple at home for Annabelle and me, so I got to taste them too, and they were very yummy!
We also had the big ice storm in mid-December. We woke up when the power went out (later found out it was about 3 AM), and even Annabelle woke up and told us it was dark. We all went back to sleep, then woke up mid-morning and looked outside. Lots of damage around us, but thankfully the trees in our front yard weren't damaged or causing damage to anything else. You can see some pictures here. We decided to head to the mall (about 5-10 minutes from our house) to keep warm, eat some hot food, and do some Christmas shopping. Apparently everyone else who lost power and had kids home from school that day had the same idea, because it was busy there! We were hungry, so we headed to the crowded food court first for some Chinese food (yummy!), then took our time eating, looking out the window. Across the street, all the businesses were closed, we assume without power. The parking lots were pretty much empty, while just below us people were packing the cars in. The driving was not the best (we didn't see any plows until that night, really), but it was okay if you went slow enough. We ate, then started walking around, doing some Christmas shopping. We spent several hours at the mall - more than we EVER spend at a shopping place. We normally can't stand being out shopping that long, but we did it. We tried calling home a couple times to see if our power was back (we have Vonage, so when the power is out, our phones are out; so we knew if the answering machine picked up instead of voice mail, we were good to go), but it didn't come back until we left the mall and were headed across the way to Target to get a couple things. I tried calling home and got the machine, so we knew the power came back around 4:40 PM that day. We were lucky - only about 14 hours without power, while some were out for days, or even weeks. Thank the Lord, because otherwise we would have been terribly cold for a few days!
Oh, I almost forgot: shortly after we got back from New Hampshire, Josh went out and got me an early Christmas present: a Yamaha Piano Keyboard! You can see some pictures here. It's so nice to be able to play again, though I am sad to say I didn't get to play it too much before Christmas since I was so busy. :-( But now that the busy times are (mostly) past, I am looking forward to playing a lot more. :-)
Christmas came up really quick, and we were more busy than ever. I had a box to mail to my brother's family, but I didn't get to the Post Office until the Monday before Christmas. I walked in, and the line was around the whole room! I had to mail the box, so I stepped to the back of the line. Josh and Annabelle parked the car (our PO is at our mall, so parking is difficult this time of year), then came to see me. They saw the line and decided to walk around the mall a little while I waited. The line moved at a decent pace, and I saw a lot of interesting human behavior during the half-hour or 45-minutes or so that I spent in that line. It wasn't so bad overall, but some people didn't react well to waiting. The lady behind me was nice enough, though, so it was a decent experience. I got to the front of the line, and the man behind the counter called me up, and after a million people (this PO is open until about 8 PM, and I got there sometime after 7:00, if I remember correctly), he was still quite cheerful. I really appreciated his friendliness, especially knowing that he probably had a pretty rough day.
So that was one "adventure" we had. After I got out of the line, I went in search of Josh and Annabelle. They had planned on coming back to check on my progress after a while, but when they did, the doors were locked (right at 8 PM!). I found them right inside the mall entrance, though, so it was all good. :-) And even better was that the box got to my brother's family on Christmas Eve - I didn't expect it to arrive until after Christmas! Yay for the Post Office! (And no, I don't always think that about the PO - but this time was special.) :-)
The next couple days were busy, especially Christmas Eve. We had lots of last minute stuff to do: wrapping, cleaning, cooking, etcetera. We went to Josh's parents' house for Christmas Eve dinner, then to church for Christmas Eve Service, then back to the Roots' for some time with Aunt Carol and Lee and to open some presents. Annabelle had fun opening some of her presents and playing, and she stayed up really late that night! We got home real late, and while Josh put Annabelle to bed, I got to work again. I made two chocolate-cream pies for the big get-together the next day, and we finished getting things wrapped and put everything under the tree. We didn't stay up as late as the year before, but we were still up pretty late.
So the next morning, we got up and got ready for the day while we let Annabelle sleep-in a little (we had another long day ahead of us, so we wanted her to get as much sleep as possible), and we got the cameras all ready for her for when she came down the stairs. When we heard that she was awake, we got her up, then asked her if she knew what day it was. She, of course, remembered that it was Christmas. She came down the stairs, and was amazed at all the presents. :-) You can see lots of pictures here. She got two special gifts from Santa, because she had "written" to him and asked him for four specific things, and he gave her two of them: ballet slippers, and the VeggieTales movie "The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything" (which we had seen in the theater this summer). She also got a beautiful baby doll, some games, and some new toy people items. Plus more. ;-) She had so much fun opening them all, and she enjoyed helping Mommy and Daddy open their presents too. Daddy got some neat Yankee Stadium books and some fun things like Yankees Jenga, and a couple of games for the Nintendo DS. His most special present was something that took me several days (spread out over a few months) to make: a fleece quilt! You can see those pics with the Christmas ones, and the making-of pictures here. And, as I said earlier, my big present was the piano, so I didn't get much else besides that and some beautiful jewelry and a couple computer/DS games. :-) It was a good Christmas. :-)
When presents were done (and stockings, of course!), we made brunch. It was smaller this year than the past, but we were very hungry and didn't have time to wait to make more food. So we had some wonderful eggs, hash browns, and sausage - sooooo good! Annabelle loved it, and when we were done, she finally got to play for a little while before Josh's parents and siblings came over for a while. When they got here, we opened some more presents and gave them some more, and then Annabelle tried to play some more. She didn't have long before we had to get ready to head to the big get-together at Josh's aunt and uncle's house. We tried to get Annabelle to sleep on the way there (it was about 45 minutes away), but she just couldn't fall asleep. We got there and were greeted by all Josh's cousins and their families, who gave Annabelle some more presents. We handed out our gifts to everyone (see them here: homemade chocolate truffles and peppermint biscotti!), and shortly after that the meal was served. It was great to catch up with everyone, especially since we only get to see most of them once a year.
A while after desserts were served (including my yummy chocolate-cream pie!), we decided to head home. It was gonna be another late-night, so we had to get going. And we tried to keep Annabelle awake in the car, but while we kept pointing out Christmas lights to her (one of her favourite things to see!), she went out. We knew that once she fell asleep, it meant that she would be awake late that night. Not good, but we worked with it. So when we got home and she woke up, she didn't want to go to bed (no surprise), so we let her stay up playing with her new toys a little bit. This was good for her, since she was trying to do this all day, but couldn't because we had to leave. She really enjoyed playing with her toy people that night, then she went to bed and fell asleep. And after I finished calling some of my family to say "Merry Christmas", Josh and I were wiped out, so we weren't too far behind. :-)
The next day we spent relaxing a little while we got some laundry done. We played with Annabelle and got ready to pack our bags for a couple of days in New Hampshire. We got to NH late Saturday evening, exchanged some presents, went to bed, then we had church and some relaxation time on Sunday, then Monday we were planning on going to town to see my Grammy and go bowling, but Josh felt sick so we didn't get to go until late afternoon. So we managed to still visit Grammy, but had to put the bowling off. The next morning we had to get ready to go, but we decided to go bowling before heading out. So back to town, and we all went candlepin bowling (the three of us, Grandpa Mark, and Aunt Annie, while Grammy June watched and kept score). We had wanted to do this because we thought Annabelle might have a better time holding the ball (much smaller than the ones we used the month before here in NY). Right after we got there, they turned out the lights and did glow-bowling, so it was even more fun! :-) I know Aunt Annie likes that, and the rest of us did pretty well still (I think it was my dad's first time glow-bowling, but it didn't throw him off too much!). Annabelle did pretty well, and even got a spare! We had lots of fun (see pictures here), but then we had to quit so we could stop in and see Grammy again real quick, then head back to my parents' house to pack up and head out. We hit the road that afternoon, and we were home around 7:30 that night. (And Happy First Birthday to our nephew Mason that day!)
The next day was New Year's Eve, so I got to work making some cupcakes to bring to the Sutphens' annual party. We were glad that the snow from that morning finally stopped in time to get us out the door, because we were really looking forward to seeing Josh's good friend Tim and his wife Sarah Beth, whom we hadn't seen in quite a long time. It was great to see them and spend some time with them, as well as the others at the party. We, of course, left early, since we weren't going to have Annabelle staying up to midnight with us. ;-) We still were out past her bedtime, but not nearly as late. We got home, put her to bed, then watched a movie until it was time to see the ball drop in NYC, watched that, then finished our movie and went to bed. We're such old people now! The next day we tried to relax and get back to a normal routine (Annabelle was out of one for over a week at that point), and we tried to get some of our new stuff from Christmas put away. We also went out to eat at Friendly's (sooo good!), and that night I made some Spinach-Artichoke Dip, which was wonderful, to say the least. And we relaxed and watched a movie after Annabelle went to bed, which is nice since we don't get to watch too many movies together anymore. :-)
And ever since then, I have been trying to finish putting captions on the hundreds (literally) of pictures we had taken this past month-and-a-half, and I've been uploading some of them to this site. I actually started the captions while we were in NH, but I finally finished a day or so ago.
So yeah, that's life. If you've read this far, thank you for paying attention. :-) And sorry for boring you. :-p Things are getting back to normal here, so hopefully the next update won't be accompanied by so many pictures, but there are lots around to check out this time. Be sure to check out our new "Annabelle" pages, and of course the "Holidays" page. And under "Our Apartment" you'll find some new folders, including a "Christmas Decorating 2008" page at the bottom of the main apartment page. I also have down-sized the "Fun Stuff" folder by moving some pictures of my own projects - culinary and sewing for now - under a new section entitled "Katherine's Craftiness".
So I hope you enjoy the new pictures, and I hope you all have a wonderful New Year! God Bless!
-Katherine, 6 January 2008
So, do you all remember a few months ago that I mentioned we planned on taking some sort of vacation? Now that it's November, we finally got one. Well, kinda. We had originally planned on a trip that would only take us a few hours west in NY, but since we didn't get to go earlier in the year like we had hoped, the weather ruined our plans this time. Snow was expected, which would have made for some unpleasant nature walks (I really wanted to go this summer when all we would have had to deal with was possible rain!). So we cancelled, and then we decided to do something closer as a day trip. Josh had Tuesday off (Veteran's Day) and Friday was his regular day off as well, so he had already requested the other three days off for the week. So we had a whole week to just relax and maybe see some local stuff. We had talked about stopping in Cooperstown on the way back from our original trip, and since that's not too far from us, we decided to head there on Wednesday. We left early and got to the National Baseball Hall of Fame about an hour after it opened. We were some of the first people there, and we were probably some of the last to leave! I haven't been there in 20 years, so it was really neat to see it again. Of course, the whole thing was different, since they did some major remodelling a few years after I was there. Plus, when I was little, I was so bored it wasn't funny. I was not into baseball then. I have very vague memories of being there. I very much enjoyed it this time! :-) Annabelle had a blast, and it was great going "off season" since we could let her be a little more free and she wouldn't be bothering people.
We spent a couple hours on the 2nd floor (where they said to start the tour), then we left the museum and ate some yummy lunch at a nearby cafe. After lunch, we ran into one particular shop that we had found on the internet. When we were at Yankee Stadium, Annabelle fell in love with a hat they had for sale there. The cost of the hat was almost $30, so we decided to pass on it (Annabelle was heart-broken) and try to find it cheaper through the internet. We figured since it was MLB merchandise, we could get it through their online store. No such luck. I searched everywhere on the internet for it, and finally just typed the description into Google to see if there was any way to get it. I got a hit, and it was in Cooperstown. It was at Legends are Forever on Main Street in Cooperstown for $20 plus shipping. We decided not to order it since we were planning on stopping in Cooperstown anyway, so we did! It was right at the edge of the Doubleday Field parking lot, where we parked our car that day. Not knowing if we would be done with the museum before the shop closed, we went there after lunch to purchase the hat (no shipping!) and some other souvenirs. The great thing about Cooperstown is that it is a town based on baseball (and literature, I suppose :-p), so a fan of ANY team can go there and find something. Granted, it is mostly Yankees stuff due to the proximity to NYC, but I was able to find some cool Braves memorabilia. :-)
After dropping our purchases at the car, we headed back to the museum and spent the next few hours touring the 3rd floor and the 1st floor (where the actual Hall of Fame is). Annabelle loved seeing all the baseball stuff, and she loved the kids' corner, especially since she got it all to herself. :-) When we were on the 2nd floor that morning, she got her first experience with a water fountain. This was quite interesting to see, as she watched to see how it worked and then drank. A lot ended up on her sweatshirt, but she loved drinking out of the fountain. I think she did it JUST to do it, not because she was extremely thirsty. :-) She has dubbed Cooperstown "Yankee Newport" - we have no idea where that name came from. But when she talks about going, she calls it "Yankee Newport". We did go to the NBHOF gift shop, and we got a couple of things there. Annabelle got a new mini-bat: a pink one which has the name and emblem of the NBHOF on it. She loves it and rarely puts it down. She also tries to take a few swings with it, so we have to keep a close eye on her to make sure she's no where near anything. :-)
We left a few minutes before closing time, and then we had a long drive home. It was a very long day, and we were pretty tired. We got home, ate some supper, then just relaxed for a while.
On Thursday, we decided it would be fun to take Annabelle to bowl for her first time. We decided to go to Sunset Lanes right down from us on Central Ave. She had so much fun! We put the little bowling shoes on her, and we had to all use the bumpers, and she tried to bowl the ball down the lane. She didn't quite understand that she needed to push the ball hard, and it was hard to do since the lightest ball they had was 6 pounds (still big to hold for a two-year-old). But we helped her, and as soon as the ball was released, she would turn around and jump off the platform. After Annabelle, it was my turn, and then it was Josh's turn. Annabelle got a little impatient when he bowled, since she wanted a turn again. :-p It has been a few years since either Josh or I have bowled, so we were a little rusty. We did well, even if we hadn't had the bumpers up. :-p (It was my first time using them, actually!) We all had lots of fun, and Annabelle didn't want to leave. We promised to take her again soon, so she finally said it was okay to leave. I think we might try taking her candlepin bowling sometime when we go to NH, since I think she might handle those balls a little better. :-)
After bowling we did some shopping, then we headed home. When we got home, I got busy making supper: we had breakfast for supper! This is something my family would do once in a while, only different. Growing up, we would have pancake night occasionally, and so when we were driving home and I was thinking of what we could eat, I decided that breakfast stuff would work great. I knew we had some French Toast Sticks (pre-made from BJ's - brings back memories of Cedarville!), sausage, hash browns, and eggs. So I got cooking it all when we got home. Annabelle loved it all, but especially the French Toast sticks she got to dip in maple syrup.
Friday was our last day of vacation, and we didn't do too much. We went out for a nice lunch at Friendly's (one of our favourite restaurants), then we ran a couple of errands and then kicked back at home. Saturday was typical, and Sunday made Josh sad since he would have to return to work the next day (today). So our vacation wasn't what we planned, but at least we finally got some family time in. :-) Now things are back to normal for a week, then (can you believe it?) next week is Thanksgiving! And so begins the hectic holiday season, but it's still one of the best times of the year. :-)
So that's life around here lately. We have lots of pictures from the NBHOF to see, plus the bowling pics are in with Annabelle's most recent "Firsts" album. Those are the two newest photo albums for you to check out, as well as an updated 32-33 Months General page. Please check them all out and enjoy. :-) And in case I don't get to update for a couple more weeks, I hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving!
-Katherine, 17 November 2008
Post Script: I know it's been a few days, but last Wednesday was also a big day for our niece, Hannah: it was her third birthday! Happy Birthday, Hannah! I can't believe she's three already, because that means Annabelle will be three in a few months too! We love you, Hannah! :-)
I just finished putting up some more pics for you all to look at. There are new pictures in Annabelle's last folder, plus a few pics in a new folder for her. Also there is a new size comparison picture with Monkey. :-) There are a bunch of new pictures in the "Around the Apartment" Fall 2008 folder as well.
You will also notice a new folder under "Family Outings" - we went to Yankee Stadium! Since they are tearing down the stadium, we wanted to tour it before it was gone. So we had a close-to-last-minute decision to go down to NYC on October 31st. We drove down to the Bronx and got there about an hour before our tour, which gave us plenty of time to find a place to park and eat a quick lunch before walking a couple blocks to the stadium. It was really neat, and Annabelle loved being there. She got so excited and kept saying things like, "We're in Yankee Stadium!" We started the tour up in the Press Box, then down to Monument Park, then around the field to the dugout. We were waiting in the dugout to go into the clubhouse, but we almost weren't able to go in, since a couple of the players showed up! The guide told us we had to wait and see if the players left, and if they didn't leave soon, we wouldn't be able to do that part of the tour. Thankfully we were able to get in real quick! It was so neat, but so empty since they're moving everything. They did not allow pictures in the Clubhouse, so you won't see any here - sorry! But we took tons of other pictures, so please check them out!
We had a great time going down to NYC, and the weather was pretty nice that day too. It will be great to say that we were all there. Josh has been to several Yankees games, but this was my (and Annabelle's, obviously!) first time to Yankee Stadium. We had hoped to go down for a game this year, but our summer was shortened and we just didn't get to go. :-( But this was nice, because we got to see some things that you don't get to see on gameday. :-)
Other than that, we've been pretty quiet lately, just living life. You'll see some fun pictures from when we made some cookies, and Annabelle dressed up as a ballerina and a princess. She is so beautiful and still amazes us every day. She's growing up so fast, which is bittersweet to say the least. :-) We had our first snow a few days ago, and she loved it! She is getting very excited for the holidays coming up, and she knows that snow is a big part of the fun. :-) She asks daily when it will snow again. I think she's anxious to get out and play in it! (She couldn't play in it the other day since it was so cold and rainy while it snowed - pretty yucky weather, actually.)
I'm looking forward to the elections being over tomorrow, just so we can finally KNOW what's going to happen, ya know? It will be my first time voting on a machine (I always used paper ballots before, filled out by hand). So that's going to be a new experience for me! I hope you all go out and vote - it's our privilege and patriotic duty, you know!
So that's it for now. Really short. :-) We'll probably update again in a couple weeks when we have more pictures to share. Until then, keep warm and enjoy the season!
-Katherine, 3 November 2008
There are a few new pictures for you all to check out. I added a new folder for the "baby" pages, and I updated the size comparison folder. I also rearranged the order of the links on the Baby Pages so that the newest ones are on top, easier to access. Maybe in the future we can rearrange things, especially since Annabelle is no longer a baby. :-( (Can you tell a Mommy is writing this?) We also have new pictures in the apartment folder. I do plan on breaking up the pictures in the "Fun Stuff" folder, as that one is getting big, but that will have to wait until another update.
We don't have a ton to report since the last update. We did have some fun things go on. Annabelle never likes having her nails cut, so this time around we made her some promises: if she let us cut her fingernails, she could eat half a cider donut from the "Farm Stand" while we cut her toenails, and if she held still for that, she could have her toenails painted. She was very good, and happily ate her donut (she got the second half after a little while) while I painted her toes. She chose the colour from my old collection. She decided on a very dark blue, and held very still while I painted her itsy bitsy toenails. In the end, she didn't want to walk because she was afraid they were still wet, and once we convinced her they were dry, she still walked carefully until we distracted her! She was so cute! So that was a big first for her: wearing big girl toenail polish. :-) (You can see the pictures, as well as some other "firsts," here).
We had Aunt Annie with us for her Fall Break. Annabelle had a blast with her, and we had fun watching some movies and relaxing. We also had lots of really yummy food! Sirloin tips, apple crisp, crepes, and raspberry cordial! (All homemade, except the meat, obviously! That we just marinated and grilled ourselves). Oh, it was sooooo good! And the weather was great the whole weekend too - one last "heatwave" of sorts before the cold comes. And oh boy, did it come! It's very cold now, and we know it will get much colder in the coming weeks. Yikes!
We were also able to have Josh's family over during the nice weather so we could spend some time with Aunt Ally while she was home (same time as Aunt Annie, since they go to the same school and came to NY together). We were able to grill up some yummy food, since the weather was so nice. (That's when we had the first batch of sirloin tips). :-)
On Monday (Columbus Day), we went to John Boyd Thacher State Park with Aunt Annie to see the leaves and hike a bit. It was beautiful! And we couldn't have asked for better weather for that day. A little windy while we ate lunch, but once we were on the trail, it was wonderful!
A few hours after saying "goodbye" to Aunt Annie and Aunt Ally as they headed back to school, we had some other guests. Our friends Brock and Nicole were up visiting in NY for their Fall Break, and they were able to squeeze a visit in with us. We had them and their adorable son Nathan over for a nice supper. It was great catching up with them, and Annabelle had a blast playing with Nathan. He's 11 months old, and very playful. Annabelle had fun clapping with him, and showing him some of her toys. We all had a great time watching them play!
That's just about it for now. We're keeping busy, getting ready for winter and doing some odd projects. And I have been prepping my material for some sewing and quilting, so I hope to be working on that more soon. I'm very excited to get going on it all. :-)
So yeah, that's really it this time. :-) I had some trouble with some of the pages loading correctly, but they should all work, even if they don't look quite "normal." Hopefully I can figure out the problems and work out the kinks. Until the next update, enjoy the photos!
-Katherine, 20 October 2008
I just finished activating the two links that I left out last update, so please feel free to check them out sometime. We have a handful of pictures to add still, but I have not yet loaded them onto the computer, so you'll have to wait a little longer for those. Today I only updated the two folders in the 30-31 month folder: "At Grammy June and Grandpa Mark's House" and "Daddy Comes to Visit for the Weekend." It's not much, but it's more from our trip to New Hampshire. And I promise to try to have a few new pics up as soon as I can get them captioned and uploaded. :-) I have recently started to tackle some sewing projects, so I might not be dedicating my free time to anything else for a little while, but I'll try!
I hope you all are enjoying this (rainy here) fall weather! Check back soon!
-Katherine, 6 October 2008
I told you we had a busy couple of weeks ahead of us! I have just finished updating most of the photos from the past two weeks or so, and there are a lot of them!
When last we left you, Josh had just returned from a business trip to Wisconsin. Well, a couple of very busy days later, he took off again. This time he had a training class in Massachusetts - for two weeks! Knowing that Annabelle and I would be by ourselves for so long, we arranged a trip to NH to see my parents and grandmother. :-) We got Josh all set and on his way Sunday night (he drove the three or so hours to MA), and after a busy Monday of getting everything settled, we were ready to take off on Tuesday. Billy, our bird, also got a little vacation: he got to spend the week at our landlord's house with their kids. :-) He went over on Monday night for his birdy break, and after that it was a matter of making sure everything else was ready to be shut down for a week. Annabelle and I left on Tuesday a little before noon and stopped in Bennington, VT. We stopped up at the monument first, since Annabelle hadn't been there since she was a few months old, and then we went down to Dunkin Donuts for a quick sandwich and a couple Maple Glazed Donuts (my favorites!). Well, Annabelle had a chocolate donut, since the maples are pretty sweet. :-)
After that, we trekked on to NH, and a very excited Annabelle arrived at Grandpa Mark and Grammy June's house. :-) We relaxed a little, then ate supper and got ready to go to Bible Study with them. Annabelle had a blast playing with the little girls at the Bible Study again. She had so much fun, she didn't want to leave! We were there past her bedtime, but as soon as we got back to Grammy and Grandpa's house, she was ready to settle down. We had hopped to get together with the three girls later in the week for a playdate, but due to illness they had to cancel. :-( Maybe next time! Charis had lots of fun with Annabelle, "reading" with her, and Ally and Christy loved her too.
On Wednesday we (Grammy, Annabelle, and I) went into town (our NH-way of saying "the city" :-) ) to spend some time with Great-Grammy. We visited for a little while at her house, and Annabelle remembered right where to go to get to the toys, and also where to go to feed the squirrels! We went out to lunch after a while and ate at Moe Joe's again. We all ordered fish 'n chips, which was just funny. :-) Annabelle loves fish! We ate up the yummy food, and then ran some errands. We went back to Great-Grammy's house after that and Annabelle played for a little while, then we took off for Grammy June's house again to put her groceries away. The next day, we just did stuff around the house, since our playdate had been canceled. It was nice to just relax a little. Annabelle was glad to have day of just playing with Grammy's toys. :-)
On Friday, Grammy June and I had hair appointments. I have been wanting to get my hair done for quite some time, but never really got around to it. So I decided to have my Mum's hairdresser do it when we were there. I figured I had at least a foot to cut and donate, so I had Joyce cut off quite a bit. Annabelle had a blast with Grammy June while I got my hair done (Grammy went first and was all done so she could watch Annabelle while I got mine cut). There were two little dogs at the salon, Molly and Sam. Annabelle loved playing with them and running around. She had lots of fun! And when she saw my hair when it was done, her response was to say, "Mommy, your hair is so long!!!" I guess she hadn't seen me with it down enough! Having it up all the time must have made it seem short to her. :-) I see where she's coming from.
After the hair appointments, we went to a consignment store and found some treasures, which you'll see in some of the pictures. We also ran to couple other stores, including Martin's House of Cloth, which is down-sizing, so all their sewing stuff is on sale. We bought some material for me to get started on quilting, which is very exciting! :-) After a busy morning/early afternoon, we headed back "home" to relax a little. I was excited because the next day, we would be seeing my long-lost Hubby! :-)
On Saturday, we went down to Waltham, MA, where Josh was staying. I got to see his room at the Hilton Garden Inn, and then we went to a park nearby to see a view of Boston. It was very nice! You can see those pictures here.
After the park, we headed to Minute Man National Park, the Lexington end. We saw their multimedia presentation, which is wonderful, and then headed down the road to the Hartwell Tavern for a reenactment. We were a little behind on our own schedule, so we weren't able to walk much of the trail, but maybe we'll be back someday soon and do that. I did part of it a few years ago, and it's so beautiful. It's hard to imagine the bloodshed that occurred there 233 years ago. We didn't get to walk much of the trail, but we did go to the Old North Bridge, where the "Shot Heard Round the World" was fired. It is such a key moment in American history, and I'm so glad I got to share this historic site with Josh. I think every American should be as lucky as I was to grow up in New England, where history really happened and still happens today.
We headed back up to NH after a quick stop at the Hilton to get Josh's rental car, and then we had a relaxing evening. The next morning we went to church, where Annabelle had a blast in Sunday School, and I thoroughly enjoyed being back. After church, we went "home" to change, then went to the Aloha! Sooooo the best Chinese restaurant in the whole world! We don't go often when we visit NH, but it is soooo good! We had lots of yummy food, then we went across the street to visit Great-Grammy one last time before heading out. Josh packed up his stuff (and a lot of yummy leftovers for his suppers that week!), and then he took off for MA again. The next morning, I packed up Annabelle's stuff and mine and got it packed up. After doing a little bit of work to keep my Dad going for the next few days, my Mum packed a bag and we took off for NY. Annabelle was very excited to have Grammy with us for a few more days, though she didn't quite understand why we couldn't stay at Grammy and Grandpa's house. :-) We stopped at Hogback Mountain on our way and stretched our legs. I was amazed how much the foliage had changed in just a week. I had seen hardly any colour on my way to NH, but on the way back to NY, I was starting to see some changes. Fall is here!
We went in the shop and managed to come out with nothing extra. :-) We drove on to Bennington and stopped for supper at Jensen's. After a nice sit-down meal, we headed the rest of the way back to Colonie. We got in around 8:20, and I went next door to pick up Billy, and then we unloaded the car. Then we settled in for the night, ready to get a lot of work done the next day. On Tuesday we got up, did some cleaning, and went grocery shopping. We got my kitchen very clean, which makes me very happy! Of course, it doesn't stay perfect for long, but it's still pretty nice. :-) Mum and I rewarded ourselves with a movie that night after Annabelle went to bed. We watched "The Game Plan" - my third time seeing it, Mum's first. Very funny, good movie! The next day, we ran to Joann's to get some other sewing items I needed for projects, then spent the day doing some more cleaning. We didn't get to our planned sewing projects, since my dining room got loaded down with cleaning stuff, but we plan on getting together very soon to have our own sewing bee. I can't wait! :-)
On Thursday we drove back to Hogback Mountain to meet my Dad so he could drive Mum home. We stopped on the way at the Bennington Museum to buy something my Grandmother wanted from the gift shop. Then on to Hogback, and what a change in foliage! In just a few days, so many more leaves had turned! It was so pretty, and I know it still hasn't hit peak yet. I really miss Fall in New England.
We said goodbye to Grammy and Grandpa after buying some things in the gift shop, then headed back to Colonie again. Friday was exciting as we got ready for Daddy to finally come home. Annabelle wanted to bake a cake for Daddy, so we did that, but we didn't get to decorate it since he came home early! We were very excited to see him, even though it was just a few hours early. We finally got it decorated a couple days later. You can see pics of it in the "Fun Stuff" section of our apartment pages.
After Josh dropped off his rental car, we went to Friendly's for an early supper since he hadn't really eaten all day. We had delicious food, of course, and yummy ice cream. Then we went home to relax and watch Stargate. And then we had a kinda relaxing weekend just getting over all the travelling and unpacking. Now we're back to getting on schedule, and making life normal for a while.
I have uploaded most of our pictures, but there are a couple of links I haven't activated yet, but I will after I do a little more work on those sections in the next few days. I'll post a quick note when I activate those so you all know.
And that is pretty much what's been going on with us the last two weeks. Told you we were gonna busy! If I forgot anything, I'll post it later! Until the publication of my next "book", I hope you are all enjoying the beautiful fall!
-Katherine, 30 September 2008
I can't believe we're halfway through September already! Where did the summer go? There's a lot to tell from the past couple months; we've been keeping busy! And since it has been since mid-July for updating, I am sure I cannot remember everything. I will rely mostly on the pictures to fill you all in, but here's some of what I remember:
We all had some severe allergies in July (I got it the worst, unfortunately), and it took a couple weeks before we were over it. Matt and Heather and the kids stopped by overnight on their way back to Maine - it's always great to see them! But that was kinda in the middle of all the sickness. Fortunately, I don't believe it was contagious, and I never heard anything from them about them getting sick. :-) That brings us up to August, pretty much. Josh's birthday was August 1st, and we had a lovely, very yummy turkey dinner. I had been asking Josh what he wanted special to eat that night, and that's what he chose. And of course this was during a heat-wave! But it was soooo good! We had Josh's parents and grandfather over, and I cooked a couple of turkey breasts, some yummy parmesan mashed potatoes, very yummy gravy, and I don't remember what else now. I just remember it was sooooo gooooood! And I followed our tradition of making an ice cream cake for Josh. This year he selected a new kind (the last few years I've made a chocolate-strawberry ice cream cake for him - you can see pictures under his birthdays on the holiday pages); this time it was a Banana-Split Ice Cream cake. More yum!
The next weekend, Aunt Annie came to visit for a few days before heading back to college. Of course, she brought Grandpa Mark and Grammy June with her. :-) They came out on Thursday night, then Grandpa and Grammy took off for a long day-trip on Friday. On Saturday, we decided to go on an outing to the Upper Hudson River Railroad (UHRR). This was Annabelle's first train ride! And it's been quite a few years since I was on a train too. And the weather was beautiful! Annabelle had a blast riding the train with everyone, and she also loved the Thomas the Tank Engine play table in the gift shop. ;-) It was kinda hard to get her away from it, but she loved seeing the model train running in the museum. You can see all those pics here.
Somewhere in there we also caught another free movie: The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything. We loved it! Annabelle loved it a lot - she's crazy about Veggie Tales! It was a good movie; very funny!
We also discovered that Annabelle has a food allergy. It took about a week (and two doctor visits) to clear up, and it was not a fun week. I did not get much sleep during that week, since I was worried about Annabelle overnight. She was perfectly happy the entire time, though, so that was a blessing. No more pistachios for Annabelle!
A couple weeks later, Aunt Martha came to visit! This was the first time seeing her in over a year. We had a nice weekend catching up and relaxing mostly. She brought Annabelle a present: a Disney Princess "MP3" player. Annabelle loves it! It's just like her "Wiggles Phone" from Uncle Matt and Aunt Heather at Christmas. So she calls it the "Princess Phone" and carries it around with her everywhere. She was already singing along to most of the songs on it after just a couple days - she's amazing when it comes to music! So, thank you once again, Aunt Martha, for the fun toy. :-)
A few hours after Aunt Martha left to go home, Grammy June and Grandpa Mark stopped in for about an hour. They were on their way home to NH after dropping Annie off at college. It was a short visit, but it was still nice to see them.
On Labor Day, we went to Adirondack Animal Land with the Roots. It was the last day they were open, so we headed up for a few hours. Annabelle had a blast feeding the animals and petting the goats and the deer. We had forgotten to empty the card on our digital camera, though, so we ended up only getting a handful of pictures from the park. So no pics of her with the deer, or on the safari. She loved the safari ride! It was about 10 or 15 minutes, and we were followed by lots of camels. :-p Annabelle really liked seeing the zebras and the little potbellied pigs that were running around there. :-) She giggled and wanted to ride again, but by then she was getting tired. We stopped in the gift shop for a few minutes, then we all headed home. Annabelle fell asleep right away in the car, and about 45 minutes later we were home. We said goodbye to the Roots (we all went to the zoo together in our car, so they came home with us), and Annabelle decided she was awake for good. It was a hot day, so we took Annabelle out back and set up the sprinkler and then the pool. She had a blast jumping around and "swimming", and Josh and I enjoyed relaxing, just sitting there for a while.
And that pretty much brings us to this past week. Very busy. Annabelle and I went to her 2-1/2 year check-up on Monday, then Josh took off very early Tuesday morning for a business trip in Wisconsin. Annabelle and I spent a couple of days on our own before Josh came home late Thursday night. He actually got home several hours later than he had planned due to plane delays and a missed connection. We had kinda figured this would happen, due to his layover in Chicago being short. And I didn't realize until that morning that it was September 11th, and that made me nervous about him flying, of course! We were very grateful when he got home around 8:30 that night. Annabelle was very excited to see him, especially because she "hid" on him: she ducked down behind our blanket bin in the corner and jumped up and said, "Surprise!" when he came in the door. :-) She had planned it about an hour earlier when I told her that Daddy would be home soon. Silly girl! She was very happy to give him a card she had "signed" for him, and even more happy when he gave her a present he had bought for her in Wisconsin: a nice sailor he got at a maritime museum he went to there. I'm sure we'll be putting pictures of the hat up eventually.
Right now I have updated a lot of pics for you all, basically from mid-July through a few days ago. It has been a project I've been working on most of this week in my "free time" (not really free). I had several hundred (at least!) to label and then upload. So here you go: lots of pictures everywhere to see. I hope you enjoy them, and I'm sure in the next couple weeks we'll have more to put up since we have some big things going on this month.
Thanks for all the patience these last few weeks; I hope it paid off and that you enjoy all the moments we are sharing here with you. It's getting toward bedtime here, so I'm off. Have a great weekend!
-Katherine, 12 September 2008
Well, a day or two after the last post, I remembered something that I was going to tell you all about. So here it is: The day before we left for NH, we took Annabelle to see her first movie in the movie theater! We had been thinking about doing this for some time, especially with the latest VeggieTales movie in theaters this summer. Problem was, we didn't want to pay a ton of money and then have to leave because Annabelle got bored or talked too much or hated it. Then, about a week before we took her to the movies, we heard about Regal's Annual Free Family Film Festival. What a wonderful thing! They show movies for free for families in the summer. It's mostly family movies from the last couple years (so not much current), and it starts at 10 AM two days a week. I have been wanting to see the "Curious George" movie and have Annabelle watch it for quite a while, since she loves the "Curious George" TV show. Well, one of our Regals was showing "Curious George" as one of the movies the week we were going to NH, so we decided to go check it out. Hey, you can't beat free! There were a bunch of kids there, and they were mostly younger, so we knew it wouldn't be a big deal if Annabelle made comments once in a while, since everyone else would be too. :-) And she really seemed to enjoy it - she laughed at George's antics, and mostly paid attention. She got a little bored a couple times, but not for long. And the movie was very good - very bright colors, a nice group of characters, funny, and a good story-line that wasn't too complex (great for little kids). Annabelle kept saying for the next few days, "We see the Curious George movie at the theater?" She wanted to go back! So we might go back another time to see some other movies. There are a couple more good ones we wouldn't mind seeing, including the new VeggieTales movie. So hopefully we'll see them! This was actually the first time Josh and I had been to the movies since July 2005, when we visited my family in NH for the Fourth and took Annie to see "Star Wars: Episode III". Yep, it's been that long. So we're not ready for the sticker-shock that's going to come from seeing current movie prices. :-p We like free. :-)
So that's what I forgot to mention last time. The only other updates I have are these: Josh's softball game went well; it was actually the championship game, and they won (again!). :-) Congrats, guys! We're all getting over this long sickness. Annabelle has a runny nose and a slight cough, but I don't know if her occasional grumpiness is from being sick or from the hot weather. Either way, it's keeping me busy and exhausted as I try to take care of her and comfort her when she's down. And naps are so not happening lately - that's probably why I'm so beat at the end of the day (on top of getting over my own illness). We were able to go to Josh's company picnic yesterday and have a fairly good time. We didn't stay near most of the people there; they stayed under the pavilion while we went out under the trees and had plenty of space for running around. A couple of Josh's coworkers brought kids, so they all came and sat near us. We all decided it was better sitting there since we had a chance at a breeze. :-) It just was a longer walk to get food and drinks. But it was a good time, and after a couple hours we headed home in the hope of getting Annabelle to nap (she had been running around with another girl her age, so we hoped she was worn out). She got a short nap, so that was good, but she's still been tired and a little sick today.
And my final bit of an update is kind of a retro-update. I was looking through our holiday links and noticed that the Fourth of July 2005 was missing. I found the pictures (which were not captioned - ugh!), captioned them, and put them up. There are pictures from the New Boston parade and the Albany fireworks (we drove back to NY that day after the party at the Poores, just in time for fireworks). So they are there if you are interested in comparing past parades, though I found many of those pictures aren't as good as the new ones. I also found a handful of Christmastime pics from that year, so I added those in the Holiday page too. They're all marked as new so you know which ones to look for. I have a few current photos to add, but not at this time. Those will be uploaded another day. :-)
Well, for a "quick" update, this is rather lengthy! Have a great weekend!
-Katherine, 18 July 2008
Happy Bastille Day! Again, it's been a month, but we've been keeping busy. On the last Saturday of June, we decided to visit the NYS Museum again. We were there last August on a very hot Saturday, and this one was almost as hot. Annabelle had a blast running around and remembering everything. It was amazing to see just how much was familiar to her. We didn't get to spend as much time there this visit, since Annabelle didn't have the patience to wait for us to read the exhibits. But we still were there for a couple of hours. We had lots of fun, though. When we got to the bird exhibit, Annabelle started talking about the "lady with the birdhouse" and looking through the hall for her. Last year when we went, one of the museum workers was stationed in that hall with a cart that had a box on it, in which there were a bunch of those stuffed birds that sing their real-life counterparts' songs when pressed. Annabelle loved pulling the birds out of the "house" and hearing them sing, and so this year she looked for that lady. We had not reminded her about the lady, so we were very surprised when she remembered her and looked for her. Incredible!
The museum's carousel is also opened up again, so Annabelle was able to take her first carousel ride! It was one of the last things we did at the museum, and by that time she was very tired, so we weren't sure if she was enjoying it. She held on real well, and we asked her, "Is this fun?", and she would make a really funny face. It was cute! After she took a nap later that day, I asked her again if she liked riding the horsie, and she said she did. :-) We look forward to doing that again with her!
The next few days after that were spent preparing for a trip to New Hampshire for the 4th of July. I have been so excited about going, since we haven't been there on the 4th since 2005. Last year no one asked us to do anything with them, so we stayed at home, and we looked at the calendar for this year and saw that the 4th would be a Friday and knew we would be able to go to NH for it. My hometown has a nice celebration every year, with a parade, lots of activity at the 4-H Fairgrounds in town, and fireworks at night. It's one of my many wonderful childhood memories - going "down town" (to the center of the Village) to see the parade, even being in the parade sometimes, seeing the fireworks at night... I've missed that, and I wanted to share it with Annabelle. She had so much fun! Matt, Heather, Hannah, and Mason came down from Maine for the weekend, so we got to spend lots of time with them. Annabelle and Hannah loved the parade - and they quickly learned what to do when the people on the floats threw candy! They got up close to some clowns, got some stickers, and got a nice portion of candy. Josh even got a couple of bullet casings when some rifles were shot off right in front of us. :-)
After the parade, we headed back to Grammy June and Grampa Mark's house and managed to get Annabelle to take a quick nap before we headed over to our friends the Poores' house. The Poores are a wonderful British family who love to celebrate the Fourth with all their friends here. Kinda funny, eh? :-) They were gracious enough to let us all join in when they heard we would be around this year. Matt and Heather and the kids came too, and the girls had loads of fun with the three other little girls that came (the same three that Annabelle played with back in March when she and I visited NH for a couple days and we went to my parents' Bible study). We had wonderful food (and lots of it!), and a while after eating, a bunch of us got into the pool for a nice swim. We brought Annabelle's boat that we bought last year, as well as her floaty ring and a PFD (personal flotation device) we had picked up last summer. She didn't care to be in the water (it was very chilly!), but she loved floating around with us in her boat. And Hannah very happily borrowed the floaty ring and swam around in that. They were both so cute! Hannah even tried out the PFD with her Mommy and got a quick swimming lesson - a good introduction, seeing as she was about to go with her family for a week at a lake where she'd be swimming every day! And Aunt Heather managed to get Annabelle to swim with her for a few minutes, but Annabelle really wanted back in the boat. I don't blame her. It probably took me about 20 minutes before I got all the way under the water - very cold!
After the party, we headed back to Grammy and Grampa's for a short while, then headed to the Fairgrounds to see the fireworks. It was just Grampa, Aunt Annie, and the three of us. The fireworks started and Annabelle climbed onto my lap. She started out covering her ears like we suggested to her, and after a few minutes she turned around and clung to me, leaning on my shoulder and keeping her back to the fireworks. She wouldn't let go, but she didn't seem too frightened. After a few more minutes she finally said she was scared of the fireworks. We don't know if it was the noise or the bright flashes or a combination of both. These were her first up-close fireworks, but hopefully next time she will be more comfortable.
So we had a pretty full Fourth, but it was great fun! On Saturday we slept in a little, then we headed to town for a nice visit with my Grammy. Matt and Heather and the kids were there too, so the girls had lots of fun together again. They spent quite a while feeding Grammy's chipmunk friend! You can see those pictures here. It was very amusing, and they were very patient, waiting for "Chippy" to return for more food. :-)
That night Grampa Mark wanted to have a big bonfire, so he and Josh and Matt built one up before Matt and Heather headed out with the kids to get to bed (they were staying with a friend). Annabelle enjoyed her first [lightly] toasted marshmallow, and she got to see sparklers in action (my first time getting to light one! Thanks, Annie, for letting us use some!). After that she had to go in for a bath and bed, since we had church the next day. Oh, before Hannah and her family left for the night, she and Annabelle got to play some VeggieTales Dance Dance Dance. They were very cute and funny!
Sunday was busy, as Sundays always are. We went to MVBC (always a wonderful thing), and Annabelle got to be in the new Children's Wing and attended her first-ever Sunday School Class, though it seemed more like it was just playtime. :-) After church we managed a quick greeting with Pastor Larry, then headed to Grammy and Grampa's for lunch and a nap for Miss Annabelle. Wonderful lunch! Very yummy! Most of the rest of the day was spent relaxing. And playing. Annabelle loved playing there. I think her favorite part of the trip was playing with my old "Little People" (the originals) that Grammy June dug out and cleaned up for the girls to use. You can see them in the background of some of the pictures from our trip.
The next day we got packed up to head home to NY. It was such a nice visit to NH, and it's been so long since we had a long stay like that. We all needed the rest and relaxation time, and we had such fun! For the drive home, we caravanned with Matt and Heather and the kids, since they were on their way to Ohio again. We made a couple stops on the way (Hogback Mountain's gift shop again, and a quick stop at the Bennington Potters in Brunswick). After that we got back to Colonie, and the Richmonds stayed the night. It was great that the girls got to have so many days to play together, and this last day was nice. They didn't do so well with the "sleepover" this time - we had to remind them to sleep and not keep each other awake a couple times. But overall they did great! We put them to bed, and Mason fell asleep quickly, and then all us adults decided to watch a movie. Matt and Heather had never seen "National Treasure", so we popped that in and had a great time. :-) Always a good movie!
The Richmonds took off the next morning, and we prepared to get back to a normal routine again. Didn't happen. I got really sick. I mean really sick. I thought it was just allergies at first, but it turned into the worst sore throat I've ever had. I mean it. I don't remember ever being in so much pain. And it didn't go away. I couldn't swallow; I couldn't chew; I couldn't spit; I couldn't talk half the time. I was really bad on Wednesday, and Thursday Josh stayed home to help with Annabelle and help take care of me. He was so good to go to the store and get some stuff we needed and get some new meds for me. I felt really sick going into the weekend still, and I didn't start to really feel better until Sunday night. Here it is, Monday, and I finally woke up without swollen glands and severe pain. I could swallow food again! It was wonderful. Except that on Friday, Annabelle started showing signs of being sick, though not acting sick, and then Saturday evening Josh started feeling it coming on. So we all are trying to take it easy and heal. Josh stayed home again today to recuperate, and he's doing a bit better. He's looking forward to getting back to work tomorrow. Hopefully we'll all be better tomorrow night for his softball playoffs, and then the company picnic on Thursday. Annabelle and I missed going to Josh's Sunday School picnic on Saturday because we were sick, so hopefully we won't miss much more.
So that gets us pretty much up to date. I'm sure I forgot something - I always do. But this is enough for now, right? Yeah, this is a long book for you to read. Speaking of reading, it's bedtime, and I'm ready to go up and read a little before falling asleep. :-) I hope all is well with all of you (and I hope all of you are well!) Until next time!
-Katherine, 14 July 2008
What a busy month it has been! Josh has been chugging away, trying to get through the last few weeks of grad school, and it all paid off: he graduated on Saturday! We are very excited at the idea of being able to spend time together as a family again - a rarity the last few months. No more homework or late-night classes, and Annabelle can now see her Daddy every day (she only got brief glimpses of him two days a week for this last term). We've been counting down the days until freedom, and now that it's here, we're kinda just taking a big breather while things settle down again. Next up will hopefully be some planning for some trips this summer. We haven't taken a vacation since our honeymoon, so we'd like to do something nice. We'll see what comes of that later...
We did have some visitors this last month. Matt, Heather, Hannah, and Mason stopped by for a couple hours and brunch on their way out to Ohio to spend some time with Heather's family, and then they stopped overnight on their way back to Maine a couple weeks later. The girls had lots of fun playing together, and they had their first sleep-over! Fortunately they were both so tired, they didn't keep each other awake. They both fell right asleep! And they had quite a bit of fun the next morning before the Richmonds had to head East. And Annabelle absolutely loves watching Mason! As you'll see in the pictures, she loved touching his fuzzy hair. :-)
The other visitors we had were my Mum and Dad, who came out the night before Josh's graduation to see him graduate (it's not every day you get to go to a grad school ceremony!). It was hot and muggy with a chance of storms all day, but we made it through it all. Annabelle got restless part way through the ceremony, so she got to go outside with Grammy June to play until the end. But other than that, she did great sitting through it all. Coloring books helped! She was tired, though. We tried to get her to nap before people came over for a late lunch to celebrate. We had the usual crowd over, and we had a great time eating food off the grill and some great side dishes and great strawberry shortcake. :-) We were stuff for over a day!
The only other big thing is Annabelle and her puzzles. She zips through her puzzles so quickly that we decided to get her some harder, "big kid" ones, and now even those are going quick! She is amazing! She's so good at puzzles, and so many other things. It is so incredible to see her new talents!
So there are lots of new pics up. The graduation pics are in the "Holidays" folder, and there are new Annabelle pics where noted, and a few new ones in the apartment folders. And that's about all that's new at the moment - we've been busy, but not with much new!
See you at the next update!
-Katherine, 19 June 2008
Four months have gone by since we put any new pictures up here. So if I estimated correctly, that should be over 900 new photos for you to see. Yeah, that will keep you all busy for a while! Sorry, Mum and Dad! (They're stuck with dial-up :-(, so that will take them a really long time).
So we've been keeping pretty busy, as you might have guessed by the neglecting of our website. As you'll see in some of the pictures, we've dealt with a stomach bug, Annabelle's birthday and then mine, a road trip for Annabelle and Mommy, and lots of new fun things! Annabelle turned 2 on February 27 (time flies!), and then March started and we were more busy than ever! My birthday was March 8th, and then the next weekend Josh flew down to Texas to be in a wedding, then a few days later my sister came to stay with us for Easter weekend, and on Easter Sunday Annabelle and I went from full house to just the two of us, since Annie left us after church to head back to college, and Josh had to fly out (on Easter Sunday) for some training classes in Illinois for a week. So we spent that Monday getting things ready and then we took off for NH for a couple days. It was my first time driving the trip solo, so I was a little nervous at first (I never know how Annabelle will act on long trips, if she'll stay awake and get upset after a while, or if she'll sleep a lot or what). But the trip went very well, and we had a blast! We stopped to stretch our legs in Bennington (Annabelle gets very excited to see Dunkin' Donuts now - that's always where we stop in Bennington), and then again at Hogback Mountain. I haven't been in the gift shop at Hogback in years since we normally go through the mountains when it's closed. I remember stopping there when I was a little girl on trips to NY, so I thought Annabelle would love it. She did! They had some of those life-size stuffed animal dogs when you first went in, and she went to pet every one of them and was so happy. She wanted to see them more than anything as we went further into the store. I let her pick out some postcards and a cute little stuffed moose that says "Vermont" on his scarf, then we paid and left, stopping to say "Goodbye" to the doggies. :-)
We got to my parents' house Tuesday afternoon, then we went to Bible Study at the Fenter's house with them that evening. Annabelle had a blast playing with the Fenter twins and their little sister. Four adorable little girls squealing and having so much fun! And it was great for me to see some familiar faces again. I miss everyone in NH! We spent a nice day Wednesday with Great-Grammy and Grammy June, visiting and going out to lunch at Moe Joe's Family Restaurant (I had very yummy fish and chips - first time in years I've had them, and they were awesome!), then a little grocery shopping and a stop at Sears to check out the clothing sales. Annabelle had such a blast hanging out with Grammy June and Grampa Mark, especially when Grampa helped her play with the flashlights and played the jumping game. ;-) And we found some treasures in Mommy's old bedroom to bring home, like my old straw hat. You'll see some really cute pictures of her wearing that in the folder of pictures from our visit. Then we had to leave for NY again after lunch on Thursday. It was too short of a visit, so hopefully we can get another visit in sometime soon!
When we left for NH, it was very warm, so we didn't wear coats for the ride. Same thing on the way home. We left from and came home to a very sunny and warm NY. When I was unloading the car after getting home, our landlord was out doing yard work and putting down some grass seed, as he was told it was going to rain that night. Well, we woke up the next morning to... snow! When I told Josh on the phone (he called from the airport to check in since he was coming home that night), he didn't believe me. So I took pictures to show him, as you can see in our photos from our trip. You can also see the landlord's compost barrels out to be picked up by the town. Needless to say, the town didn't pick them up.
We've had lots of flowers come up, but we seem to have missed spring. We went from cold weather to very warm weather, then back to really cold weather again, and now we're up in the warm weather again. Of course, we have a slightly cooler week this week, but still, it feels like we jumped to summer with no spring. Only the flowers tell us otherwise. We have even missed out on Spring Showers - we're waiting for rain, but it never comes when they tell us it will!
After our busy March, April just flew by. Josh started his last grad school classes the week after he got back from Illinois, and it has been very crazy since then. He is taking two classes this term in order to finish up, and he has each class once a week. Unfortunately they are two nights in a row and he doesn't get home until after 10 PM on those nights. Thankfully he will be DONE on June 14th!!! We are counting the [busy] days. Things just got busier too, since softball has started up. And Josh has a couple papers/projects to do for his classes, so he spends a lot of weekend time at the school's library doing research. So we find we have little free time, and hardly any quality time together as a family. So we are looking forward to June!
The last few months are such a blur to me, I can't remember what else has been going on with us. Hopefully the pictures will help you see some of what we've been up to. Like I said, we've had a couple birthdays and holidays like Valentine's Day, Easter, and most recently Mother's Day. And yesterday was our 3rd Anniversary! Josh was at class, so we couldn't celebrate much, but we'll do something when we have time. We did get to watch our wonderful wedding DVD last night, so that was something! And hopefully this summer we'll be able to do some sort of vacation (it will be our first one, really, since our honeymoon), so we'll have more pics to share. In fact, there are already some new pics on the camera for me to add, but after labeling over 1,000 photos the past couple weeks, I needed a break. ;-) This includes the latest size comparison picture, and I want to warn you that we were so busy that we didn't get a chance to take Annabelle's 2-year size picture, so that's why it's missing. But we have her 25-month one up and her 26-month one is on the camera! Plus some others. So maybe in a few days I'll update them.... again. :-) (And maybe we can find some new pics for our homepage here, since some of these are a bit outdated!)
Until then, I hope all is well with all of you. Oh, and a special "Hello!" to Aunt Carol and her friends at work, since we know she tries to check our site regularly and we have a few Annabelle fans there. :-) Thanks for giving our website some traffic!
God Bless!
-Katherine, 15 May 2008
Happy 2nd Birthday to our beautiful 
little girl, Annabelle!!! These two years have flown by, but they've been wonderful! We love you very much, and look forward to watching you grow more and amaze us more each day!
With Much Love,
Mommy and Daddy, 27 February 2008
It's been a while. For those of you who might have discovered some updated photos in the past couple months, it's because we've been working on updating the site, but we kept getting glitches. And by "we", I mean "me" (Katherine), since Josh hasn't had time to work on the site. So I started updating back around Thanksgiving, but a lot of the pictures weren't uploading correctly, and so not much got done. So now everything should work, and I only know of one minor glitch we're still trying to fix, but it shouldn't affect viewing too much. So yeah, there are tons of new pics, so check them all out!
I don't even know what all to tell you about our life the last few months. So much is new with Annabelle, but I can't even begin to tell it all. She's absolutely wonderful, very smart, and very creative/imaginative. She got lots of good stuff for Christmas that will help her imagination grow, including a new toy kitchen and a couple tea sets. She has a blast with them! And she got some cute doll houses that are buildings from a village (a vet's office and a church), and she loves playing with those and her new trains. She definitely has her own story lines going, as she talks about what the people are doing and all. And when she has tea parties, she talks about serving the tea and drinking it.
Josh is back at classes again, which is kinda sad, but good because it means he is one class closer to graduating. He always seems to be busy, so we'll be glad when he's done with school and he can maybe get time to relax.
I'm doing mostly fine after the holiday rush (I am currently getting over a bad cold). I had some busy weeks getting ready for everything, but it was nice to end it with a couple days in NH, even though travel brings another kind of stress. We came back to NY on New Year's Eve, after a storm the night before. We got home before that night's storm, but it was still a little later than we planned because we had a very happy delay: our nephew was born late on December 30th!!! Mason James Richmond came just in time so we could see him before going home, and also a couple days before Heather's family had to go home. So all around we were happy for them (and us!). :-) I know my parents are thrilled to have a grandson, and I'm sure Heather's parents are very happy too. ;-) So congrats to Matt, Heather, and Hannah on the addition to their family, little Mason! (Check out some of our pics of him, and check their site for their pics too.)
We had a great Christmas, and Josh got lots of time off. We got several new movies, so we caught up with the rest of the world on the recent flicks like "Shrek the Third," "The Santa Clause 3", and a couple others. And Annabelle is thrilled to now own "The Polar Express" - every time it was one TV this holiday season, she watched it, and now she can see it all year around. :-) She is very cute watching that movie; she loves the train, and she gets involved with the characters, saying, "Oh no!" when something bad happens (like when Billy gets his present taken away). It is so precious!
I'm sure there's more news to share, but I cannot think right now, as it's late on Saturday night. So I'm gonna close this now, and we'll definitely try to update regularly again. God Bless!
-Katherine, 12 January 2008
Well, not quite a month, but still pretty close. Sorry it's been a while again. I spent yesterday uploading a bunch of pictures, and today Josh helped me get some kinks out, so now I'm writing this update to let you all know that there are some cute pics for you all to look at! :-)
As for news, here you go:
Josh took his final exam for this term on Tuesday, so that means no more classes until January (yay!). He gets a few days to relax before the holidays start and it will be time to handle all the stress that comes with them. I've been keeping busy watching Annabelle, of course, and trying to get more organizing done around here. It seems like every time I get something organized, something else gets messy or whatever I've just accomplished gets undone. *Sigh* The joys of being a Mom/Homemaker. :-p At least I'm ahead on my Christmas shopping! Of course, I work on it all year, so it's no wonder I'm ahead. :-) And my Mum came out last week for a few days to help me with a project: sewing hats and mittens for the girls! (Okay, she also came to see her granddaughter, and Annabelle had a blast with her!) I bought a pattern for a toddler/infant hat and mitten set last year, but since I've never worked with a pattern before, I wanted some help from someone experienced. So Mum came, and we went to Joann's to buy fleece and materials, and we took a couple days to sew. We had great fun, and the hats (and mittens) came out so cute! When I had bought the pattern, I dreamed of making the set for Annabelle, and then I decided to do one set for Hannah too. So Mum and I worked hard to make at least one set before she left (we got both done) so she could take one to Hannah. It was kind of an early Christmas present for Hannah, because I wanted her to have them before it got too cold. So it was in time for her birthday! (November 12th she turned two! Can you believe it's been two years already?!?) Mum brought them along with our birthday present for Hannah over to Matt and Heather's house on Monday night, and I'm told Hannah loved everything, though she didn't want to wear the hat for long. :-) You'll have to check out the pics on their site when they get posted to see her in the hat. In the meantime, you can see a pic of the hat before I wrapped it up on our site in the 20-21 month Annabelle folder. Anyway, enough about me and my sewing accomplishments (of which I am very proud). :-)
In Annabelle's world, things are crazy as usual. She is now officially in her own room and doing great! I'm getting better sleep too. ;-) She loves exploring, and she can go up and down the stairs all by herself, which keeps me busy chasing after her so she doesn't fall! She loves to hold the railing and go down with no help, and she does very well with it, but I still get nervous and stay close by. She says so many words now, too, and she learns new ones everyday. She has started putting together sentences and is getting pretty good at expressing herself and what she wants. She's so amazing! And her new cute thing: she sings! She started by singing along with some songs on her favourite TV shows (she loves to sing "The Helping Song" from "The Koala Brothers"), and yes, she still dances as she sings. :-) But yesterday she brought me one of her books that had the words for "Baa Baa Black Sheep" in it. I read/sang it to her once, and then she said, "Gehn!" ("Again!" - she says that all the time when we finish reading a book), and as I turned the pages, SHE sang it - she only had to listen once and she remembered most of the words! So now it's her favourite song to sing. She sang it in the car last night for Daddy as we went out to eat, and then she kept singing it in the restaurant. She is TOO precious! I hope we can get it on video and maybe we can post it up here sometime.
Annabelle is also learning to pray, and she does quite well with it. She is so precious as she repeats the words after us, adding her own voice intonations. She loves doing it too, which is such a blessing for us. :-)
Ugh, it's getting late - 11:23 already! I'm sure I had more to say, but I can't think what. If I remember, I'll post more later. Until then, I hope you all have a great day/night/week/weekend/whatever! :-) And in case I don't get to say it later, have a wonderful Thanksgiving (it's next week!)!!! Now I'm gonna go to bed...
-Katherine, 15 November 2007
So much for being on a roll! It's been a month since our last update. I'm not sure what happened; I could have sworn it had only been a couple weeks. Oh well. I just finished updating pics - a whole lot more than I thought there would be! Apparently the most interesting thing that happens around here is how Annabelle sleeps. She gets into so many funny sleep positions that most of our pics are of her taking naps. So I only put some of those up. I didn't want to bore you all too much.
Josh has been messing around with the website on and off the last few weeks. He has some vision to transform the site, but hasn't had a lot of time to do anything. He's pretty busy with classes and work, as I'm sure you all can imagine.
A couple weeks ago Annabelle and I both had some allergy-like stuff going on. Annabelle started with a non-stop runny nose, and I got a bad sore throat and blah-ness for several days along with stuffy head and all. So that knocked me out for a few days, making me miss some events, which was disappointing to say the least.
Last weekend was Fall Break at PBU, so we had Annie and Ally around for a few days. Annie came up to stay with us last minute when her previous plans fell through. Annabelle had such a blast hanging out with her all weekend (Friday night through Tuesday morning)! It was great having her around, but I forgot to take pics of her with Annabelle until her last night here. I always seem to forget! At least I got some. And we saw Ally on Saturday when Josh's family came over for one last grill before winter. We had some great food (Josh did great on the grill with burgers, sausages, and hot dogs!) and it was all yummy.
Annabelle was pretty sad after her playmate left - on Wednesday morning she woke up and went to look in "Annie's Room" for Annie. Very sad. :-( But she loves seeing Annie's picture even more now, and I'm sure she'll be very excited next time she comes to stay with us or we see her in NH over the holidays.
So that's most of the happenings around here.
Okay, time for a cute story: We've been working on teaching Annabelle to pray before we eat the last few months. Well, a couple weeks ago, she suddenly took Josh's hand and my hand and started talking in her Annabelle-speak (something like, "Ah-dibba dibba dibba") followed by, "Ah-MEN!" :-) It was soooo cute! She prayed! We weren't eating or anything, but she knew the hand-holding part and grabbed our hands and prayed. Too precious!
Other than that, it has been pretty quiet around here since baseball ended for us. Oh, I almost forgot: my parents stopped by on a business trip to Syracuse a couple weeks ago. It was great seeing them for a couple hours, and Annabelle loved showing all her toys to them. I wish we were a little closer so she could see both sets of grandparents, but these visits are precious. We never know when we'll be able to get together next, and I know my parents love every minute they get to spend with their "far away" grandchild. Hopefully we will see them again soon!
Well, it's getting late, and I can't think of much else to say at the moment, so I'm gonna sign off. Don't forget to check out the new pictures I've posted! Have a wonderful weekend!
-Katherine, 19 October 2007
Another photo update! After spending the last few days going through the 1,671 photos I ordered from Snapfish and putting them in albums, I got to work uploading the latest batch from our camera. That's right, 1,671 photos, plus 5 sheets of wallets for Josh. We haven't ordered photos for over a year for some reason, so we had a major backup. Good thing I pre-ordered a lot of prints at a reduced price! That saved us a lot of money! And I ran out of albums (I only had a couple on hand), so we hit up the Christmas Tree Shop and got a bunch of albums cheap. :-) So I used up most of them putting the rest of the pictures in them, and we are left with four and half extra for future purchases!
With all the photo-ordering, we were finally able to fill up Annabelle's "Who Loves Baby?" albums. We bought a second one to accommodate pictures from both sides of the family, and I must say, they have really improved the design! (The one you see through the link is more similar to the old style). She had been going through the albums I was filling up and pointing at people she recognized (mainly Annie, Mommy, and Daddy), so we knew she would love her own special ones that can be "beat up" a little without us taking them away. She definitely loves going through them, and I'm working on teaching her everyone's names. She can say pretty much all of them, too! She had Annie down from our last trip to NH, and she knows Hannah from seeing Hannah Montana on TV and then making the association with her cousin. She calls my Mum "Gammy" and her attempts to say "Grampa" for my Dad come out sounding like "Peek-ah" or "Gee-kah", and she finds him in every picture. She also makes an attempt at "Great Grammy" and for Josh's grandfather she tries to say "Great Grandpa." She can say "Ally", but usually with some prompting, and she learned to say "Gigi" for her uncle Jordan, and she points to him in every picture she can find him in. She even got to "talk" to her Aunt Ally on the speaker phone the other day and said "Ha-woh" ("Hello"), and later to Uncle Jordan she (after much prompting) said, "Hi, Gee-gee!" It was fun! But she really enjoys looking at the photos and is very proud of the names she knows.
She is also pointing out everything she recognizes and saying what it is. She must know a million words! She's always amazing me at what new words she picks up, and the associations she makes. For example, she saw a picture of a dinosaur and said her word for dinosaur, even though the only dinosaur she knows is Dorothy from the Wiggles, and the ones in the picture didn't look the same at all. She picked it up all on her own! She loves letting us know what she knows. :-) And she's starting to do small sentences; her most clear ones are, of course, the phrases she repeats from us, like "I love you" and "I got you!" or "I see you!" She is incredible!
In other news, we finally got a printer to replace our old junk one that we never use anymore. It's pretty spiffy and can do lots of stuff, but Josh knows more about it than I do. And we've had some good meat lately - made all the better by it being bought on sale or they were just super good deals. Josh is getting great at grilling! Too bad it's getting toward the end of the warm weather. :-( It's been so very cold lately, and the next couple days are gonna be warmer again, but then back to cold again. Yikes, fall came on fast!
Anyway, that's all the news I can think of for now. Hope you all are having a splendid week!
-Katherine, 18 September 2007
Wow, look at me - I'm on a roll! I've updated some pictures AGAIN! Okay, enough exclamation points for a minute... I added some pictures to the Apartment pages, and of course the latest to the Baby Annabelle pages (new 18-19 month folder, updated size comparison). And yes, we know, she isn't exactly a baby anymore since she's toddling, but she's still OUR baby, so we're leaving that title for now. ;-)
So check out these pics, and maybe I can actually keep up with them now and update regularly. Truth be told, we just haven't been taking as many pics lately. We'll try to pick up the slack there. ;-)
In other news, we finally signed up for Facebook, so I expect a lot more hits on our website from you slackers who never check it out but are on Facebook all day long. Especially since I might update more often. :-p So there. But yeah, at the constant "prompting" of a couple people, we finally each signed up, but personally it doesn't seem like anything too special at the moment. It seems like a big, fake, popularity contest without prizes. Anyway, I'm sure it will be handy someday when people actually try to get in touch with me through it, but for now, I'm still trying to figure out the obsession. Anyway...
Also, today is the dreaded day: Josh starts up Grad School again. He's hoping to graduate in the spring if he can work in his last three classes in time. Exciting! But sad, because it means that starting today he will be gone longer two nights a week. But happy because he's almost done! Yay! Anyway, we'll keep you all posted as things progress.
That's all the news for now. Have a wonderful day!
-Katherine, 6 September 2007
Just a quick note to say that I finally added some pictures that were e-mailed to me to Annabelle's folders. There are a bunch from my brother from Thanksgiving last year, and a couple from my sister in the same folder. Also there is a picture from Dean of Annabelle and Caroline added to the pics from our trip to Indiana last year for the Quicks' wedding. And finally, there is one from the Ladies' Tea on Mother's Day Weekend that Heather took. So enjoy those few (49 total, I believe), and hopefully in the next few days I'll be updating the current photos. Have a splendid day!
-Katherine, 4 September 2007
Another "dry spell" on our part for posts, but this time it isn't entirely our fault. Our hosting company has been having trouble with their servers lately, and then there was some glitch or something where they thought we hadn't re-registered our domain name, so our apologies to everyone who came to our site and found that weird search-engine thingy instead. Anyway, that's part of what's been going on. Here's the rest:
Earlier this month, we took a long weekend (Wednesday night to Sunday afternoon) to visit my family in NH. We had so much fun! We arrived Wednesday evening/night, and we had a nice cool place to sleep during all that heat: my parents' basement! (It's a finished room, don't worry!) On Thursday we were hoping to go down to Boston to see the Aquarium, but due to some complications, we decided against it, and we stayed "local" that day. Josh, Annabelle, my sister Annie, and my parents all went to the SEE Science Center in Manchester. The coolest thing about this place was the awesome Lego Millyard Project! They made a model of the Manchester Millyard and some surrounding buildings/sites from the Victorian Era entirely out of Legos! It was incredible. Check out our pics! Annabelle had fun doing some of the activities in the museum, especially the caterpillar tunnel she crawled through at the end. :-)
After the museum, we headed over to visit my Grammy and spent some time with her. She can't travel too well, so she doesn't get to see Annabelle very much at all, so she very much enjoyed being with our sweet girl. :-) While we were there, I dug out the jewelry box full of necklaces that my sister and I used to play with when we were little. I showed them to Annabelle, and she immediately started putting them all on - that's a LOT of necklaces! You can see those pictures too.
After visiting Grammy, we got a call from my best friend, Martha! We haven't seen her in about a year, so we were really hoping to get a visit with her in while we were in NH. If you follow the above link you can see some pics of our time with her. Annabelle was asleep by the time we got there (a long day for her - the museum, lots of playing at Great-Grammy's, and missing nap time), and when she woke up, she found a doggie to play with! Martha was dog-sitting Lady for some friends who dropped her off while we were there. Annabelle loved playing with Atlanta our entire visit to NH, so another dog was fun too! We had a great time visiting with Martha and catching up. We miss seeing you, Martha!
That night, Atlanta started to act very poorly. A few days before our arrival, she had injured her leg somehow, but she was doing fine again until Thursday. She started limping around and having a hard time of things. So Mum decided to stay home with her on Friday while the rest of us went on another outing. Atlanta ended up going to the Vet on Saturday, and they learned she had a torn ligament and her arthritis was setting in. So it made it a little stinky that Mum couldn't go on our "big" outing with us, and that the dog was hurt, but it was for the best, and we still managed a good weekend.
Friday's "big" trip was to the zoo - my first time to a "real" zoo, actually. My Dad drove Annie, Josh, Annabelle, and me up to York, ME, with Matt, Heather, and Hannah in their car coming with us. We went to York's Wild Kingdom, and it was fantastic! The day started out rainy, but when we got there we ate lunch in a light drizzle, and by the time we were done, it had stopped raining. We took our coolers back to the cars, and shed our umbrellas and coats, and headed into the zoo for some animal encounters. What a wonderful zoo! We were there for several hours, and the little girls had so much fun! The highlight of the girls' day, though, was feeding the ducks! I bought the girls some of the feed for the ducks as we were getting toward the end of the zoo, and they had a blast feeding them all! If we ever put video up on our site, you will all have to see the footage of Annabelle throwing the food straight down and laughing - toooooooo cute! And the whole time we were in the park, if Annabelle saw a duck, she called it "Gonal Guck" ("Donald Duck"). She did a great job naming the animals. She now knows what an elephant ("Ellie" or "El-unt" to her) is. We got to see the elephant paint, and I got to touch her! How cool is that?! It was such a fun place. I recommend it to anyone going that way, and I look forward to going back in a couple years. They had an amusement park section too, and we walked through it before heading home, and it looked great for kids. And they had very yummy Fried Dough! I haven't had that in years, but Dad bought us all some (3 giant doughs to share) - only $3 for a giant one! You can see a picture of Dad holding one of them here at The Richmonds' site, as well as some other pics from the zoo that we don't have.
After the zoo, we headed to the York Harbor Beach for Annabelle's first trip to the Ocean! The really cool thing (to me, anyway) is that my Dad has an old film reel with footage of my brother and me at this same beach when I was about 3 years old. I recognized the beach from the film as we drove to it. So Annabelle's first trip to the beach was the same location as one of my early trips - possibly even my first! Well, Annabelle was tired, so she didn't want to go near the water, but she LOVED the sand! She was running on it in no time and loved the feel of it on her bare feet. We carried her into the water a little way, without getting her wet at all, and she still didn't like it. But I think if she hadn't had such a long and busy day at the zoo and been so tired, she would have loved it all!
On Saturday we had an "off" day. Josh and Annabelle and I headed into Manchester to do a little shopping for a short time, and then we visited with Grammy one more time before heading back to my parents' house to have supper with my family and Matt and Heather and Hannah. Hannah and Annabelle had a blast playing with my old toy kitchen and all the food toys! You can see lots of pics of them playing together on our site as well as Matt and Heather's site. Annabelle even got into the little kiddie pool that Grammy June picked up for the girls to swim in, even though it was chilly! She was having a ton of fun splashing in there with Daddy and dumping water everywhere.
On Sunday we went to church, and we got a chance to see Pastor Larry for a few minutes after the service when he caught Annabelle who was running around the auditorium after most people had left. After that we headed back to my parents' house again to try to get Annabelle to take a quick nap and get some of our stuff organized and packed, then we went to Matt and Heather's for a yummy lunch. We watched our video of the zoo while we were there so Grammy June could see what she missed, and then we headed back to finish packing and take off.
We got home Sunday night and then Josh had Monday off to recover from travel, so we took the chance to do some errands. Josh bought a grill! We got it at BJ's, and Josh loves to cook on it now. We've had some great burgers, and chicken, and veggies.... and we'll probably be having more soon! It took a long time to decide on a grill and price-shop, but we finally got one, and Josh really likes it. He even ordered a cover and some nice grill utensils for it (the stores were out of them at this time of year, so he had to order them over the internet).
This past Saturday was a hot and humid one, so we decided to escape the heat and humidity by going to the New York State Museum. We spent several hours there in the cool AC, and Annabelle loved being able to walk most of the museum (there weren't a lot of people there, so we didn't have to worry too much about bothering others). She loved pointing at different exhibit pieces and saying what it was. She liked seeing the Mastodons and calling them "Ellie" and "El-unt". :-) We have some pictures (not a lot) from that visit. If you all want to see something neat, head to the NYS Museum and check out the Joan Steiner exhibit. It is awesome! And the museum is "free", but they ask for donations for your visit. I think most people throw $1 or $2 in the box. It's a great museum, though, and I hope you all visit it someday.
I think that's most of what's been going on lately. I'm sure I'll think of more later, but then I'll just do a shorter post. Our little girl is 18 months old! She's saying LOTS of words, and always picking new ones up. And she's always running around everywhere! And she loves coloring and reading her books. She's a busy little girl! She's got lots of teeth, with more coming in, and she's doing really well feeding herself. Oh, and speaking of food, I made my first Creme Brulee the other week, and it was AWESOME! I am totally in love with the recipe, so that's what I'm sticking to for the future! And I made some yummy, very rich, very fattening brownies (I got the recipe from Paula Deen, so of course it's over-the-top!), and they're great. But I'm really proud of my first ever turkey dinner that I made just last night. I'd never cooked a turkey before, so I thought it was about time. I only did a turkey breast, since it was just Josh and Annabelle and me eating, and I consulted Fannie Farmer on how to season/roast it, and it was delicious. I am especially proud of my gravy - some of the best I'd ever had! And I've never been too successful at gravy before (pot roast gravy, usually), so this was great. :-) I love cooking and trying new stuff, and I've got more new recipes in store. Sorry, I get a little excited over good food accomplishments. :-)
It was also nice seeing my parents again Sunday night when they stopped by to spend the night on their way home from dropping Annie off at PBU. We missed seeing Annie, but I'm sure we'll be seeing her during some of her breaks this year. Annabelle was very excited to see them when they arrived and started showing them all her toys. She especially loved playing "Trot, trot, to Boston" with Grampa! :-) And she was very comfy cuddling with Grammy the next morning before they left and she was still tired.
Well, this is certainly long enough! Hopefully we won't have problems with our site host anymore, so we should be able to post more regularly. Lots of new pics are up, so check them all out!
Until next time!
-Katherine, 28 August 2007
Happy 25th Birthday to the best Hubby and Daddy in the world! We love you!!!
-Katherine and Annabelle, 1 August 2007
Hello again! Just wanted to let you all know I did some MAJOR photo updating! Lots of new pictures of the cutest baby in the world (of course!), and one new pic in the Holiday pages, and some shots from around our apartment in the "Our Apartment" page. You'll see new pictures in the 15-16 month folder for Annabelle, and a new folder with subfolders for the 16-17 months pictures. Soon we will be updating that one as Annabelle will be 17 months old in a few days! She's been learning new words everyday - she loves to listen and watch us say a word and tell her what it is, and then she tries to sound it out on her own. She's doing great! She tries really hard to get words right, and she comes up with some very cute sounds. :-) She even has a couple words that we're pretty sure are her version of her name: one sounds like "Abba" and the other sounds a little more like "Appah". Soooooo cute!!! We are totally in love with our little girl. She has also learned to say the word "no", but (thankfully!) she does not yet understand the meaning in a way that she is telling us "No!" or anything. She's finally beginning to grasp the idea that when we say it, it means to stop doing what she's doing. But she thinks it's funny to repeat words she hears, so that is one of them.
Nothing else too new. We got an area rug for our living room a little while ago. We shopped around trying to find an inexpensive one and finally decided on one at BJ's that was a good deal. It has really made the living room feel a little more warm and welcoming. Annabelle loves rolling around on it too! Other than that, we've had a pretty quiet summer for the most part, just relaxing and watching the Braves and Yankees play on TV (which looks great in HD!). Oh, and we finally went to our library and got cards so Annabelle and I can go check stuff out sometime. She currently has four board books out and she loves them all! We also checked out a couple movies our first day with the cards (DVDs for free for 5 days is awesome!), and Josh finally won: I finally saw Independence Day. I have been holding out on seeing it all these years because I'm not into the whole alien invasion thing (this from a Star Trek/Star Wars/Stargate fan - I guess I like the idea of us exploring other planets better than the aliens coming here!). I have to admit, it was a good movie. A little language, a lot of blowing stuff up, but it was good overall. Okay, I liked it. :-p
On a quick note: we removed our e-mail address from this site because we kept getting spam in our inbox addressed to that address, and claiming to be from the handle we used. So we didn't want other people to get spammed by a third party using it. Don't know how it all works, but it stinks, and we're sorry if you got any spam from our address somehow. We wanted to take precautions and remove it though. Hopefully if any of you want to contact us, you have a way to!
I've been feeling a little sick the last couple days, so I'm gonna end this soon since my energy is draining again and I gotta make popcorn tonight. And no, I am not pregnant. Man, can't a woman my age be sick without being asked that? Jeepers. Anyway...
This isn't a huge thing, but I thought I'd share an interesting story that showed how good God has been in the little things. We were at Crossgates Mall on Friday afternoon running some errands. For those not from this area, that's probably the biggest mall around here, and it's always busy. Well, Annabelle had a hair "clip" in her hair that was meant for younger babies (I think), but never worked in her fine hair before. Instead of being a metal clip, it uses velcro. Well, we had been walking all over the mall, and we were almost done running our errands when I looked down and noticed her hair clip was gone. We had seen it a while before, but didn't know the last place she had it. So we immediately started back-tracking. We walked through a huge crowd outside the movie theater, and I silently prayed that we would find the clip. I knew it was insignificant, and it hadn't cost much, but I get so sentimentally attached to things sometimes, especially Annabelle's things. I didn't ask God for much, just that we would somehow find it. We kept walking as close to our original path as possible, and I was looking all over on the floor ahead of us. I saw something a few yards ahead near an entrance to a store we hadn't gone in but had passed by (but not closely). Just quickly walked ahead when I pointed out the "something" and I dared not hope, and he picked it up and held it up. It was the hair clip! I got a huge smile and then silently thanked God for taking care of something so little and unimportant in the grand scheme of things. God is good! :-) Just wanted to share.
Well, it's Sunday night, and I gotta go make my hubby some popcorn on the stove (very yummy!). So please enjoy all the pictures, and God bless you in some small way this week!
-Katherine, 22 July 2007
Just a quick update to let you know we added some more pictures to the Holiday Page (Father's Day pics) and the Baby Annabelle 15-16 month folders. I haven't uploaded the size comparison pics yet because today is Annabelle's 16-month birthday, and we will be taking that picture tonight, so I will update that folder in the next few days (hopefully!).
Not a whole lot of news otherwise right now. Annabelle is doing great - getting her molars in! It's been super-hot the last few days (in the 90s yesterday and today) and makes us really miss central AC, but we're getting by just fine. :-)
Oh, and Annabelle will be getting a new cousin this winter! Congratulations to Matt and Heather and Hannah as they look forward to meeting the newest member of their family in December/January!
And before you all start asking: we are not returning the favor at this time; our family is staying the same size for now!
Okay, I'm gonna sign off, upload this message, and then go eat some yummy Velveeta Peanut Butter Fudge! That's right, Velveeta Fudge. Yummy! You should try it sometime - e-mail me for the recipe! :-)
See you for the next post!
-Katherine, 27 June 2007
What a busy month! We spent the first half of May traveling, and the second half trying to recover!
The first weekend in May was Jordan's graduation at Cedarville University, so we made the long drive out. We left on a Wednesday, stayed that night outside Cleveland, and then drove to Dayton the next day. After settling in at our hotel, we went out to eat at Bravo! - our favourite place to eat while we were at Cedarville. Annabelle got to use crayons for the first time! They put paper down on the table and let people write on it, so Annabelle had a lot of room to colour! I had the yummy Filet Mignon, and Josh got some yummy chicken on pasta; this is actually a reverse of our first time ever eating at Bravo!, as he ordered what I had the first time, and I ordered what he ate the first time! Kinda funny, considering he didn't know what he was ordering was what I ate our first visit. And we ordered food off the kids' menu for the first time for Annabelle. We ordered their version of macaroni and cheese and it was huge! It was good, though. Josh and I finished it in our hotel room the next day. :-) All in all, it was a great meal, and Bravo! is still one of our favourites.
After Bravo!, we gave Jordan a call and surprised him when he found out we were already in Ohio. We headed over to Cedarville to meet up with him and hang out for a while, then we went back to the hotel to sleep. On Friday we took our time and had a nice breakfast and then went to CU again to try to catch up with some of the profs. We managed to find my advisor, Dr. Mach, (he and his wife were our mentors for the Fit to be Tied program) and talk to him for a few minutes, and then we headed toward the engineering building to find Josh's advisor, Dr. Hegna. We were able to spend some time talking with him too. Well, Josh talked, and I chased Annabelle around the lower level of ENS (Engineering, Nursing, and Science Building for you non-Cedarvillians ;-)). Then we went to the Alumni Office to "check in" and try to update some information with them that's wrong on their website. We got a nice gift bag from them, and Annabelle got a cute rubber duckie. Then we just walked around looking at stuff, and then we hit up the bookstore and got some souvenirs. I got an alumni t-shirt (they only had two, and they were too small for Josh), and we found alumni sweatshirts on clearance - they were supposed to be something like $40, I think, and we got them for less than $5! We also got Annabelle a CU t-shirt, and a very cute CU teddy bear - it's yellow with a blue shirt (the school colours), and she was very happy with it in the hotel room. After that, we decided to go back to our hotel.
That evening for supper, we met up with our friends Matt and Beth at Young's Jersey Dairy. They were back at CU to see Beth's brother graduate, and we really wanted to see them, so we arranged it for a nice casual supper at Young's. Good times! It was great to see them again and get all caught up. They got married a couple months after we did, and we've tried to keep in touch. And congratulations to them on buying a house! We're very happy for them. :-)
Saturday was graduation. This was, sadly, the down-point to the weekend. We drove all that way, and we ended up having to sit in the room designated for small children. There were only a few chairs - most people were sitting on the floor or along the walls on floor mats, etcetera. We started in the main room, but Annabelle really wanted to get up and run around and talk, so we took her in the other room. There were kids running around, playing, screaming, tossing a football; there was a woman in the corner with a few little girls watching a DVD on their laptop. It was hard to hear the graduation ceremony that was being shown on a big TV, and it just seemed like a waste. We tried to get to the main room entryway in time to see Jordan cross the stage, but otherwise, we completely missed the speech. And we really wanted to hear it, since Chuck Colson was the speaker. So hopefully we can get our hands on a copy of the ceremony or something so we can hear it. The first part of the speech was all we heard, and it sounded good!
After graduation, we all gathered outside (such is the custom), and then I saw a couple of my friends from college, so I ran over to see them (we hadn't seen each other in a few years). We talked quick, but then everyone was running off to lunch, so not a lot of visiting-time. But it wasn't too bad - this was my first trip back to CU (Josh's third) since graduation, and I got to see a bunch of people!
So after that, we went back to our hotel so we could try to get Annabelle to nap before Jordan's "party". Then we went to the get-together and met a bunch of Jordan's "families" (as he calls them) from church and Cedarville. After that, we went back to the hotel to go to bed. We left Ohio on Sunday morning (after breakfast) and drove to Erie to visit with the Lewises again. We had a great time with them - I think it was Annabelle's favourite stop the whole weekend! She was very excited to see all the toys and another baby, and she and Caroline had great fun chasing each other around the house. It was great to watch them together! We went to a park with them, ate some very yummy food that Darcey made, and spent the night. We left the next day to drive home, and I unloaded the car while Josh drove off to class. Boy, was it good to be home!
The next Friday, after Josh got out of work, we headed to NH for the weekend. It was our first time going there since Thanksgiving, so it was good to be back. We stayed with Matt and Heather, and Hannah and Annabelle enjoyed playing together. Heather, Hannah, Annabelle, and I met up with Mum and Annie at the church on Saturday for the Ladies' Tea (a Mother's Day weekend celebration). It was so nice! We had wonderful food after a cute presentation in the chapel. Annabelle enjoyed eating some of Grammy's roll, and also some chocolate-covered strawberries! I didn't have the camera with me at the time, but I think Heather might have gotten a picture of her eating, so we'll try to get a copy and post it in with the pictures. After the tea, Heather and I stopped at a wonderful consignment store on the way home. It was called "Mother & Child" and had a lot of clothes for little kids and babies. I had mentioned I wanted to do some shopping for summer outfits for Annabelle since the warmer weather was finally arriving, and Heather mentioned that store, so we stopped. I got about 9 outfits for Annabelle at super-low prices! It was great! We also got a couple of toys: I saw a Dorothy the Dinosaur (from the Wiggles) "backpack" and Annabelle loved it, and then I found a plush Bob the Builder doll, and they were each only a couple dollars. I also found a Baby Einstein DVD for only $6, and a Baby Einstein CD for a couple dollars. The real steal was this, though: I looked up and saw the Fisher-Price Dinosaur Roll-A-Rounds toy on top of a rack of clothing. Annabelle was familiar with it now since Hannah has one, and I knew she would love it. I found the price tag, and it was only $10!!! This is normally a $35 toy, so this was most definitely a steal. The only downer was that it didn't have the original balls with it, but you can buy them pretty easily for a few bucks, and we had some jungle ones already from her Jungle Toy (the one online isn't the same as ours - you can see ours in the baby pictures), so it was still worth it. I was very excited by it all!
That night we went out to eat at the Aloha - the best Chinese restaurant in the world! Annabelle had her first taste of Chinese food (not much, just some rice, chicken finger, wonton) and loved it. So did I. :-)
On Sunday we all got together at my parents' house to celebrate Mother's Day. We got to spend some time with my grandmother there, which was nice since we rarely get to see her, and I miss her a lot. And since our anniversary was the next day, my Mum got us a cake! It was nice and yummy, and we got to bring the leftovers home with us. Yummy!
After hanging out for a while, we headed home to NY. It was a great weekend visit, but it would be nice to be home for a while. And it has been nice. I've finally been able to get some unpacking and organizing done, though there's still a lot more to do. And on Memorial Day, we inherited some dining room furniture from Josh's aunt: a very nice hutch and a nice table and chairs. So there's still more to do, but we're getting there. We also used Annabelle's new pool for the first time that day. Next on our calendar: a visit from some of my relatives from France! Don't know when, but sometime in the next week or so, we'll probably be seeing Karine and her parents, Joelle and Fernand.
We also had Annabelle's 15-month check-up on Tuesday. Everything is great, especially since we were able to opt out of the chicken pox vaccine (they use nasty methods to make it - if you want to know about it, e-mail us and we'll tell you. It's not a good thing.), and that was something we were worried about. But it's all good now. No more shots for a while, which is nice. Meanwhile, Annabelle is growing like crazy! She's learning new stuff everyday, it seems. And she has a molar in, and another one on its way. And she loves running around!
Well, this is like a mile and a half long. And I'm sure I still forgot to mention something! No major trips for a while, so I should be able to start updating more on weekends. And Josh is done with classes for the summer as soon as he hands in his final this week. He's not taking any classes again until the fall, so he's looking forward to some relaxation time - and so are we! So maybe you'll see an update from him every once in a while. :-)
Well, that's all I can think of to say right now. I know there are more pics on the camera, so we'll be updating the photos again soon, I think! In the meantime, check out the newest ones!
-Katherine, 9 June 2007
Guess what? If all went well and I did everything right, then we should have a bunch of new pictures for you all to look at! There are a couple of new main folders in the Baby Annabelle pictures, plus an updated one (you may have to hit "refresh" a couple of times to see the ones we added). We haven't updated the size comparison pics yet. We were bad and didn't take a size picture for Annabelle on her 13-month birthday (we were busy moving and getting settled and totally missed doing it), but we will have one for 14 months. It's still on the camera, though, so it will wait until the next update. But please enjoy all the other new pictures we're putting up!
Oh, and I did remember another bit of news from before: we welcomed some new members in our home recently - a washer and dryer! YAY!!! We finally bought our washer and dryer a couple weeks ago and they arrived safely from the store, and we love using them! So much better than going to the laundromat! It is great to be able to do laundry during the day and get other stuff done rather than waiting for Josh to come home and all of us going out to do laundry and waste a couple hours sitting around. Plus, Annabelle was getting bored at the laundromat lately. :-\ So it is wonderful to have our own machines! (And no more collecting quarters for the laundromat, either!)
Well, I'm going to try to upload the pictures now. We'll be checking all the links the next day or so to make sure they work, so give us a little time to fix any glitches, okay? Thanks!
-Katherine, 29 April 2007
Well, if anyone still checks our web site anymore, they probably think we've disappeared off the face of the earth. Or perhaps you all just think we're bad at keeping promises of updating. All I can say is sorry - again. We have had some very busy weeks!
I can't even remember all that has been going on the last few weeks. By the middle of March we were finally sleeping in the new apartment, with almost daily trips to the old place to finish packing and cleaning. Let me tell you, I don't know how we got some much stuff into the old apartment! It feels like it all expanded as we moved! There is so much stuff in the basement now... but that's kinda how we planned it. We don't have a lot upstairs in the bedrooms yet, and we moved most stuff into the basement and the first floor. We plan to move stuff up as we organize so we can put stuff away and unpack at the same time. So our basement is packed. And last week with all the rain/melting snow, we had some minor flooding through a crack in the floor, so we had to get a lot of stuff back out of the basement, which was a headache, but there was no major damage (thank goodness!). And then we had to move everything from the first floor down into the basement for a party so people would be able to walk around, so it's all a big pile of stuff again. It's confusing, but basically my point is this: there is a lot of stuff in the basement. :-p
Annabelle started walking on March 10th, and now she is going everywhere, and fast! She loves our new home, as she can just walk/"run" around in a big circle through the downstairs. And she loves to climb the stairs too! We have to block the bottom steps so she doesn't sneak away upstairs without us. She loves to sit on the bottom step though - she'll just go over and sit there, smiling away. :-) Very cute!
We finally had a birthday party for Annabelle this past Saturday (the 21st). We originally hoped to have it in March, but moving didn't go as swiftly as we hoped, so here we are toward the end of April and finally had the party. It was just some family, nothing too big (our house couldn't handle ALL the relatives and friends!), and it was great. We had both sets of grandparents, a great-grandfather, a great-aunt, and my brother and his wife and Annabelle's cousin, Hannah! It was great to have Matt and Heather and Hannah spend the night and go to church with us the next day. The girls LOVED playing together! They had so much fun and entertained everyone. Annabelle got a couple new presents that kept them busy even when the rest of the people went home. :-) And we had lots of food! And I made my first attempt at decorating a cake with my new Decorating Kit. It was really warm that day, though, so the frosting didn't entirely cooperate. That and I was busy getting everything else ready, so I was a little rushed. But it looked okay - you can see pics of it in Annabelle's Birthday Party folder when it's uploaded.
The weather has been crazy the last few weeks. It was too cold Easter weekend for Annabelle to wear her Easter dress to church, and the next Sunday it snowed, but she finally got into it this past Sunday since it was in the 70s. We had a day in the 80s a couple days ago too, but today it got down in the 40s! And now it's rainy and cold for a few more days.... when will spring come to stay?
Annie got to stay with us for a couple days for her Easter break, and it was great having her around and seeing her play with Annabelle! We also got to see Ally and Jordan for Easter. It was nice seeing everyone.
It's 11:00 PM now, and at the moment I can't think of anything else big that's happened. We have a TON of pictures to put up, but things are still a little busy, so it might be a few days more. I'm sure one of us will write a note to let you all know when they're up, and if there is anything I forgot to mention that was big news, we'll write again.
So, goodnight for now, and enjoy the rest of the week!
-Katherine, 25 April 2007
It's Tuesday! That means it's Annabelle's birthday! At 11:55 PM tonight, she will be exactly ONE YEAR OLD!!! It has been a wonderful first year, and we look forward to many more happy years ahead! Happy Birthday, Annabelle!!! We Love You!!!
-Katherine and Josh (aka: Mommy and Daddy), 27 February 2007
Tuesday. Tuesday is the big day - Annabelle will be a year old! It is so hard to believe it's been a year already. She has grown so quickly! We are so very blessed to have her in our lives. She is always making us laugh or smile, and of course she is constantly amazing us! We love her so very much, and we are excited to celebrate this milestone!
Unfortunately, this past Monday she hit another "first": her first cold, complete with ear infection. So we're not sure how well we'll be able to celebrate since she is still sick. But hopefully she'll get better in the next two days!
We have been working hard the last few days trying to get some new pictures up. Everyone keeps asking - even our friends at Seton/St. Mary's! So, we have a TON of new pictures up, and we are working to try to update every week or two instead of every few months. :-) Yes, we know, it's been almost 3 months since we updated.... I don't have to tell you how busy life is with a baby and Josh in grad school.
So, what's new since early December? Well, Annabelle crawls EVERYWHERE she possibly can. She also cruises around along the furniture faster than anything. Oh, and we can stand her up and she balances to hold herself up really well for quite a while before gently lowering to the floor - it's so precious and cute and amazing all at once! She'll probably be walking before we know it at the rate she's going! She also has her seventh tooth, and she is always "talking", trying to make the words we say come out of her mouth.
We spent Christmas here in NY with no trips to visit my family in NH this year. I missed being in NH, but to try to make up for it, my parents and sister came here a few days after Christmas to have a big meal and exchange gifts. It was great to spend a day with them, and we had a great time, but we still missed seeing Grammy who couldn't come.
For New Year's Eve, we headed over to the Sutphens' for a little while. We got to introduce Annabelle to her "Uncle" Tim, and you can see pictures of that in the holiday pages. We didn't stick around to see the ball drop, though, as Annabelle was getting tired/cranky. We came home and watched the ball here, allowing Annabelle to sleep comfortably.
And January we spent looking for a new apartment. We read through so many ads, and we went to see a few places, but most of them weren't much of an upgrade from where we are now, and we really needed a little more space for storage. Well, in the end, we found two very promising apartments and had a tough time deciding, but we ended up picking half of a duplex that is owned by one of Josh's co-workers. It is beautiful, and it will definitely suit our needs until we can find a house! We posted pics of our new place - before we move everything in. We started moving some stuff this weekend, but we have a lot more to pack up. We hope to be living there in the next couple weeks and be totally done with our old apartment before the lease is up at the end of March. We are VERY excited about our new place and look forward to living there. I'm excited; I get a bigger kitchen! :-) And Annabelle already loves the living room window because it is low enough for her to look out. :-) Oh, and we have stairs! Annabelle has already mastered climbing the first two to the landing, and she goes up another four or five on her own, but then stops, and she hasn't figured out getting down yet. I give her a week after we move in before she climbs all the stairs. Then maybe she'll work on getting down. :-)
In early January, our wonderful TV started acting strange. In short, we had to exchange it for a new one (thank goodness we had a service plan!). After a great deal of research and trips to Best Buy, we finally chose a new one. We went ahead and upgraded and now have a VERY nice HD TV! Josh is looking forward to watching the Yankees in HD this year.
I think that's about all the news for now. We should have more in the next couple weeks, since we have two birthdays and a move coming up! Oh, and hopefully no more big snowstorms - we have so much snow on the ground, it isn't funny! We'll keep you all posted (I hope!).
-Katherine, 25 February 2007
We've had so much going on here, it's been crazy! It is absolutely amazing how Annabelle is changing and growing. Last time we let you all know that she has six teeth (all of them are in now!), but so much more has happened since then. In early November, she finally figured out how to sit herself up, so no more fussing for Mommy or Daddy to pick her up and put her back in the sitting position (yay!). She's pretty good at it now, and it's really nice to not have to get up every few minutes when she wants to sit up again.
She's been really good at getting around, and now she's pulling herself to stand by the furniture. We had no idea how she moved from point A to point B so quickly (always when we weren't looking), but she's quite good at it. She also likes to "walk" by holding onto our fingers and walk around the apartment - she gets such a kick out of it!
A week or two ago, we took Annabelle into the pet store at the mall. I figured she'd get a kick outta seeing the dogs, and she liked them for a few minutes. Then she saw the fish. She liked them for a while too. Then she saw the birds. She LOVED them! She sat there giggling as they climbed their cage walls and then slid down. They had some in the open pens, too, and she loved being parked next to them. She loves parrots apparently, and a cockatiel was keeping her quite in hysterics! It was so fun to watch her, but after 15 minutes or so, we had to leave so we could run some other errands.
She has also discovered that shaking things sometimes results in some cool noises. She enjoys shaking her rattles a lot, and we bought her some sleigh bells in the hopes that she would like to shake those. Well, she likes them, but not for shaking - for putting in her mouth. :-\ She also is madly in love with our "Very Merry Trio" that we bought at Hallmark earlier this month - she loves to see it sing and dance!
We spent Thanksgiving in NH with my family and had a great time (of course!). Annabelle was introduced to Atlanta, and she loved giggling at her. She had lots of fun playing with Grammy June and Grampa Mark. And she had her first taste of strawberries! We don't know if she likes them, but she ate them. And she's getting better with eating her applesauce. Hopefully we can get her to eat more solids now. (For those who don't know, Annabelle is not taking to solids too well - she hasn't liked most of what we've offered her. Any suggestions would be welcome! We're slowly making progress, we think). She also got to try the sippy cup for the first time, but she's didn't pick it up too well the firs time. So we're working on that one too! She learned to mimic Grampa when he patted the table, and now she slaps her hand down on everything when she's happy and excited! She's sooooo cute! We also got to see Uncle Matt and Aunt Heather and Hannah for a short while the day after Thanksgiving. Heather's family was visiting from Ohio, and it was nice seeing them again, but we didn't want to overwhelm the girls too much with all the extra people. Hannah pushed Annabelle around on her doll-walker toy, which was too cute! We'll try to post pictures when we can. We were dumb and forgot to bring our cameras to Matt and Heather's, so we're collecting pics from Aunt Annie and Uncle Matt. :-)
While we were in NH, we went to Kringle's Toy Box, a great toy store in Amherst, in search of a jack-in-the-box. We found a nice one for Annabelle for Christmas (it's Curious George!). And Annabelle did GREAT in the nursery at church - so many babies to keep her busy! Grammy June said she was the perfect baby. And we got free donuts in Bennington on the way home - we love Dunkin' Donuts!
We came back on Sunday night, and I was in the kitchen doing something, and I thought I heard one of Annabelle's Roll-a-Rounds on the jungle toy. I asked Josh if she had dropped it herself into the tree (something she's never done), and he didn't know, so we watched, and she did it! She finally learned to put the balls into the hole in the tree! She hasn't even "practiced" it, and all the sudden she did it! It was so fun to see her, because she kept doing it over and over (probably because we kept going, "Yay, Annabelle!"). And we also got to see Uncle Jordan real quick that night before he headed back to school, then we went to bed early because Josh needed to be up extra early for work.
Overall, since we got back (actually, since the day before we left NH, I think), Annabelle has been very happy and giggly, and she's so much fun! She'll be sitting on the floor, and she'll look up at you and start laughing. It's great!
Well, we had another surprise just last night after we came back from a trip to Target. I came around the corner from the kitchen into our living room area, and I saw her crawl a short distance to get to some books. I had seen her crawl one little crawl (whatever you call crawling-steps) that afternoon, but I figured it was just her scooting around. Well, last night we definitely saw her crawl! We quickly put it to the test and got her to crawl towards a shiny bag of M&Ms we had just bought, and she did it! So now we have a crawler on our hands! Again, we didn't see it coming that soon - she's just been doing the whole thing where she pushes herself up and rocks back and forth. All the sudden she's actually moving! Crazy! And only one day after she hit the 9-month mark!
Okay, I think that's most of the Annabelle news. We'll be going in for her 9 month checkup in a couple weeks, so we'll find out how much she weighs now and how long she is officially. No [scheduled] shots this time, though! Yay!
Josh is done with grad school until January (*phew!*), but he's super busy at work. They've had him traveling lately, which is stinky, but he should get a break soon. And I am doing fine, taking care of Annabelle and Josh. :-) I'm getting into the Christmas mood, and soon I'll be working on the Christmas cookies (in just another week or so)! And I'll be addressing our Christmas cards soon too, so I can get that taken care of early in December. And if there's time this weekend, we might get to put up our Christmas stuff - yay! We bought Annabelle her "Baby's First Christmas" ornaments last month with a coupon I had for Hallmark. There were two we really liked, so we got both, and saved $8 with the coupon - good deal! And we got her Baby Einstein's Baby Santa's Musicbox DVD, and we're watching it right now. She seems to like the puppets. :-) And she's eating her Cheerios at the same time, and taking breaks to climb on the couch and all. She's so fun! :-)
Well, the DVD is winding down, so I'd better go take care of her. We'll try to put up more pictures when Josh gets a chance (he explained how to do it, but I can't remember - sorry! I think I need practice first), and we'll keep you all posted on Annabelle's progress! Hope you all had a Happy Thanksgiving, and in case I don't post again for a long time, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! ;-)
-Katherine, 29 November 2006
Guess what? We finally added some pictures! Now, the baby pictures pages are still being worked on, but there are a bunch of pictures up, including some from our trip to Indiana and seeing Rachel and Caleb. We will be modifying the pages a bit still. And I DID try to cut back on the number of pictures, but some pages are still pretty full. So we plan on breaking the bigger pages up into smaller ones, so all you dial-up users don't need to get too frustrated with our site!
So yeah, we finally added pictures. That's one of the biggest things we needed to tell you all. The other is this: on Thursday last week, I looked into Annabelle's mouth and saw a little white spot sticking out of her gums on the top. Another tooth! It was her upper tooth just to the left of the middle teeth. That would be tooth number three! But the next day, we looked, and there were three more! One of them is still just under the gum, but we can see it, and it will pop through any day now. But the others have all broken through! She now has the two teeth on the sides of her middle upper teeth, and her left upper middle tooth. The one in the middle on the right is the one that is visible but still hasn't broken through yet. But it's very exciting! She now has SIX TEETH! Well, almost. ;-) And it was all a surprise again. No fussing, no warning - they just popped through one day!
Annabelle is also pretty much fully back to herself again after our long trip a couple weekends ago. :-) She had a little bit of a crazy weekend this week, because Aunt Annie stopped by on her way home for Fall Break, and then Grammy June and Grampa Mark came for a visit and to pick up Aunt Annie. So she lost some naptime, but she had a lot of fun with Annie! And she'll see them again on Tuesday on Annie's way back to PBU. Fun! Yay!
Okay, I didn't want another "book" this time, so I'm ending here. We'll do our best to finish fixing up our photo pages and keep this page updated.
-Katherine, 16 October 2006
So, once again it has been a couple months between updates, and we still haven't kept our promise to post pictures and keep you all posted about our lives. Well, all I can say is that life is busy, and if I knew how to put the pictures up, you all would see them updated more! Josh is in charge of that area, though, and we're going through some reorganization of the web site. And we've been asked to only select a few pictures to put up rather than just throw them all on the web site, because some people have trouble loading the pages. So yeah, we're working on making some changes.
As far as what we've been up to, it's been basically the same old stuff. Josh is still working on grad school classes; he even got to help build a potato gun for his class this summer! Now, I've seen a couple potato guns in my life, but this was high tech! Crazy stuff, really. But I can't explain it. Josh can. :-)
I have been very busy taking care of Annabelle, who is learning new things all the time! She still has only the first two teeth, and she sits up and plays for long periods of time. She doesn't like the church nursery, and she isn't too into her solid foods. She's okay with rice cereal and oatmeal cereal, but so far she hasn't cared for the veggies we've tried. And she's working out those muscles for crawling! No crawling yet, but she can lift her shoulders up pretty well and manages to scoot backwards some. She moves around really well; we just don't know entirely how she does it!
Annabelle is now 7 months old - time has flown by! And it's hard to believe our niece, Hannah, will be 1 year old in about a month. We haven't seen her or Matt and Heather since the end of July, but we hear how much she's growing all the time!
Last weekend we took a loooooooong car ride - to Indiana! We went out to see our good friend Rachel marry Caleb, who we hope will be just as much of a good friend. :-) I was one of Rachel's 8 bridesmaids, so I was apart from Annabelle a lot, and poor Josh tried his best to keep her happy, but after a 14-hour trip in the car, she was not doing so great. She REALLY wanted to be with Mommy! It was a busy weekend, but definitely worth it to see Rachel and Caleb joined in marriage. And Rachel and Caleb actually stopped and spent the night Thursday night on their way back to Indiana from their honeymoon in the Poconos. It was nice to spend a little time with them, especially since last weekend was crazy busy with the wedding and all!
On the way to and from Indiana, we stopped to see our friends Dean and Darcey and their little baby, Caroline. It was a little more relaxed when we stopped on the way home, and the girls had a lot of fun playing together. We really appreciated them for letting us crash at their house, and we really had a great time seeing the girls play!
So yeah, I think that's basically it. Again, sorry for the "book." I REALLY promise to try to update more. Really. Oh, and Josh just said he'd teach me how to do the pictures, so if Annabelle gives me a few minutes once in a while, then I'll try to keep you all updated!
-Katherine, 7 October 2006
Well, it's August now, and I'm finally getting a moment to update. Things have been busy! Annabelle learned to roll over a few weeks ago, and boy is she good at it! She took to it right away and can now roll towards her favourite toys easily, and she also likes to roll over in her crib in the morning. She's even rolled so far in her crib that she gets her legs through the bars, so we had to go out and buy her a bumper for the crib (Classic Pooh - VERY cute!!!).
We took Annabelle swimming for her first time several weeks ago. We went over to Josh's parents' house, put her in Splashers and a swimsuit, and then put her in a baby float. She seemed to like it a lot! We haven't been back to swim again, but hopefully soon! Especially with all the hot weather in August!
We also took a weekend trip to NH at the end of July. One of my favourite museums in NH is closing this year, so we wanted to go see it one last time. If anyone is in NH, go up to see Heritage New Hampshire - it's one of the best museums I've ever seen. It's a walk-through of NH's history, starting in England in the 1600s and getting on a ship and then walking the path through NH's development and ending with a train ride in the early 1900s. And it's all indoors! The museum was way ahead of its time, using hydraulics and many different forms of media presentations, including animatronics! I've seen the museum change and put in additions several times through the years, and I was very much looking forward to bringing my children there someday to see the history of where Mommy grew up (plus, it's right next door to Storyland, so it would have been a great mini-vacation!). I am very sad to see Heritage close its doors. It is truly a unique place and will be missed.
When we were in NH, we stayed at Matt and Heather's house. It was great having the babies interact a little - Hannah is getting so big! It was just too bad we didn't get to have them together more that weekend, as we were busy driving up North and going to church and stuff. We got to spend some time with my grandmother too, and that was great to have the babies at her house playing with each other. It was a good weekend overall!
And when we got home, to our surprise, on Monday Annabelle stuck my finger in her mouth and I felt something sharp. We didn't get to peek until Tuesday, but when we did, we saw not one (as we suspected), but TWO teeth poking through! It was very sudden - they was nothing there one day, and then there were teeth the next! Josh is excited because we "discovered" them (saw them) for the first time on his birthday (August 1st).
Annabelle has also taken to her Johnny Jump-Up. We have only put her in it maybe twice, and she just hung out and twisted around a little. Well, the other night we had her in it, and she started jumping around like crazy! That didn't take long! Now when she's in her Exer-Saucer, she tries to jump too, making the whole thing bounce up and down with her - it's quite a funny sight!
Our little girl is growing up so fast! Rolling over, then teeth, and jumping, and now she's working on the sitting up thing. Hopefully time won't fly *too* fast!
As you can tell, our life is mainly about Annabelle right now. In other, not-so-Annabelle news, Josh had a nice quiet birthday. He had lots of homework last week, so we didn't really celebrate until the weekend, when I made him an ice-cream cake. It was yummy! I will definitely make one of those again. :-)
So, we have lots of pictures to share, and we'll let you know when we put them up - soon hopefully! It will include everything from swimming to our weekend in NH to fun stuff at home. :-) And I promise to try to update the site more so we don't keep putting these "books" up for you all to read!
-Katherine, 7 August 2006
Well, I'm working on updating the website now. I'm using Adobe GoLive CS2 and it seems to be working well so far. It's a great program, but I don't know how to use it too well yet. So, our website is a work in progress. Hopefully it will get better and better as time goes on. We'll see how that goes though, seeing as my grad school class for the summer starts on Monday!! But church softball ends after the week is over, so maybe everything will even out and I won't be too busy. But with a baby, life is always busy!!! Annabelle is still doing great. We got her a Johnny Jump Up today, and she seems to like it. She only spins so far, but she'll learn how to jump soon, I'm sure!! She can do other cool stuff now too. She can sit up and then stand up while pulling on our fingers, she can suck on her toes, and she reaches and grabs for everything in sight!! And of course, everything goes straight to her mouth!! It's kinda funny. So we are busy, but doing really well. I hope everyone has fun!!!
- Josh - 8 July 2006
It's been over a month since the last post, but now we have a whole bunch more pictures of Annabelle up!!! She's definitely changed a lot in the past month!!!! And life has sure been busy. My second grad school class ended on the 31st, and I'm pretty sure I got an A, and my next class starts early in July. So there's a month-long break for me to enjoy my family with no homework, that will sure be great. So, I'm going to go enjoy that right now. Have fun!!!!
- Josh - 11 June 2006
Well, it's been a couple weeks, and we still haven't had the time to organize our pictures better - sorry. :-( We have some new ones, but we haven't posted them yet, so you all have to wait a little longer on that one.
In other news, Josh got a new toy: a video camera. So, there's a good chance you'll be seeing some videos up here someday! We'll see how it goes. Right now Josh is pretty busy with grad school, so he doesn't have a lot of time for the website.
We also are approaching our 1 year anniversary. Hard to believe it's been a year already - how time flies! And just my luck, it lands on Mother's Day. :-p
Annabelle is now over two months old. It's hard to believe it's been that long already. She had her checkup on Monday and weighed in at 13 lbs, 14 oz, so we just missed the 14 lb mark, but she's still bigger than her almost-6-month-old cousin! She's doing fine overall, but she did NOT like getting her shots (Mommy didn't like seeing her get them either!). We've had a rough couple days since then, but we're doing fine for the most part. Annabelle is changing all the time, "talking" a lot, and smiling like crazy. Oh, and sleeping more at night! Grampa Mark finally got to hold her for the first time last weekend when he and Grammy June came to visit, and now we just need Aunt Annie to hold her for the first time!
Annabelle loves playing with her Daddy, and she seems to enjoy spending all day with me. :-) Hopefully this will last for many years. :-)
So, yeah, hopefully we'll have some more updates soon and put up the next bunch of pictures. Keep checking back, as usual!
- Katherine - 4 May 2006
Not much of an update right now, but I wanted to let you all know that we put up a LOT of new pictures on the Baby Annabelle Page. They aren't sorted yet, but that is our next goal. So, I apologize for the chaos caused by the random jumbling of photos; the folders are basically grouped in the order we took them off of the camera (and by date). We'll try to make sense of them soon, but as you can imagine, having a new baby keeps you busy!
Life is still crazy for us. Josh has been back at work for a while now, and he's doing grad school two nights a week. I stay home with Annabelle, and it's amazing to watch her change every day! She likes to "talk" a lot in the mornings, and sometimes at bedtime, and it's adorable! She and Daddy love to hang out too. Josh is planning on teaching her baseball now that the season has gotten under way and his Yankees are back on TV. Don't worry: we still catch some Braves games too!
That's about it for now. We'll try to update again soon. Oh, and a quick congrats to Rachel and Caleb on their engagement! Yay! :-)
Love to all, and God Bless!
- Katherine - 18 April 2006
Life has been a lot different now with the new baby!!! We've had good nights and bad nights, and I'm very happy they've shown some of the WBC on tv at 4am!! There's not much else on!! But Annabelle has really been an awesome baby. She is the cutest little baby girl ever!!! And now, we finally have pictures up!!! Check out the Baby Annabelle Page and also a few pictures from our time before the birth on our pregnancy page under Labor Time. You can see me in my nice suit for the OR!!! We'll definitely be taking a lot more pictures in the near future, but who knows when we'll get them up.
- Josh - 9 March 2006
Baby is now 9 days overdue, and we are definitely ready to have our baby outside of Mommy's belly!!! Katherine is way more anxious (for obvious reasons) than I am to have the baby, but I sure am anxious too!!! The biggest thing I'm noticing for myself is the complete lack of motivation to get anything done at work. I'm doing my best, but I have way too much on my mind to work as well as I normally can. Fortunately my boss understands!!! So, we could have a baby at any time now, even though we've been saying that for a few weeks!! We can't wait to have our baby and put some pics up here for everyone to see!!!
- Josh - 23 February 2006
Just an update on some stuff: Baby *should* be here no later than next week, as the midwives will schedule me to be induced in the next few days if Baby doesn't show up before our appointment tomorrow. We have had two non-stress tests to check on Baby (with a third scheduled for tomorrow before our appointment), and we had an ultrasound this past week to check on things, so check out the new pic - we got to see Baby's face! :-) Other than that, please keep praying!
- Katherine - 23 February 2006
Well, we haven't done any major updates in quite a long time, and that is mostly my fault, just being so busy and everything. Preparing for a baby takes a lot of time!! I think for now though, we've bought everything we need, or at least everything we think we need for the first couple weeks, plus the major things, so now we're just waiting for the baby to come. The sooner the better!!! But for now, I actually have time to work on the website. So, here is the new style website with all the same stuff, plus a little bit more, and more will come in the future!
- Josh - 12 February 2006
Less than 3 months to go for us!!! Buyeah!!! Check out some new pics of the progress, they're great!! Also, we got to hold our new niece (Hannah Marie Richmond) on Thanksgiving. That was awesome too. So our baby will have a cousin as soon as she or he is born!!! Check out the pics from Thanksgiving to see pics of Hannah.
- Josh & Katherine Root - 28 November 2005
We finally had our ultrasound today. It was awesome!!! We got to see the baby and lots of little details. We saw the arms, the legs, the heart, the stomach, the spine, and even the face!!! We could even see the fingers some too, It was really neat!!! But, we don't know the gender. We're going to let that be a surprise. Needless to say, we were very excited by the neat pictures and watching the baby move around and stuff!!! It rocked!!!! Click the picture of the ultrasound shots to see the pictures.
- Josh & Katherine Root - 3 October 2005
Well, we were supposed to have our ultrasound pictures on Friday, but that didn't quite happened. We got to the doctor's office and Katherine did all the stuff with the nurse, and then we waited for the midwife to come to do the ultrasound and whatever else. A few minutes later, the nurse came back and said the midwife was going to be a while. It turns out one of her patients went into labor and she had to be there instead. I guess that makes sense in this business!! So, we don't have those pics yet, but we do have pictures of Katherine and her tummy starting to show!!! Click here for those pics!!! So, things are mostly going well for us now, Josh's grad school class is going pretty well and Katherine is starting to feel better and we're definitely excited and happy!!! We hope you like the new pics!! And feel free to e-mail us at happycouple@joshandkatherineroot.com if you want!!!
- Josh and Katherine Root - 25 September 2005
Hey friends!!! This is the new website of Josh and Katherine Root. It's quite simple now, but hopefully it will get better in the future. I'm Josh, and I grew up near Albany, NY, with my parents Tim and Sharon Root, my brother Jordan, and my sister Allison. My wife, Katherine, grew up near Manchester, NH, with her parents Mark and June Richmond, her brother Matt, and her sister Annie.
Katherine and I met at Cedarville University, and we have a pretty good story about how we met and got to know each other. It was definitely God's doing. On February 19, 2002, we left the realm of "just friends" and started a whole new era of our lives. On May 14, 2005, we were married in Merrimack, NH, at Merrimack Valley Baptist Church (Katherine's home church). We went and had a great honeymoon in Colonial Williamsburg, VA. We have plenty of pictures from there that you can look at on this site. We also have some wedding pictures posted here.
The biggest news in our life right now is that we are having a baby!! So far we've heard the heartbeat, and that was really really neat to hear. Our due date is February 14 - Valentine's Day!! Buyeah!!! We'll make sure to keep updates on here when we can!
- Josh - 23 August 2005