Josh!

I thought I would post some pictures of Josh since I just got his 2-year-old pictures done.



Josh has been doing well with the move to Texas. Before we left, Adam found a toddler bed on craigslist for a good deal and when we moved in to our new house, we set up the toddler bed in Josh's room. He's been doing pretty well with it. For the first few nights, he would get out of bed and play with the closet doors, the door stop, and anything else he could find in the room. Eventually he would fall asleep. After a couple nights, though, the curiosity wore off and he was able to stay in bed and fall asleep pretty quickly.



Josh has been growing and growing. He loves to run around like a monkey and play with his toys, especially his cars. His speech is improving and he is able to repeat more words lately. His doctors have told us that he will probably need speech therapy to overcome the delay in making certain sounds due to his cleft palate. He is learning his colors and is really good at blue and orange. He can recite his numbers from 1 - 10, but for some reason he always skips 7. He still LOVES Blues Clues ("Bah Poo") and has started shouting out when he sees a clue ("a poo, a poo").



He eats the crusts of his sandwiches first, and sometimes won't eat the rest of the sandwich. He won't eat ice cream. He used to not like cookies, either, but recently he's changed his mind on that. Sometimes I don't know where he came from (who ever heard of not liking ice cream!), but he's a cutie and we love him. I especially love his giggles. It makes up for the frustrating times that come with being the parent of a 2-year-old.

Surprise!

One of the worries I had in moving to San Antonio this summer was finding a new OB and making sure I had the continued prenatal care I needed. I was able to find a new doctor (that was accepting new patients and had appointments available within the next week) relatively easily, and I went for my first appointment this past Tuesday. When the doctor said it was time to listen to the baby's heartbeat, he said, "Oh wait, you're almost 20 weeks. Let's do an ultrasound." YAY! I love being able to see pictures of our baby, especially since we would be able to find out the gender of the baby, too. I was hoping to be able to at least schedule an ultrasound at this appointment, but instead, we got to do it that day. We had to wait a little bit longer than they originally thought for the sonogram room to be available, but it all worked out because it gave Adam time to get there on his way home from work. It was also Adam's birthday, so seeing pictures of our little baby was a nice little birthday present.

The doctor was very informative in telling us what we were looking at and what he was measuring. All measurements looked good for the gestational age, so that was good to know, especially since I haven't really been gaining any weight yet during this pregnancy. It's good to know the baby is still growing as it should. The doctor asked if we wanted to know the gender, and we said YES! He said it was a girl! We are very excited to welcome a baby girl into our family.



This is a very close up profile of our baby girl's face with her hand below it.



This is looking right at the face and head (on the left) and the body. I guess. This one is a little harder for me to make out, but that's what the doctor said, and I trust him.

Like I said, we are VERY EXCITED to know we are having a girl!

The Riverwalk

Last Monday while my mom was here we all went downtown to the famed Riverwalk. We were in the mood for BBQ, so we found a place called The County Line that looked good and found a parking place nearby. The entrance was down on the Riverwalk level, and the food was pretty good. After dinner we walked down a few blocks to one of the Riverwalk tour boat stations and bought tickets for a tour. The tour was very pretty and informative about San Antonio history. Joshua even sat still for most of it. His favorite part was the ducks on the river and he quacked at them every time we saw them. The Riverwalk winds through lots of restaurants, a mall, the convention center, and other historic buildings.

Josh and Mom

The tour boat

Josh and Grandma

"Quack
quack
quack
quack
quack!"








































Mural on the con-
vention center made up of 1" tiles. It was a gift to the city from Mexico.
























We were worried about the weather, particularly that it was approaching the 100s, but the evening was pleasantly shaded with a slight breeze, so we had a very nice evening on the river. I think I'm starting to like this town!

Update

I've been meaning to blog about our move and everything, but I've either been busy or too tired. I was going to detail all our stuff being packed up and everything, but suffice it to say it was very nice to have movers pack all our stuff and truck it on down here. They packed it up on Thursday the 30th, and loaded it up on Friday and headed on down the road. The next three days were filled with cleaning, touch-up painting and minor repairs, and we are indebted to our family and friends for all their help with everything. Especially since it was in the high 90s and into the 100s that week.

On Tuesday we flew to Austin and rented a car to drive to San Antonio and pick up our cars at our friends' house. They had been shipped there a few weeks before. We went to our new house and turned on the AC (it was 93 degrees inside), then went back to our friends' house for dinner and a dip in their pool. When we got back to our house it was getting down into the 80s inside. We set up our air mattress and set up Joshua's pack 'n play and camped out in our house until the moving truck arrived on Thursday. My mom also flew down Thursday afternoon to stay with us for a week and help with the unpacking. The next week was filled with a flurry of boxes, packing paper, and sorting out where everything should go. We're still not done yet, but it shouldn't take very much longer to get it all unpacked. Then there's the matter of putting up the curtains and the pictures on the walls and everything. It's starting to look more like home.

We've done some fun things, too. Last Monday we went with my mom downtown to the Riverwalk (pictures to follow in another post), I went to the temple for a RS enrichment activity, and my mom watched Joshua for us one night while we went to see the new Harry Potter movie. We've gone to our new ward a couple times now, and even though it seems small, we're meeting new people and getting callings soon. Josh and I went to a play group yesterday made up of moms and kids from the ward, and I got to know a lot of the moms and Josh had fun playing with the kids. Hopefully we'll all be able to make some good friends.

The weather had been hot, hot, hot. Thank goodness for air conditioning everywhere. Adam's commute is 20 minutes from leaving the front door to sitting down at his desk, which is very nice. We've been here for a little over two weeks now and we are enjoying all the space in our new house and are settling into our new life here in San Antonio!

One Week

Adam here. Today marks exactly one week left until we move to San Antonio. The past few days has been a whirlwind of activity. With the assistance of my brothers and our friend Dean, we tore up the old vinyl flooring in the kitchen and dining room, and then put down tile. It is now all nice and grouted, thanks to Brek (who is installing new baseboard molding today) and then all I have to do today is seal the grout and it is ready to have appliances moved back into the kitchen. With the assistance of Lisa's family, we painted the bathrooms and the office. They both look great now. It's the rest of the house that is a mess.

We moved a bunch of stuff out of the office in order to paint it, and that stuff is sitting in the garage, along side a bunch of the stuff that had to come out of the kitchen and dining room in order to do the tile. Good thing our cars are already on their way to San Antonio, eh? Also, our stove and fridge are currently in the living room until the tile is ready for them to be moved back in there. So the extreme disarray of the place is almost over.

And then it will all be thrown back into disarray on Thursday of this week. That's when the packers from the moving company will be arriving to pack everything up that we are allowed to ship down with us. I have no idea how long it will take, but I am really hoping it will go quickly. We need all the time we can get in order to finish a thorough cleaning and to do the yard work that needs to be done to pretty up the outside of the house. So that will be a bunch of weeding and laying down beauty bark.

It's crazy, though. Sometimes it still doesn't seem completely real that we are moving in a week. All of the stuff around the house that needs to be done has successfully distracted me from really taking in the enormity of what we are doing. We're moving halfway across the country, trying to rent out our house up here in Washington, and hoping for the best. We'll be separated from our families by quite a bit of distance, and on our own for the most part.

The strange part is that I am not scared about this huge change. I'm definitely nervous, of course, but not scared. I guess it's a side effect of my general "go with the flow" attitude toward life. That attitude has served me well in the past, and hopefully it will continue to do so going forward.

So, onward, I guess. We'll be doing a ridiculous amount of cleaning in the next few days.... You never realize just how much gunk can accumulate around and behind things that you really don't move very often. After the cleaning and the yard work comes the new carpet installation on the day before we fly out for good. I hope the renters appreciate and enjoy all the work that we have done to make the house nice for them.