Oh man, the past two months have certainly flown by and completely gotten away from me. I am planning a few posts on my travel blog, but here's the run down of the past two months for us:
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| Grammy and Landon at Mariah's wedding reception |
- I received word a week or so before flying back to the U.S. in September that my maternal Grammy had passed away. Grammy always lived closed to us and was actually living with my parents at the time of her passing. She struggled with an array of health problems over the past 25 years or so, but her passing was sudden. I was sad to not have been able to see her in person prior to her death, but she did hear from me the day of her passing in that I talked to my mom on speaker phone with Grammy in the room that afternoon. She was always our biggest cheerleader and had wanted to travel before her health became too poor to do so. She loved following our adventures, looking at the pictures and imagining herself in all the places we visited. As a family, we decided to do a private memorial service while everyone was gathered in California in October. It was healing and therapeutic for all involved. I learned that Grammy loved being outdoors and would wrangle her 4 children, along with 4 cousins, on outdoor adventures and picnics all the time growing up. I appreciate her love of being outside. I love being outside too!I know that families are forever and that I will get to see my Grammy again. In the meantime, I know that her spirit lives on and that she is rooting for us from heaven, where she is free from all of the physical ailments that caused her so much disability and pain.
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| Family Great Wall pic... |
- We took a long weekend in Beijing on our way back to the States. We spent a day at the Great Wall, a wonderful Sunday with friends from our ward in Chicago, and a morning at Olympic Park.
- We triumphantly returned to the Chicagoland area in mid-September. We have never been more thankful to live in a free country, especially after having to dump our water that we got in the airport, after the normal security screening, immediately before getting on the plane. I was not a happy camper to say the least. I drink a tremendous amount of water normally, more when in the extremely dry environs of an airplane, and even more when I'm pregnant! Thankfully, the United flight attendants took great care of me from the moment we got on the plane.
- After a week or so, we successfully recovered from jet lag. Yay!
- Grandma Ev came to visit us! I had booked a bunch of medical appointments and she was able to be there to help corral Landon and make the process SO much easier. Pictures and adventures to follow...
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| Landon's favorite place- digging in Grandma and Grandpa's garden with his trucks! |
- Grandpa Jim came the week after Grandma Ev! We went to a Cubs game (before the playoffs, so the tickets were reasonable). Landon loved having his grandparents here, and was pretty sad when they had to leave. Pictures and stories to follow...
- At the tail end of September, Landon and I flew alone to California to visit my family for a few weeks. My sister, Hannah, left on a mission to Fort Lauderdale, Spanish speaking, so we wanted to spend some time with her before she left. We spent a lot of time with Aunt Hannah. She had just finished up working in Alaska for a month, and she had a ton of fascinating stories about bears and fish and all kinds of awesome things that boys love. Landon developed a talent for embellishing and improving the stories and retelling them to anyone who would listen. We made Landon a Dusty airplane cake for his birthday. Hannah was my artistic helper on this and it turned out great! We spent a lot of time prepping for Hannah's farewell and temple trip to the LA temple.
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Landon got a fireman outfit for his birthday... Here he is saving the day
in his "fire truck" |
- As a family (minus spouses... I MISSED Austin), we all attended the LA temple together as Hannah went for the first time. It was awesome to be in the temple together as a family.
- In the absence of a real house to clean, I nested my parent's house getting it all ready for Hannah's farewell open house. It was a great event, and Landon got to visit with his great-grandparents!
- We returned to Chicago and got back into the swing of things here last week. I washed and organized all of our baby stuff in preparation for our little guy to be born. Currently, I'm 36.5 weeks and I've already been having "practice labor" contractions every day, usually around the times I'm chasing Landon around! My mom comes in to help out on November 10th, so I'm hoping our little guy can wait for Grandma to get here!
- We are getting geared up to move into a house we are renting from friends in early November. How grateful I am to be able to (hopefully) bring our new son home to a house vs. an extended stay hotel. It is a big, fat, giant, crazy blessing in our lives that I had all but dismissed as something that was not meant to be after house/apartment hunting for months. Our situation is such that we wanted a short-term lease on a furnished space. Aside from executive housing, which was far outside of our price range, I was having a really hard time finding a place that would accommodate these unusual requests. We are sad that good friends are moving away short-term, but grateful for the opportunity to be in a mutual beneficial agreement and be in a house. It has been 18+ months since we started living in hotels. As anything does, hotel living gets old after awhile. We are currently in a two-bedroom extended stay room with a full kitchen, so we are happy to be here, but excited for more space for Landon to play, a washer and dryer, and not having people stampeding in the room above us in the middle of the night!
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