Don't Forget Me!!!

I had to do this post as a commemoration to Adventuregirl, who has been a trooper through the whole new-baby-coming-home experience. She was wonderful for the grandmas while AdvenureDad and I were at Madigan, and handled her first night without Mommy better than I did (boy did I miss her cheerful little self!). Of course she has tried to reclaim her position as the family baby a few times, including some half-hearted fake crying and increased requests for me to pick her up, but you can't blame a girl for trying! I'm taking her renewed interest in the potty and her big-girl panties as realization that being the "big stister" has its perks, including several bribery presents including her new fairy dancing skirt sent by her "Auntie" Sara (see pic).

A Week Already

I'm completely blown away by the fact that Olivia is over a week old now. I feel as though she has been around for a couple of days at most! She and I are fairly recovered from our hospital visit, and she's growing like a weed... already back up to her birth weight and then some. She's starting to spend a few more minutes every day with her eyes open, and we can't wait to see what her personality is like.
On a personal note I also have to brag that I'm within 5 lbs of my pre-pregnancy weight and I can wear my non-maternity "fat pants" already. Granted I weighed a lot more than I ever wanted to before the pregancy, so I still have A LOT of work to do, but it does give me hope. I guess the strict diabetes diet had some unintended benefits!
In other big news, we also closed on our property in Dixie (near Walla Walla, WA) yesterday. Once it is recorded with the county we will be the proud owners of 52.5 acres of pasture and canyon in the foothills of the Blue Mountains. We've already seen deer, elk, turkey, and black bears, and it has a gorgeous home site that overlooks the WW valley as well as the foothills. We can't wait to start working it into our "someday" house!
Here are a couple of pictures... of course more to come when I get another minute.

5 Short Years

AdventureDad and I celebrated our 5th anniversary on the 25th. Talk about 5 short years together! Yet we have been through so much... two deployments, our first child, purchasing (and selling) a house, moving overseas and back again, and now a second child on the way. Those are the kind of thing that either bring a couple together, or tear them apart, and I can honestly say that we are a much stronger couple for having been through them. I fall in love with AdventureDad even more with every challenge that we face, and he has done a wonderful job of showing me that the feeling is mutual. Here's to another 5 years, and 5 after that, and 5 after that, and 5...
So what did we do to celebrate this momentous day? Piled the whole family into the car, drove out to the coast, splurged on a bunch of fresh seafood that we then took to a picnic area and cooked over a charcoal grill, then went on a hike through the dunes to the ocean. Probably not the most romantic day we could have planned, but right up our alley, and one of the best days we've had in quite awhile. I'll post pics soon... honestly they're still in the camera.
Not much else has changed for the AdventureFamily. We have mostly settled into a pattern of adaptability with AdventureDad's ever-changing work schedule, he finished his massive recertification exam (now we wait 6-8 weeks), as well as getting his WA license, and I'm of course starting to really anticipate AdventureBaby's arrival... speaking of which there is now an induction date set for October 14th, so in 17 days or less we will have a new family member.
I have to admit I'm a bit nervous about having an infant in our lives again... it just seems so complicated when there is already a toddler. I'm not sure how I'm going to keep my sanity, and I hope my parenting skills are up to it... thank goodness for the help that I'm getting from family. I also have two wonderful role models to follow in Gutsy Mom and Vicki, not to mention Joss who makes the whole parenting thing look easy. They have proven that it IS possible! I just wish we were all close enough to share a latte and some venting with. Bless the internet, but e-venting just isn't the same. Sigh.
Now off to bed for me and my belly...

The Belly

OK, here they are, the promised belly pics. The first is from a hike near Rainier in early July, and the second was taken tonight. Enjoy, and don't laugh too hard.

Promises, Promises

OK, so I really can't believe that more than a month has gone by since my last post. This time I really really promise that I will post a belly picture in the extremely near future. So, what has been going on that is keeping me so busy?
Well, aside from the usual demands of trying to keep the house picked up and our 200 acres of lawn and garden mowed/watered/weeded (OK, 200 acres might be an exaggeration, but it feels that way when I'm doing over the basket ball attached to my front), the Adventure family has been hitting the pavement pretty hard. We spent every weekend in August on the road, first on our second horse-retrieval trip (no additional adventures on this one... whew!), then to MT for a wedding (AdventureDad's sister is now hitched), then two trips to Dixie, WA (near Walla Walla) to look at some property. The deal on the previous piece that we loved got too weird and we backed out, moving on to this second piece which may suit us better in some ways. The deal isn't done yet, but we are about 1/2 way to closing at this point. Once it is signed and I don't feel like I'm jinxing anything, I'll post some pics and give a full description. Needless to say we're pretty excited... the someday land is hopefully soon to become the Today land, which means that the Adventure Family is one step closer to the "someday" house. Ah, things to dream about!
In other news, this time around I have developed gestational diabetes, which although in my case is not super severe, is of course cause for additional worries. One more reason I will be breathing a big sigh of relief when we have a happy healthy baby in our arms!
My mother-in-law has also recently moved in. She's my new-baby support system since it is impossible to predict anything about when/where AdventureDad will be except that he probably won't be here, and he'll be lucky to get much time off (although the official Army line is now in support of 9 days of paternity leave, he has to work a set number of hours in the ER to complete his training, so any time he takes will have to be made up in the future, which is a superhuman feat given the demands that are already being made on his time). My due date happened to align with some changes in her life as well, so things worked out nicely in that she can be here basically as long as we need her. Of course there are a lot of adjustments to be made having another adult in the household, but I have to say that so far it has been less painful than I thought it would be.
That brings us to AdventureDad, who is definitely in the thick of things now. In addition to working 8-14 hours a day 5-6 days a week (usually 3 on followed by 1 off), he also has at least an hour of homework a day, and a 300-extremely-difficult-question recertification exam to get done in a month, and a research project to get started. Oh, yeah, and sleeping every once in awhile is helpful. It makes me doubly happy that I'm not working at the moment, because I can flex with his craziness... otherwise I doubt we would be in the house at the same time for more than an hour or two a week. Luckily there is a finish line at the end of all of this, which gives it all a bit of perspective.
AdventureGirl (M) is doing very well, although she echoes my longing for our old neighborhood frequently. She still talks about all of her buddies as if she has seen them recently (they all feature regularly in her requests for versions of "The Bear Went Over the Mountain"), and I feel bad that she doesn't really have any good kid friends in our isolated living arrangement. She does make it to daycare once a week or so, and "plays with the kids", and she seems to relish her role as the entertainer of the family. I hope that the arrival of some competition won't be too horrible of an experience for her, although I'm bracing for a reaction. In the meantime her vocabulary has expanded to 7 and 8 word sentences, and she has grown several inches and gained a couple of pounds, although she still resembles a bean pole. We are limping toward potty training, but the slow approach seems to be working better for us than the "train in a day" miracle.
So, that is the novel that is our life at the moment. I won't even hope that things will settle down anytime in the near future, but hopefully we will all find a comfortable groove once the new arrival has come.

Home on the Range

After a long weekend on the road house-hunting and horse-hauling, we are back home in Yelm with 2 of our 3 horses in the pasture. It is so wonderful to have them home again, even though I'm not going to be able to ride them for awhile. Still, there's lots of brushing and loving to do between now and then! Pictures coming soon.
We also had a successful trip in terms of our land hunt, and we found the spot that we want to call home. Now it's a matter of crossing fingers while we go through the whole negotiation, financing, inspections, etc. Whew!
We also had an incident that turned out better than we ever could have hoped... as we were starting up Snoqualmie pass, a car frantically pulled us over to inform us that "your tire just flew off and almost hit us!". Envisioning a blown-out tire on the horse trailer (which we didn't hear or feel thanks to the tandem axle), we turned on the flashers and drove slowly up to the next exit to put on the spare (the road shoulder wasn't wide enough for changing tires on the traffic side of a horse trailer). To our horror, when we got off the road we discovered NOTHING where the tire should have been. No wheel, no lug bolts, nothing but a flat hub. That meant nothing to attach a spare tire to either. Now what to do on a Sunday evening with two horses??? We took a back-road back into Cle-Elum (the nearest town of any size, luckily only about 4 miles back), and as we were limping through town looking for a place where we could park while trying to find a boarding place to lodge the horses until the trailer was fixed, AdventureDad just happened to notice that the local gas station had a service center. We pulled in, and to our sheer delight, not only were they still open, but they said they could repair it right then, on the spot, with the horses still in the trailer!!!! So, what had happened??? Apparently at some point the lug nuts had been seriously over-tightened, to the point where they weakend the bolts, which then sheered off level with the hub. Luckily the shop was able to drill out the stubs, put new bolts on (they just happened to have the right size), and they also had a wheel and tire in the right size... talk about lucky! The rest of the lug nuts on the other 3 tires were also over-tightened, so we'll have to replace all of the bolts, and I'm having rotten luck finding anyone local who can do it, illustrating just how lucky we were. It's almost worth a trip back to Cle Elum! We were also super lucky that our giant tire bouncing down I-90 didn't hit another car and injure someone or cause a big wreck. We went back and looked for it, but it was nowhere to be seen... probably bounced off into the woods somewhere. The lesson; NEVER over-tighten your lug nuts!!!
So, after a more-Adventuresome-than-usual weekend, we're happy to be home even though it's in the 90's.

On a Roll!

Wow, 2 posts in one week. I'm on a roll now. This is a shortie though... just reporting that we have now gone 5 days Binky-Free in the Adventure household. M doesn't even mention them anymore, so that is one more hurdle that we have overcome. We are staggering to a start in the potty-training department, but M has discovered that she can manipulate me very easily by telling me she has to go potty (thus creating a great diversion when it is nap time or any other time we are doing something she doesn't approve of), so I'm currently trying to figure out how to deal with that and still respond appropriately when she REALLY has to go potty. I guess no-one said this was going to be easy!