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Journey to the Center of the Earth — Chapt 22
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Where did the last 11 months go??
As it’s nearly Lydia’s 1st birthday, I thought I ought to go ahead and write her 11-month update. Let’s see if I can remember the highlights…
Lydia is crawling like a fiend and pulling up on everything. She is super-fast! We enjoyed a wonderful Christmas visit with my parents, aunt and uncle, and cousins. Lydia, of course, was the star of the show. She had a great time exploring the packages and cruising around the furniture.
Once we got home, it was time to get serious about packing up our house. Lydia got to play with Matt’s parents when she wasn’t “helping” us sort and box everything up. She has been such a good sport through all of the busyness and transition of the last month!
Speaking of transition, during December Lydia started getting a couple of bottles a day. She didn’t seem to care one way or the other and by the end of the month was down to one nursing session (in the morning) and three bottles (mid-morning, mid-afternoon, bedtime). Right after her 11 month birthday, we “moved” in with Matt’s parents for a couple of weeks while we finished getting the house and contents squared away. I nursed her Saturday morning, then on Sunday decided we’d try bottles only. Lydia didn’t mind at all. I had a couple of uncomfortable days later in the week, but both of us weathered the transition very well 🙂 It was a wonderful experience for both of us, especially in light of current formula costs, but I’m glad to be done. I am very much enjoying having full access to dairy and eggs again (cheese, ice cream, and milk, oh my…). It wasn’t so terrible to forgo foods with those ingredients for all those months, but it was inconvenient. Although, I’ll have to be careful if I do’t want to undo all the weight loss 11 months of breastfeeding (and nearly that long on dairy restriction) produced.
Lydia is standing on her own from time to time and getting braver about holding onto things/balancing with just one hand. She also talks up a storm and I really think she’s said mama and dada a few times. She just hasn’t been consistent enough for me to conclude definitively that those are, in fact, her first words. One of her favorite things is to “sing” to her food. She just hums up a storm while she’s stuffing a fistful of cheerios in her mouth or enjoying a bottle. I’ll have to take a video clip so I can embarass her when she gets older. I do hope she outgrows this particular habit, though…what’s cute for a baby isn’t so cute for a little girl!
She’s such a funny little thing, but her personality is showing itself more boldly every day, and it’s not always pretty (but at least she’s sweet and cute more often than not). She can be stubborn and whiny, and she can sure give you “what for” when she doesn’t get her way. I think it would be so neat to know what she’s thinking or saying, but there are times when it’s probably just as well that I don’t 🙂
God has certainly blessed her with a resilient personality. In spite of all the changes as we pack and travel and get ready for our big European adventure, she continues to eat, sleep, play, and travel very well indeed!
Even now, she’s jabbering contentedly at her Great Grandma and playing around in the third place she’s visited in a week. Chairs are excellent pull bars and tables make great tunnels!!
And in just over a week, our little one will be one 🙂 Will we have some fun stories and pictures to share!!
Lydia’s First Snowfall
It snowed today in Richmond (it was a Richmond snow….after about 1/2 inch of real wet stuff fell, it started raining). Since it was Lydia’s first snow, we decided to go out and take some pictures. The entire set of Lydia’s first snow pictures can be seen on our flickr site.
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Juice Error
Occasionally, Juice wouldn’t start but would error out. Seemingly for no reason. After googling for the error, I didn’t find anything, but have a fix work-around.
The error I was seeing in juice.exe.log was:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “gui.py”, line 4, in ?
File “iPodderGui.pyc”, line 3621, in main
File “iPodderGui.pyc”, line 707, in __init__
File “wx\_core.pyc”, line 5301, in __init__
File “wx\_core.pyc”, line 4980, in _BootstrapApp
File “iPodderGui.pyc”, line 1472, in OnInit
File “iPodderGui.pyc”, line 934, in SetLanguages
AttributeError: ‘iPodderGui’ object has no attribute ‘menu’
I fixed this by setting my shortcut to run in xp service pack 2 compatable mode.
Moving…or Something Different?!
Cyndi, Lydia, and I are preparing to move to relocate to transition to do something different and start living in another country. When we started this process last October, I would have said that it was no big deal: Cyndi and I have moved 5 times in 9 years of marriage and prior to that, I moved another 12 times either growing up or on my own (provided I counted correctly). No big deal…we pack up, sell tons of stuff, keep some stuff, and store our furniture.
Only it doesn’t work that easy. This has been the toughest move of my life, but it isn’t really a move. In a normal move, you sell some stuff, throw away some junk, and take the rest with you. However, in this move, we sold about 1/2 our stuff at a yard sale (thanks to all who took our junk). We planned on storing our big furniture while we are gone (bed, couch, etc…). But what to take and what to keep? The process has been easy sometimes but grueling at others. Insane is probably the best word to use (that is why I put it in the insaneness category).
We are trying to only take the 6 bags the airline allows us to check for free. That has been very rough…looking at things and trying to figure out what we really need, what we would like to have, and what we can leave behind. All of this not really knowing what to expect once we get there too. What can we buy there? What can’t we get? What to buy? What to leave behind? What do we really need?
Through all of this, Lydia has been a trooper. She has played contently in her walker while we packed boxes. She even played with some paper in a box (pictures to come). More recently, we moved in with my parents and she has been content to play with them (or have they been extatic to play with her??). God has certainly blessed us with a wonderful daughter.
Please pray for us through this time of transition. Pray that we would take what we need to take and leave what we don’t need. Pray that God would give us wisdom to know what we need to take and what we don’t (and that we would listen to Him).
If you want to keep up with us as we go, we’ll be doing an e-mail newsletter tri-monthly at least montly. If you want to subscribe, visit www.pray4serbs.org and register for an account. Once you regsiter and login, you will be able to subscribe to our e-mail newsletter (newsletters are listed in the nav bar on the left. Click Newsletters/Updates then check our newsletter in the upper right-hand portion of the page). We will also be keeping this website up to date with happenings in our personal lives while we are gone. Some of the items will make it into our newsletter while some won’t.
Random Lydia Picture
I’m working on uploading all of our pictures to Flickr (sorry for the current mess in the Photo Gallery) when I ran across this picture of Lydia. I thought I would share it with everyone:
To stuff or not?!
Ok, do you prefer your turkey stuffed (and I mean with stuffing) or do you prefer crunchy stuffing? I like my stuffing nice and soft from the interior of the bird. All you do is stuff the thing, cook the bird until it is done, and eat. no extra muss…no extra fuss.
How about you? What do you do? Why?
Whole life or Term Life?
Which is better…whole life or term life? I know which is better (term) but recently, I heard some discussion about whole life and how it was so great. Below are some links from Dave Ramsey (an awesome financial guy) talking about why whole life is a dumb move:
The truth about life insurance
Losing Money with whole life insurance
Whole life insurance good?
Merry Christmas!!
Merry Christmas everyone!
