Groundbreaking

At last, it has begun ... This past Thursday and Friday they set the forms and the plumbing grounds for our new house. We don't know exactly what this means, but it looks like something is going on out there so we are thrilled. (Now we just need to pray that it doesn't rain for the next ten days like the weatherman is saying.)

Baby Stuff, Part XIV

Adam and I are still having a very uneventful summer ... Adam is spending about ten hours a day preparing himself for the Texas Bar on the last three days of July. I just submitted the final grades for my summer class and am finally getting back to my dissertation. Little Charlotte was measuring a full week ahead of schedule (32 1/2 weeks instead of 31 1/2 weeks) at our doctor's appointment today, which may mean that her big debut is coming sooner than we thought ... or maybe just that Mommy's been hitting the ice cream a little too hard lately!

Despite the tedium of daily study, Adam and I manage to distract ourselves with baby equipment. We have been at Babys-R-Us just about every Saturday this month picking up various items. But "Baby Christmas" came when the UPS man showed up one morning not too long ago with both Peanut's new Bugaboo Bee stroller and her car seat (a gift from Grammy in Utah) at the same time. We managed to waste several hours playing with them!

Do I look maternal pushing Peanut's new stroller around our living room? I wanted to put a watermelon in it and take it out for a walk but Adam was too embarrassed to let me. (There is a famous family story about my aunt taking a human skull out for a walk in a stroller and scaring the bejesus out of an old lady, which I think would be much worse.)
Hope this thing holds up well under spit-up, snacks, and baby poopy! We'll see. And thanks again, Grammy, for investing in Little Charlotte's car seat. We'll remind her that you are responsible for her having it every time we strap her into it and she starts wailing!

31 Weeks

For all of you who have been wondering ... Yes, I really am pregnant, not just using that as an excuse for the extra twenty pounds!

Easter Comes Early

Just when we thought Baby Charlotte couldn't get any more pampered, we received a special delivery from Tiffany & Co.--a beautiful white and pink rabbit "piggy" bank from her great Aunt Ariel. As many of the other beautiful items we have recently received, this will be going directly on the "you can't ever play with this" shelf that we will be installing high up in Charlotte's room when the house is done in Houston. Thanks so much, Aunt Air!

Charlotte Cleans Up

Our little Peanut had her last--and most lavish--baby shower this past weekend. The lovely ladies of Beaufort, North Carolina (Adam's home town) gathered together to teach Baby Charlotte something about her Southern heritage: good old-fashioned hospitality. More of a reception than your standard baby shower, there were six hostesses (eight including Charlotte's grandma and great-grandma) and over forty-five guests in attendance. And the gifts? Well, let's just say that Peanut pretty much has a new dress to wear every day until her third birthday!

Charlotte's mommy, Charlotte's Mimi, and Charlotte's Mamaw. (It's a Southern thing.)
Here's what our table looked like after we brought everything back to Durham and unpacked it. That Charlotte is going to be a very girly-looking little girl!
Two very special gifts from the shower ... One is a dress that was hand-made by Adam's great aunt Sue. She did all of the fancy smocking on it herself, and then she made another dress exactly like it on a tiny scale for this little porcelain doll. The other is a quilt that Adam's great-grandmother Nanny made for him when he was a baby. Adam gave it to us at the shower for Nanny's first great, great-granddaughter to use. Thanks, sweet Nanny!

Designer's Challenge

Hum ... Remember this--our future neighborhood in Houston? Not a single house in sight when we took this picture on May 7.

Well, look what has been going on over there in the last month. We took this picture of our new stomping grounds on June 2.
Not bad, eh? Thanks to dry weather and the long hours of our hard-working friends from south of the border (and their refusal to be scared off by a mere 105 degree heat index), things are progressing really quickly in our new area. They are scheduled to start on our house around June 16. If the weather gods smile upon us all summer, we could be into our house by mid-September. (I'm skeptical, but Adam is being the optimist about this ... Kind of a role reversal for us, really!)

We made our way to Houston once again this weekend not just to take the above photo to entertain all of you, but also to do the really fun part of buying a new house: picking out all the new stuff! Our builder has a massive design center with hundreds and hundreds of things to choose from--a veritable garden of expensive forbidden fruit! We managed to make it out of there without too much damage done. In fact, we picked everything out in half the time it normally takes people since we were pretty determined not to spend money upgrading stuff that we felt could wait (carpet, paint, fixtures) and only indulged ourselves in a few areas (wood floors, maple cabinetry, and of course, plasma TV wiring for the gigantic set Adam intends to buy when he gets some money.)

Here's Adam entering the very welcoming New Home Center: Here's a little preview of the stuff we picked out:
Can't wait to see what it all looks like in a few months!

Summer Reminiscing

Things have both slowed down and sped up for us this past two weeks, making it difficult to 1) find time to write on this blog, and 2) live lives interesting enough to be documented in pictures, cute little stories, or short video clips on this blog. Adam has been spending all of his days studying for the Bar which he will take at the end of July. I am going crazy trying to keep on top of the lectures I have to write every single day for my class. I'm counting down the days until the summer term is over at the end of June!

Since we're not having much of a fun summer around here so far, I thought I'd take a minute to reflect on the good times of summers past. Join me in a short trip down memory lane as I reminisce about being a kid during the summertime once again ...

What ever happened to those sweet days of summer when you could just sit around in your pool with a good friend ... (Mexico, ca. 1980)Or stay at the beach until the sun went down and your teeth started to chatter (Huntington Beach, 1982) ... And you couldn't sleep at night because you knew you were going to Disneyland after school got out in June (Disneyland, 1984) ...And all you had to do in a day was meet up with the neighborhood kids to ride bikes (Chicago, 1982) ...Or lounge around in your underwear with your cousins on your grandpa's lap? (California, 1980)
AH, THE GOOD OLD DAYS!