10 Years!

Mark and I hit our 10-year anniversary in August!  It's hard to believe that we have already been married for 10 years!  We hoped to do something significant to celebrate the occasion, but with a 3-year old and 5-month old, we were limited in our choices of "get-aways."

We thought that our best chance for some alone time would be to take the kids to Oregon, and leave them with my parents for a few hours while we went out for a nice dinner.  Unfortunately, the evening we had planned our date, Benjamin was at the peak of a nasty cold (which the rest of us got when we returned home), and very clingy, so we cancelled our date and watched Veggie Tales and Thomas the Train in bed with him instead. :)

We did manage to escape for a delicious bagel and coffee breakfast by ourselves during our visit with Mom & Dad, and enjoyed sitting outside(!) enjoying the quiet together.

I often like to remember what we were doing on specific days in previous years (ie kid's birthdays, anniversaries, etc).  Somehow, for almost all of our anniversaries, we have been in-transit.  While I remember most of them, I'll go ahead and record them now.  Sorry, no pictures from the first few anniversaries - this was way back when, before digital photographs were common! :)

August 19, 2000 - Got married!  

August 19, 2001 - Moved from Miami Beach to Starke, FL.  Mark had won his first full-time (sort of) orchestra job with the Jacksonville symphony, and I was enrolled to begin studying Engineering at the University of Florida in Gainesville.  We have wonderful memories from our time together in Starke.  We were thrilled to be living in our first (rental) house, and soon after moving, adopted our first dog, Buster.

August 19, 2002 - On the road back home from spending the summer with my dad in Oregon.  This was a special, yet difficult summer to spend together with him.  We stopped for a short visit in Duncanville, TX with Mark's parents and to attend Mark's 10-year high school reunion.  I remember returning to our home in Starke extremely late on a Sunday night, and I had my first early morning class for the fall semester the next day.  I also remember being thoroughly disgusted by all the dead bugs that the house had acquired while we were gone, and being surprised to find a VERY tall yard had grown in our absence, even though we had paid a neighborhood boy to mow it while we were gone. :) 

August 19, 2003 - Mark helped me move into my "apartment" in Orlando to begin my first semester co-op at Disney World.  Disney had a large apartment complex to provide housing for their "interns."  Most were non-specialized interns who took tickets for rides, etc. hoping to eventually land hospitality-type internships after they had paid their dues.  There were also a few engineering internships, namely a very large group (about a dozen) of industrial engineering interns.  I shared an apartment with 7 other industrial engineering interns, a bathroom with three of them, and a room with one.  It was certainly a change from our cozy Starke house with my husband! 

August 19, 2004 - Moving to Houston!  I can't remember if we were driving our moving truck to Houston on this day, or actually moving into our rental house on Chippendale.  Either way, we were SO excited!  Mark had finally won the "big" job earlier in the summer (while I was completing my second co-op semester with Disney).  I had one more semester to finish my degree at UF, so after helping Mark move into our new home, I returned to small apartment in Gainesville to finish up my studies.  That last semester was a pretty rough one (hurricane through Gainesville, tick infestation, etc) - but that's a story for another day. :)  At this point, though, I noticed that in our first four years of marriage, we actually only spent three of them living together!

 

 

August 19, 2005 - Moved into our first (purchased) home!  The house has changed a lot since we bought it - but we loved it then, and we still love it now. 

 

August 19, 2006 - I think this may be the first year that we actually were not in transit.  This summer, we remodeled our kitchen and shortly after our anniversary, I got pregnant with Benjamin!  I am sure we went out to dinner, or did something fun to celebrate six years of marriage --- but I can't remember exactly what.  We may have gone to the Cheesecake Factory, one of our favorite restaurants. 

(Note: don't have a picture from this day, but here is a picture of the two of us a couple of months earlier during a vacation to the Midwest.  Here we are at Cedar Point, about to ride the Millennium Force).

August 19, 2007 - We now have a two-month old baby.  I do remember (because I blogged about it) that Benjamin slept very well the night before, so we enjoyed the day in a less sleep-deprived than normal state.  I believe this day was a Sunday, so after church, we went to Colina's, a low-key Italian restaurant.  I remember being very proud of ourselves for getting out and doing something to celebrate, even though our lives felt a bit overwhelming at that time.

 

August 19, 2008 

 I can't actually remember what we did for our anniversary this year.  By this point, we regularly hired a neighbor's teen-aged daughter Eliza to watch Benjamin for a few hours while we got away for dates, etc.  So my best guess is that we hired her for our anniversary so we could go on a date.  I wonder what we did?  Good chance we went to the Cheesecake Factory, since it used to be our all-time favorite place to eat when we lived in Miami Beach, so reminded us of our early days of marriage.

(Note: this picture is not from our anniversary, but it is from August of 2008).

 

August 19, 2009 - Mark was in transit on this one, with Benjamin in tow.  The two boys flew solo to Mexico to visit Grandma and Granddaddy.  I stayed home alone, now pregnant with Katie to focus on work (my role in recruiting was ramping up now, and I was approaching my full-time hours) and rest (and feel nauseous).  I think I actually forgot it was our anniversary until Mark sent me a text message! (Note: the picture of me and Ben is from my dad's visit earlier that month while Mark was on a mission trip in Guatemala.  The picture of Mark and Ben is taken at Grandma & Granddaddy's house in Mexico.  And, yes, I am recognizing the lack of pictures of Mark and I together!).

 

August 19, 2010 - Well, you've seen the story above.

 How fun to remember the past ten anniversaries in our lives!  Hopefully the next ten will be as much fun!

15 lbs, 4 oz

That's how big I "grew" Katie solely from my own body.  That's right - my newborn baby girl has started solids.  We started her about a week ago on rice cereal, and she LOVES it!  She knew what to do right away.  Ben gave her the first bite, and she went right after it!

As with Benjamin, beginning Katie on solids is both exciting - to be entering the next stage of babyhood with her - and also sad, a marking of the end where I provide her with 100% of her nourishment.  I love looking at all that baby chub and knowing that she got it all from me!  That first I grew her within in my body, and then after she was born and I had to share her with the rest of the world, that still only I had something that she needed.  And that my body was able to grow a healthy 15 lb, 4 oz baby.

But now, it's time for her to take that next first step in independence - and allow the rest of the world to nourish her little body.  And it also marks the initial stages of weaning.  Which, actually, is sort of nice --- as since I am not back at work, we do not regularly give her bottles, and at this point, I'm not even sure if she would take one.  But a couple of days ago, I took Ben to a friend's house to go swimming and could leave Katie at home while she napped, because I knew Mark could feed her a bowl of rice cereal when she woke up.  And that was, admittedly, sort of freeing.

So here are a couple of pictures of Katie getting her first bowl of rice cereal!  We offered the honor to Benjamin, who was quite excited about it - and actually has looked forward to feeding her the cereal every day since!  It's a wonderful activity for Ben and Katie to do together.  We have challenges with Ben's "enthusiasm" for touching his sister a bit too energetically, so all of their interactions have to be carefully monitored (no, Benjamin, it's not okay to sit on your sister or rub your feet on her face), but he really "gets" the feeding her process.  I explained to put some on the end of the spoon, wait for her to open her mouth, and then pull the spoon back out.  And he totally gets it!  He's gentle and attentive and really does a good job!  Our only challenge is that he wants to wipe her mouth after EVERY bite, which she doesn't really like, so we compromised that she gets a few bites before getting her mouth wiped.

Okay, that felt really good to finally write a blog post --- and it didn't even take that long!  Man, I really need to do this more often - it just feels hard to find the time to actually sit down and do it.  Hopefully I'll blog soon about a few other topics I've wanted to capture: Mark and my 10-year anniversary (wow!), and our progress on our exterior projects and my determination to make a few changes in our lives (both of which are going well!).  So stay tuned...

Before

The blog posts about home improvement projects continue.  Sorry to those of you who would prefer updates about our kiddos.  We are immensely enjoying time with them day in and day out, and often several times during the night.  So, for now, I'm a little more interested in writing about something besides our two beautiful children.  :) If you remember an earlier post - these Projects are what get me through the hum-drum (at least for me --- nothing meant for you other SAHMs) of this lifestyle.

(but seriously, all sarcastic-ness aside, Ben is responding well to a few small changes in expectations in our household, and Katie is turning into a pretty fun, go-with-the-flow five month old --- so I do want to write more about them - maybe I will update tomorrow, which will be the one-week point since making my "statement" to be more disciplined about a few things in my life...)

Our interior projects are almost complete.  Most of our interior home remodel came courtesy of Hurricane Ike, and I've spent a lot of time over the last five months (!) of my maternity leave organizing our many possessions.  The only area left to tackle is our kitchen - and I hope to do that in the next few weeks.

So now, with the promise of fall in the air (I get giddy every time I feel the hint of a cool breeze), we are moving our efforts outside.  And I am thrilled.  Equally excited to:
(a) update the exterior of our home.  Some of this we'd meant to do two years ago, but redirected our efforts (money) to the Hurricane Ike remodel
(b) spend time outside together as a family.  With cooler weather, and less intense sun, it's been fun to begin taking Katie outside with us, and I have hopes of us all enjoying time outside together as we tackle the exterior of our house.

So what is there to do outside?  What isn't there to do!?  First, we've hired a contractor to replace our siding on the whole house and garage and also to build a new carport.  We signed the contract last week, and carport demo begins on Tuesday!  We are so excited to finally be having this work done.  You would think that having someone else do the work would make it easier, but Mark and I really drag our feet when it comes to making decisions about contractors, as well as just coming up with a larger-scale plan that we have to communicate to someone else.  When we do the work ourselves, we can just make up our mind as we go.  With a contractor, you have to make all the decisions up front.  We actually spent a fair amount of time this morning simply trying to decide whether to replace the shutters with painted shutters, wood shutters or to omit them all together.  Again, it's often the decisions, not the actual work that slow us down.

But don't worry, in addition to hiring a contractor, we've got plenty of work planned for ourselves too (and don't forget that Mark's garage remodel is also underway):

• Rebuild a few of our fences that need repair and/or we want located in different places.  These are all very short sections of fence, so this shouldn't be too bad.
• Pave the area by our back door.  Currently this area becomes a mudslide every time it rains, which is just great when little people forget to take their shoes off upon coming inside.  We also hope to (maybe) get a dog next summer, so I really want to not have to wipe muddy paws every time doggie comes in and out.
• Improve our drainage.  We may actually hire this out to a contractor.  Not sure yet whether we are going to try and actually install some drains in low spots or just even out the yard.  Either way, our grass is a bit spotty and lumpy, so with or without drainage, we need some evening out.
• Install a sprinkler system.  We considered hiring this out, but I've heard it's pretty simple (and cheap) to do yourself, and I thought Ben might like hanging out outside with Mark while he does all that digging.
• Landscape!  Including figuring out how to make a rain garden for the area outside our front porch, where the roof run-off has killed our attempts at sod.

So hopefully future home improvement posts will include pictures of our whole family working together outside, in addition to the transformation of our home.

So, here are our before pictures!