After seb had been home for a few weeks and we felt the kids had gotten enough quality daddy time, we planned a couple trips. we knew we were going to be moving in just a couple of months and the window we had for being able to simply pile in the car and head off to visit our families was closing fast.
first off, i took the kids up to visit my parents. it was a hot few days in the midwest and we spent a lot of time in the water.
we had some quality snuggle time with pawpaw. caleb doesn't nap much when were at other people's houses but you can almost always convince him to snuggle up and watch something with you. my dad is great at taking the boys and heading outside with them to play or 'help' him with something he's working on, and he is pretty good at wearing caleb (and himself) out. they are good buddies.
seb hadn't come with us because we decided to send him off to tacoma to find us a house. i loved going to hawaii with a house ready to move in to, and with two kids now, staying in hotels for a couple of months didn't seem very appealing. we'd spent hours and hours and hours pouring over house listings online together, rating them, comparing locations and distances to schools i'd looked at in april. we narrowed it down to the ones we both liked the best, and i crossed my fingers and put my trust in my husband to find the best one for our family.
naturally, he bought the house i'd laughed and said no way to. but that's another story.
after he wrapped up the house hunt seb flew back to st louis and we drove down from my parents' to meet him there.
here is noah, exhibiting his willingness to extend his nap with daddy. i complain to seb about how unfair this behavior is. noah has deprived me of exponentially more sleep than he has seb. he owes me. and yet it is seb who gets this preferential treatment. seb complains right back that it's actually sort of an insult. that he is just some object to lay on whereas i am the provider and sustainer and therefore worth waking up for. still. in a contest of who makes a cushier pillow i think i've got it covered. so not fair.
while in st louis we played at the magic house, which is always a hit with the kids. this was an alice in wonderland themed exhibit they had up at the time. i've said it before and i'll say it again: if you live in or around or are just visiting st louis with your little ones, you must go here. you won't regret it.
still terribly hot outside, still a great time to get in the water in this oval shaped circulating moat. like the world's smallest lazy river.
i think seb's next summer project will be building us one of these in the backyard. i'd never get any work done, but i'd be having such a great time, i'm not sure i'd care that much.
that's grandpa in the background. i love taking pictures of our family and yet manage to almost never do so. i'll spend a week visiting family and realize i never took a single shot of them or of them with me or the kids. LAME.
this was a bit of a foreshadowing. noah could have stayed here all day. when we got to our new house and saw a large play area of pea gravel already set up, i knew we were set.
safety first!
we had a great visit but for me it was bittersweet. i knew we'd be back again soon, but that the next time would be the last for a while. from then on visiting nana and grandpa and yaya and pawpaw would involve a lot more time, a lot more planning, and a lot more money.
we had 2 good years living within driving range, and for a military family, that ain't too bad. we could have stayed for a third, but seb's job if we had stayed would have meant much longer hours and being on call a lot, and the last thing we wanted after he'd been gone for a whole year was for him to come home and be gone for a whole year. we knew we'd miss being so near the grandparents, but we knew we were making the right choice if it meant having seb home more.
so we packed up the car and went home to start the packing in earnest.
we didn't know it at the time, but caleb had picked up a little souvenir.
if you didn't know (i sure didn't) this is the typical 'target lesion' associated with LYME DISEASE. he must have gotten bit while playing in my parent's rather woodsy back yard. never even saw a tick on him. sucker must have worked fast. good thing i have two doctors in the house or i probably wouldn't have caught it very quickly. thankfully caleb loved his medicine, even when we had to wake him up at 11 every night to take it.
we had hundreds of ticks infesting our house in hawaii and not a single bite*. we play in my parent's yard for a few hours and we get LYME DISEASE. go figure. but believe it or not, this did not trigger some sort of ptsd response and i didn't feel the urge to burn down my house and lock myself and the kids into a padded room surrounded by insecticide.
according to my inventory of pictures, july never happened ;) so up next we shoot straight to august!
*this is where my husband would point out that we were spared bites because the dog was taking them all. and that the dog was really protecting us, and how dogs are good to have for protection in general. and how much the kids love dogs. it's also the part where i would reply that the dog is what brought the ticks in in the first place :(
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