Back on the Wagon

Hi. It's me and I am back.

Miss me? :)

Dude, I haven't blogged in so long that I don't know where to begin. I guess I could tell you how the move to Texas has been.

It's been hot. Super hot. Break records as the second hottest summer in San Antonio on record hot.

We left in July for Texas and it was the LONGEST TWO DAYS OF DRIVING EVER.

I rode in the car with our two drugged up cats while Evan drove with the girls. The first night we planned on staying in Amarillo, TX and got in around 9:30 only to find out that Amarillo is the only city that has hotels in a good 200 mile radius. Everything that would except cats was booked. We were ready to have to sleep in our cars for the night (I am not kidding) when a very nice man at a Holiday Inn that had rooms but would not let us bring our cats into the air conditioned hotel (it was in the 90s even at 10:00 at night) said he found one "inn" that had a room for us. You know how in the vacation comedy movies (like all the National Lampoon vacation movies) the characters end up in some backwards hotel that there is no way anyone in their right mind would actually stay in? Yeah, we totally stayed in one. The room smelled like an old Moose Lodge, the air conditioning didn't work, the other guests were all pretty sketchy, etc., etc. We made it through that horrific night and made it to my sister's house the next day around 7:00PM and thanked her endlessly for her clean house and her air conditioning that worked properly.

We stayed with my sister and her husband for almost exactly one month. And while we were so appreciative of their hospitality, I am a pregnant mom and needed a place of my own. I won't get into the details of how every time I called the housing office on base they would tell me I was a different number on the wait list (sometimes 9th, sometimes 14th or 15th) and it got to the point where i would cry whenever I had to talk to them. I will tell you that, after almost exactly a month, we got the call that a house on base was available. Oh, and they wanted to know if it was ok that it was a 4 bedroom instead of a 3 bedroom. We said we could live with that.

So, we moved in to our new house exactly a week before we were to leave for a 12 day trip to Illinois.

I won't lie, I am not a Texas fan yet. It is too hot to outside and there are no mountains. I could forgive them the mountains if the weather would stay out of the 100s for longer than a day. Unfortunately, the girls feel the same way. When Julia gets overly tired or is upset, one of the first things she says is she wants to go back home to Colorado. Her "real" home. It makes me cry every time she asks.

But, now that we're back from our Illinois vacation, I am determined to make this place "home". Our house is beautiful inside. All wood floors and lots of rooms for everyone. I am almost done with the downstairs living area (with the exception of the office/guest room, which is now a dumping spot for things we don't know where to put yet) and the girls rooms are set up with the exception of pictures on their walls. We're back to setting up a routine similar to what we had going on in Colorado and I am hoping we'll get to where this place is where we most want to be.
We've done a tiny bit of exploring (when the weather was under 100 degrees) and we definitely plan on doing more as we watch the temperature drop for "autumn".
My parents are coming in early November and our lovely friends Kim and Chris are coming for Thanksgiving with their lovely daughter Kayleigh. We have school and work and dance classes and a baby growing in my belly who will be born in the Army hospital 10 minutes from our house.

So, that's kind of where we are right now. Trying to get ourselves rooted here in this oh-so large state. Thankfully, we now have internet, so I will be blogging more again.