Phew! Well we are here in Kansas City! We live less than a block away from where we were living last summer, so we know the area, which is nice. It's also great to have friends here already. Our apartment is pretty small, but not as small as I expected it to be. But hallelujah everything is all on the same floor! I don't have to walk all the way to the corner of the basement to do laundry, and I don't have to worry about Ethan falling on the slippery wooden stairs. I'm also enjoying the coziness of carpet. Although I did love our hardwood floors.

This is such a boring post but not much has been going on besides unpacking and getting settled. Here's some pictures I've taken of Ethan lately.

He's started to try and bounce balls like a basketball.. he's not very good at it.

And he's also into jumping. Here's a video for Grandma and Grandpa.



There Dad, a post just for you!

Two new chairs!

So this is probably NOT what we should be doing right now, but I'm so excited to have them! We found both chairs at different garage sales, and we are suckers for fun projects. The first little chair was in really bad shape, I wish I had a before picture! But I didn't think to take one. It was pretty scratched up, and the seat was made up of a few strings tacked to the wood. Ross sanded and re-painted the wood, and then he RE-WEAVED the entire seat! It looks so good! The chair also came with some really crappy little cushions that I made new covers for. I personally think it looks better without them, but with the cushions it's a little more comfy.

He likes having a seat for his ducky.

We called in a professional for the second one. So I guess I couldn't really call it OUR project, but Ross did all of the stripping; there were probably a few hundred nails and staples in it that needed to be removed. Susan from Upholstery Creations by Susan here in Manhattan did all of the hard work, but we got to watch her do it, and now Ross wants to do that for a living instead! Well, maybe someday. Oh, but remember? We are moving into a SMALLER apartment. I hope there will be room for it there. It doesn't exactly match our couches right now, but I picked out the fabric knowing that I'll always love that color and that someday we'll have a room where that will go perfectly. Plus it was on sale. Of course all of my very favorite fabric was like $30/yd. That's not happening.

The legs still need to be re-finished.
But we really are focusing on moving now. :)

And life barrels on like a runaway train

So we officially have a place to move into on August 1st. It's an apartment. We kind of felt like a house would be too much for us right now. BUT we're really excited because it's half a block away from the Clarks, who we stayed with last summer. It'll be fun to be near them, and we know the neighborhood and the area pretty well, and know that we'll be comfortable for a year. However. We will be CRAMMED into the place because we are used to having a basement right now where we can throw anything we don't need at the moment. That crap's sure been fun to go through!

Can't tell, but here Ethan is enjoying playing with snappers(poppers?)

Anyway. Oh Ethan. I'm just waiting for him to explode into a terrible toddler. But it hasn't happened. Yet. He's got the funniest little personality and I'm loving getting to see it come through more. Some unique things about Ethan are:

1. His diabolical laugh that makes me giggle every time he does it.

2. His obsession with balls, all sizes and textures.

3. His love for little tiny things. My jar of spare buttons entertains him for quite a while.

4. His love for experiencing the world in new ways. Bending over upside to look at things, keeping his eyes shut tight through an entire family meal (weird, eh?) or while walking around in the living room, etc.

5. His affectionate hugs.

He also loves watching the maintenance guy mow the
lawn with his riding lawn mower.

And for the life of me I can NOT name this baby girl inside of me! We are having the hardest time coming up with a name we both really like. And there are very few names we like even just a little bit. Ross likes one that is more unique, and I'm not sure I love it. I've loved one name forever, but it's become quite popular in the last couple years and I don't want her to be one of 4 girls in her class that has the same name. Why is it so hard? We knew Ethan's name like 4 months into the pregnancy!

England: Part 3

Day 7:

- Chatsworth



- Haddon Hall (where apparently they filmed a lot of The Princess Bride)



- Drive to London, get caught in 2 1/2 hours of traffic. :(

Day 8 (didn't have nice camera that day):

- Southwark Cathedral

- Tate Modern

- St. Pauls

- Lunch at St. Dunstan's in-the-East



- Lloyds of London

- Leadenhall Market

- Courtauld Institute

- Hyde Park

Day 9 (didn't have big camera that day):

- Portobello Road. Sigh. I LOVE Portobello Road.

- Kensington Gardens

- My mom to Victoria and Albert, me to the National Gallery, Trafalgar Square

- Kenwood House (missed the inside by 10 minutes!)

- Mozart and Handel at St. Martins-in-the-fields.

Day 10 (carried camera with me half the day):

- Tube to St. James park

- Took a long walk
- Buckingham Palace
- Westminster Abbey
- Big Ben


- Along the Thames, across from 'The Eye'
- Trafalgar Square


- Leicester Square
- Picadilly Circus

- Paperchase (love that store!)

- Back to hotel for a little rest

- Oxford Street, Regent Street
- Mamas and Papas (cutest baby store, super expensive)
- Hamleys

- Rode bus to Tower of London and back looking for Thorntons. Missed it by 10 minutes too!

- Marks & Spencer for Indian take-away dinner. Yum.

- Beautiful evening stroll around the Serpentine in Hyde Park.



And done. Already thinking longingly of when I can go back with Rossy. Or with the kids for an extended stay. Very extended.

England: Part 2

Other tidbits about England: The weather was a beautiful breezy 70 degrees the whole time. Could not have been better! Also, it was a lot of fun spending time alone with my Mom. She's a lot of fun to travel with. Travel buddies are the best when they love all the same things you do. It will be a trip that we will talk about for years to come.

Day 4:

- Leeds Castle



- Bodiam Castle



- Bateman's (Rudyard Kipling's home)

(Image from google images)

- The Downs (Southern coast)


Day 5:

- Oxford

- Blenheim Palace

- A long drive to Derbyshire- Our Bed and Breakfast was called Heathy Lea, right on the Chatsworth Estate!


Day 6:

- Hardwick House

(Image from google images)

- Kedleston

(Image from google images)

- Walk in Chatsworth park

(Could it be more picturesque? I'm glad I had my camera for the walk)

Fabulous awesome England trip

Boy have I lost my gusto for blogging. But I can't bring myself to delete it either, cause I'm sure I'll come up with something really awesome to blog about the moment I do.

I do have one excuse however- I've been in England with my mama for a week and a half. Boy that was an amazing trip. But boy I get really tired when I'm pregnant and walking most of the day. It was a little discouraging to not have the energy to immerse myself as fully into exploring like I wanted to. I'm at the beginning of my 7th month of pregnancy and my baby is taking up all my energy. But I was able to enjoy everything a lot still, and tried my best not to think of Ross and Ethan while I was gone... Yeah right like that was possible! Every little baby boy I saw was Ethan. Anyway. It was an awesome trip.

So because I didn't really have a lot of energy to spare, I didn't get a whole bunch of pictures (creative or otherwise) like I wanted. I brought my big camera. Which is so heavy! And my little baby point-and shoot doesn't really allow you to do much. So that was another small dilemma.

Day 1:

- Rented car at Heathrow airport and drove West towards Bath (scariest thing ever, but my mom only grazed the curb like 5 times. Those roads are so stinkin' narrow!)

- Wells




- Bath


- City centre
- Royal Crescent
- Royal Circus

Day 2:

- Roman Baths



- Longleat House

- Stourhead


- Bradford-on-Avon

Day 3:

- Stonehenge

- Petworth

- Hever Castle


To be continued... hopefully I'll get some of my mom's pictures to supplement here too. Sigh. Now it's back to reality with 100 degree weather and 1,000,000 percent humidity.

Houston!

Well so we returned from our trip to Houston to see Phil and Kathleen over a month ago... and here're some pictures from the trip!

Ethan did surprisingly well in the car for 12 hours. We made multiple stops, and I think we had braced ourselves for the worst. So when he only screamed twice for extended periods (like 10 minutes) of time it felt like we were doing great! We stopped in Oklahoma City and Dallas on the way down and on the way back.


It POURED rain all the way from Wichita to Oklahoma City. But we had made plans to see the Myriad Botanical Gardens in Oklahoma City, so we stopped there anyway. We couldn't see any of the gardens outdoors but luckily they had an indoor arboretum that was pretty dang cool too. The rain was dripping through the ceiling and off of the plants anyway so we got pretty soaked after all. (I used the point-and-shoot almost the whole trip. I LOVE the macro feature on that camera!)






Of course I demanded that we go to IKEA while we were there. It was only a few minutes away from where they live! Lucky. And we went to the park, and we went to Galveston, and we went to Kemah boardwalk... and some other things too. But this is getting too long.

Ethan slept the whole ride. He was exhausted.

I couldn't help paddle cause I was wearing a skirt.
Good thinking Lauren! Got outta that one.

And Ethan knew just what to do at the beach.

He loved the fountains at Kemah boardwalk.

Stolen from Kathleen's camera:

And it was a looooong pretty ride home.

Thanks Phil and Kathleen! It was lots of fun. We'll come visit you at the next cool place you live too!

Oh and another thing that was super cool was that we got to see my grandparents who were traveling down from Manhattan (we missed their visit there) to Austin! We just both happened to be in Oklahoma City at the same time, so they treated us to dinner. It worked out so nicely.