Birthdays Galore!

Well, we all celebrated our birthdays these last couple of months. Greg's was in August. We celebrated it with some of his favorite friends, his family. We had cake, some ice cream,and presents. This is when Riley first started to get excited about her birthday (which is in November).




Next we headed out to Mildgeville to celebrate Riley's cousin Jackson's birthday. Well, actually he is a 2nd cousin,but I feel that his mom, Kelly is just like a sister, so we consider him a cousin. Kelly's family just moved to GA to start a Little Ceaser Pizza business. We are excited for them on their new adventure, but we are even more excited to have family close by. They are going to be living in Augusta which is about 2 1/2 hours away. After two years living in the South and in the Midwest and having most of my family in Utah or CA, 2 1/2 hours is close.












Than came my Birthday, it was two days before I went into surgery. I was so worried about the sinus surgery, that I could hardly even enjoy it. Plus there was a whole list of things that I should not eat due to causing excess bleeding.The big highlight for me was the gift of my mother coming to visit to help with the kids after surgery and Greg got me tickets to Wicked!



About 5 days after my birthday, we stopped by one of our new Georgian friends to celebrate their daughters Birthday. Um...I m going to stop now. I would just save this post, but I am afraid all the pictures I have embedded into this post would be lost. So stayed tuned for more birthday stories(Carter's and Riley's Birthday)

I am definitely not much of a Blogger.

Ok so I love reading other peoples blog, but for some reason I hate doing it. Well, I don't hate it, it's just not a high priority of mine. Those quite moments I get when the kids are a sleep are usually filled with bills, random projects, cleaning, hanging out with Greg and calling family and friends. But I do want to post some catch up info on our family. It has been an active couple of months. We ended up celebrating everyone's birthday, starting in Aug (Greg's) than September (Carter and I) and November ( Riley's). Also during this time, I ended up having surgery, had a princess party for Riley and monster Party for Carter, cousin Brooklyn came for a visit, Kelly and Mark moved to Augusta,ga and I refinished some furniture for Rileys new bedroom. Lastly we have had yet another problem with a rental-MOLD!. Seriously, I cannot wait to be in a spot long enough to own a home. I plan on making a post for each event starting tomorrow.

Sinus Surgery

Well, I just wanted to let those who knew and those who didn't know that recently I had sinus surgery. I found out last March that I had developed nasal polyps (yes, it does sound gross and it is). I could never see them because they were deep in my sinus, nevertheless they needed to go. They were only causing slight breathing problems, but basic medicine was not going to cure them and they were causing me to start having headaches and consistent stuffiness. So I put off the surgery until now, and everything went better than expected. What I had done was a complete right endoscopic frontal sinusotomy, right endoscopic ethmoidectomy and bilateral endoscopic maxillary antrostomy with tissue removal. Basically alot of technical words explaining that the sinus opening were enlarged, and polyps were taking out. I had been so nervous to have this done and I have heard numerous horror stories from people who have had it done. For those who are contemplating having this surgery, I say go for it. Recovery time flew by and everything is clear.I am so glad I did it.I was only down for about a day or so and really did not have much pain. My mom was a sweet heart and flew up to help out Instead of taking care of me, we just played around with the kids and hit up a few of my favorites here in GA such as the aquarium and Noah's Ark ( a small zoo).

Our Last Day in Chicago, IL (This was in June)

 

As you can tell I have been having blogging block and had not posted much since our move to GA. Before I move on to our life in GA, I thought I would just post some pictures of our last day in IL. We had a blast staying downtown and wondering around Navy Pier. I think Chicago would be a fun town to live in without kids, but hauling kids in a busy city just would not be for me. Oh and parking at the Hilton downtown was $50. Luckily, we found another garage a few blocks away for the low low cost of $35.

 

Carter and I walking along the lake.

 

A fun architectural boat tour. It was cool to cruise through the city and under some really unique bridges. A Funny thing about this tour is that it is close to one of the only thing Riley remembers about Chicago and it was only an hour. She will still talk about it like we did it last week!

 

A shot of Greg taken by our little photo bug, Riley


 

Sears Tower from boat

 
Riley's Marilyn Monroe pose.
We sat in the front row and Riley kept dancing and lifting her dress right next to the tour guide, so everybody got a bonus show on our tour.

 


Riley wanted to get closer to the kids playing in the fountain





Riley having a blast!


 
Cater having a blast!


The boys having fun.


 
Navy Pier at sunset.

It has been way too long!

Really I cant believe it has taken me this long to post. I have been busy, but I need to be better than this. Well, we are now living in Locust Grove, GA. So far it has been a great move. This will be our third move in 3 years. Moving has been somewhat exciting and adventurous,but I am really getting hungry for some stability and I would love to own a home again. This renting thing just bites. It is hard to make a place your own if you know you may be moving within a year and your hands are tied as far as painting and such. Really living with white walls after two years just gets to me. Luckily this year we found a rental with some color. Actually every wall is painted in nice neutral tones. Our neighbors are really nice, but I think you can expect that in the South and we love our subdivision. It is just beautiful with great amenities. Check out the pool. The bigger pool is heated(to a perfect temp every time I have been there) six-lane Jr. Olympic-sized pool, there are 2 water slides, and they have splash pool for the kids with brightly colored umbrellas that spray water.


We walk there at least 3 times a week. We can take tree lined sidewalks there or we can cut through some hiking trails to get there. It is about 1 mile, so I am finally getting some much needed exercise. Having Carter has totally changed my body and exercising habits or lack of. I am closer to my pre prego weight, but my body just looks different and this not one of those good differences. Men just don't realize what us women go through, and frankly either did I. ( Thanks mom, you sacrificed much for our family)



We have now been here since mid July and it took about 1 month to really unpack and get things organized the way they should be.I am planning on getting rid of a bunch of stuff before we move again to hopefully cut my time down in unpacking. Before we moved out to GA, Greg and I flew out there to secure a place to live. During that week long trip, we had tons of fun without the wee ones. My mom came out to babysit. Again thanks mom. Here is what we did during that time.




In May, Greg and I flew up to Ga to find a place to live for this next year. Here are some fun things we did



River rafting in Chattagoo river



Here we are at the Atlanta Aquarium. This is one of the largest indoor aquarium in the US. I believe this is one of the only ones that has live whale sharks.


This is the huge aquarium that 2 Whale sharks live



Check out how thick the walls are!


Next we took the CNN tour. That was fun. The building was huge. It was still under construction from the damage it sustained from a tornado, but everything was open.



This is a picture of another building that was hit by the torndao. The windows that are black were blown out. There were around 6 big buildings that we could see from the central park in Atlanta that had tons of windows blown out.

Here we are hanging out in the park watching everyone run through the water while a band played in the background.This made us miss our kids.


We than headed over to the Coke factory. This was great..a little history on Coke and lots of free sodas from around the world for tasting. I left a little sick and very wired. After that we at a restaurant name Lucky. That place was tasty. It was a total high tech restaurant as well. They had the coolest restroom I have ever seen. Cool lighting ( even the water stream out of the faucets had a glow)and TVs in the mirrors.Before leaving Atlanta we spent a day at Six Flags. It has been a while since I've been on a roller coaster, so I was so excited to be there and I didn't care that it was sweltering humid and everyone was sweating just standing in line. However, I was upset and a little worried mid day when all the rides were closed and everyone was told to seek shelter due to sever weather. Luckly, no tornadoes hit us and we were able to resume our fun 2 hours later.


After spending some time in Atlanta, we headed north to a town called Helen. There we went hiking in the Tlalluha Gorge that is filled with waterfalls, and a natural rock water slide.









Of course, more exciting than our trip is our children. So I thought I would just throw in a quick updated photo of them

Some videos of the kids

Here is a quick video of Riley practing telling everyone where we will be moving too.

This next one she has a little bit more energy, but starts to get distracted when Carter begins to slip out of her lap. You may not be able to hear her say this but she starts to get worried and says,"It's slidding."( It = Carter)

Lastly, Riley loves to try and spell things. Here she is practing her favorite word.

The allure of cookies

The smell of chocholate cookies was just too much of a temptation for our little buggy. I had baked a batch and had placed them on the counter to cool when Riley came runing in asking for a cookie. Well, let me restate that, she was actually demanding one. She told me that she "needed" the cookie. Lately she has decided to use the word "need" instead of "want or I would like". It makes me laugh to think that someone would "need" a cookie. Anyway, I told her she would have to wait unitl after dinner when the cookies have cooled. She stomped around a little bit and than found something else to occupy herself. A few mintues later, Carter needed his diaper changed. So I headed upstairs, changed him and by the time I came back down, Riley had moved a kitchen chair to the counter and was proceeding to finish her second cookie. I was a little mad, but amazed at how her desire for this cookie lead her to figure out a way to reach the top of the counter. Being a softy for her cute smile, I had to pull out the camera to capture her disobedience. God sends us these kids with these adorable smiles that make it so hard to be a stern parent. What do you do...I guess just love them.