Gavin is 7

Gavin started out his seventh birthday with a seven pancake. He ate the seven first. I let him open one present, which was a nerf gun. He spent the rest of the morning playing with it and our neighbor Seth. After church, the Nelson’s came over and we had more cake. Gavin opened the rest of his presents. Nick took his kids shopping for Gavin’s present and came up with a sticky hand, a whoopee cushion which Gavin popped on the first try, a Heman DVD, and silly string. The silly string lasted two minutes. It is so hard to believe that my oldest child is already seven. Where has the time gone?

Kid's Club Birthday Party

We celebrated Gavin’s birthday at Kid’s Club (our babysitting co-op.) Gavin requested corn dogs and chips for dinner. I added green beans. Then we played a game where I taped a batman symbol to each kid’s back. Then when I said go they had to collect as many as they could. Gavin won both times! Then I taught them to make the bat plane. Our next game was to try to land the bat plane into the bat cave (our laundry basket.) Our last game was Mr. Freeze. When the music stopped the kids had to freeze. If they didn’t, they were out.

Gavin wanted the batman symbol on his cake. It was way easier than last years transformer symbol. Chocolate cake with chocolate icing was a mess, but all the kids enjoyed it.

Cupcakes at School

Carter and I brought cupcakes into Gavin’s class to celebrate his upcoming birthday. Gavin was sitting right next to his girlfriend, Sydney. Carter got to sit in one of the empty desks and everyone thought he was adorable.

Quilt

My mom sent us this quilt for Christmas this year. The center area is all made from the same fabric. We think she did an amazing job. Thanks Mom!

Since we have been back

We got over to Alycia’s house at 7am to see our kids before school. I really missed them and they were so excited. Sam had a fever the first day and ended up calling in sick to work. He did make it to class that night. The next day he felt a little better and went to work. He did notice a big red spot on his leg. He went to the doctor on Wednesday and the doctor thought it was either a blood clot or cellulites. It ended up being cellulites but hopefully he caught it soon enough and won’t have to be hospitalized.
Our biggest struggle has been adjusting to the time change. We keep waking up really early and then falling asleep at 9:30. Carter has been a different kid. Debbie, Sam’s mom, cut him off from chocolate milk and he actually eats. Nick also started making him dress himself. We had some fights while we were out and about because he didn’t want to walk, but I held my ground and he is now walking without a fight. Debbie also taught Gavin to tie his shoes, which he proudly showed me.
We left on December 26th so all of our Christmas decorations were still up. We finally got around to taking them down on Saturday. We also have been working on getting the toy room back in order. The kids’ new Christmas toys were throwing off our organization system. Life is continuing on and we are getting back into the swing of things.
A big thank you to the Angerbauers who had our kids until Debbie arrived from the airport, to Debbie who had our kids for a week, to John who helped her out, and Alycia and Nick who had our kids for nine days. With their three kids it was like having three sets of twins. You have given us a wonderful gift of being able to travel without worrying about the welfare of our children. Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

Traveling home

We left our hotel at 7:15am after eating breakfast. I sure will miss having desert for breakfast. We met up with Urmi and Gokul, friends from the MBA group, at the airport. We had to go through extra security to go to the US. Every single one of us had to get patted down and our carryon bags were searched. This made us late leaving by about an hour.
Once we were in the air the airline announce that they needed a doctor. A little while later they announced that we would be stopping in London. A one year old child had a seizure and needed help. We ended up being on the ground in London for about two hours. We all stayed on the plane during that time. We were starving by the time we were finally fed lunch. We had breakfast at 7am and didn’t get our lunch until 3pm because of the emergency stop. We everything we were on the plane for 12 hours which is a really, really long time. I am just thankful I wasn’t entertaining my children. That would have been a nightmare.
We missed our connecting flight from JFK, so we were shuttled to another airport. It was 4pm in New York, but it felt like 11pm to us. Sam’s leg started hurting so he propped them up on a chair while laying on the floor. Our flight to DFW wasn’t very crowded, so we each were able to have a row and I slept most of the way. I kept waking up having no idea where I was.
Alycia picked us up from the airport. We got in early, around 9:30pm, which was about 4:30am to us. Alycia kept our kids one more night and Sam and I crashed as soon as we got to our house. It felt so good to be in our own bed.

Venice & Milan, Italy

When we woke up it was raining again. We were really hoping for a nice day. Breakfast was good at our hotel. I still love that Italy serves desert with breakfast. We also had more hot chocolate. Mmmm it is good. After breakfast we checked out of our hotel room and stowed our bags in their storage room.
We visited Galleria San Marco, which does glass blowing demos. We watched him make a vase and a horse out of molten glass. It was really cool. The salesman then showed us around his shop. The chandeliers were incredible but completely out of our price range. Really everything in the entire store was out of our price range, but watching the demos was a neat experience.
It was still raining but this was our only day in Venice so we were going to experience it even if we got wet. We wondered the streets and after about an hour the rain stopped and the sun even came out for a little while. There are mask shops everywhere and really fun to look at. I had no desire to own a mask because what would I do with it when I got home?
The one thing Sam wanted to do in Venice was take a Gondola Ride. It actually cost more than our hotel room did but what an experience! Sam was almost giddy about it. I had a great time photographing the places that you could only see by canals and not by foot. Our gondolier told us a little about the history of Venice and pointed out the interesting places we past.
After our ride we went back to Rosticceria San Bartolomeo for more mozzarella al prosciutto and hot chocolate. After exploring the city a little more we made it back to the hotel for our bags. We took a vaporetto back to the train station for our 5:20 train to Milan.
We arrived in Milan a little before 8 pm and went back to our previous hotel to see if they had our camera. They did not, so we found a restaurant to eat at. I had wonderful pasta and savored my last Italian meal. After dinner we took a bus to the airport. We called our hotel to get a shuttle from the airport but it took us about a half hour to figure out how to use the phone and by the time we got through they had stopped their shuttle five minutes before. We asked a taxi driver how much it would cost to get to our hotel and he told us 20 Euro. We found and ATM got 20 more Euro got took the taxi the 10 minutes to our hotel. When we got there the taxi driver wanted 45 Euro for the trip! We only had 30 so he took what we had, but we still felt taken advantage of. Oh well, we will be home tomorrow.