To Iowa and back...

A wedding is such a beautiful thing - the combining of two lives, two worlds, two hearts.  And it's so obvious when two people are truly meant for each other and they are surrounded by a beautiful glow whenever they are together.  We were very blessed and honored to have taken part in just such a beautiful ceremony this past weekend in Iowa, and because it was not only Calvin's first wedding, but also his first road trip out of state, we took a couple of extra days to make it like a family vacation.  The trip went something like this:

Wednesday 4/9  7am (EST): wake up, finish packing and preparing the house for the pet sitter, leave, forget camera cord, come back, leave again.  2pm (CST):  arrive in Chicago, miraculously find nearly free parking (cheaper than Ann Arbor's) on museum campus, enter Shedd Aquarium, spend more time climbing the steps in the amphitheater than watching the dolphins (to be fair, the dolphins only jumped once), have more fun getting a snack than watching the otters (to be fair the otters were sleeping), fall in love with the beluga whales (how many times CAN one two year old repeat the word beluga?), finally get interested in the sea creatures as we are LEAVING the aquarium.  5pm:  Leave the museum campus to pick up uncle Curtis and get dinner, get lost, twice, three times, get uncle Curtis, miraculously find free parking near his office, walk to dinner, QUICKLY order margaritas, walk back to uncle Curtis's apartment.  9pm:  settle Calvin down for the night (in the closet) and enjoy a couple hours of Rock Band before hitting the hay.

Thursday 4/10  8am:  Walk to breakfast, then back to apartment, then to car.  10am:  miraculously find nearly free parking on the museum campus again (to be fair, this might have had something to do with the pouring rain and long walk, but we're not complaining), run to Field Museum, have more fun eating crackers than seeing dinosaur bones, have more fun watching people than seeing stuffed animals (well, who can blame him?  He's used to the zoo), have more fun seeing dinosaur pictures than dinosaur bones (hey, bones don't look like the dinosaurs he's used to).  1pm:  drop uncle Curtis off at work, get on I88 withOUT getting lost, spend an hour traveling only 20 miles and wishing we HAD gotten lost.  6pm:  Arrive in Cedar Rapids Iowa (still CST), check in at the hotel, change clothes, unite with other arriving guests, book it over to Rachel's family's house, get there just before tornado sirens go off, book it to Rachel's family's house's basement, QUICKLY serve margaritas to whole group (tornado and all we had a great, great, great time).  10pm:  Back to hotel for night, tornadoes having been kept at bay, possibly by the constant siren usage.

Friday 4/11   8am: Get free breakfast in hotel restaurant, go swimming in hotel pool.  11am:  Cortney goes shopping with the girls and get to manicures, Jon goes with the guys to get tuxes and ride the escalators in the mall several times.  3pm:  Calvin stays at the hotel with his grandparents while his parents go to rehearsal at the church.  6pm:  Calvin enjoys a riotous dinner at Applebees with his grandparents and uncle while his parents enjoy a really fun rehearsal dinner with the rest of the wedding party.  10pm:  Bed for Calvin, pool party for a handful of wedding guests who don't know when to quit (Cortney and Jon included).

Saturday 4/12   7am:  Get not so free breakfast in hotel restaurant with whole family.  9am:  Calvin and Jon go swimming, Cortney goes with bride and bridesmaids for mimosas and breakfast.  10am:  Calvin and Jon are likely still swimming, girls go for hair and makeup.  12pm:  Girls return to house with plenty of time to fix any damage that has been done (this is a whole other story in itself, and a funny one at that).  2pm:  Calvin is napping at the hotel with Grandpa, everyone else is at the church getting ready.  3pm:  STEVE AND RACHEL GET MARRIED, lots of happy tears are shed, lots of tissues meet their end.  4pm:  The wedding party drives to an outside location and spends an hour with the photographers and no coats in the 35 degree weather.  6pm:  Everyone convenes at the reception site (Calvin had already been there for some time enjoying his own appetizers), dinner is fabulous, the live band is amazing, Calvin seems to enjoy the drummer the most, and we all dance the night away (well, Calvin and his grandparents go home around 8pm).  12am:  Jon and Cortney arrive back at the hotel in time to join the after party at the bar there.

Sunday 4/13  7am:  Calvin drags us all out of bed and down for a not so free breakfast in the hotel restaurant.  9am:  Pack the car, check out of hotel.  10am:  Get to eat again at a brunch with the bride and groom and their families, enjoying one last chance to celebrate with the happy couple!  12pm:  Still waiting for the video we took to finish transferring to Steve's computer (the digital age? Got love it).  1pm:  Pull out of Cedar Rapids, stop at Herbert Hoover's Birthplace National Park (or something like that), where we add a stamp to our National Park Passport, and Calvin gets a Junior Ranger pin, and we enjoy the beautiful, though still chilly, weather.  2pm:  Pull out of Westbranch, head for Illinois, not knowing yet where we will spend the night.  5pm:  Find a Holiday Inn, go in to ask about rates, while waiting for service stumble upon a magazine with an ad for a neat looking lodge inside a cool looking state park, call lodge and find out they are having a special and are cheaper than the hotel, immediately ditch the Holiday Inn and head for Starved Rock Lodge.  6pm:  check in at the lodge, go for a quick hike (oh so beautiful and including a wild turkey sighting), eat in the lodge restaurant (really fantastic food).  9pm:  put Calvin to bed, visit the hot tub, then visit the lodge bar.

Monday 4/14  8am:  Enjoy a fabulous free breakfast in the lodge restaurant, pack up and check out, then hit the trails for some fantastic hiking, see gorges, canyons, waterfalls, the river, and moss (Calvin's favorite thing to find while out walking these days), all while doubling our picture count for the entire weekend.  12pm:  Realize we took the long trail instead of the short trail and are at least an hour behind schedule, get lunch in the dining room, then hit the road for home.  The rest is history. 

Find a plethora of pictures in our Iowa Trip album. 

The house does not make the home

A good friend warned us that moving is rated as one of the most stressful moments in life, ranking right up there with getting married or having a baby, but we have to disagree.  We think that's a deplorable understatement - moving seems way more stressful than marriage and childbirth combined.  It could be the monetary strain, or the physical one, or maybe it's the act of condensing one's whole life into boxes and hoping it makes the transition in tact, but we think it goes even beyond that.  We think it's less the act of moving and more the process of being between homes that elevates the stress level so greatly.  With our old house, once familiar and comfortable as an old shoe, now stripped bare and left for the taking, the new house has become our family base. But we are not yet familiar with the sights, sounds, or smells of the new house, and in some ways our first week here has felt a little displacing, like being on vacation and expecting go home any day now.  Glimpsing our possessions settled into their new arrangements has been unsettling as well - familiar but in the wrong context, like seeing a face at church that you had previously known only at work.  We truly love our new house - we love the layout, the colors, the deck, the neighborhood, the location - but it will take some time for it to fully become our home.  In the meanwhile we find ourselves marveling at and enjoying the new (the open kitchen, the larger bedrooms, the wood floors), but clinging to the old (the dogs and cats in the same old sunshine, our usual coffee in our usual mugs, Calvin's same toys on the same shelves, and hey - we painted his new bedroom to match the old) while we go through the seemingly unending process of unpacking our familiars.  We'll know we've come to an end point when Calvin no longer exclaims "new house" whenever we pull into the driveway.

More pictures in the New House Process alubm. 

Happy Easter

We wish you all a blessed Easter.  We celebrated Easter weekend the hard way - by moving into our new house.  Don't get us wrong, we are happy to be here, but instead of searching for eggs we're searching for, well, just about everything we own.  And, since it is a bigger house, it takes nearly twice as long to find everything.  But in addition to moving heavy furniture (in the wake of the first post spring snow storm, mind you) we also celebrated in some more traditional ways.  Though we didn't actually get dressed up for the holiday this year, Calvin did at least try on his new suit, which he will be wearing to a very important wedding in just a few weeks.  On Saturday, after the moving of said heavy furniture, we were able to share a wonderful dinner with Calvin's second cousin, Iris, and her family.  And on Sunday morning Calvin did get to partake in his first ever hunt for colorful eggs.  Ask Calvin what he did, though, and he's likely to tell you that he hunted for pretzels, because that's what we put inside each plastic egg, and that's what he yelled out each time he found one.  We weren't even sure that at his age he would be able to grasp the concept of egg (or pretzel) searching, but once again we underestimated the powers of food.

More Easter pictures here, and more spiffy suit picture here.

Welcome to Spring

We are celebrating this momentous occasion with a county wide weather advisory, complete with several inches of snow expected over the next 48 hours.  We're doing our best to hope for rain instead, since we are also celebrating by closing on, and moving into, our new house during the same time span.  Perhaps a more appropriate celebration (of the season turning) would have been the near 60 degree weather we enjoyed at this time last week, topped off with the relaxing walk we took through our neighborhood.  At the time we'd been assuming there would be more of those, but with the recent weather changes and the move looming large before us, the odds aren't for it.  The nature in our neighborhood is likely to be the one thing we miss after we leave: the rabbits, muskrats, foxes, coyotes, ducks, cranes, geese, and abundant avifauna.  There is a small pond in our new neighborhood, and we border a large expanse of farmland where we are sure to see deer at the right time of day or year, but we had come to look forward to our nightly walks when we visited with the ducks and the muskrats in the well developed (drainage) waterways of our large neighborhood planting.  We plan to make at least one trip back this way to visit the baby ducks after the first hatching of the year.

Vacationing in Ann Arbor.

A little over a year ago you might remember that we came home one day to find our ceiling leaking.  Even if you don't remember, we do, and the paint and drywall damage to our ceiling was a daily reminder that just would not let us forget.  So finally, with thoughts of trying to join the already flooded housing market this spring weighing on our minds, we got around to doing something about this eyesore.  We'd been toying with the idea of attempting to do the work ourselves, but that plan lasted all of the five minutes it took Jon to get the instructions for such an undertaking from a skillful friend in our choir who does this stuff for a living...and then we hired him.  So instead of spending several days bumbling our way through an extremely intricate process we spent the whole of last week, and a bit more, on what felt like a mini-vacation, staying in Cortney's childhood home thanks to the good graces of her parents (who were also staying there, as they do all of the time since they happen to live there).  We think it's safe to say that we all enjoyed the time.  Jon and Cortney certainly enjoyed being so much closer to all of their day to day activities and needs, and Calvin clearly capitalized on the constant doting attentions of his grandparents.  We moved back home today (to a much cleaner and brighter ceiling) feeling like we'd just been on a week-long vacation, and having the laundry to prove it.

More pictures - in the February 2008 album.