Flagstaff or Amelia

So my wife just called me a slacker for not having blogged for a while. Then she said I needed to blog about or trip to Flagstaff this past weekend because she didn't have all the pictures. Excuses excuses. :)

Anyway, we made a trip to Flagstaff this past weekend in conjunction with our trip to Phoenix for our little bean check up. The reason for our trip was to see my sister's new little girl Amelia, and to see the rest of the family. But it was our first time meeting Amelia in person. Ari has been dying to hold Renee's baby since he first saw pictures of her a month ago.

Our time in Phoenix was fairly brief, which was good because it was pretty toasty there. We stopped at the midwife for Cara's check up and got to not only hear the heartbeat of our new bean but we also got to see him/her on the ultrasound. After a few minutes the baby was moving around and that was fun to see considering we were only at 12 weeks. It's pretty impressive how developed they are already. Then we stopped to drive an SUV at a dealer, which was pretty nice except it didn't shift into overdrive so we decided to keep looking. Then we had lunch on the way out of town with Piper and Mikaela.


On to Flagstaff, we headed strait out to Renee and Cory's house instead of getting our kiddo out of the car at the hotel then back in again. He's still not super fond of the car, probably mostly because he doesn't like sitting still that long. I don't know what we are going to do if our next kid actually likes the car. We arrived to a sleeping Amelia who was snuggled up with her daddy. He promptly gave her up for the rest of us to hold. She proceeded to sleep for the next couple of hours, waking at her mother's dinner time of course. The next few days of visits followed a similar pattern.

Ari was very excited to stay in a hotel! We decided to get a little more expensive room than we originally planned but it came with a bunch of extras like breakfast and dinner and drinks. So we really didn't spend anymore than if we had to eat out a couple of times a day. Plus it was a suite so Cara and I didn't have to go to bed at 8 once all the lights were out for Ari to sleep. Sunday night we invited my sister's boys over to the hotel to go swimming with us and have dinner. Renee was more than happy to give them up for a few hours and took advantage by going out to dinner with Cory and Amelia. The pool was a little chillier than we had anticipated but the boys all had a good time.

Unfortunately, we had to come back to Tucson and much warmer weather. Maybe that winning lottery ticket will come through for us some day and we can have a summer home up there. Until then we'll just have to look at the pictures and reminisce.

I think he's going to make a pretty good big brother, at least until the baby gets big enough to steal some toys from him.
Cara, Ari and Amelia.
Ari and I with our best cheese faces on!

What, energy? What's that?

I have more energy today than I remember having for several weeks now. I will be 12 weeks on Thursday so maybe the first trimester blahs are on their way out!

We started the morning with breakfast, and then I made him a quick bean bag with a sock and lentils and he danced to the Bean Bag song on youtube for awhile. They do this song at library story time and he loves it, but story time is on hiatus for the next five weeks, so I figured we could just do it at home! I will try to get a video of him dancing to the song with the bean bag soon, it is pretty cute.

Aside from the usual entertaining and feeding of Ari, I spent the morning rearranging and cleaning up his room. I also replaced the art work on his walls; he used to have prints that I chose well before he was born. I cut out pieces of his recent paintings to replace the prints. He thinks it is cool to have his paintings up in his bedroom! And I was just tired of the prints and ready for something different - and this was the right price: free paintings and frames we already had. I also moved the rocking chair back into his room since we finally have everything else out of there (crib, full size box spring, etc) and organized his diaper table a bit.

His new framed paintings - two on each side of his window:

The rocking chair my brother made for us, back in the correct room!

Diapers. Most of his cloth diapers are soaking for wash right now though.

Just for reference, these were the prints that used to be in the frames in his room: