Stay at Home Mom - Day 1

Today was Ryan's first day of work....which means my first day at home with Kherington. For the record this will be the longest I have ever been left alone with Kherington....I know, kinda crazy. So how did the day go?

• 5:00am - I woke up and looked for housing in Belgium (we are provided with a real estate person here to help, but I need to become more educated about pricing and the areas and such)
• 7:30am - Kherington woke up cranky.  She went to be the previous night around 11pm and slept through...with a bottle sometime during the night, but never left the bed. She played with dad a little and crawled around whining.
• 9:00am-12:30pm - Kherington slept. I looked at more housing and tried to figure out how to do the basics here (shopping, banking, garbage, etc) and did part of the first Rosetta Stone French lesson. La fille boit (the girl drinks)...getting good.
• 12:30pm-2:00pm - Kherington played, ate some mac n' cheese (that we packed with us), took a bath, dressed and got ready to head out.
• 2:00pm-3:00pm - We went shopping (there is a grocery store right next door so we didn't venture far). Kind of a long shopping trip...we explored all the different foods. I said bonjour just fine when we checked-out then it was all downhill. The checker asked me a question in French, then I messed up on the thank-you and said gracias instead of merci (oops...hopefully I get better at this).
• 3:00-3:30 - I got the jogging stroller out and found the path to a park I was thinking we'd go explore...Kherington had other plans
• 3:30pm-present (currently 6:15pm) - Kherington is sleeping. I joined her for a while, but figured I could get some stuff done if I got up.

So not exactly the fun packed day I had been anticipating...maybe tomorrow. Kherington has had a little cold and is still adjusting to the time change so I'm glad she's sleeping (hopefully catching up on the last 8.5 months when she though sleeping was overrated). I was hoping to put her on a schedule that included 3 meals, 24 ounces of formula, sleeping through the night and 2 naps during the day. However I wasn't planning on those naps each being 3 hours long.

Here she is in all her glory:

Highlight of the Day: I bought chocolate hazelnut spread (not the nutella brand, but tastes just as good). It costs less than peanut butter costs in US (including the dollar to euro conversion). Yummy...I'm thinking once we have a oven (right now it's just a microwave and stove) and some cooking ingredients I'll try substituting it in a peanut butter cookies recipe!

Belgium

View from our Apartment

Belgium has welcomed us with SNOW. Weather wise, it feels like Utah. We ended up checking 6 bags and the jogging stroller, carrying on 2 backpacks, a diaper bag and a rolling carry-on. I would have to say we could packed a lot less stuff if we didn't have baby. I realize we can buy stuff here, but that's not the first thing we want to worry about.

Kherington has been a trooper. In the last month we have flow: Salt Lake City to Myrtle Beach, Charlotte to Seattle, Seattle to LA, LA to Seattle, and finally Seattle to Brussels. Keep in mind the only direct flights were the LA ones. She is a little charmer on the plane. It's really how she likes it...she like to have mom hold her and then be able to look at everyone else.

Back to Belgium. We arrived at the airport, went through the border checkpoint, found all of our luggage (it takes extra long to get special size packages...aka stroller), made it to our temporary apartment, unpacked, took a little nap (for now when Kherington sleeps Erin sleeps is in full force), went grocery shopping and made dinner.

Breif 2009 Recap

2009 was a great year full of changes for our family. Erin continued working as a consultant for Omniture (recently bought by Adobe). Ryan graduated with a Bachelors and Masters of Accounting from BYU in April. Kherington joined our family the day he was supposed to walk (April 23rd) ...needless to say he did not walk; we snapped a couple pictures of him in his gown and return his $60 rental gown (so it cost $40 to buy a bachelors gown, and $60 to RENT a masters gown...how does that makes sense?). We had planned on moving to Dallas, however an opportunity came to move to Belgium instead. We enjoyed spending a lot of time with both our families.

She's Mobile!

Kherington is now almost 8 months old and is VERY active. At church, I look at other kids her age and wonder how in the world parents get them to sleep through the meetings (and in their carrier mind you...she never did that) or even just sit contently on their laps instead of wiggling free, pouncing on any paper or hair within reach (the reach is getting even bigger), or sounding off the "aba-ba-ba-ba." She's happy, but noisy and active. Today at church for the first time she stood on the pew and played with the people behind us, sang to the songs, crawled all over the relief society room and didn't even take a little cat nap the entire time (she did crash on the drive home). She's crawling, pulls herself up on anything, has her first tooth and tries almost anything we eat. Some of her favorites foods are the sweet potatoes puffs and bread. She also likes sweets (and can be bribed...if you want her to like you cookies work great).

This video is from today. She's playing with her music table next to the white Christmas tree.

As to me and Ryan, we are now homeless, carless and jobless. Last Friday, I had my last day of work AND the movers came to pack/ship our stuff to Belgium. Monday we sold our car and Tuesday we flew to Myrtle Beach to spend the holiday's with Ryan's family. It has been great...a true vacation! I was greeted by Bubble Bath from Ryan's mom and so far have gotten to enjoy two baths. We've made a couple sweets including a custom creation I really wanted to try...it'a knock off "My Dough Girl" Audrey cookie (Almond dough with white chocolate, almonds and cranberries). I just took a standard chocolate chip recipe with really good ratings off all recipes, substituted almond extract for vanilla (halved the amount b/c almond extract is so strong), and the mix-ins I wanted. I think they turned out great! I also just finish another book in the series I've been reading (Diane Mott Davidson's cooking mysteries).

Kherington has been sleeping back in her grandparent's room so we haven't had to do nights or mornings. It's a pretty sweet deal. We really appreciate them taking her. The only downside is that Kherington has also decided to become extra clingy lately. She is not very happy when mom or dad walk away from her (whether it's a couple steps or out of the room)...but if she's happy and we can sneak away she's fine. In addition, she does seem to like females more than males.

*I guess I never actually posted anything about this here, but we are moving to Brussels, Belgium. Ryan will be starting his career at Deloitte and Touche with a 3 year rotation abroad. We're still working on Visas (getting closer to securing them) and anticipate starting January 11th. We are starting to learn French and are very excited for this adventure!

Our Little Munchkin

Kherington is getting bigger, smarter, and stronger. She keeps amazing us with new little tricks like transitioning from stomach to sitting, getting into her push-up/crawling position, actually walking around when you hold onto her hands, standing up on her high chair (she got in trouble for that one).

She's beginning to like playing with toys on her own more and more. One of her current favorites is her own computer.

Here's two videos of her. I took them this morning after she slept from 11pm to 6:30am! A nice little treat. She was however in our bed (I fell asleep with her...i was really tired), but still...grandpa and Ryan finally got a night without hearing her cry (I sleep through it for the most part). Anyways, I woke up at 5:50 like normal and she was still asleep. I left came back...still sleeping...left again came back and she was just stirring. She woke up all smiley faced instead of crying and then played downstairs.

Halloween 2009

For Halloween this year we went to Omniture's (now Adobe) annually Halloween bash and then out on the town. The highlights included:

• Adam and Ryan competing in a Chinese game show. Nylons are tied together. Each person puts the nylon on their head and then when the host yells go they try to go ring the bell. Well, Ryan and Adam were just too strong and ended up breaking the nylons.

• The next one from the Chinese game show was pretty good too. They asked for volunteers to compete in a hula hooping contest. So these little kids and grandparents go down to compete. Then they say: "When I blow the whistle start hula hooping. When I blow it again the audience will start throwing balls at you." Then preceded to hand out a bunch of nerf balls to the audience...hahaha

• Kherington dressing up in her first Halloween costume. She is a little charmer. She fell asleep for the entire last building, but we still got a couple cute pictures.

• Halloween evening we left Kherington with Ryan's Mom and Aunt (Thanks!) and when Chipotle hopping dressed up as burritos. Between the two of us we got 8 Chipotle burritos!
  

Major Purchase Time

For the past month we have been creating numerous lists of things we need to purchase; however, we haven't purchased very much. The idea of having to spend all this money upfront for furniture items to start our new place is somewhat daunting, especially since we don't own very much furniture right now. Nevertheless, we have come to grips that this needs to be done.

So, this weekend we focused on purchasing our major furniture items. We like to thank Erin's dad for letting us borrow his car for the weekend to transport a majority of these items. Our list consisted of 16 items, i.e., two dresser drawers, coffee table/toy storage, couch, crib, daybed w/ trundle bed, convertible car seat, high chair, kitchen table, etc.

We were very successful by getting our list down to only five items and three of them can be purchased next week online. We successfully used Craigslist, KSL (online classifieds) and IKEA to purchase a majority of the items. Below are two pictures of a couple items we really like.

A Crib for Kherington
We decided we couldn't let our daughter sleep in a Pack 'n Play for the rest of her life...and what's the first thing she did in it? Why, stand up of course. We had it at the highest level thinking it would be fine, but she proved us wrong...it got lowered to the next level.

New 27" iMac
You might be thinking we already had an iMac; however, I was able to return our old one when I heard about the new ones coming out.

This weekend was very successful. We are grateful to get a lot checked off our list of major items to purchase.