Weekend

The weather has been incredible this weekend so we decided to spend time outside and go for a bike ride. The high yesterday was 82 and today it has been 77!
There's a bike path right behind our house.
This is the "view" behind our house. You can't tell very well in this picture, but you can see lots of hills in the distance.

Will loves to use utensils now. As you can tell, he sometimes drops some on his shirt, but he's getting pretty good at making it to his mouth. We've given up on bibs b/c he pulls on them the entire meal and doesn't eat nearly as well. Good thing I do a load of laundry every day...

Playing in the water table at Nick's house and being silly, of course

Will & Zach in the sand box, they kept sharing toys and handing shovels back & forth to each other

Will's new thing is to say, "Goal" and stick his hands in the air like this.

Other news:
-We no longer own 2 houses! The buyers closed on our house in TX on Friday, thankfully. We had several little things come up the last week. Our window treatments were missing at the buyer's walk through (they were there when the movers left) so it appeared that someone came in our house and took them down afterwards. Very strange. Thanks Ruth for shopping for the replacements for me! Then, last week I find out our sprinklers weren't running for several days and our lawn was turning brown. Great. We're just glad to be done with trying to keep it up while we're living 1500 miles away.
-Robert is on a plane to Austin right now for business. He'll be there until Friday. We're a little jealous and homesick, but we'll make it. We do miss our friends & family and we've also been craving some Rudy's and some good Tex Mex. We're planning on coming with him for the next trip.

This is what you get when you combine sidewalk chalk and a sprinkler...fun!

County Fair

We had a fun time at the county fair yesterday with some neighbors. Here are Aubrey & Nick checking out the pigs.
Aubrey loved getting a shooting star glitter tattoo.

Enjoying a picnic with hot dogs, chips & lemonade

Aubrey & Nick watching the circus show

Playing a bean bag toss game

We were attempting to get a group shot with all 4 big kids and 4 babies, but this is what we got with only 2 pairs on the blanket... We decided it wasn't worth it. The kids had a great time, but I think everyone was ready for a nap by the end of it!

Little Linebacker

The Redskins practice field is about 2 minutes from our house, so we stopped by on Saturday for a free fan event. I wouldn't necessarily call us Redskin fans, but it was fun to stop by and they had lots for the kids to do. Here's Will posing as a player. People have referred to him as a linebacker since the delivery room(weighing in at 9 lbs) and ever since because of his motor skills and activity level. Also, his favorite game lately happens to be tackling. He loves tackling Aubrey and unfortunately any unsuspecting baby we happen to be around... Anyway, our little linebacker was 15 months yesterday -- here's a few highlights of him lately:
-he's getting his 4th molar and all 4 of his eye teeth or whatever those sharp ones are called. This is not fun, we hope they come in soon so he'll hopefully go back to sleeping better.
-he's talking a ton and even putting 2 words together sometimes like, "eat waffle"(these are usually the first words out of his mouth every morning!)
-Some of his other favorite words are: dater(water), duice (juice), dup (cup), dar (car),Desus (Jesus - every time he sees Aubrey's Bible), bubble, bubble ba (bubble bath), nanet (planet) and erf (earth), dent (tent), nunnel (tunnel), ball, ello (hello), etc...

-he's using a few signs : more, all done, air plane, bird, please, thank you and baby. Baby is his favorite and he does it a bazillion times a day

-he loves making animal sounds

-he's already shaking his head, saying "no, no no" and we've even seen a few foot stomps to go along with it -- not yet, I'm not ready!

-He's doing great though and we absolutely adore spending every second with him!

Unpacking

This truck arrived at 7:30 a.m. last Sunday and was gone by 2 p.m.

We've been trying not to drown in all the paper the packers used. I can't tell you how many times I unwrapped 5 sheets of paper to find a marble, a paperclip and a penny!

We have chairs...

...and a couch! We're hoping to get most of the boxes and paper out of the house this weekend, we'll see if we can get it done.

Other stuff...

We thought we'd miss HEB, but Aubrey likes the new grocery store even better. Not only does she get a balloon and a cookie, but a grocery cart just her size.
We've been doing lots of park hopping, as well.
Will seems to like running around the empty house. I wonder what he'll think of all the furniture next week?

More visits to the neighborhood pool.
Lots of playtime at home while Will naps
A train ride at the mall, another carousel ride, and lunch at Chick-fil-A

Neighbors & Parties

Carleigh's 4th of July party

Aubrey with her new buddy, Nick, at our other neighbor, Jet's birthday.
Aubrey & Carleigh
Will loved the corn on the cob!

Air & Space Museum

I'm getting caught up on posting some pictures from our first week here. Here are some from the Air & Space Museum. Since it's free and we have an empty house to come home to, we randomly stopped in after returning our rental car to the airport.

Child astronaut doll?

3D Space Shuttle simulator ride

Week 2 Update

Enjoying a cool treat on the mall

Checking out the bugs at the museum
Aubrey loved getting to hold a real caterpillar!

Another carousel ride on the mall

Getting ready to get on the train
First metro ride
A keeps talking about how we got to ride underground.
A is fascinated by spiders, especially this poisonous tarantula. She already knew about this orange & black one from her spider book, so she was excited to see it up close.

It's hard to believe we've already been in VA for 2 weeks! Things are still going well -- we're getting more and more familiar with our surroundings and have gotten into a pretty good "temporary" routine, since we're still camping in.

-Our house is officially packed and the moving truck will be heading out tomorrow. Our stuff will arrive next week, by Wed. at the latest.

-We also have a contract on the house and the buyers are scheduled to close on Aug. 15, so that's an answer to prayer!

-The kids seem to be doing well and playing well with the 1 box of toys we packed -- blocks, legos, cars & trucks and animals. Today I heard Aubrey playing school with her animals and telling the class, "Jupiter is made of mostly gases and has 16 moons". Can you tell her favorite book lately is her children's encyclopedia? I think not having a tv has been a really good thing for our daily routine, we hope it sticks once we do have it here.

-We took our first ride on the metro into DC on Saturday and went to the Natural History museum and hung out on the mall b/t the Capital and the Washington Monument. Aubrey rode the carousel and had a popsicle and Will ran around and chased birds the whole time.

-We're looking forward to a visit from Gigi this weekend!

-Hopefully, I'll get caught up on pictures soon. Here are a few from our weekend...

We made it!

Happy 4th of July from our Nation's Capital! Tonight will be our 5th night in VA and everything is so far, so good. The kids did great on the plane, the night in the hotel went well, the closing went smoothly and we are in our house. We're all sleeping on air mattresses and Will in his pack'n'play and we bought a card table & a few folding chairs from Target to eat at until our furniture arrives. I actually think that Aubrey & Will are enjoying the empty house b/c there is so much room to run around and play. We packed a big rubbermaid container with toys, so they are keeping themselves entertained. Also, we went to the Smithsonian Air & Space museum yesterday and the kids had fun looking at all the air planes, space shuttles and Aubrey even rode on a 3D space simulation ride. All the museums are free for VA & MD residents, so we're going to try to hit them all. We also had 2 different neighbors come and introduce themselves to us in the past few days and they both invited us to 2 different parties this weekend. So, we already went to a neighbor's 2nd birthday this morning and Aubrey & Will got to meet lots of new friends. Tomorrow, we're supposed to go to a July 4th/ fireworks party with over 100 neighbors attending. Our street is crawling with kids 6 years and under, so it should be a good spot for our fam for the next couple years. We're enjoying the noticeably cooler weather and the tall trees and having fun exploring our new surroundings. But, we do of course miss you all and Aubrey has mentioned a couple times that she wants to go back to our old house in Texas. I'm sure it'll take time for all of us for it to really feel like home here.