More pictures

What we've been up to...

Nannie and Lilly on Mother's Day at the Providence airport

On our way home from Providence we stopped at Mystic Seaport

Nothing says Happy Mother's Day like a giant anchor!

On our way to Denver - Lilly wanted to put on her "pack-pack"
The portable DVD player - the greatest invention ever, an antsy toddler's best friend.

With Grandma and Grandpa T!

Making monkey faces with Grandpa T

Lilly and her friend Allie - kind of playing together, kind of ignoring each other

Lilly and her great-grandpa.  Always on the move!

Great-grandma Ella, Mike and his silly picture face, Uncle Mike

Lilly, Great-grandpa and Aunt Chris

The weather in Denver was beautiful!  Lilly at the park

A cute little smile on the swings

Lilly and Dada - ready for naptime!

Reading books with Grandpa T

Lilly and her doppelgangers!

Trying out the smile recognition feature on our new camera (I dropped our old one in NYC)

Lilly and Mike playing, I just missed a shot of her throwing up!  (just kidding)

Poor Addie's bite (they kindly agreed to pay our vet bill!)

Lilly and Mike at the West Hartford Memorial Day parade (don't worry, she was slathered in sunblock!)

"Are we finally going to get a band or is it another Girl Scout troop?"

I'm still here!

Hello to my three faithful readers :)  Sorry it's been so long - life has been good and rough and busy.  We got some tough news about Mike's dad's health, so we got to go out to Colorado to visit last week, which was so good for us.  It's hard to be so far away when you just want to be there.  If you're a pray-er we would love prayers for healing and peace for Michael and all of us.

I know that I can be quite verbose at times, so I will try to give some brief updates and thoughts:

The week before last my mom was here.  She was so determined to see Lilly - and Mike and me, of course :) - that she got out of bed and flew out here, still recovering from pneumonia and all.

This morning I ran the farthest that I ever have - 4.57 miles.  It felt good!  I didn't die!  I didn't even feel like I was going to die!  Good progress.

Mike gets to give his first sermon at our church here tomorrow.  I love hearing him speak, but don't think I'll get to tomorrow - for my last (or second to last) week as the interim head of the children's ministry I will probably be filling in in one of the classrooms again.  Bless all the volunteers, but my goodness they're flaky when it comes to actually being there!  So I'm disappointed that I won't get to hear him in person, but I've gotten to be there for all the drafts.  There's so much that goes into preparing Mike's sermons, it's amazing to see what God does in the process.

We bought The Little Mermaid for Lilly for our trip to Colorado.  She and I sat down to cozy and watch a few minutes of it before she went to bed tonight.  Tory used to watch that movie incessantly, but I still couldn't believe that I knew so many of the songs.  Lilly finally told me in a loud voice, "Mama no sing, just Aribow." (Aribow = Ariel)

We had to board Addie while we were in Colorado, which is very traumatic for our poor, sensitive dog.  Even worse, she was bitten by another dog while she was there.  They just casually mentioned it to me when I picked her up, but when I looked at it at home it was an incredibly deep and angry-looking bite, so off to the vet we went.  Poor sweet puppy, she wouldn't hurt a fly and the vet said that she was probably trying to get away when she got bitten.  It had been too long to give her stitches, so she's now on antibiotics and pain medication and I have to squirt some ointment into it three times a day.  It makes me weak when I think about it too much.  But lucky girl gets to go stay with my uncle Bill when we go on our next trip and I'm genuinely concerned that she's going to love it so much with him that she won't want to come home.

Jen and Lauren are coming for a quick visit this weekend!  We are SO excited to get to see them, and it's so awesome of Jen to make the trip.  We'll get lots of pictures of Lilly and Lauren together.

The countdown to 30 is T minus 17 days.  Au revoir my twenties...

Tomorrow afternoon we go to a cookout at Amy and Thad's.  I love a festive holiday weekend cookout!  And Thad makes a mean pomegranate cosmopolitan - yummy!  On Monday we head to the Strawberry Festival and then the West Hartford Memorial Day parade.  The weather was beautiful today - after my run at the reservoir this morning we all walked into town for coffee and muffins.  The bushes and trees and flowers are blooming.  I'm dying to plant some flowers, but we'll have to wait a few weeks because...

We get to go on our amazing trip to Europe with my family in a little less than two weeks!  With all that's going on, we thought we might not go, but instead we are taking Lilly out to Colorado to stay with Mike's parents.  She will also have such a good time that we're afraid she won't want to come home.  I've only been away from Lilly for five nights of her life, and I will be away from her for twelve nights and when I think about it too much my heart hurts.  But I know it will be good for her and I know it will be good for me.  She and I fly to Colorado on Wednesday morning and then I take the red-eye back to CT that night.  Then I take another red-eye to Spain on Friday night.  That also makes my heart hurt when I think about it too much :)

There are a lot of really amazing things going on in our lives, transposed with some really tough things.  At times like this we just have to praise God that we aren't in control of it all and that He is.  No matter what, even when I don't understand, that makes my heart happy.    

Finally, some pictures.

Okay, these pictures are completely out of order, but I give up.  It takes me way too long to post pictures.  Can someone give me a lesson?

This was just a few days ago, but it's for the Leesons - Lilly right after her first Fluffernutter!
Lilly and her BFF Uncle Joey.

Wondering what the dude in the red suit is doing...
Joey had just gotten there and she'd already roped him in to some Monkey George watching.
The first bite of Fluffernutter.  I think she thought it was going to be liver or something.  She's very untrusting of anything new I give her.
So proud that we had just arrived in NYC, just gotten to Central Park and she had already gotten her tights so dirty that we had to take them off!

Just.too.much.excitement!
Refreshed, posing in Bryant Park, dreaming of the day she'll walk the runway there (for all you Project Runway fans).
Thinking deep thoughts at the fountain across from The Plaza.
With Dada and Aunt Lishy in Rockefeller Plaza.
Still snoozing.
Listening intently to Uncle Corey read in his Smurf voice.
We finally got Corey to play some Guitar Hero - it's addictive!
Corey and Lishy got to watch Monkey George too.

The amazing dinner that Corey made for us.
Enjoying our picnic in Central Park.
Elmo!  (Mike swears that the people who dress up as Elmo for tips are probably some sort of pervert, but Lilly seemed to enjoy it nonetheless :)

Everybody gone. Sad.

To quote Lilly, "Everybody gone.  Saaaad."  We had a great visit with my dad and Lilly thinks that he's still riding around on a train somewhere, after we got to wave goodbye to his train as he pulled out of Hartford, heading for Washington D.C.  Then we had a great time with Alisha, Corey and Joey.  We all got to head to NYC, which was a first for everyone but me, but I hadn't been there in years.  We heeded no one's advice and decided to drive rather than taking the train, which actually worked out really well.  We parked right in Manhattan and hit the Trump Tower for a bathroom break.  I was hoping that there would be gold toilets, but instead they were a decidedly 80s pink.  From there we set out for the Carnegie Deli.  Upon arrival we saw that the line went half way down the block and opted instead for the seemingly charming Benash Deli across the street.  The food looked good and we were all excited for some authentic deli food.  We took our lunch and had a picnic in Central Park.  The park was fantastic, the food was not.  When you pay $25 (!) for a Reuben you sort of expect that it will be a good Reuben.  Actually, nothing was good, not the Reubens, not the latkes, not the matzo ball soup.  Oh well, everyone needs to get ripped off in New York once.

We walked around the park and then headed down Madison Avenue towards Rockefeller Plaza.  On the way we had our one celebrity siting of the day - we saw Darlene's boyfriend from the show "Roseanne."  He was standing on the sidewalk in front of his hotel, smoking.  Not quite what I had hoped for, but at least it was someone :)

Rockefeller Plaza was fun - I liked seeing where the Today Show is filmed.  Joey and Corey headed up to the observation deck at the top of the building and said that the views were amazing.  The rest of us didn't feel like ponying up the $20 admission fee.  Then we headed on to the seriously over-stimulating Times Square.  Lilly was so awed by it that she finally fell asleep in her stroller.  Then we went on to my favorite spot, Bryant Park.  It's such a pretty place right in the middle of it all.

Then we headed back up Fifth Avenue and poked around in a few stores.  We checked out The Plaza Hotel (beautiful!) before taking Lilly to FAO Schwartz.  She was really amazed by it.  Mike and I wanted to get her a little souvenir, but there wasn't anything that she wanted (who is this child?), so we continued on.

Corey was dying to at least have a drink at Daniel Boulud's restaurant, and we knew Lilly couldn't handle that, so Corey, Alisha and Joey headed there and Mike, Lilly and I got to make a pilgrimage to Chipotle!  Oh, how we've missed it!  It was fantastic and worth the 13 block walk in the cool, windy weather.  Then we headed back to West Hartford, which seems like a bucolic farm community compared with the excitement of NYC.

The next night Corey cooked us the most amazing dinner of crab-stuffed mushrooms and sea bass with fennel, apples and oranges.  It was AMAZING.  Corey is an owner and the chef at John's in Boulder and makes amazing food.  As someone who loves food, I so appreciate everything he makes.

Otherwise, we hung out in West Hartford, ate some more and Lilly was completely doted on by her aunt and uncles.  We really had such a good time with them and were so sad to see them go.  They are such great people and such great friends.  Lilly especially loves Joey and just wanted to watch him a lot.  She also loves Corey's Smurf-like reading voice and wanted to be with Lishy all the time.  I really love it when our house is full of people, so head for Connecticut for a visit soon!

In other news, I am writing this blog on our new Mac laptop.  I know, we are total Mac, yuppy nerds, but we are trying to do our part to stimulate the economy by spending our newly deposited check from the government on something really worthwhile :)  Actually, Mike and I have kind of been fighting over who got to be on the computer lately and we decided that we really need to be more portable.  It is fantastic to browse the internet from anywhere in the house!

My mom was in the ER the other night and finally went home with a diagnosis of pneumonia.  Get well soon, Mom!

Tonight we're having some friends over and tomorrow we're hoping to tackle some painting in the house.  We've painted almost everything downstairs, but the upstairs is all still stark white, so we've got lots of work to do.  Where is Tory the expert edger when we need her?  I had a meeting here the other night for the teacher's in our church's children's ministry and people really seemed to like our house, which was so nice to hear.  I guess the work we've done has paid off, as our house was for sale for a year and a half with no takers.  It's still kind of an odd place, but it's really come a long way.  Next weekend my mom is coming to visit and we're going up to Boston for my cousin's daughter's 2nd birthday party.  The next weekend we are heading out to Denver for a quick visit with Mike's parents and then Mike gets his first chance to preach at our new church on Memorial Day weekend.

In weight loss news, I am .1 pounds away from hitting a big milestone for myself, so I'm hoping that by next week I'll be in a new weight bracket.  I'm hoping to drop another ten pounds before our trip next month, which would at least put me in the same stratosphere as my pre-pregnancy and pre-hypothyroid weight range.  I might have to start pulling some two-a-days.  My trainer suggested sweating it out by overdressing in a hoodie at the gym, but I'm not sure that's a good look for me :)

Okay, enough is enough.  I'm just so comfortable lounging as I type this that I could go on forever...  I'll post some pictures soon from last week.  Have a great weekend!