The Long Drive to Texas

The next thing that I will catch you up on, is the trip. So, Dexy's birthday was on the 6th and on the 7th he had his one-year well child check-up. His appointment was at 9:30 AM. I had stayed up late into the night finishing all our laundry so that we would be ready to go. Then, while Dexy and I were at his appointment, Brian loaded the car. And when Dex and I got back, it was time to go! It came fast! We said our good-byes to Marie and her family and Amanda and Ben at Dexy's party the evening before. Grandma and Grandpa Bowles said bye to us early in the morning before they left for work. Hollianne and Angela were there to help us with the boys while we got everything ready and then it was time for our final good-bye to them. These 2 girls have been such good friends to me and to my boys!! It was especially hard for Hollianne, who entered the MTC on the 19th - she was saying good-bye for much longer than the summer! We love you all and will miss you!

We didn't want to pay for a U-Haul (and our apartment out here is furnished), so we just stuffed the essentials into our little Elantra and then crammed ourselves in on top of it. And when I say stuffed, I mean STUFFED!

It was a long drive, but the boys were fantastic! We stopped along the way to eat and get gas and change a diaper or two, but that was about it. They were so good. We stayed in a hotel in Gallup, NM the first night and Childress, TX the next night. On our third day, Brian had wisely planned for us to only have to drive about 4 and a half hours to finish out our trip as we dropped from Childress down into the Dallas/Ft. Worth area and to our summer abode.

Our apartment complex is very nice, in a good area (right across the street from a golf course and a lot of huge houses) and close to a couple of freeways. Plus, the carpet is not brown, neither are the walls, there's an oven, a lock on the door, a washer and a dryer right in our unit, and a real bathtub with a faucet and a drain and everything!!! It made the boys very pleased, as you can see...

The boys were so happy to be free from the car and their restraints, that they got right down to business, playing and getting settled into our new place. Within the first couple of days, Ollie had figured out how to climb up onto the dresser in their room.

Dexy worked on spreading the toys around and breaking in the trucks by attempting to ride them.
And of course, there was wrestling to be done on the not cat-infested-oober-disgusting
carpet! So nice to have a floor that I can watch me boys play on without feeling worried that they're going to be contaminated by it!
We're settled in and happy and now that the boys have stopped having issues adjusting to the climate here (we had a week and a half of killer allergies turned into what I call the "barfarrhea" disease - it was a nasty one!) all is well and good. Brian is working super hard and is gone from 8:30 AM to 10 or 10:30 PM. Long days for all of us, but he already has about 20 sales so it is going well. It's starting to heat up and it's pretty humid here - good thing we have a pool in our complex!

Dexy's 1 Birthday!

OK. So Dexy's birthday was on May 6th and this is way behind, but we don't have the internet at our place. I had to remember to bring my pictures to my sister, Heather's house for Sunday dinner. And I have a LOT of pictures from our time here! I decided that I would just try to catch us up a little. Since this was Dexy's 1st b-day, it' a big deal, so we'll go back and cover that first. Dex loves animals! They are his favorite. He's only one and he already knows the sounds that a sheep, a cow, a pig, a duck, and a dog make because he just loves them and always wants me to read him animal stories. We, therefore decided that we should take him to the zoo for his birthday. He loved it! And Ollie thought it was pretty cool, too! k

It was kind of cold that day and a lot of the animals weren't outside, but it was still fun and the boys liked it. We saw elephants, giraffes, peguins, camels and a lot of monkeys and primates and small animals. One little howler monkey came right over to the window to get close to Ollie.

They also have one of those fun, round stones that you can push because there's water running over it. The boys really liked that. Anything with water is fun!

But what they liked the best was the playground. We stopped to play there on our way out and it was great. Dexy's favorite, unexpectedly, was the teter-totter! He thought it was a blast and Ollie of all people didn't really like it. Very weird, since Ollie is generally our crazy, dangerous child. But we put him on it and he almost instantly wanted off. Dexy, on the other hand, didn't want to get off!
Ollie liked the slides. He went to the pink elephant slide first, but then we found a big, tube slide that looked like a snake. It had fangs on the side of the exit and everything. It was quite a fast slide, with a lot of stairs to climb, but Ollie ran right over and did it all by himself. Now this was the opposite - I took Dexy down the slide twice and that was enough for him, but Ollie wanted to slide down again and again and again!

Then we went back to the Bowles house to have dinner and cake for our little b-day party. Marie and her family came over to celebrate with us. It was great to have lots of family there to play with us for Dexy's birthday and to get to see them one more time before we left for the summer.
It was a fantastic 1st b-day, I think! I'm glad that we were able to celebrate it and not let his b-day get lost in the chaos like I did with Ollie's 1st b-day (sorry, again, my Ollie boy! I'll never again let a birthday fall by the wayside)! And now my Dex is a big, one-year old, boy. He's offically a baby no more. Sniff, sniff, cry, cry! I'm kind of sad to loose my baby, but I am loving the fun one-year old stage. He is getting so big.

Dexy is developing a personality of his own. He loves to stand up on high places (such as the table or the top of a playground) and stomp just one foot. We've started calling it "The Dexy Stomp" and we even sing a song about it when he does it. He loves reading stories, swimming (he's less scared than Ollie and likes to lay on his tummy and kick his feet while trying to blow bubbles in the water) and teasing his big brother. Kind of backwards. I know, right?! But he drives Ollie crazy with his teasing sometimes. He's generally so happy and pleasant and is such a sweet kid, but when he's sad he is so sad! He has such a loud, pathetic cry that makes you feel so sad for him. He's also getting so he likes to laugh and play with people. We love our sweet Dexy boy and are so glad that he pushed his way into our family when he did!

Happy Birthday beautiful, one-year old, boy! We love you so much!!

The Count Down Begins

Dexy turns 1 on Thursday and then he has his 1 year routine check-up on Friday morning. We are leaving for Texas right after his appointment. I realize that I didn't fill everyone in on the details (sorry, Emily), so I will now. I tried to do a post a while ago, but it didn't work and it was late, so I never re-did it. Here's what's up. Brian has a wonderful opportunity to go to Texas with a summer sales company. He will be selling pest control there. His friend who got him hooked up with it make quite a bit of money doing the same thing last summer. We are looking forward to the adventure and really hope that it will be a succesful trip. This company does this in several places all over the country, but they let Brian choose his area. He picked the Dallas/Fort Worth area for me, so that I could spend the summer with my oldest sister, Heather, who lives in that area and we therefore don't get to see her or her 5 beautiful kids very often. He will be out knocking doors all day (hopefully getting tons of sales), so it will be great for me to be close to at least one person I know. We will be there until mid/late August. We are getting so excited!

A down side to all of this is the stuff! I had no idea that we had collected so much junk in our last place. It was pretty small and we only lived there for a little over a year, and we still managed to gather up a bunch of stuff. We will only be in Texas for a few months, so Brian's parents have very generously offered to let us keep all of our crap at their house. But we moved out in a hurry, so it's all kind of unorganized. Now we have the daunting task of going through ALL of our stuff, deciding what to keep, what to donate, what to junk and then boxing it all up and organizing it in the Bowles unfinished basement without having it take up too much space or be to obnoxious! Today was our first day on the job. We made piles all over their basement and now it looks like a real mess, but I guess it has to get worse before it can get better.

And my poor boys tried to keep themselves occupied, but it didn't last too long, so we had to close them in the room with the TV and all their toys so that they wouldn't totally be undoing all of our efforts. I'm sure that by the time we sort through it all, they'll have abandonment issues.

But, I did get to spend time with them this evening, so hopefully the feeling won't be permanent. They were being really cute before bed as Ollie tried to talk on the phone and then shared it with Dex, saying, "here Dexy, it fo you."

And they haven't had a night since we've been here where they've fallen asleep without talking, laughing, crying, screaming, just generally struggling because there is usually noise and something going on. But tonight, we finally got a break from all the noise! Everyone ended up gone when it came time for me to put them to bed and it was so nice for us to have a smooth, quiet, fuss-free bedtime again! But it has been really fun to be here playing with Brian's family and letting the boys make bonds with everyone, especially because one of Brian's sisters entering the MTC just a couple weeks after we leave. Anyway. They're just so cute! And I hope we can get everything pulled together by Wednesday night, so that we can enjoy Dexy's birthday on Thursday and hit the LONG road on Friday! Good Luck to us - we'll need it.