Happy Valentine's Day

YA

I asked Reese today if she could say Momma, she responded "Ya". The funny thing is she never said Momma, so either she's holding out on me or she's lying to me.

I got a bike for my birthday and last week we bought Reese a seat and helmet for it, then as soon as we got the seat hooked on the decent weather that would've allowed us to use to disappeared and it'll be at least a week before we get to go out. Reese had to settle for trying it out in the kitchen, I think she looks pretty cute.

Here's to hoping winter ends soon!

Prepare? We don't need to prepare!

I'm beginning to realize that Nate is leaving for Iraq in the near future, okay the very near future, and we've yet to get things ready. It's funny how my outlook has changed between the first deployment and the second. The first go around I talked to tons of people to find out what he should take, I made lists upon lists to make sure nothing was forgotten, I packed and repacked his bags to try and fit everything in the most efficient manner, and of course I had his bags packed and ready to go a few weeks out. This time things are different, a lot different. Nate just got his uniforms on Friday and I haven't given any thought to taking them to alterations and getting his stripes and nametapes sewn on, I figure he already has two ready to go and I'll just take these in whenever I get a chance and send them to him once he's there. I haven't pulled his trunks of deployment stuff up to go through, or gone to the store and picked up the list of toiletries he's supposed to take. I guess that's the difference between the first time and the subsequent times, this time there isn't as much to worry about. I know when he'll leave and I can guess when he'll be back, based on the completely inefficient travel schedule the military likes to operate on, and I know that he'll just be doing his day to day stuff only with mortar flying around. All in all there isn't too much unexpected about this deployment and there's quite a bit of peace in that, at least for me. Now the thing I am scared about, hmmmmm, those days when I can't wait for Nate to get home from work because I can't even go to the bathroom without Reese getting into things, scary.

Catching Up

Since it's been almost a month since I last posted I figured I'd just toss some pictures up and let them speak for themselves. We had a great Christmas, Reese did really well opening presents as she was dying to eat the paper and she got a lot of fun new things. She's becoming very independent which I find odd to say about an 8 month old that literally needs to be dependent upon her parents but it's true. She pretty much only likes to eat food that she can feed herself and gets a little upset if you try and give her too much "baby food", she'll play nicely with her toys until the second you walk out of the room and then she speeds over to anything that she knows she's not supposed to have. A funny example of this was a few days ago after breakfast she was playing with her toys on one end of the living room and on the other end there were a few sweatshirts and a pair of shoes or something on the ground, since it was cold outside I left her inside with her toys while I took Jaeger to the bathroom. As soon as I got outside I went to watch her through the living room window while Jaeger peed and in a manner of about 10 seconds she had gotten over to the sweatshirts and was looking for trouble. I tapped on the window and she looked up at me and when she realized she had gotten caught she smiled and started laughing and rolled back on over to where her toys were as if that was what she had been doing the whole time. Crazy little girl.
This picture was actually taken this morning, Nate got a bowl of cheerios and since Reese loves cheerios she went right over and dug in. It was soooo cute the two of them sharing and naturally Jaeger strolled in to pick up the ones that fell.Here she is eating her raviolis and pears since I am no longer allowed to feed her with a spoon.
I love making Reese laugh, she has the cutest laugh ever and it makes me laugh. Here she is trying to get into Jaeger's toybox, once she realized she was caught she tried to pull off an innocent look.This is how I found her one day after naptime, just lying in her crib with her feet propped up. She always either turns sideways or goes and sleeps in the corner, she likes to be cuddled and cramped.Nate and I each got Reese one gift that the other didn't know about and my gift to Reese was these nursery letters. The artist matched them to her bedding set exactly and they totally completed the room.Well I think that's the past 4 weeks in a nutshell, Reese popped both her bottom teeth at the same time the first weekend in January but I have no pictures because she won't move her tongue and we're getting ready for Nate's deployment so I plan to do a photoshoot of the two of them in the next few weeks. That's us.

Christmas Soon Will Be Here

Nate, Reese, Jaeger and I have really gotten into the Christmas spirit this week. We've got presents under the tree and Christmas music can almost always be heard in the background at our house. I've gotten really into making baked goods this year, I decided that it's what moms do and since I'm a mom now I need to get started. I've made 6 lbs of fudge and a bunch of magic cookie bars thus far and I have 6 more lbs of fudge and a few more cookie bar batches to make before Christmas.This past Saturday our friends wanted to go to the Trier Christmas Market and despite our experience last Saturday we decided to go back and soak in the Christmas spirit. Luckily, it was actually less crowded this time than it was the last time. We wandered through the stands looking at the crafts and of course had to get a Nutella and banana crepe to cap off the evening.

On Sunday we took Round 1 of Reese's Christmas pictures, she looked way cute in her dress. My friend Lindsay made a cute bow for her hair which totally completed the outfit, I'm definetly indebted to her since my attempts at finding anything for her hair were fruitless.

Merry Christmas everyone!!

My Christmas Nightmare

I had been looking for a Christmas dress for Reese for a little while now and kept coming up empty handed. I checked the selections at both Ramstein and Vogelweh when I was there and all the ones in her size were ugly and if I saw one that I did like it was way too big. A few weekends ago I almost broke down and bought one at the BX just because I knew that if I didn't send the fam a picture of her in a traditional little Christmas dress my mom would ask why I hadn't gotten one, you know you would have mom, but after I had carried the dress around the store I just couldn't go through with it so I hung it in all its hideous glory back on the rack. (I'd like to insert an apology here to anyone who might have seen these dresses and thought they were gorgeous).

Since we were still dressless this weekend we headed over to Trier to give the German stores a try, which is where my Christmas nightmare truly comes in. I don't know why I wasn't thinking that the walkplatz and the mall would be a nightmare of German crowds, but I was just imagining a regular amount of people. There was only one parking garage that still had spots available when we got to Trier at 10am and from the time we first saw the sign advertising 122 available slots til we finally pulled up to the lot, the sign read 60 slots. There were soooooo many people there for the Christmas market, and apparently to do their Christmas shopping, that we could barely manage to get from one area of the walkplatz to another, not to mention my Christmas cheer was going out the window as store after store there was not a single dress, let alone holiday dress in the baby section. I seriously wonder where Germans buy baby clothes because all I saw in up to roughly an 18 month size were pajama like outfits, but whatever.

We decided to take a break from the madness to get some lunch and all we were looking for was a place slightly off the walkplatz where we could all sit down and not be bombarded by people for a few minutes. Instead we found all that we were looking for and more in a place called Lousiana just behind the main area of the walkplatz. It's the German version of a stereotypical American restaurant and we LOVED it. The word big is everywhere, "Big American Buffet Breakfast" and "Classic BIG Burger" we were cracking up. Our favorite phrase was "Traditional Big American Apple Strudel" we didn't realize there was any such thing but it looked delicious. We both got amazing, and true to the advertisement, big burgers with super yummy cajun fries, not to mention BIG colas with ice which doesn't often happen in Europe.

Our escape into the American stereotype energized us to get back out and get to task, so we hit up the mall where we found an H&M kids and a dress that while not the traditional christmas dress you would imagine picking up at JcPenneys, will still serve our needs and is quite cute. I'm still looking for some accessories for it as attempts to find a little black headband or bow for her hair were fruitless as was my attempt to locate a black shrug or sweater to go over the dress, but I will not be deterred. We're headed to bitburg to look for anything that will work. Needless to say when we got home after that amazingly long day, we decided to lock ourselves in our house where no one could enter the "BIG American zone of personal space" that I like to maintain.

Postage

How is it that postage rates go up so fast? I bought stamps in October only to realize that when I put them on my Christmas cards today they were a penny short, so now I get to go buy some penny stamps. My angry postage realization led me to go on a hunt for all our old stamps so consider yourself lucky if you're one of the people that gets two .37 stamps or an .80 stamp on your Christmas card because I was too lazy to go buy a ridiculous number of penny stamps and stamp up the whole outside of the envelope just to use up my old stamps. I hate it when the post office gets the best of me.

The News

Well, we just found out that Nate will be deploying again in March. His leaving doesn't come as much of surprise, I mean we were hoping he wouldn't have to but we knew that his groups time was coming up again. The only surprise is that he'll be leaving in March instead of May, which is what we were expecting, and he'll be going for 5 months instead of the standard 4, which by the way in Air Force terms that means he'll be gone 6 months. He'll be spending his summer back in the sandbox of Balad, Iraq so I'm thinking he'll need a whole lot of sunscreen to keep his pastey skin from turning lobster red in the desert sun. As for Reese and I, we haven't quite decided what we'll be doing during his absence but I'm sure it'll include a trip to the states and a big 1st birthday party. For now we're focusing on the brightside which is that we get to spend this holiday season together and that when he gets back in the fall we'll get to spend those hard earned deployment benefits on a trip to Egypt.

Polska

I've been wanting to take this Krakow/Auschwitz tour for the past few Thanksgivings and finally this year we were able to go and it was such a cool trip. We left from Spangdahlem Wednesday night and arrived in Krakow around noon on Thursday after a long drive through the night and a breakfast stop around the border. Reese was amazing on the bus, she didn't make a peep and when we got to Krakow the other people on the bus couldn't get over how good she was. We wandered around, checked into our hotel room and rested up a little bit before our Thanksgiving dinner at a restaurant just off the main shopping area. We had some really good food, the polish sour soup was my favorite, and watched polish folklore dancers put on a show for us. During one of the segments Nate was selected to dance with the older Polish woman, he did a great job and Reese was quite excited to see daddy dancing. After dinner we walked around the area, but most things closed at 8pm so we just headed back to our hotel for an early night.


On Friday we got up early and went on a tour of Krakow. Reese started off as a happy camper, but naturally we had to have a meltdown moment on the trip so when we were about to go into a church we had been lagging behind the group with her since she was crying and we decided to stop outside and change her diaper. When we started this old polish woman grabbed us and nicely demanded we go inside to do it, so we're standing in this dark church trying to change her diaper in her stroller while she's screaming and echoing off the walls and naturally she ends up peeing as we change her diaper and gets pee all over her shirt and pants. When we got out of the church we had to laugh because what else could we do. After that she put her hapy face back on and we enjoyed the rest of our tour. Poland has such a neat history that I didn't really know much about before we went, but our tour guide really knew a lot and shared so much with us, especially world war II information. After the tour we went on our own with a few other people over to Oskar Schindler's factory (which they're turning into a museum so we only saw the outside), the Jewish ghetto and had some traditional Polish pierogis for lunch.

Later that evening we went out and did some shopping, you get three polish zloties for each u.s. dollar so our huge dinner cost us $17 and we were able to get some nice souvenirs for cheap as well. It's always nice traveling somewhere where you get more for your money. We got Reese this super cute polish pottery piggy bank and since the Krakow Christmas Market opened that day we wandered through and I got a few Christmas ornaments and some cute decorations. I love Christmas markets, and Nate loves trying the different foods at the Christmas markets.

Saturday morning we had to pack up our bags and get back on the bus for our drive to Auschwitz. Saturday was the coldest day of our trip and when we got to Auschwitz it was drizzling and pretty much miserable, I guess perfect weather for the event. There is so much to see there, our guide told us it would probably take 4 or 5 days to go through all the exhibits so we only went through a few during our nearly two hour tour but they were quite powerful. We went through a building about extermination and we learned a lot about the history of Auschwitz and all the satellite camps, but I won't detail that all here. Then we went through a building where they showed the things found at the camp upon liberation. There were rooms full of shoes that amounted to about 4 or 5 days worth of incoming people, it was madness. When we left the building everyone wanted to hold Reese just to lighten their moods, and it was so cute the way she went to everyone and gave them hugs and smiled at them. After our tour at Auschwitz we drove the short distance to Auschwitz-Birkenau which was the complete extermination camp, only about 10% of the people that arrived were processed instead of being led straight to the "showers" to be gassed. The camp is huge, there are a few barracks that with as cold as I was I couldn't imagine living in wearing only pajamas. Both the camps were really powerful and I don't quite know how to describe the feeling of being there in a mere paragraph, it would take pages, it really is something to experience.

When we left Auschwitz we started our long bus journey home and got back around 4am on Sunday. I'm so glad we went, I think Nate was skeptical about going at first but he had a great time as well.

6 Months Old

Since it's been almost a month since I blogged I better cover the highlights of November up to this point.

For Veteran's Day Reese and I took our vet to the zoo in Cologne. They have an aquarium which was the real point of the trip because Reese likes fish and I thought it would be fun for her. The zoo was huge and Reese enjoyed the animals, especially the baboons because they were feeding them when we got there and all the screeching caught her attention, but the highlight of the trip was the aquarium. She just stared at the fish and when one would swim past her face she'd follow it with her eyes until a different one swam by, it was really quite cute. Anyways, now we're calling her our future marine biologist.Beyond fish, her newest thing is wanting whatever you have in your hands. She tries to get telephones, remotes, anything. One day we were sitting at the table having pizza and she reached for the soda can and almost got it. We got the video camera out and it looks like a Pepsi commercial with her shoving everything out of the way to get to it, maybe I'll send my footage to Pepsi and they can make Reese a star......hmmm movie star and marine biologist.I'm sure there's more that I'm leaving out but who cares because my sweet baby girl is 6 months old, as of saturday. She's such a little crack up that I can't quite remember what I did for entertainment before she was born. She thinks it's hilarious to pull the pieces out of her exersaucer and throw them on the ground, then when I catch her in the act she opens up those eyes real wide and looks at me as if she has no idea how they keep getting pulled out. But that's Reese, she's a problem solver, she knows how to get out of her Bumbo chair, though it results in a crash, and she can get from one side of the room to the other yet she somehow does it without crawling or walking. She's an ingenious little girl and we're glad she's in our lives. I mean who wouldn't want this smile greeting them every morning?

We're leaving tomorrow to spend Thanksgiving in Poland so I'll be sure to post pictures from our trip to Krakow and Auschwitz when we get back.