August, Part V
August 15th, a little later than our last entry, it was time for another trip to the park with Grandma Barb before she went home the following day!!
Sittin’ on a frog. See this image larger.
Maximum velocity slide goooooooo! See this image larger.
The inevitable “I am currently unhappy with you because we have to go home” segment of the park trip. See this image larger.
Nina’s ready to go! See this image larger.
Another shot of the front of our house. This one makes our shutters look less green. I like it! See this image larger.
That other side of the front. See this image larger.
Fire pit! See this image larger.
It was great having you here, Barb, we’ll see you soon! (And we did!)
August 15th… *Hi Grandma!* 
The playroom, but Ian sorta looks like he’s out of play… 
*This way to your room, Gramma!* 
The sunroom, clean-ish! 
Nina continues to impress with her fine motor skills. 🙂 
Dining room. 
Living room and Ian’s bunny. 
August 13th, our Princess at the park! 
Ian skillfully digging at the same park. 
Woohoo! 
This is where Grandma Barb crossed the line and let Nina go down the sli– I’m totally kidding. She just set her on there and took a pic! 🙂 
August 14th, Melissa took Barb and the kids to a function wherein they needed kids paintings… no problem! 
Lured by the scent of a dirty diaper, potential babysitters swarmed. (I’m kidding, they said she was cute!) 
*I’m painting with this?!?* 
August 5th, I took this one of Ian in the sunroom, quietly (well, sometimes quietly) making up adventures. 
August 6th, I believe this was the day Grandma Sue went home, but not without sharing a tender moment with her grandkids! 
August 8th, our first day alone in our new house… this was when I really started to wonder about the move, I think. I missed the old place a bit. 
Our little ones acclimated very quickly, it seemed. This little angel here likes the sunroom. 
The other angel loves the playroom. 
Hopefully there’s no extra significance here, might have been her first time in the high chair at the new house. 
August 9th, while her gross motor skills were lagging, Nina’s fine motor skills were doing great. I’m not sure which of those interacting with this box of wipes falls into, but if you could have seen how she hefted this thing up onto her belly and flipped it around, you’d have been impressed. 
August 11th, just the view out the back of the office, through the screen. By now I’ve begun to get a little more comfortable, but it would take the changing of a few things before I’d really learn to relax at the new house. Keep in mind I work from home. Being uneasy is really not good. 
August 1st, I can’t remember (at this moment) precisely when 224 Arbor started to feel like home. It still doesn’t completely feel that way, it is a feeling that has to grow on you. At this point I was worried we had made the wrong decision… but it was interesting to see us all making use of the sunroom. 
August 2nd, Ian hangs out on the porch with Greg and Mommy and I… Greg came over from Owosso to help unload those 8 Pods… a couple days later they were emptied at last. Was very happy to get them out of the driveway. 
August 3rd, all too soon the sunroom became the playroom — we got it back under control eventually… well… I guess. At least half of it turned into a play-pen, but man did we ratchet down Ian’s toy use. I mean he’s maybe down to half of the 50% that’s left. 
Camera flash surprise Nina! 
I don’t really have time to photoshop the stuff in her nose out of there, but let’s pretend I left it there to remind us that at this point Melissa and I were thinking heavily about a surgical procedure on the horizon. 
My little sweet pea! 
August 4th, Ian and I driving around… those are “safety belts” and a “steering wheel.” 
Grandma Sue stayed awhile after the move and took some shots of the new house. This is the front, obviously. 
The back. 
My office. 
July 29th, and it was almost time to leave 139 Highlander. Grandma Sue, Grandma Marcia and Grampa Dave worked together to help us make a truly impossible move possible. I thank them all from the bottom of my heart. A move can be a very stressful time, and Melissa and I were still reeling from the Cystic Fibrosis scare and the Choanal Atresia news… hopefully we didn’t freak out too bad. Pictured here you can see we still had a long, long way to go. 
This is the 2nd set of Pods, we ended up with 8 total — and it would turn out we wouldn’t see those at the new house until that Monday, a few days later than we had hoped. 
Mommy packing kitchen stuff. Somewhere off camera the cat has been taken for an overnight stay at a vet clinic. 
July 30th, and this is the day we moved out of 139 Highlander Drive. Grandma Marcia gets cat hair off of curtains here. He has a talent for spreading his message. I’m proud of my family for taking the time to really clean the house for the new people. I would think everybody would want to move into a completely clean house. 
Grandma Sue cutting the rug… again, this is for the new people, a touch we didn’t have to do, but did. (Grampa Dave, I don’t think we got a picture of you helping, because you and I were out so much in the truck and whatnot those days… and more importantly, the camera was already packed! Sorry!) Suffice to say, I can’t thank you all enough. Thank you. 🙂 
Grandma Sue took some pictures while we were on our way out… Ian here looks sad, and I really think he was… however keep in mind it did not last much longer than the pictures you see here. Thank you Grandma Marcia for the balloon, it helped Ian through this. 
“My closet is empty!” 
“See?!” 
And there goes the stuff! This guy was great other than the time he speared one of the pods with his forklift… turns out it didn’t hurt anything, miraculously. 
July 31st, everybody but me spent the night at a hotel because the carpets were drying. I stayed mostly because the plan said to do so. I wrote the plan. Truth is it turned out I didn’t need to, but it was an interesting experience anyway. While I was there, Nina enjoyed hotel goodness as pictured here. 
Family bonding! 
And then at the new house, enjoying the swingset! 
If you can’t tell, it was around this time that Ian’s sadness went away, replaced with pure happy. 
And how could it not? The new house has playground equipment! And a tree that’s more than 3″ in diameter! 
July 17th, the Pods showed up this day… I mostly took this picture to track the numbers in the corner in case they were lost. You see, the company picks them up and plops them in a warehouse full of Pods. The idea of losing our stuff in a warehouse somewhere concerned me. 
July 24th and things started to get down-to-the-wire for moving. Here Ian helped me out with a box full of stuff! If I remember correctly Grampa Dave and Grandma Marcia helped us with some packing around this time and we moved mountains I didn’t think were possible to move. (I’m looking at you, elliptical exercise machine.) The basement was pretty much emptied, but there was a long haul ahead of us. 
It was also fun when Ian helped me load some items into the Pods. Here you can see he carried chalk, a boat, and a few other toys into the Pod all by himself! 🙂 
July 26th, it is a credit to the expert packers (mostly Grampa Dave and I) that we got away with hardly any casualties in the move. This shows an example of the Pod I was most proud of. Ian’s turtle sandbox made up the keystone. 
July 12th, Ian and I discover that the track he got for Christmas a long time ago can actually become cool hats. So. We wore them. 
Unless somebody tells me otherwise, I believe July 12th was Nina’s first solid food… rice cereal! 
A lot of it ended up back out on her face, but once it got in there on the second or third push… it was found to be fully acceptable by the patron. 
July 15th, the previous ER trip with Nina led us here to the ENT. I took this picture there, and it serves as a reminder of a feeling I had at the time. Fear, mostly. This is when the topic of Cystic Fibrosis was brought up, and a test was scheduled for about a week later. This is also when Nina was first diagnosed with Choanal Atresia, that she has only one open nasal passage. 
Nina and Mommy snooze in the background, Ian in the fore. 
July 10th when our friends Elena and Scott offered up that Ian could stay the night if we needed some time to pack, we took her up on it quick. 
Ian grabbed his backpack for the overnight stay… he looked adventurous with it on, so I told him to put his hand up to his head and squint off into the distance like an explorer. Somehow we ended up with this sleepy salute, but that’ll do. 
This was his first sleepover! Such a brave boy! (I only stayed up and worried a little.) 
Click! 
Click! 
Click! 
Click! 
Click! 
On July 2nd we had 224 Arbor inspected, here’s Melissa writing something down on a piece of paper like “OhMyGawdWeLuvUrHouse.” (Probably not.) 
There were clues that we might not have enough room for stuff, if we looked around carefully enough. 
You’re probably wondering how we could let the Fourth of July pass without an adorable and patriotic photo of our children wearing red, white and blue. Well, we did take this picture on the Fourth, we just didn’t post them at the time. Here! 🙂 
A bonus picture for your patience! 
July 6th, Ian brought his laptop downstairs and joined Daddy for work in the office! 
My favorite co-worker of all time! 
July 7th, and Target loses the fight of marketing vs sleepytime. 
July 9th, we ended up in the emergency room based on a phonecall from daycare stating that Nina was having difficulty breathing. This would eventually lead to her procedure on September 21st, though at the time we figured she was just a little stuffy. She was started on a nebulizer. (which sounded so futuristic, I had to throw in a laser sound effect “pew-pew!!!”) 
That evening Daddy and Ian foraged for food on our own while Mommy stayed with Nina… we went to the “Pizza Store.” Ian looks hungry. (If we haven’t mentioned it previously, restaurants are referred to as “stores” for now, by food type or menu item of Ian’s interest. “Peanut Butter & Jelly Store” and “Mexican Store” are other examples.) 