Back in the Blogospere .... AGAIN!

17 days ago I broke my elbow, and I'm finally feeling up to blogging again...

I broke my elbow falling down the stairs holding Audrey.  So not to fall on her, I kept her upright, and landed on my other side.  A direct hit to the inside ball of my right elbow.  We had workmen in the house replacing our boiler.  They had thrown a bunch of scraps out front, and some guy was at the front door gesturing like he wanted to take the metal.  Our boiler is on the 4th floor, so I had run all the way up there to grab one of the guys, and was running all the way back down.  I slipped on the second or third step from the bottom right outside our kitchen, and landed on the ceramic tile.

At first I thought I had just hit my funny bone.  But the pain was insane.  It hurt to move at all, even if I thought I was keeping my arm still.  And it just continued to intensify.  Matt rushed home from work, and we had our friend Maureen come over to stay with the girls, so we could go to the hospital.  I would by lying if I didn't say I had several minor freak outs on the way to the hospital.  I was almost certain I was going to need surgery, they were going to have to put me under and I didn't even say good bye to the girls.  Poor Matt having to listen to me and drive.....

We had never been to the hospital in Brussels before, but had heard some positive stories of experiences others have had.  Matt dropped me off at the emergency room, and went to park the car.  I walked in and found my way to the check in.  Once Matt got there, we were immediately taken back to be examined.  Two different people looked me over - I don't know if they were doctors or nurses, but I have to guess doctors, as you don't see very many nurses here.  I was having a hard time with the pain and describing where it was exactly.  They took me to have xrays, and twisted me every which way and took at least 5 different pictures.  We waited about 5 minutes, and they had the results and whisked me to the casting room.  Casting was uncomfortable, to say the least.  At one point, I told someone in the room that the pain was worse then child birth.  When they were done, I argued with them about the state of my cast.  It was only plaster on the bottom, and just gauze on top.  I was like...'uh, where's the rest?'  I thought we were having language issues.  But eventually another doctor confirmed that it was right.  I wasn't convinced.

So we were sent home, with the weakest pain pill prescription EVER.  Ibuprofen 400!  WHAT?  I at least got 800 when I had the girls!!  Anyway.....  Katie and India hightailed it over from London the next day.  We were not sure how the pain was going to be, so they hung out with us for the weekend, and then we loaded up 3 small children and a weeks worth of 'stuff' into a Prius and made the drive to London on Sunday.  It was really an easy drive, all things considered, and really cool to take the car train across the Chunnel.

What a blessing to have Katie so close.  She was a life saver!  For all of us.  Matt is so busy with work right now, and the last thing he needed was to play nurse maid.  We had planned on being in London towards the end of the week anyway because he had meetings, so it worked out well.  We were all able to travel back to Brussels the following Sunday on the Eurostar.

So now to continue catching up....

Up next, our visit to Quincy.

Then we'll do Florida, London/Windsor, and the Brussels 2012 Flower Carpet.  All before the first day of school on Wednesday!!!  Lots of catching up to do!!  Thank God I can use my right hand/arm again.  Mostly.  The cast came off last Monday, and every day it gets a little bit better.  I go back in a week for another examination of how I'm healing.  Turns out the cast was only needed to control the pain and really not to aide in healing.  Only time can heal. 

Pretty in Purple Photo Shoot

This morning when we were getting ready for church, a purple and grey themed emerged....  so I hoped that the predicted all day thunderstorms would hold off until after church so we could get a few shots.

And luckily they did!!

But snapping pictures of these two girls looking at the camera together is IMPOSSIBLE.

 

Audrey is looking blonder......  and her hair is still wild!

 

Grace is just too silly to hold still....

 

 

Hard  to get everyone looking and smiling together.....

 

Almost for Mommy's picture....

It was so nice out, we had lunch outside.  And it was so warm and SUNNY (SHOCKING), we moved the table into the shade in the grass.

The thunderstorms rolled through during dinnertime.  And are already gone.  Hopefully we'll have some more sun and warm temps tomorrow, too.

A (RARE) Night Out on the Town

While we were in London, Matt and I enjoyed a rare night out on the town to meet up with some good friends, Mohit and Erica, that recently relocated there.

So good to meet up with some friends, and enjoy some quality adult time catching up.  Thanks to Granny, Hapa, Uncle Terry and Aunt Katie for keeping an ear open for two little girls sleeping soundly upstairs while we went out.  Much needed!

Monday Morning Fiasco

Thought you may all enjoy my Monday morning fiasco....

I had to go to the local grocery store to get some things for dinner, get some pictures taken for our photo IDs and have a spare key made. Sounds easy enough. Matt drove with me yesterday so I would know my way. Stores are closed on Sunday, so we couldn't just do it then......

So I load the girls up around 10am and head out. Found my way easy enough. Got a parking spot. Got out and suited up with the Ergo to carry Audrey so Grace could ride in the cart. And that's about when Audrey started to scream. And she proceeded to scream until we got back to the car. She screamed while we got our cart - which it's like Aldi here and you have to pay for your cart ( you get it back when you return the cart). She screamed while we walked inside. She screamed while we waited patiently for the man who would take our pictures and make our keys finished with another customer. She screamed while I tried to explain with minimal french and a lot of finger pointing that I needed 3 pictures for each girl and 5 for me, and one each of both house keys. Turns out pictures come in sheets of 4, so once we all understood that, we were doing good. All except Audrey who just continued to scream. Grace did great getting her picture taken! She even smiled nicely! I look frazzeled in mine, and Audrey looks like she is screaming, which she was...... so anyway, we pay, and then head off to grocery shop......Audrey screaming the whole way. The whole store is looking at me like I'm stabbing her in her eyeballs. I felt like someone was stabbing me in my eyeballs. So we're halfway through the store, I'm trying desperately to find Worcestershire sauce. And then a mouse ran in front of me. I think Grace and I both jumped out of our shoes. Any squealing we may have done, or those around us with in 50 feet were of course muffled by Audrey's screaming! I threw in the towel on the Worcestershire sauce, and headed to the checkout. The nice girl spoke English to me, so that was a plus. I forgot my bags, so had to buy some......

So we get out to the car..... Audrey is still screaming..... we load up, return our cart, get our Euro back.... and try to head home..... and get to where I have to turn on the only street I know to take home, and it is closed for PAVING. Luckily, Audrey is not screaming anymore. The GPS can't acquire satelites, I have no cell phone, don't speak French, Brussels roads are crazy.... so I just start driving. I must have circled the grocery store 5 times before I got brave enough to go down a new street. And every time I tried a new street, I circled back a little bit so I could at least get myself back to the store so we could just walk, if need be. I finally found a familiar landmark and got myself home. But I think it will be awhile before I drive again. At least until they are done paving the one road I know!

Dentist

Yesterday, I had an appointment to get my teeth cleaned.... and Grace had an unexpected day off school because of a water pipe bursting, so I took her in with me for her very first visit with the dentist. She did so well! She sat and watched while Dr. Sparkman cleaned my teeth. (Tiffany, Elaine and Charmaine were all out and are going to DIE when they find out I was in with both girls and we're moving!!! This is only relevant to the one blog reader who actually knows these guys...)

Anywho, Dr. Sparkman has this cool camera he uses to look at my teeth on a flat screen, so he was showing Grace my teeth, and then asked if she wanted to see her teeth on TV. Bingo. She jumped up into my lap and let him explore away. Everything looks great. No cavities, and all 4 molars are working there way in. During xrays, Dr. Sparkman lured Grace away with some evil stickers. She had two huge stickers on each arm and one on her shirt. The stickers are evil because whoever made them should sell their secret adhesive recipe to band aid makers. Those suckers will not come off without a fight. Grace still has one on because the others hurt so bad coming off they left marks!!

After my xrays, Dr. Sparkman asked if Grace wanted her teeth cleaned too. She reluctantly agreed, and sat in my lap as he showed her the tickly brush. She opened wide, and let him tickle almost all her teeth. If her tongue hadn't been in the way, he probably would have gotten all of them.

As a reward, she got a new toothbrush and TWO tubes of toothpaste. She was happy as a clam and so proud! Mommy, too. I took her to Chikfila on our way home, and THAT is a story for another day, and probably not cyber space. :)

Up Close & Personal with Audrey

Alternatively titled...'Mommy has a Double Chin'!

Easter Egg Hunt

Face painting



The Bunny Face



Game Face



The Hunt









Checking Loot with Daddy post hunt

Countdown

I am 35 weeks pregnant today. That means I have 35 days till Sprout is expected to arrive. And we have 3.5 days till Daddy is home. I think I should play 3 and 5 in the lottery tonight!

Making Pizza

Crust



Sauce



Pepperoni



Mushroom, Tomato



Artichoke, Basil



Cheese



Assembled



Eating

The Second Attempt Pic with Santa

FINALLY got a copy.....sorry for the glare, but I had to take a picture of the pictures.

Take 1




Take 2



She still has that same "you're going to pay for this expression" on her face!

Family Vacation

[Editor's Note: Long winded post, including lots of URLs, pictures, talk of mountain towns and FOOD.]

The Caspermeyer's Three took a long weekend vacation to the western North Carolina mountains; home base, Asheville. We left Saturday morning and took the LONG way, up 575, through Ellijay and Blairsville, GA. We had lunch at FATZ. The waitress looked surprised when I said we had never been to one before. We're seeing them everywhere up here, so must be a mountain thang, and pretty good.

After lunch we weaved our way into North Carolina. And when I say weaved, I mean we literally fish tailed back and forth and all around all the mountains. My navigator had a queasy stomach, and my little daredevil was grabbing her feet and yelling 'WEEEE' from the back seat. We went through Highlands, Cashiers, Sapphire Valley, Brevard, and landed in Hendersonville, North Carolina just in time for dinner at the North Carolina Apple Festival. We strolled through downtown Hendersonville, and dined on gyro's, BBQ, grilled corn, and FRIED APPLE PIES!

We then headed up the road about 30 minutes to Asheville for Shindig on the Green, featuring clogging and mountain music. It was a beautiful, cool evening, and we really enjoyed the music.


Sunday morning, we took a Trolley tour through Asheville to get our bearings, and then did some walking and looking for lunch. Asheville is known as a foodie haven, so the good restaurants have long waits..... we tried to get into the Tupelo Honey Cafe, but it was over 1.5 hour wait. Our little miss has no tolerance for those types of waits....not to mention her father..... so we walked over the Grove Arcade area and started looking at other options. But given the long, holiday weekend, it was not looking good. Until we stumbled upon Chorizo. It had no wait and was surprisingly delicious. I had a Crab Stuffed Avocado, and Matt had a Flank Steak Pupusa. We also had an Argentinian Beef Empanada to share with Grace. So much food, and so good. We are so blessed with a little girl who has an adventurous palate!

We headed back to our hotel for nap time and then headed to the LAAFF festival. Holy freakshow, Batman. And I think I saw him, wonder wo-MAN, and spiderman. Along with many other costumed and intersesting Ashetonians.


Unlike the apple festival, at least this one served beer. :)

We used a recommendation from our friend Emily, and detoured out of the festival into Bouchon, a little French Bistro, with a patio out back that was pleasantly shielded from the ambiance out front. We enjoyed our little french dinner; beet, apple, walnut, goat cheese salad, pomme frites, steak and rabbit.

Monday, we were up bright and early to start our 2-day pass to the Biltmore Estate.


We spent almost 3 hours touring the house. That was a lot to ask of Miss Grace. But she was very good, overall. We gave her plenty of opportunities to walk, even up and down stairs inside the house, and the let her run wild on the front lawn.


The Estate was featuring the Flower Carpet while we were there.


We ate a quick lunch at the Estate, and then let Grace start her nap as we drove around the rest of the Estate and figured out what we were going to do for day 2. We finished up nap at the hotel, and then headed out for drive along the Blue Ridge Parkway (celebrating 75 years this year!). Amazing views.


I can't even believe how gorgeous it will be a month from now when the leaves really start to change (we saw about 3 trees starting...).

We capped off the day with dinner at the Tupelo Honey Cafe (utilizing invaluable call ahead seating, but still waiting about 20 min for a table). We had biscuits (which we decided are NOT as good as Swallow in the Hollow), with a blackberry/raspberry jam, sockeye salmon special, with a corn and bacon relish, and blueberry coulis and squash caserole (yum), and a southern Stroganoff, with goat cheese grits and a zesty cilantro pesto. We thoroughly enjoyed our dinner (our daughter was a bottomless pit!), along with local microbrews.

Tuesday, we were up bright and early again to pack up and finish our Asheville Adventure at the Biltmore Estate. And today was Adventure day. We rented BIKES! Grace has two favorite things. Dogs and Bikes. Not sure where the bike obsession came from, but she gets so excited when she sees them and motorcyles. So we thought this would be a big hit. Not quite.

Ready to go, a tad apprehensive....


The first half of our roughly 8 mile ride was ok. It was on a paved path with this view.

But the second half was off road, and maybe a tad too bumpy and scary for Grace, as she screamed the entire way.


After our bike ride, we had lunch at Cedric's Tavern in Antler Hill Village before a quick tour of the winery. Then we were on our way home....going the faster, more direct, but still hilly way home.

Overall, we had a wonderful family vacation. Here is an album of all our shots, before the battery died in my camera, luckily on the last day.

Asheville 2010

First Pedicure

Look at those tan lines on her feet from her water shoes!! And if you look closely, you can see the bruise on her right foot, all the way over below her pinky toe, extending almost back to her ankle..... yesterday's incident that required frozen carrots and an episode of Sesame Street. We're not sure what happened.....she was getting up from her table, and her chair slipped sideways and fell. She let out a horrific no breathing scream....which really scared us because she also had a mouth full of animal crackers and the no breathing scream went on so long we thought she might be choking. But then the ear piercing second half of the scream commenced...... We initially thought the chair hitting the tile scared her, and it took us awhile to notice her foot swelling/bruising. Poor thing. But painted piggy's made it all better!

Save the Babies!!!

Yesterday morning while I was working, I kept noticing this Robin sitting in the grass right outside my window. She was there all morning long. And I thought to myself, how strange that this bird is sitting in the grass so long..... and then I noticed what looked like a nest next to her.


I went outside for a closer look, and there were babies lying in the grass next to the Mama bird. I was really in a panic when I saw the poor babies. You can ask Matt. He must have thought I had completely lost my mind when I called him asking how to save these babies.

Anyway, I called the Chattahoochee Wildlife Preserve and asked them what to do. They will only rescue birds of prey, so you're on your own with 'song birds'. But Norma was nice enough to tell me that I should pick them up and put them back in their nest and up in a tree off the ground. I thought if you touched a baby bird, the Mother wouldn't come back. But she said that was an old wives tale.

So I marched out there, put on my gardening gloves and put the little babies back in their nest. And put the nest up in the Magnolia tree. One of the babies didn't make it though. There were 3 total, that I found.

And then I worried all day long that the Mama wouldn't come back. I kept seeing her, and I suspect the Daddy, in the grass near where the nest had fallen. It looked like they couldn't figure out where the kids were.

This is like my own personal Bird Soap Opera.

When Matt and Grace came home, I took them outside and showed them the babies. And the one that didn't make it was moved from where I had last seen it and GONE this morning. Suspiciously, Gabby (the neighborhood stray cat) was hanging around all afternoon.

I kept checking back all evening to see if I could see the babies, if they were still breathing and if the Mama had found them. Finally, just as the sun was setting, I saw her in the nest. I was soooo excited.

So this morning, I of course, checked first thing on my baby birds. They were still there, still breathing, and sounded HUNGRY!

And guess what! Mama brought breakfast.


The nest is probably not in the best place, and the little babies are getting quite big, and the nest keeps tipping. One baby fell out this morning and had to be rescued again. And I've already had to reposition the nest twice to keep them from falling out again. It's like having 3 kids, I tell ya!! I might have to move my desk so I can actually get some work done around here. :)

Christmas in Quincy

The Georgia Caspermeyer's traveled to Quincy, IL last Thursday to do Quincy Christmas. Grace did great on the flight into St. Louis. Which probably made us overly optimistic about how our return flight to Atlanta would go.....

We ended up having a snowy trip!! But we didn't do much playing in it.



Friday night we did Christmas with the immediate family. We mixed it up this year and started with the youngest.....mainly so Grace could go first and head to bed!! She made out like a bandit, but didn't quite grasp opening presents. She will have lots of practice in the next couple of weeks in that department, though! Thank you to everyone for all of Grace's Christmas presents!






Saturday night was the Fischer Family Christmas. Another late night partying and playing hot potato with the baby. Which I think she personally loved.

And Sunday was the official kick-off of Birthday Month. This will be a separate post...stay tuned.

The big hit of the weekend was "dog dog", aka Blondie, the Dailing Family yellow lab. Grace loved dog dog. And she started holding objects up to her ear like she was talking on the phone. Mainly remote controls. Or her cousins' cell phones.



Our return flight was a complete nightmare. We were THOSE parents with the screaming baby. :( I'm hoping it was less about ears and more about being overtired and worn out from her very exciting weekend in Quincy. It was bedtime when we took off, and we did everything possible to entertain her and keep her from screaming, yelling, crying..... the nice lady in front of us even gave us a candy cane for her to suck on. And it worked for awhile. She also almost ate an entire quart ziplock bag full of goldfish. And worked on a bottle of baby green beans and her sippy cup of water and about half of a bottle. All this in the span of a little over an hour, which felt like eternity. We tired just about everything. The icing on the cake was landing early in Atlanta and then having to sit on the tarmac for another 45 minutes while we waited for a gate to open up. Not a good situation at all. The 48 other passengers of our very small, cozy airplane were not our biggest fans.

All in all, it was a great trip! Grace is having the time of her life. :)

Resemblance?

Here are some baby pictures of me:

You don't see it? Me either. All I ever wanted was a healthy blue eyed, blond haired baby anyway. :)

Pantaloons

I was so inspired by Natalie's gorgeous UGA game day outfit made by her very crafty Martha Stewart wanna-be Mama, Melissa.... I decided to try to make my own FSU outfit for Grace. I found this very cute McCalls pattern for a wrap around dress/top with cute pantaloons.


I don't know where we (my Mom and I) went wrong, but the inseam is completely wrong. They are LOW RIDERS. Her diaper completely hangs out. And I don't think it is salvageable at all.


Mom, can you get me a yard more of the FSU fabric so I can just try plain 'ole bloomers?

*Sigh*

There is still hope for the dress. But Martha junior will probably have to give me a quick lesson in ruffles. Stay tuned.....

Grace's Baptism

Grace was baptized this past Saturday at St. Andrews Catholic Church in Roswell.

Grace wore the slip from my grandmother's baptismal gown, which my father also wore when he was baptized. Over the slip, Grace wore a robe I had made from my wedding dress. Her bonnet was also made from the lace on my wedding dress.

After the baptism we came back to the house where we had pulled pork sandwiches, squash casserole, broccoli slaw, potato salad and red velvet cake.

Here is an album of unprofessional pictures : Grace's Baptism

My wonderful friend, Lori also took some amazing pictures during the ceremony, as well as the reception. Stay tuned for those....

Thank you to everyone who was with us in body and spirit on Saturday for this special occasion.

Amicalola Falls

It was a gorgeous weekend in Atlanta. The weather was absolutely perfect - no humidity and very mild temperatures. So we took advantage of a beautiful day and went up north to Amicalola Falls. It's a Georgia State Park about an hour and a half north of here with a the tallest waterfall east of the Mississippi.

Here's a slideshow of some of the shots from today: Amicalola Falls

We can't wait to go back when the leaves start changing.