Happy Mother’s Day, 2014

Tomorrow is Mother’s Day, and I’m starting to realize that this is becoming one of my favorite holidays. In addition to paying homage to Jessica, my Mom, all the amazing Mom’s in our lives, its giving me the excuse to make some nice meals for Jessica and the girls. And not just brunch either. As far as I’m concerned this is a whole-weekend affair. That being said, tonight for our Mother’s Day Eve dinner we’ll be having prosciutto-wrapped filet mignon, baked potato with homemade cheese sauce, sauteed mushrooms, salad, and to wash it down we’ll be enjoying a bottle of Catena Malbec that we’ve been holding onto for a bit. Then tomorrow morning for brunch we’ll have a crab cake benedict along with a bottle of Prosecco I have chilling. Then tomorrow night will be linguine with clams. I hope we don’t sound like alcoholics here, but there’s a method to my madness. Each bottle we consume is one less thing to pack and move 😉

Speaking of moving, everything is coming along nicely. Yesterday I met Jessica and the girls at the new house at 2:00pm for our inspection. Jess kept an eye on the girls while I followed along with the inspector. I had a lot of questions for him, mainly because I’ve never done anything like this before and know practically nothing about construction or houses, but luckily for me he turned out to be the nicest guy and was happy to answer all of my questions. Our agent told us he’s the best in the business and after having spent nearly three hours checking out the entire house with him I couldn’t disagree. Luckily, although there were a few small things we found that need some attention, there was nothing major at all. The house is in very good shape and there is no reason to think that we can’t deal with these few small issues before closing.

Even though we’re still about 4 weeks away from closing, I can already feel myself growing an interest in learning how to work on the house. Having rented for all these years I never had much of an interest in getting my hands dirty, but now that I’m going to own a place the idea of being able to fix or upgrade something on my own without having to hire somebody is much more attractive. Plus with school ending shortly I’m going to have a lot more time to take on projects around the house. Speaking of school, I just reached the half-way point of Spring quarter, meaning I’m on a short break before classes resume next weekend. This is my last break of any kind at school; when classes resume I’ll only be 5 weeks away from completion. I don’t want to start getting excited yet because there’s still a lot of work to do, but its so close I can almost taste it.

The girls are both doing great. Elise has been crawling for a while, and is now getting to the point where she is pulling herself up to her feet. She’s still pretty wobbly but once she’s up she does well assuming she has something to hold onto. She’s also starting to talk a bit. Not in terms of actual words but you can tell that she’s trying to mimic sounds and words she’s hearing. It’s pretty exciting to be seeing all this for the second time, and you can’t help but compare it to everything we experienced with Ava not too long ago.

Speaking of Ava, she is quite the little handful. She’s got more energy than you can possibly imagine, and knows exactly what she does and does not want to do. She continues to show incredible signs of determination, even for something as trivial as collecting certain colored markers. She’s also really tough. I know I’ve said it before but her toughness continues to amaze me. Elise seems to have that gene as well because the two of them have taken a few spills this week that we were concerned about, including Ava pulling Elise’s high chair tray down, hitting the ground, then Elise falling out of the chair and right onto her. As you can imagine the decibel rating goes up considerably for a few minutes, but both girls bounce back quicker than anyone could ever expect.

Before I go I want to give a quick shout out with all my love to my Mom. I’m sorry I won’t see you on Mother’s Day but can’t wait for your visit next month. I also want to send our love to Amy, Dana, Brenda, Kristy, and all the aunts, cousins, and friends who are moms. We love you all and wish you a great day tomorrow. You deserve it. As for Jessica, thanks for being the best mom our girls could ask for. We love you so much!