This And That!

Shiloh and I returned home yesterday from an awesome trip up north that included stops in Tennessee, Ohio, Pennsylvania and North Carolina!! We left a week ago from this past Sunday and spent the night in TN visiting Rich's brother, Dale, and his family. They have a little girl, Emily, who is 2 weeks older than Shiloh and the girls hadn't seen eachother since they were 2 1/2 months old. They had so mujch fun playing, dancing and running around together.

Monday morning we left TN and drove up to Ohio to spend a couple of days with my mom's parents. My mom, Adrienne, Andrea, Austin, Jeff and Brayden arrived at my grandparent's house shortly after we did. While in Ohio we also had a nice visit with my Uncle Doug and Aunt Bec. I'll do another post later with pictures from our trip...this post will be long enough sans pictures. Anyway. I am so happy we were able to get the great grandkids up to Ohio to see my grandparents. You never know how many visits you have left so it's always a blessing to see them.

After our stop in Ohio we were off to PA....our main stop. We had a great time in PA between the church festival and more visits with family and friends! The main reason for the trip was to be home for my old church's festival and it was sooo much fun! Shiloh (I) won two goldfish (Flower and Belle...Payton named them), two super soft, kinda large tiger stuffed animals, an extremely large, super soft teddy bear, and a little elephant. I also bought her a pretty cool toy box at the White Elephant Tent for $20. We need to sand it down and then stain it, but I feel like once we do that it will look pretty awesome! During the festival weekend The Marcinick Family from Cleveland (Uncle Greg, Aunt Denise, Melissa, Matt and Michelle) visited. It was so great to see them and for them to see Shiloh! The day they left cousins Josh and Emily arrived for the night and Aunt Nina stopped by for a few hours Sunday evening also. For people reading this not in my family, my cousin Josh is a senior in high school who is 6'7" (and not quite done growing). Anyway. The last time I saw Josh he was 8 years old and we were playing basketball in his driveway. Needless to say, he was nowhere near even 6 feet tall then. I told my mom it was like meeting Josh all over again last weekend...he's definitely not the same kid I saw 9 years ago. It was so great to see him and Emily and again it was great that they were able to meet and spend some time with Shiloh and Austin. And from what I heard, Shiloh had a great time playing with Aunt Nina Sunday....we were at the festival with the cousins so I wasn't there.

Our visit ended Tuesday morning, but not before an awesome evening with Hollie, John, Payton, and Anthony on Monday. The kids had so much fun playing with sticker books, dancing along with Yo Gabba Gabba, chalking up the front porch and just playing together.

Tuesday morning we drove Andrea and Austin home to North Carolina, spent the night, and finally arrived back in Georgia Wednesday around 6:00. It was a ton of driving but so worth it!

Now for another baby update! Yesterday Shiloh and I met up with Kim for lunch. We talked about various things including her pregnancy. She's having a little more morning sickness with this one, although she said it's still not bad, and she is finding that she needs to eat every few hours or as she said she just doesn't feel right. Because her pregnancy is different this time around, she is guessing its a boy, but my mom said all of her pregnancies were different and she had to eat every few hours or she didn't feel well when she was pregnant with one of my older sisters.....so maybe it's a girl! I'll be honest right here, I would LOVE, LOVE, LOVE for this to be a girl because I want so badly for Shiloh to have a sister, but if it is a boy we will still be extremely happy and excited, of course! Anyway. Kim is doing well. She should find out the gender of the baby August 31 (she might have to reschedule) and Rich, Shiloh and myself will be at the doctors with her that day. To sum this all up everything is looking really good for potential adoption #2!

Later that day, as if things weren't going awesome enough already, we received a phone call from Brittany letting us know she was showing the house. I spoke with her up until the moment she was pulling into our drivway to meet the potential buyers. When we hung up she said she'd call and let me know how it went as soon as they left. Usually it's a good 45 minutes or so before I hear from her, which is a good thing, but not even 15 minutes after I hung up the phone she was calling me back. I was worried that the people had totally hated the house and just walked through real quick and left, but it was just the opposite! They loved it! They were extremely impressed with all of the upgrades Rich had done and they LOVED Shiloh's old room....they have a young daughter as well. They left the house and told Brittany they woul call her later because they wanted their parents to come see it. Well, it seems they loved the house so much that last night they called the lender Brittany works with to get things started and then they called Brittany to say they will be putting in an offer tomorrow (meaning today). Brittany will be meeting them at our old house at 5:30 this evening to show their parents the house and then we will start negotiating! We are so hopeful that these are our people!! Rich and I had given ourselves a deadline of this weekend for renting it. If we still had no one after this weekend Rich was going to put an ad in the newspaper on Monday looking for renters, which as I said before, we DO NOT want to do. So right at this moment things are really looking good for us regarding the Athens house!! Hopefully I'll have great news for you all on Sunday night when we return from Florida. Which brings me to my next paragraph.......

After ONE full day of being home, Rich ,Shiloh and myself are heading down to the Orlando area tonight for a birthday party this weekend. The daughter of Rich's roommate at Camp Pendleton is turning 1. We told them we'd do everything we could to get down there for Olivia's birthday before I realized it fell right in line with my trip up north. All I want to do this weekend is spend some quality time at home with Rich and Shiloh, but instead we will be driving 7 hours tonight and 7 more hours back home on Sunday. But, again, it's worth it. Josh and Kara are great friends and we haven't seen them since Olivia was about 5 months old. It's always fun getting Shiloh together with one of her future bestfriends, but after this weekend I am done with long distance car rides for a LONG time. Actually, after this weekend we start the extremely intimidating task of potty trainng Shiloh.....hmm, maybe we'll stay in Florida a little longer.