Tuesday, December 29, 2009

New House






The biggest development in Waldroup World is that we are buying a new house...tomorrow. We found a great deal on a house in Copperfield subdivision. It's just outside Man O' War between Harrodsburg and Nicholasville Roads off Clays Mill Extended. It's right in the area where we wanted to be...close to Porter, my parents and closer to Andy's job at UK. It is a bank owned foreclosure. The bank bought it back at auction and installed new carpet, new appliances and painted. We had a full home inspection without anything to report, which was a huge surprise to me who expected at least a few substantial fixes to be required.

We will begin moving a few things over soon, but with an open house at our present home in less than two weeks, I didn't feel like we could be completely out by then. So, we'll be moving sometime after that...mid to late January. We're excited about the new house and feel very blessed to have found it and be able to move gradually.

We have not sold our present home, though about half of those who have visited have really liked the house (or at least that's what their realtor's say), and we feel fairly confident that we'll be able to sell it in the spring. However, we realize that with the market going up and down, we are certainly emotionally and financially prepared for a longer wait. We feel like God will provide the right buyer in His timing.

Baby's First Christmas...and Joshua's crawling adventures
















First, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to everyone! As I'm sure everyone has, we have been busy these last few weeks. We spent most of last week in Lexington, visiting my Aunt's Thursday night for Christmas Eve Dinner (Andy and I took time out and enjoyed the babysitters while we went to Porter's Christmas Eve service). We spent Christmas morning at my mom's then drove to Owensboro to spend Christmas evening with Andy's family. Joshua had a great first Christmas...and was very blessed with lots of toys and clothes. It was a little overwhelming (both for Joshua and his parents), but we're grateful for so many family members that love him and us. Most of all, we're thankful for God's gift of salvation through Christ, which is why we can celebrate and have hope all year round.

Before Christmas, we celebrated my grandfather's 92nd birthday. He is in Country Place nursing home, which is attached to the Lafayette where my other grandfather and uncle Johnny live. My grandfather has not able to get out of bed for the past several months after a fall in September, but he is now comfortable, and we appreciate your prayers for him and our family through this season. We feel blessed for the long life God has blessed him with and hope he will continue to be comfortable until the Lord calls him home.

We had a get together at Mark & Traci's two weekends ago and enjoyed getting to see many friends. Joshua was able to play with two of his friends, Ben Marsh and Hallie Johnson. It was great to catch up with so many of our friends.

We went to Eric & Joni Beth's in part to move furniture after their painting finished up. We had a great visit. First, we laughed as Joshua pulled all the bows off Aunt Joni Beth's Christmas gifts. Then, we all played Beatles Rock Band, which was so much fun. We're again glad they found jobs and a great house in Lexington, and we look forward to many more times together.

Joshua continues to crawl everywhere and has started looking for anything possible to pull up on. He can cruise along the couch, his pack-n-play, and on some of his toys. The funniest development of his new mobility is his interest in Emma's cage. He often crawls in the laundry room, opens and closes the cage door and sometimes even crawls inside. He also likes to bang Emma's food bowl on the floor or the cage. This upsets the dog to no end. When Joshua moves to the laundry room, Emma will sit outside the door and whine. She looks at Joshua, then looks at me, then back at Joshua as if to say, "Do you see that he is messing with my stuff! What are you going to do about this!" She then sneaks in the cage as soon as he moves to one side and begins to save her things (blanket, sleeping pad, toys etc.) from his evil grasp by pulling them out into the kitchen or living room. All the while, Joshua remains generally oblivious to her stress level. This Joshua/Emma showdown moved to Owensboro where Andy's family enjoyed it immensely. As you can see, Joshua sat in an empty cage since Emma had already rescued all she could carry.

Since he's now 9 months old, he is allowed to try all kinds of new foods. Almost nothing is officially off limits anymore, but with only two teeth, the list is still narrow. Though, Joshua gets better at chewing/gumming every day. It's been exciting to see his expressions as he's tried cheese, potatoes, rice, lots of fruits, breads, muffins and soft veggies. Our favorite was his experience with our peppermint chocolate chip Blizzard. We gave him a tiny taste, thinking the extreme sweetness or peppermint flavor might be too much. At first, he cringed at the unexpected taste. Then promptly opened his mouth as wide as he could to let us know he wanted more of that.

Monday, December 7, 2009

Crawling Everywhere!















First off, we had Joshua's 9 month pictures taken today. To see those, go to www.babyboophotography.com, choose client proofing, password is waldroup, and type an email address. He was not in the best mood, but there are still some cute ones.

Here are a few pictures from the last few weeks.

We spent Thanksgiving in Owensboro with Andy's family. We enjoyed getting to see Mimi and Pops as well as Andy's grandmother's, aunt, uncle and cousins. Lee was gracious to buy a high chair just like the one we have, so he ate great. With the excersaucer they already had, we didn't have to pack hardly any baby gear...which as awesome! She also had a silver baby spoon. He wasn't born with it in his mouth, but he sure put it there on his first Thanksgiving dinner :).

On the way back, we stopped to visit the Hoskins, close family friends of the Waldroup's, who were visiting from Georgia. We also visited Andy's Uncle Vaughn and Aunt Lina and cousin Sam a few weeks ago.

In case you hadn't heard, we are working on selling our house and moving back to Lexington, since Andy's now working at UK. It's exciting, but it's been quite a challenge to get the house in showable form when someone calls to see it. We put up the Christmas decorations last week (in a terrible rush on Tuesday night since someone wanted to see the house Wednesday), but it did free up our weekend. Joshua likes the Christmas tree, but he loves the dancing Santa. He makes a bee line for it every time he's on the floor in our living room. I need to take a video because he bounces ad taps his hand on the harth to the music. It is adorable.

After a couple weeks or rocking on his hands and knees, Joshua officially started crawling last Monday...and boy has our world changed! We had been warned by about every parent we know, but you just can't quite prepare yourself. He loves garbage cans, any type or cord, and closing doors. Here's a picture of when he crawled in the pantry and pulled a can of coke out of the package. I thought it was too cute when he put it to his mouth and placed my bets that he couldn't chew it open before I got back with the camera.