9 Months old/ Grandparentals visit.

The child has now been out as long as she was in. It is so crazy how quickly this has occurred, time flies by so fast. We love her so much and are so grateful we get to enjoy her and share her fun spirit with others. We are having lots of fun this week since my parental unit is here visiting. We have explored Aber as well as outlying areas with great success and the baby has loved every minute of it. She fully believes that the grandfather is here strictly as her personal jungle gym and grandma is available for silly songs and stories. We are off tomorrow for a quick trip to Paris and London so I felt I should share some pictures before we go.


Swinging is fun, especially with Grandma and Grandpa





Eatin some toast

We all rode a train to the top of Constitution Hill, a large hill one one side of Aber. The view was fantastic, even if the wind was blowing hard.





It snowed in Aber! I know that it does not look like much but it is crazy for here. The little kids in the branch were so excited, throwing pathetic snowballs around and playing. Sad that this is only the second time they has seen snow.

Home, Home, Home

Well, we arrived back in Aber on Tuesday afternoon and have been cleaning and doing laundry since, this is the first chance I have had to sit down and work on photo organization and such. We had a great time, but are glad to be home. We were away the perfect length of time, not so long that we were sick of it but enough that we were glad to be home. So here is a run down on the trip.

Tuesday the 18 we woke up at 1am Aber time and quickly got dressed, finished packing, and loaded the car. We live in the middle of no where, well actually further than no where, like crazy far out in Wales. The nearest airport in three hours away, so to make it to a 7 am flight we had to leave early. So at 7 am we flew from Birmingham to Almaria Spain. Almaria is on the southern tip of Spain, on the Mediterranean side. We arrived in the Almaria airport and proceeded to the bus stop. Our hotel was located in Aguadulce which is about 15 miles from the airport. After two bus rides and a small walk we arrived at our beautiful beach side hotel.


During check in, we discovered that our passports were missing. We are usually very vigilant about keeping them safe but somehow we miss placed them. Not good. Mine and Anya's are USA passports, and Adam's is Canadian, but our visas for our stay in the UK are inside them, plus I did not bring any ID with me except for my passport. We also have all kinds of immigration things going on which would be extremely hard to explain to nice embassy people. We quickly went up to our room and said a quick prayer, then Adam ran off to see if he could find them. The last bus station we had been to was the place to look. Adam had taken out all the passports as ID when he changed money at a bank. He went and searched the bus station while I put Anya down for a nap. Two hours later he returned with no passports. He had searched the station, and asked at all the info desks and such but no luck. He was unable to search the bank however as they were closed for siesta. We tried to relax the rest of the afternoon and decided to go back to the bank the next morning.

Wednesday morning we ate breakfast and made our way back to Almeria to ask at the bank if they had seen our passports. The second we walked in the bank manager pulled our passport case out of drawer. Adam had left them on a desk. The manager noticed the second Adam left but we were gone on the next bus so fast that he could not catch us. Hurray for miracles! We were so worried that our little trip was going to be ruined but thankfully it all worked out and we could start having fun.
Our hotel was half board, so breakfast and dinner were provided which worked out great because then we could find super yummy lunch in town. We had high hopes of finding some Lebanese for Moroccan food, but no luck. We have a hard time finding when the best time to eat lunch is in Spain. Everything closes for 3 or 4 hours in the afternoon for siesta and they eat dinner really late so many times we ended up wanting lunch when everything was already closed. Our other problem was that Thursday and Friday were really big holidays so everything was closed all day. We did find some Argentine food and a great roasted chicken place so eating still turned out OK, even though I did not get my falafel.
Lots of people ask us what kind of traveler Anya is. She loves to travel. Trains, planes, busses are super fun to her. She loves people to look and that give her lots of attention. Often she loves to stand on our laps and look at all the people around her, or play peekaboo with people between seats. She got tons of attention at the hotel also, the wait staff at the hotel loved her. There were tons of old ladies from France, Germany, and Spain who would come and talk to her all the time, which she loves. She was however happy to be home. As soon as we walked into our flat she got all excited and started looking around at our stuff.

This is the view from our balcony, great huh?

Adam and Anya on the beach in front of our hotel.


Relaxing by the beach.



Miss Anya loves strawberries. We found this giant box of beautiful strawberries for super cheap, they were sooooo tasty we gobbled them up in no time.

Adam with a giant cool tree, there were entire boulevards full of trees like this one.


This is one of many shots of a giant Arab ruin which is located in Almaria. It was an early fortress dating back to 955, super cool. It is high up on a hill and you can see the entire town and the Med forever. It had beautiful gardens and water ways all the way through. If you click on this photo it should connect you to my flickr page where there are more of the Alcazaba.


Me and Anya chilling.

Some cool foliage.


There were tons of beautiful flowers all over the place, including my second favorite, the African Daisy. We wanted to get pictures of Anya sitting in the flowers but she would have none of it. We settled for sitting on my knee looking at them.

Anya loves to fly!

Yea for babybel keeping a baby quiet and happy.

Off to Spain

Adam has a 3 1/2 week Easter break which began on Friday. We wanted to get away to some warm weather (not that it is really cold, but my tan has faded and I need a good touch up) but we needed to wait to make a decision until we received our next three months pay. It came in on friday so we have been searching for last minute deals since. Today we chose a resort and town and we are off early tuesday morning. We have to leave here at 2 am to make it to Birmingham for a 7 am flight, although this is not ideal, by 11 am we will be in warm southern Spain sitting on the beach! Here are some cutness pictures of Anya. She started to put her arms up in the air on Saturday, it is really cute and funny and she loves to try to get my plants.

8 Months old!

Our little monkey is 8 months old today. She is so much fun right now, we love having her around. Anya is total social butterfly and loves to have people around. Last night we had a whole bunch of masters students over for dinner (the come over every Thursday) and she spent the entire night being passed around from person to person, kissing, hugging and smiling at everyone. She loves to have kids from the branch over for sleepovers and to visit with random people in the street. She has two teeth (they have been there for over a month but it is hard to get a picture of them) and likes to eat sometimes. She hates pureed baby food and would much rather eat slightly mashed food from our plates her favorite being butter chicken, or other various rice and sauce Indian dishes, potatoes, carrots, peas, grapes, apples, strawberries, oatmeal, and bread products. She weighs in at a low 16 and 1/2 pounds and she can move pretty fast now. She crawls all over the apartment, following me around until she finds something interesting to climb on, her favorite being the edge of the couch and dining chairs and she has mastered getting off of the couch with out disaster. She also knows where her toys are kept and therefore pulls the basket out and all over the living room floor three or four times a day. I was going to take her out today to take pictures with the spring flowers but she was not feeling great so we will have to try that tomorrow. I do however have plenty of pictures from the last week to share.



On this day, she was not feeling so great so she snuggled down and watched Cars.

Book Tag

From Holly:

1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages).
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find sentences 5,6, and 7, and post them.
4. Tag five people.

"But the Coordinator for the Improvement of the Status of Women reported to the General Assembly in 1987 that women from Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa comprised a far smaller proportion of the officials from those regions than was equitable. Whereas 31.0 per cent of all geographically appointed officials from Asian and Pacific countries were women, only 5.4 per cent of all geographically appointed officials from Eastern Europe were women. Second, those Eastern European, Middle Eastern and African women who where appointed were most likely to fill service and administration posts, not posts responsible for technical projects or with policy-making authority."

This excerpt is from a book I just bought, "Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics." So far it is a fantastic book, but I am only a little way in, and yes I am reading it for fun.

I tag- Liz, Liz, Catherine, and Kip


By the way, is this exercise supposed to say something deep and meaningful about me as a person, or is it to show that three sentences taken from the middle of a book can give a good representation of that book? I am just wondering.

She Crawls

I thought that I would share some video of Miss Anya making her move. She has moving around by rolling for over a month now, and has done quite well but this last weekend she started crawling more than four "steps" at a time. This video is quite long, but I figure only grandparents are the only ones that interested and they won't care how long it is. By the way- she is now pulling herself up into a standing position on the couch and her toy basket and trying to walk around while holding on, this has created many accidental falls but she continues on. Also, she just woke up so her hair is a mess- I usually have it pulled back.

Beautiful temps!

Today was absolutely beautiful in Aber. It was about 60 degrees with no wind and the sun shining brightly. We went for a walk through town and along the ocean along with what seemed like everyone else in Wales. Tons of people were out and about but it was still so pretty. It has been really rainy lately, which I realize I should not complain about as many of you are experiencing crazy ice storms but it was nice to be warm. Here are some pics of us out and about.








Last week we went with some friends to a beach a little north of our town. Our friends brought their big kites to fly in the crazy wind. It was so windy that the little kite was picking our friend Rich up off the ground. It was fun to walk around the beach and watch the wind surfers.


This picture needs some explaining. Anya has been getting around lately by rolling. She is a total pro at this, and if left for only a few minutes she can be at the other side of the apartment, she moves very quickly and can get anywhere she wants especially places where she knows I don't want her. Next to our TV I have a kitchen chair set up in a feeble attempt of keeping her away from the cords connecting everything. She loves the playstation controllers and our guitar hero stuff. Anyway, she knows how to get herself under the chair and behind the TV without a problem now so it really doesn't work. The other day she was doing her thing and one minute she was next to the chair lying on the floor pounding on the wall like a drum and then two second later she was attempting to pull herself up onto the chair. It was quite scary as before I actually took this picture she was almost standing up with her hands on top of the seat. We have stopped the rolling behind the TV, we know have pillows all the way around the TV stand as well as under the chair. I know that this will not stop her for long, but for now she just rolls into the pillows and then moves on to something else.