Merry Christmas!

Well, it wasn't a Christmas like we're used to, but at least it was a heck of a lot better than Thanksgiving was. We were still able to participate in some of our traditional Christmas traditions - most of which centered around food, of course. We had egg nog shakes, a ham for dinner, and a glass of orange juice before opening presents. We also opened up Christmas pajamas for Tyler on Christmas Eve and even found a toddler book about the birth of Christ to read before going to bed.

As anyone who's had kids can attest, the best part about Christmas was seeing how excited Tyler got with all the presents. We got him a big boy chair and he climbed right on it, turned around and just smiled and laughed like it was the coolest thing ever. Of course that was just the beginning. After we got him past the idea that wrapping paper or boxes were the coolest thing ever, he just laughed and played all day with the basketball hoop, DVDs, football, and tractor tunnels. We got to enjoy watching him and capturing the moments on our new camera. Here are some pictures of our Christmas activities.

And here's a fun little video of Tyler making his first baskets.

We hope everyone else had a wonderful Christmas as well. Sorry we couldn't be there to enjoy it with you but rest assured that we're keeping as many of the Christmas traditions as we can alive and well out here in Maryland.

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow…

If we’ve learned anything about moving to a new state it is that you have to form your own opinions based on your own experiences.  When we came out for our house hunting trip, the realtors all told us that snow really isn’t that big of a deal around here.  Well tell that to the 20 or so inches that fell on our doorsteps last weekend. 

Here’s what our parking lot looked like:

Here’s what my poor motorcycle looked like (I can’t wait for a garage unit to open up):

All was not lost, however, since it gave us a chance to take Tyler out in the snow.  He wasn’t quite sure what to do with all the white cold stuff.  He just stood there at first and when Tag put him in the snow that was deeper than a couple inches the fun was officially over.  At least we got a cute picture of him:

Needless to say a pair of gloves have already been purchased for Tyler’s Christmas stocking. 

Speaking of which, we went out and almost finished up our Christmas shopping.  It should be a really good Christmas for Tyler as well as Tag & Thesha.  We’ll be sure to take lots of pictures for next week’s post.

In other news, we had our first doctor’s appointment since moving here for the new baby.  It was a little anti-climatic because they don’t do an ultrasound at every visit like they did at Circle of Life, but we at least got to hear the heartbeat.  Thankfully our next appointment (Jan 21st) will include the 3D ultrasound and give us chance to finally find out whether Tyler will get a little brother or sister.  We’ll be sure to keep you all informed.

Merry Christmas!

Serenity Now!

It's amazing what a couple of bedrooms and a few hundred square feet will do for one's demeanor. On Thursday we moved the stuff from the 1 bedroom apartment (700 sq. ft.) to the 3 bedroom apartment (1460 sq. ft.). Even though nothing else changed - we were still sleeping on a foam pad, we were still eating out, we still had most of our stuff in boxes, etc., it’s amazing what a difference it had on our attitudes. In fact, conditions were probably even worse that first night because we still hadn't moved the couch or the TV so there was no place to sit and nothing to do to relax. But like flipping a switch, Tyler now had room to play so he was happier, which meant Thesha didn't want to pull her hair out so she had a better attitude, which made me less of a jerk and I was actually nice to be around, which put Thesha in an even better mood, which meant we could sit and talk and laugh again (something that hadn't happened in a couple weeks). It was like a breath of fresh air. Then the rain let up long enough for us to be able to move in on Thursday and Friday which also improved our moods. Don't get me wrong, there are still some frustrations, but now we get frustrated and a little time goes by and we're laughing about it or we've at least moved on. It was so nice on Saturday to actually get Tyler's room set up and have at least one space that was completely unpacked and back to normal.

So now instead of constantly hearing "this sucks" at home we're constantly saying "little by little, it's coming together." By the way, whoever said "we can do anything for a few months" never had to try and stay in the microscopic apartment we were in for almost 3 weeks. Oh yeah, I think that was us. Well, we now know why they have to screen astronauts for their ability to spend extended time in a confined area. “The right stuff” obviously refers to their ability to not kill each other even though they’re living in a space the size of a closet.

In other news, we were finally able to make it to church yesterday which was another nice thing to check off the to-do list. We were happy to see that all of the auxiliary offices appeared to be filled, so we won't be called up immediately to anything crazy. It was a pretty small branch, though. When we pulled in there were only maybe 8 - 10 other cars in the parking lot. Even by the time we got to the sacrament there were maybe only about 75 people there. One of the sisters we were introduced to said it best when she said, "it's a nice little branch."

The best news, though, was that there was another couple about our same age (maybe a few years younger, but hard to tell) and they had a little boy that was only two weeks younger than Tyler. We hung out with them most of the time and the boys seemed to have fun together. They invited us to dinner next week and Thesha and Tyler to their semi-weekly play-date with some of the other parents/kids in the branch. So needless to say it was a pretty good experience. There were a lot of Utah transplants, which we expected, but a handful of people who have either been there a long time or are from there. It will be interesting to start getting to know people in the branch which we'll have another opportunity for this Saturday at the branch Christmas party. Normally we've only gone to those if we absolutely had to, but we're trying to be better about being proactive and friendly in our new surroundings.

The better-est news of all... we actually ate dinner at our own kitchen table last night. I know that doesn't sound like that big of a deal, but when you've been eating out for every meal except maybe a bowl of cereal in the morning a nice home cooked meal really put a smile on our faces. Then tonight for family night we moved the boxes out of the way and put up the Christmas tree and decorations. We even put on some Christmas music and drank some hot chocolate. The irony was that while we are finally starting to feel at home, the title of the CD that helped set the mood was titled “Home for the Holidays.” Go figure.

We’ll post some Christmas pictures of Tyler by the tree soon. We didn’t quite have it done by bed-time so it’ll have to wait until later.

And we thought there wouldn't be anything to blog

Well, we must admit that when we started this blog we thought for sure that we'd have nothing to blog about. While that may be true in the future, that certainly isn't true for this last week.

The most obvious post needs to be about our first Thanksgiving in Maryland. Well, it sucked. We still don't have a table set up, so even if we had gone to the effort to make a Thanksgiving dinner it would have been eaten off our laps. As it turns out, Thesha and Tyler had some Ramen noodles and Tag went to the local gas station and got a turkey sandwich. We're hoping to make next year a bit more festive.

But that was just the first day of the Thanksgiving vacation. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday made Thursday seem like a dream. Tyler started getting a fever on Friday and he woke up at 3:30 in the morning on Saturday with a fever of 104. We had been giving him Tylenol and Motrin, but he was still burning up. We tried to explain to Tyler that there were other ways to get the 'find a pediatrician' task to move up on our To Do list.

Without a local doctor to call, we ended up calling our doctor's office back in Utah and they told us to take him to the hospital. So Saturday morning we strolled into the local emergency room as directed by the Utah nurse and the GPS lady. That's right, we weren't even sure where the local hospital was yet. They doubled up his Tylenol, looked in his ears, even took a chest x-ray but everything turned out to be negative. Once his fever broke we went home and took a family nap. We did go out and do some shopping on Saturday and he was ok, but still not great. Thankfully we were able to call the local branch president and had a member come over and help us give Tyler a blessing. If nothing else, we gave thanks this Thanksgiving for good members of the church who take time out of their vacation to come and help strangers in need.

Unfortunately we weren't out of the woods just yet. On Sunday morning at 5:00 Tyler's fever was back up to 103.6 and now he was puking. So back to the emergency room we went. The doctor looked him over again, they gave him a catheder to get a urine sample (always a blast on 3 hours sleep), and doubled up the Tylenol once again. The official diagnosis... "He doesn't really look sick. He looks like he feels like crap, but he doesn't look sick, sick." Yeah, that's a direct quote from the doctor. I think the same could have been said of all of us as well because we all looked and felt like crap, Tyler was just the only one with a fever. In fact, the information sheet that they gave us when we checked out said that we should call the doctor if we notice a "stiff neck, confusion, marked irritability, or sluggishness." We had to re-read that section to assure ourselves that it was only if we noticed these symptoms in TYLER that we should call the doctor because after just a few hours sleep over a two day period, all of these symptoms pretty much described both Tag & Thesha to a T.

Thankfully by Sunday evening Tyler was doing much better and by Monday he was well below 100 degrees and smiling and laughing like the Tyler we all know and love. We're hoping that he'll stay healthy because this week we'll be moving into our permanent apartment. Yes, we'll finally be in a permanent residence - and not a moment too soon. We made arrangements to stay in a microscopic apartment while we built a home, but on our trip out here we found out that our builder had filed for Ch. 11 Bankruptcy. They tried to assure us that it was just a restructuring filing, but after living in North East, MD for a week and a half we started to have second thoughts about whether or not this was really where we wanted to settle down. With all these doubts, and since we still haven't sold our house, we decided the wise thing to do would be to move into a better apartment for a year or so, then reassess where we really wanted to settle down. Plus by then we should have (hopefully) sold our house so we could just move right in rather than have to do a bunch of contingency agreements while we wait for our current house to sell.

Thankfully the apartment complex worked with us to find a 3 bedroom, 2 bathroom apartment that won't be too expensive and won't charge us for breaking a lease agreement. I can't tell you how excited we are to finally have our own bed to sleep in rather than the foam pad we've been sleeping on for the last two weeks. My guess is that the new place will likely be the subject of our next blog.

And we thought there wouldn't be anything to blog about.

Snack Time

Here's just a quick post to share a piece of our life. Tyler is learning new words all the time with the latest one coming during snack time. Tyler loves getting his favorite snack, a "na-na."

The Choate's jump in to the world of blogging

After resisting the blog-o-sphere for years, we've finally realized that with the move to MD we need to jump onto the blogging band wagon. Our intentions are to make blogging a routine part of our family night activities, but our lives aren't that exciting so don't get too excited.

Tonight's family night was simply setting up the blog. We'll have stories to share soon - especially regarding the move out to Maryland. For now we're still just trying to get set up - both with the blog as well as in every day life. We're down to just a few boxes left to unpack and Tyler seems to finally be settling in. Other than that, we're just trying to figure out what it's like to be a Baltimore Ravens fan - not that the Ravens are making that very easy this year.

We'll keep the blogs coming. For now, take a minute or two to respond to our Poll of the most useless item dropped off. By way of background, we're living in a temporary apartment and when they packed up our stuff back in Utah we had to tell them what we wanted dropped off at the apartment and what we wanted sent to storage. Of course, there's a lot of stuff that didn't show up (none of Thesha's shoes, for example) but then there was a bunch of stuff that did show up that really should have gone to storage - especially since we only got half the item. Thanks for participating!