Summer Fun… even in OHIO!

We have an awesome neighbor upstairs that has been filling us in with all of the things to do in the area, so just about everyday we tag along for some of the fun. Hope she doesn’t tire of us, lol. Anyways, as far as picture worthy stuff go, we’ll start with the Cleveland Metroparks Zoo… Its ginormous! We only made through a third of it, but it is really fun to see animals that weren’t at the good ‘ole Portland zoo… like kangaroos, flamingos, sharks, camels, ginormous turtles, etc.

Oh, and I forgot to mention that with the humidity, it was sweltering hot…

These kids get along pretty well… when Allie isn’t beating on Victoria that is. But Alesandro and Malia seem to have cute little crushes on each other and have fun making crafts for each other, lol.

Not a real alligator, but this was inside of a fun jungle house play area for kids…

Love these girls, they crack me up!

I just loved this picture for all the wrong reasons. It was just so perfectly candid!

Alright, what’s next. Oh yes. Splash parks are big in this area. Probably because it gets so stinkin hot. We are going to hit as many as we can through out the summer.

So… does someone want to tell me where my child has picked up her ‘poses’… Malia just seems so old to me in this picture. And I love that Allie is a copy cat.

Allie was using the pavement to warm up and dry off.

I’m really loving all of this time I get to spend with girls!

There are a lot of parks around town for us to enjoy, and the girls have been having experiencing the them all. There newest favorite is this one because of the ginormously long slide!

Allie’s first time on a rope swing. She is so strong to hold herself on… and she loved it!

Malia enjoying her first zip line ride!

The libraries here are pretty amazing too. There are several close by and each have their own little activities complete with stories, dancing, music, toys, snacks, and crafts!

I have one month till school starts, so we plan to stay busy with lots of the same sort of stuff, and maybe even squeeze in some more pool time, and hopefully a little camping!

Settling In…

I’m just not feeling like I have a lot to blog about lately due to a lack of pictures, but since we have been SUPER busy around these parts, I figured it might be nice to say a little about what we have been up to these past couple of weeks.

For starters, I was going through my camera looking for recent pictures and came across this gem. I kinda miss my bangs (and my tan), but they were way too much work for someone like me… someone who prefers sleep over getting ready in the morning, LOL. Plus, you can’t give a perfectionist bangs, it should be way against the rules.

Can you believe it has been almost THREE weeks since we made it here to Cleveland? I can’t. Time FLIES. We feel pretty settled in, but still have some unfinished business. For example, Aaron still needs a job. But really, other than that, I think we are pretty much set. We have faith that the right job is just not ready for us yet, but the time will come when everything feels like it is meant to be.

The kids have gotten used to the place. Well, kind of. Allie is convinced right now that it is filled with monsters. It can be kinda creepy at times. For example, she won’t walk into the house alone or go to the bathroom alone. Anyways, it’s been wonderful having all of their toys in one room. Sure saves on the clutter and mess. The musty smell seems to be disappearing, or we are just getting used to it. And, the kitchen isn’t as much of a headache due to it’s size. So, that’s all good. We got some flowers and vegetables planted in some pots, but unfortunately, some sort of animal dug everything up and ate it. Poor Malia. She wanted a garden so bad and this was her little thing. She’s pretty disappointed over it. Next year we have dibs on the little fenced garden plot in the backyard, but for now, it belongs to the upstairs neighbors. And… speaking of our neighbors… AMAZING. They have been so welcoming. They too have two kids, 4 and 2. Mayka stays home, and her husband is in his last year of anesthesia school. She has invited me to all sorts of things in the area, and has filled us in on ‘things to do’. HOORAY. Without work and an agenda of places to be, see or do, I was feeling pretty helpless. Add to that Aaron and myself home together everyday frustrated over the job situation… and yeah… you get the picture. But anyway, thanks to Mayka we have enjoyed the library, story time, free lunches at the library, playdates with some of her friends, we’ve been introduced to the free swimming pool (not ghetto) down the road, and have park hopped to like four different parks within walking distance. I was even invited to a girls night! We’ve also met and played with some other new friends in our Ward at church, and managed to squeeze in strawberry picking with some of them on Friday. We’ve been given a list of fun places to go this summer like splash parks, the zoo, the beach along Lake Erie, and more! It has been so nice to feel such a warm welcome and thankfully, we haven’t really suffered with home sickness (of course we do miss certain peoples, so don’t go getting offended, lol). I’m sure it helps that the scenery here is so familiar: the gray mornings, sunny afternoons, sometimes constant drizzle, and the GREEN. This place is kinda growing on us. AND… we can walk from our house in a kazillion different directions and feel safe doing so, all the while taking in the neat stuff around our house. I don’t remember if I mentioned it before, but we live right next to a main strip of fancy little eateries and shops, so it’s always fun to window shop and people watch.

I’ve been to my school to take care of some pre-orientation stuff. Parking is horrendous. I might be riding my bike for sure after all. Oh, and we think we figured out the girls’ school situation. We live like 5 blocks away from an elementary school but when we toured it last week, I just didn’t feel very good about it. They have three kindergarten classes in one huge room down in the basement that is split up by 1/2 wall dividers. It also seemed strange that there wasn’t a single piece of any sort of decoration on the walls to show school-aged stuff. The staff wasn’t really that friendly either. We left feeling pretty discouraged. And on top of that, SOOO many people tell us to send Malia to a different school here in the district. Plus, one lady was telling me about this awful harassment situation her daughter went through. Didn’t make us feel that good about kindergarten. But… we figured we would just deal with it until something happened. In the meantime, we found a preschool to send Allie too. Long story short, we might have found someone to help with the kids, and they have a daughter same age as Al who will also be going to the same preschool. So transportation won’t be a huge problem if that all pans out. During that tour we just became so impressed by the school. We LOVED it. It was what a school should feel like. Since the preschool is part of the school district, we decided to apply for a boundary exemption so that Malia can go there too. Good news is the neighbor upstairs will be picking her son up from the same school in the afternoons which means we might have her pick up Malia at the same time. Bam… Malia aftercare solved too. The only purpose in me writing this stuff is so that I can see that yes… eventually everything works out as it is suppose to!

Also, I’ve been blessed with work while Aaron has been job searching. A temp agency just calls and hires me for random dental offices. And oh man… dentistry here is so different. On the west we put some care into the comfort and experience of our patients. Here… it’s like a freakin farm, and everything is so dirty and outdated. I hardly have the instruments I need to work. And… I work twice as hard and get paid 3/4 as much. Kinda sucks, but, money is money when there is no cash flow.

Ok… that’s enough… here’s a few pics of random stuff. I forgot to mention that we went to the annual Parade of the Circle, which circles an area around my school. (My school is surrounded by museums, parks, a lake, etc.) It is put on by the Art Museum and OMG… best parade ever. So many colors, dancers, tons of music, and the floats were amazing! There are only two rules for the parade: nothing can be mechanical and no advertisements are allowed. So it was so nice to have a REAL parade, without even the political crap. We will definitely do this again next year. And, after the parade there was an area with like 20 gazebo tents with the different sponsors, and at each tent, the kids got to do a different free craft. So cool. Oh, and the museums were all free for the day too. My camera was missing it’s SD card, so I only got a few pics… SAD.

Bottle cap dancers.

The old folks home decorated their wheel chairs! So cute.

Fun. How could I resist… I’m going to Dental School!

Just so clever and creative. That’s what I loved about the parade. The community involvement was so impressive.

And just so entertaining!

Here’s a few from strawberry picking, I didn’t get to take very many pictures because we were busy watching a little boy who’s mom was sick in the hospital. He was a HANDFUL. Thankfully we couldn’t stay very long because it was all I could do to keep the kid from tromping on the strawberry bushes while at the same time trying to stop Allie from picking the not yet ripened ones. She would pick a light colored strawberry and yell “Not ready yet!” before chucking back to the ground to squish it. Just pick the RED ones kid! haha.

Malia on the other hand was in strawberry heaven. She has been begging for a strawberry plant but they were all sold out when we went shopping for one. She was very good about picking the ripe ones and was so helpful. She is getting way too old!

And, if it hadn’t been for Aaron coming that morning, we would have left with NOTHING. He’s a strawberry picking pro… with a nice back end, LOL.

So that’s it for now! I’ll try to remember to take my camera out more often. I think this next week we are going to try out the zoo, I’m sure we’ll hit the pool and set up a play date too. Oh, and I joined an outdoor soccer team, and Aaron is picking up some softball games! I can’t believe how smoothly this transition has been. We are counting our blessings!!!

Day 11 thru 19: Chicago, IL to Cleveland Heights, OH

Our drive to our new Home was quite uneventful. We didn’t have a lot of time for stops (despite the fact that there wasn’t much to see anyway) because there was a group of people from our church planning to help us move in at 2pm. The girls, if I remember, slept most of the morning (since we woke up to leave at 4:30 in the morning) and did very well. Our only complaint was the dang tolls! In the Northwest we have ‘freeways’… here, there is no such thing as a ‘freeway’ and they extra charge you for towing something. So, in total, we spent well over $150 in just stupid tolls. And even more retarded… the roads were the worst ones we had driven the entire trip! Irritating. Nonetheless, we never found a sign for Chicago [sad], but we did cross over into Indiana, and of course, OHIO.

We hit quite a bit of rain on our way and were worried about the weather conditions for our move in, but thankfully, there was good weather here at home. We were greeted by at least 10 people from our new ward here in Ohio. They were all so helpful, and even after unloading the truck, several stayed to help put together our beds and such. The neighbors upstairs were kind enough to let the girls play with their kids and toys. It was indeed a great welcoming. For me, it was the first time I had actually seen the place. I was so nervous. But, it wasn’t actually that bad. Bigger than I imagined, older than I imagined, and kind of a little bit musky smelling, but all in all, not too bad considering how cheap we have it. I wish I had taken a before picture. So much dirt and crap was tromped in on our nice new clean floors and there were boxes EVERYWHERE!!! Thankfully we have storage space down in the basement, but still, we felt like we had brought way too much stuff, and that was even AFTER getting rid of half of it! So, anyways, when we arrived, my little brother Jared and sister Makenzie came from Elmira, NY (4-5ish hours away) to help us move in, help with the kids, and to ultimately take the kids back to my Mom’s house for the week. Even though we missed them, it was so nice getting to unpack, organize, and shop without the stress of the kids getting into and making a mess of things. I’m sure Nana was worn out, but it sounds like they had a lot of fun! Jay and Zz even took them out to a museum on their way out.

So… here are the long awaited pictures of our new place!

This is the sunroom, looking in from the living room. There were no blinds or drapes. It was kinda weird and very uncomfortable until we got them up because the neighbors on all sides could easily peer in while we were unpacking. And the room has some sort of musty smell, that hopefully will disappear soon!

This is the living room / TV room. The sunroom is on the left, and the dining room to the right. That fireplace is pure decoration and completely unusable. But we did have fun shopping for that new carpet.

This is the dining room looking towards the living room and sunroom. It’s a huge space, which is why we put my school desk along the other wall.

Here’s the dining room looking towards the kitchen (sorry the pic is dark). The little shelving unit to the left of the entry way is our meager little pantry. A LOT different from our ginormous walk-in pantry back home!

Here’s just a view of our our house ‘longwise’ from the sunroom into the dining room.

Our kitchen is super tiny, and we had to buy A LOT of shelving/storage things for our stuff. We will learn to make do with the 1 and a 1/2 counter spaces, lol. My most favorite part was getting to buy my new Paula Deen pot set! Which of course has to hang for lack of storage space.

These last few pictures aren’t too exciting. Here’s the ONE bathroom we have. We will definitely have to get used to only having one. Especially since the girls and Aaron are on the same poop schedule, haha.

If you noticed, there were not toys in any of the previous pictures. We decided to keep all the toys in the girls’ room, to keep the mess consolidated to one space. They loved coming home from Nana’s because everything seemed so new! Since we were living at my Dad’s, all of their toys have been packed for almost a year, so it was a joyous reunion. Their toys line all the sides of their room. So there are plenty more not seen in this picture, lol.

Here’s are room. It’s not too small, kinda perfect sized. We stayed with the same décor we had before moving. We like the paint colors and the trim is pretty elegant and beautiful.

So, enough of the house! My mom brought the kids home Sunday night. It was the longest we have ever been away from the kids. In total it was 5 nights. Too bad it wasn’t because we were on some nice exotic vacation or something. Oh well. While Nana was here we did a little exploring of the area. Now that the house was complete and done, we could get out. Finally! We headed out for a walk towards Malia’s school, and stumbled upon a nice little park area between the suburbs. The area around our home is actually pretty nice. And things are so green here. It sounds like the weather is very much like Washington, only very snowy in the winter.

We were surprised at the nature we found so close to our home! This was not something we were expecting.

These were fun cute pics during our picnic.

Later that night we went to the Cheesecake Factory and got to see my Aunt Amy and Uncle Paul. They live in Indiana and were passing by the area after visiting my mom in New York BEFORE she came down to drop off the girls. They had my grandma with them, and we got to celebrate her birthday! Happy Birthday Memere.

The next day before sending Nana off, we went and explored the area around my school. There is this beautiful park with a walkway within walking distance. Malia really wanted to get a pic with the naked statue.

(I took pictures in front of this museum back when I was here for interviews.)

The little pond had some ginormous Koi fish.

The craziest thing is that everything is in bloom here. So, I guess we will be suffering through allergies all over again and re-live spring!

So, that is all for now! We hope to spend the next few months getting to know the area before I begin school, and hope to be able to make a few trips out east to see Nana again before she begins Pharmacy school. Here’s to our new life in Cleveland! Oh… and here’s a funny thought. Before leaving the Northwest so many people made stink faces or turned their noses up at the idea of moving to Cleveland. (We kinda did too.) Well, when we were East of Yellowstone around the Rushmore area and such, so many people would be like “wow, Cleveland is a beautiful place! You will love it there!” And then they would give us their well-wishes. So funny. We are actually really liking the area and think our home is in a pretty decent place. It’s affordable, nice and close to school, and very close to a lot of neat things! I’ll be sure to post about our new adventures. Thanks to all who have followed our recent travels! We miss and think of you!