Abbie Rose is 11 months old!

Yesterday was Abbie’s 11 month birthday.  It’s hard to believe in a month she’ll be a year old..

It’s not the prettiest picture of her, but I finally got a picture of her teeth!  She’s also getting the teeth on either side of her top front teeth, so she now has 6 teeth total.

This is how we find her every morning, standing up in her crib, hanging on to her pony.  (Rachie, did you get her that?)  She loves that pony and is always dragging it around by the leg, and she snuggles with it sometimes at night.

 

She can now reach down and pick things up off the floor while she’s standing, as long as she’s holding on to sometime.  And she’s still spitting food out ALL the time.  I don’t know how to stop her from spitting food out.  Pretty much the ONLY food she won’t spit out is cheese and whole wheat bagels and broccoli.  But any other fruit of veggie, she’ll put in her mouth, and chew, but then spit it all out.  It’s super annoying.  And anything pureed, she pretty much spits out right away.  You put it in, and she immediately spits it out.  Sometimes after the 3rd or 4th try she’ll actually swallow it..

Her sleeping is still an issue…  Sometimes she does great, and sleeps from 9pm to 8:30am.  Other times it takes us 2 hrs to get her down, and she wakes up 3 times during the night and screams and then is up at 7am.  I really don’t understand her sleeping habits at all.  And her naps are still a huge fight.  I just gave her a bottle and she was pretty much asleep on me, but as soon as I put her in her crib, she’s up and screaming, and she’s currently in there screaming.  Either I let her scream and she’ll eventually fall asleep, or I go in there and then she won’t go to sleep at all and she’ll miss this nap for the day and then the rest of the day is hell.  I was hoping that one day she’ll just lay down and go to sleep when she’s tired, but she hasn’t yet, and I’m not holding my breath for the future. So she was better from being sick, but now her nose is running all over the place again and she’s sneezing like crazy.  I’m wondering if she has allergies, but I don’t really know.  She doesn’t have a fever, just sneezing and running nose.

So it’s incredibly hard to get a picture of her with my little cards, so this is the best we could do this month.  She just has an agenda of her own these days, which doesn’t include a monthly photo shoot.  We take what we can get, and this is what we got.

Bedtime for bonzo!  (It’s no big secret when she’s tired, the secret is how in the heck to get her to sleep!)

Venezia!

We ventured down to Venice (Venezia in Italiano) today for the first time.  It was my and Abbie’s first time in Venice, and Mark’s 2nd.  It’s a beautiful city and fascinating to see.  We had a really good time walking all over the place.  We drove to the Sacile train station, which will be less than 10 mins from our house, and figured out how to buy our tickets from the guy in Italian.  It’s a lot of pointing and hand gestures with a mixture of English and Italian, but we got our point across and got 2 round trip tickets.  We were waiting on the platform for the train to get there when some lady came up and told us that if we were going to Venice that we were on the wrong platform.  How she knew we spoke English or that we were going to Venice is beyond me, but it’s a good thing she said something or we would have watched our train leave without us.

It was about an hour and 20 min train ride to Venice.  Abbie was getting tired so she was pretty pissy and Mark and I were really starting to wonder how much we were going to be able to travel while we live here with her.  She was quite the handful on the way there, but once we got to Venice, she was great!  Thank God!

 

We stopped for lunch shortly after we got there and shared a panini and a coke.  The one thing that I don’t like about Italy, in general, is that all the restaurants serve the same type of food, for the most part, ESPECIALLY in touristy areas.  It’s all paninis/wraps, pizzas and pastas and they’re all basically the same types/combinations of flavors.  The food is good, but I guess I like more variety.  Here’s our 3Euro can of Coke.  No joke!

So obviously Venice is full of canals.  They’re just beautiful.  There are guys trying to sell gondola rides EVERYWHERE, but in the Rick Steve’s book we borrowed from friends, it said they’re VERY expensive, so we didn’t even bother to ask prices.  We had more fun walking anyway.

 

There are these types of stores with produce and noodles out like these all over Italy.    We ran across a market that they were having.  They were cleaning most of it up as we got there, but there were still quite a few whole fish around, and they were cutting chucks off of really big ones.  I think these fish are REALLY fresh. Here’s the produce part of the market.  These never cease to amaze me.  They’re beautiful to look at and we got 2 bananas and an apple for 1Euro. I had to take a picture of the weina.  We saw 3-4 of them, including a wire-haired! This is the grand canal.  All the other little canals actually have street names, but this is the main one.

Of course we had to try out the gelato (for the first time since we’ve been here).  It was WONDERFUL! San Marco’s.

 

 

     There are these steps all over Venice.  This is how you get on and off all the boats/ gondolas.  A Venice ambulance!    

Venice was a lot of fun, and I’d love to go back and look at things a little more ‘in-depth’.  This time around it was kind of a quick run-thru where we got the feel of the place.  There are hundreds of shops to look in, and lots of people selling original artwork, so we’d love to go back and buy some of that.  I’m sure we’ll have lots of opportunities to explore Venice more when friends and family come to visit.  If you come to visit us, you really can’t pass up the opportunity to see Venice if you haven’t seen it before.  However, we’ve been told by quite a few people to not spend the night there, so I don’t think we’ll ever do that.  It’s kind of pointless anyway, since we live so close to it.  Why pay outrageous prices for a hotel there, when you can pay 8.80Euro to get home AND we won’t have to board the weinas somewhere.  But we’ll definitely go check it out.  (Mom and dad, I know you said we didn’t have to go while you’re here, but you’d love it, so we should go.)

Mark and I decided that Abbie just gets bored on planes, trains and in cars.  Once we’re out and about, she’s happy as a little clam.  She likes to be worn on our backs, better than our fronts, in the Ergo and she’ll just ride along back there and chatter and point.  She was great the entire time we were in Venice and most of the ride home too.  That Ergo was one of the best $100 we’ve ever spent.

Luckily I found a 2gb SD card for the camera at the BX for $9.95!  Score!  The pictures in this blog aren’t even a fourth of the amount that I took today.  I’ll try to post more on Facebook once we get the big computer hooked up.

A girl after my own heart

A week or so ago there was some stadium show jumping on one of the AFN channels, so naturally, I was watching it.  However, so was my 10.5 month old daughter!  No kidding!  She was riveted by it!  She sat on the couch and watched it with me for a good 5 mins, which is a long time when you’re only 10.5 months old.  And she was pointing at the TV most of the time.  I think it’s in her blood.
By the way, she just started signing “more” and she frequently signs “milk” now without any urging.  So she now signs for eat, drink, water, more, bye-bye and milk.  And she can say mama pretty well now and you can say “Where’s daddy” or “Where’s mommy” and she’ll point to us.  She’s growing up way too quickly.

Feeling pretty blah.

I don’t know what the deal is, but I just feel blah.  Actually, I do know what the deal is.  Being stuck in a hotel room with no access to a car, no friends around and having it be 2am (their time) for everyone you could talk to when you want to sucks.  Add a cranky almost 11 month old who’s just as bored as I am to the mix and it’s just not good.  I just want to sleep the days away, but it seems as though every time I fall asleep, Abbie wakes up.

I find myself thinking “this would be SO much easier if it weren’t for Abbie” quite frequently, and I feel guilty for thinking that.  But it’s true.  If it weren’t for her, I could sleep whenever I want, I could drag my sewing machine out and work on my quilting, I could read books, I could do whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted, and that’s just not possible with her.  I wouldn’t trade her for the world, but this is definitely challenging. 

I think this sums up how we both feel right about now….

Mark still doesn’t feel good.  He still has pink eye and a lot of pressure in his head.  He went back to the dr today and got more meds to go along with the Mucinex they already gave him.  I don’t know what time he’ll be home tonight, but it probably won’t be until 6:30-7pm.

Here’s Abbie and Mark doing the conga line.

 

The good news is that we should be into our house by next week.  The even better news is that our unaccompanied baggage shipment (the “express” shipment) is in!  So I will get a bunch of my own kitchen things back!!   And we’ll get our big computer back, we’ll just have to find some place to put it since we won’t have a desk.  And Abbie’s crib is in that shipment too, along with more of my sewing stuff and the rest of Abbie’s toys.  That’s a BIG plus for all of us.  I bought her a few toys today – a bucket with sand toys in it and a little Playskool “garden” with flowers and little ball things she can put into different parts of it.  Those things have kept her entertained for the past hour, which is wonderful.  We also bought her a water table that we’ll give to her for her 1st birthday in May.  Luckily we’ll have a yard at the new house to put it in so she doesn’t cover the house in water.  Anyway, so we’ll probably be in the house by the end of next week and it’ll probably take us at LEAST 10 trips from here to the house to get all our stuff there.  The Passat was packed to the brim and the Lancia is about half the size of the Passat, plus we have all the stuff we bought here and all the stuff we shipped to ourselves to move.  Oh well.  It’ll be worth it once we’re all settled in Sarone. 

Quarters

 

So yesterday the plague that’s been in this household since we got here it seems, hit Mark, and hit him pretty bad.  So today we went to the flight doctor and had him checked out.  The nice thing about seeing a flight doctor is it’s different from family practice.  Mark always has to see a flight doctor, but I can see either.  The appointment was only for him, but they checked me out too since I was there.  They think that he possibly could have strep throat, but won’t know until tomorrow since it was a 24 hr culture test.  He looked in both of our throats and said Mark had a ton of drainage and mine was really red and irritated, and listened to our lungs and Mark’s was fine and mine were a little wheezy.  I feel fine except for my annoying cough and my throat is killing me.  I asked what meds I could take while nursing Abbie and he gave us disgusting Cepocal lozenges that taste terrible and don’t exactly work.  They numb our entire mouths, but not our throats really.  Anyway, they put Mark on quarters, meaning he can’t leave his living quarters for 2 days now, until he’s released from quarters.  Good thing he’s not too busy with training yet and is still waiting for clearances.  Hopefully we’ll all feel better in a few days.

 

Little pips still has an icky cough and her nose is still going quite a bit, but she’s still active as ever.  She’s finding all sorts of things to get into.  The other day she used her little walking toy to walk while on her feet instead of her knees for the first time.  And she’s started “sharing” everything.  She picks things up and tries to give them to you.  It’s really cute.  Now we’re working on signing please and thank you with her.

She is fascinated by the washer in our TLF.  We might just have to get a front loading washer when we get back to the States, just so she can watch it. =)  (KIDDING!)

 

So things are definitely different here in Italy.  The #1 thing standing out to us since we’ve spent so much time in the TLF lately, is the TV…  We get AFN channels here.  (Armed Forces Network)  They basically record shows from a bunch of different channels and put them all on 5 channels here, and their show selections suck.  The only show we’ve been able to keep up with has been Survivor.  Shows are played a day late here, if at all, and the recording quality leaves much to be desired.  Lots of times there is this incredibly annoying background “music” playing during the entire show.  I’m hoping once we get the desktop computer up and running at our house, we’ll be able to watch things online.  My fingers are crossed.

The other thing is we buy gas with coupons.  Because gas is so expensive in Europe, the military lets us buy coupons for gas.  So we bought coupons for 200 liters of gas, for about $176, which means we’re paying about $3.45/gallon.  Gas here is about 1.21Euros/liter which is about $6.25/gallon.  So we hand the gas station attendant (most here are NOT self service – they pump the gas for you) these coupons we buy from base, and then base pays the gas stations.  Kind of a process but it’s fairly simple and it saves us money.

The other thing I noticed – ya know that grated parmigian cheese you buy in the green containers?  It tastes NOTHING like the real stuff.  We bought a wedge of cheese that we grate ourselves and it tastes completely different from the American stuff.  And we have to buy our milk in half gallons here.  And the big potatoes here cost a DOLLAR EACH!  I about died!  Guess Idaho is quite a ways from here!