Northern Midwest Clouds

I don't think it has been any surprise, but for those who were not watching the news, there has been some crazy weather around her for the last three weeks. Heck, our first weekend in the house (June 7 and 8) we slept in the basement Saturday and Sunday night. There had been severe thunderstorms, one after the other, and with them came tornado watches, and then a tornado warning or two.

The first night was not too bad. But Sunday night, it was pretty bad, storm rolled right over the house. It was one of those, flash-bang, no delay kinda storms. Pretty loud. It was cool, except for when you have kids and a two story house. Interesting how and additional 10 feet of height makes a storm feel that much more dangerous. The storm on Sunday night reminded me of when I was in Nashville back in early February. If you recall, there was a ave of tornadoes that rolled through the south. It was the deadliest stretch of tornadoes in 20 years. I remember how the wind would act, it would be calm, and then it would blow 30-40 without any build up. I saw the tree outside our front door bend in the wind. I turned and looked at Amy and told her it reminded me of Nashville and that we should grab the kids.

So anyway, we had another stretch of weather here this weekend. Not nearly as bad, much more manageable. Although, we did get some hail, almost dime sized at times. Kinda makes us cringe when we are not parking the cars in the garage yet. On Friday, we went out to dinner withe boys and as we were walking back to the car, I decided to take a picture of the clouds off in the distance. They were Northwest of where we were, no threat to us, although they only looked like simple rain clouds. I thought it looked cool. It was taken with my cell phone, so it is not the best quality. Notice the bright, gorgeous sun to the left and just above us, yet it looks like it was dumping a god amount of rain.

Boxes Boxes Boxes

Man!! We have a lot of stuff. This should not be a surprise to those who know us well. Our inventory sheet from the moving company was 13 pages. This was not all boxes, but essentially, if it could fit in a box, they put it in a box. We have now been in our house for three weeks and we are still trying to unpack boxes. We have been able to get the kitchen completely done, the dining room, about half of the office, almost all of the boys' rooms, and most of our room. But, I would say we still have at least 20 boxes in the house that still need to be unloaded. Let's not talk about the garage. We have until the middle of July to get as many of the boxes emptied. We are afforded one box pickup from the moving company and we need to call them by the middle of July. This should be a good weekend for it. Plus, a three day weekend coming up for the 4th of July. Yeah!

The Flight (a.k.a. Part 2)

Okay, so I know that it has been too long since I updated the blog, so I apologize, dearly. We are finally starting to get settled in. More on that later.

As for the flight out here (Part 2 of 2). Everything went very fast getting to the plane. We got to the airport and I dropped off Amy and Elijah with the luggage. Well, everything but Malachi's little Elmo rolling backpack. He wanted to keep it with him. We then returned the rental car and we rode the shuttle bus back to the terminal. As we were approaching the terminal, I received a text message from Amy asking how far away we were. She said Elijah was pushing all of the wrong buttons. Go figure. We were just getting started and he was getting into rare form.

Well, I got there and we checked in our bags. It was quite the site. We had four suitcases we were checking. We were also bringing aboard our laptop bags, Malachi's backpack, a diaper bag, Elijah's backpack, an umbrella stroller, and a small suitcase we put our electronics in. While checking our bags, Malachi decided to go behind the counter to see what was going on. I mean all the way around, not just peer around the corner. Surprisingly, the ticket agents were okay and just laughed. I expected a sneer or stink eye. Guess I was stereotyping the airline industry.

After checking our bags, we went and got some food at a Chili's in the baggage claim area. Somehow during this time we managed to convince Malachi to get into the stroller. I think we bribed him with a banana. This really helped out because lugging everything around and also trying to contain him had become an Olympic event. We then proceeded to security, which went surprisingly well. It certainly took a while with all of our stuff, but we made it through without any issues.

Once we got onto the plane, we settled in and it was actually pretty uneventful. A little jostling between the boys for the window, but we eventually convinced Malachi to sit in the middle between Amy and Elijah. The flight was uneventful (which is never a bad thing). We ate shortly after taking off, and it was not long before Malachi fell asleep, and then Elijah. I think M slept for a little more than 2 1/2 hours, which was great. He needed it. Elijah also slept for about an hour and a half. I think I nodded off too. We had the boys switch seats for the landing so Malachi could see out the window.

Interestingly, the arrival was good. We were able to gather all of our stuff off the plane without too much issue. We took our time, let a bunch of people behind us go first, but it worked. When we got to the baggage claim our bags were there. It was awesome! I was actually going to get the rental car and then come get Amy and Elijah (taking M with me), but they were there. It was quite the chore getting the bags on a cart and to the rental car pickup, dropping the suitcase of electronics along the way. We were able to get going pretty quickly and stopped at Portillos for the famous Chicago style hotdogs. I think we made it to the hotel by 10:00. Whew!! It was a long day, starting out in Roseville, CA at 6:30 in the morning, and ending in Crystal Lake, IL at 10:00 at night, 2012 miles away. Interesting day.