Happy Thanksgiving!

Even in Mexico you can have a traditional Thanksgiving feast. It may take a bit longer to find all the ingredients and you may have to sacrifice a few things but it can still taste just like Thanksgiving. We had a great day yesterday filled with the beach, the pool, a little bit of shopping, football and a lot of great food. Seems pretty typical.

Some pictures from our Thanksgiving!



Not the greatest picture but there is the family enjoying the Thanksgiving feast.
Post-turkey lounging with Aunt Lori.
Pool keep-away helped to burn off some of the enormous amount of calories that we had eaten! Grandpa, Nana and Sam watched safely from the hot tub. I did participate quite a bit but seeing me try to jump around, chase after a football and compete with my very tall family was not a pretty sight!
Hope your turkey day was filled with family and great food!

Okay, Chris worked his magic and got the very large sized pictures up on here. We are headed into Cabo San Lucas today for some site seeing and shopping!







Sam and I enjoying our virgin strawberry daiquiri.

Lovin Life in the Sun

We survived three airports and two long flights to make it to Cabo safely. We have only been here a couple of days but already I feel so relaxed and refreshed. It has been very nice.

Chris got to go deep sea fishing yesterday, caught a fish and even saw whales! I could not handle the 8 hours on the boat, and of course neither could Sam, so we stayed behind at the house. I am very jealous about seeing the whales. Even though I am not a big ocean person for some reason I have ALWAYS wanted to see a whale in the wild (not that I have seen one in captivity either, but I think that would just make me sad). I won't lie that when they told me they actually saw a whale I was so jealous I almost cried, almost.

So, here are some pictures from our first few days. Of course there will be more to come.

*Okay, I have been trying for three days to finish this post and upload the pictures and finally my patience has run out. I don't know what is wrong but the pictures just do not want to upload. Sorry, but you are going to have to wait to see the whale!

Meeting Spot

Wednesday Sam and I went to a library program to meet the storybook character Spot. Sam loves her Spot books and I knew she would get excited to see the actual dog in person. The program started out with the library staff reading Spot books, then we watched a quick Spot video. Sam did not want to sit still with all the other kids during these portions and it was a bit difficult to keep her on my lap. But then they got to meet Spot. She joined the rest of the kids as they mobbed this poor adult dressed up as a dog. It was pretty cute.

Shaking hands with Spot.

Fascinated by the tail!

Waving goodbye to Spot.

She did not want to leave at the end of the program, of course, so there were lots of tears but overall I am glad that we went.

Whirlwind weekend

We had a quick visit to St. Louis this past weekend and it was great. Sam got to play a ton with her cousins which always makes me happy, we got to see some of the Kuhn extended family and even had Christmas morning! Yup, that's right. We celebrated Christmas.
My sister surprised me Saturday morning by having her house decorated for Christmas, all our traditional Christmas morning foods prepared, a Christmas tree and presents for Sam, Chris, the baby and I. As we pulled into her driveway, thinking we were meeting there for breakfast, they were all out on their front porch in Christmas jammies and started singing Christmas carols. I worked really hard to hold back the tears. I don't think I can even begin to describe how much this surprise meant to me. Missing Christmas with lots of family will be really hard and the fact that my sister thought about this and then stayed up all night working to create this big surprise is truly unbelievable. Best surprise! Thank you Aunt Jojo!
Since it was a surprise to me I didn't have my camera with me, so no pictures but trust me watching Sam open the few presents we could convince her to open, and watching her cousins beg to open the rest was very cute. And my sister in Christmas pajamas was pretty priceless too!

Here are a few of my favorite pictures from the rest of the weekend.

Gettin Crafty!

With many suggestions and much guidance from my sister, Sam and I are attempting to be crafty! I am not a creative person so even the thought of coloring with Sam puts a small twinge of fear into my mind. What will I color? How will I show her how when I don't know how? I know its totally irrational but whatever.
So we started small with "projects" that took multiple steps but were all very simple. We got paper and colored; I just handed her the crayons and encouraged her to put them on the paper, not the table. Then we got brave and painted! Jodie gave me all the steps on how to do this successfully and even though it makes quite a mess we both enjoy it! Then comes stickers. Sam loves putting stickers on her pictures, well on anything really, but she doesn't quite understand yet that the stickers are suppose to stay on the paper; oh well.
Anyway, with those three skills "mastered" here are some of the final projects we created.

This is for sure my favorite because I am hoping that we will actually keep it for a long time. I got the idea from somewhere and can't for the life of me remember where now. I cleaned out one of those Clorox wipes containers, peeled off the label and then when Sam was done decorating the cover I glued it to the container. Since I was unable to glue it on straight (HA!) I glued some ribbon onto the bottom to cover up my poor gluing skills! She now has a piggy bank that she helped to make.
And here was today's adventure. Please excuse the bed head and pajamas that she is wearing. We were feeling very lazy! We are starting to work on the first stage to a wintery kind of project that I am hoping will turn out cute enough to become fun gifts to mail out to friends and family. You will have to wait to see the finished project...if it works out!

"mama all better?"

Is it bad to let your kids see you cry? Hormones right now are kicking my butt. I don't know if it is all the time alone right now in the apartment to think, plan, worry, and dream but I seem to be upset or sad about something almost everyday (and night!). Doesn't help much that I have a serious head cold which Sam has caught; a very woe-is-me mood is floating around this apartment today.
Anyway, today while reading something that was making me cry Sam came up and asked "mama all better?". I quickly wiped the tears away and said "yes Sam, mama is all better". Obviously she has no idea what I am crying about or even how sweet her words were at that moment but in some little way she helped. But, again I ask, does it hurt her to see me upset and not understand why? Is it okay for her to see me cry?

Belated Happy Birthday!

It is horribly sad that I have to say a belated happy birthday on here to my own HUSBAND! Internet outage and an exhausting day meant no sweet, romantic, thoughtful happy birthday post for my poor husband yesterday. Just one way of many that his birthday went unnoticed. I had plans for Sam and I to make his birthday card but then of course the morning got away from me and she chose yesterday to take a super long nap and woke up just moments before he got home. Then the most important part of the birthday, the Enlund traditional carrot cake, turned out a slightly overdone, crooked, slightly broken apart mess! It still tastes okay but looks awful. I couldn't believe that I messed up his birthday cake. A while back he bought himself an IPod, so that was his birthday gift, which meant nothing to open yesterday.
I don't know why but it makes me sad to have birthday's go by so unnoticed. He got a lot of phone calls from friends and family; was even sang to TWICE over the phone! But it still made me sad that I didn't make the day more special for him.

SO, happy birthday Chris! Considering next year is a VERY big birthday I promise that I will do better. LOVE YA!

Our Apartment

It is certainly not ideal and we don't love living in a two bedroom apartment but being in the same town as Chris and not being by myself at night is for sure worth the sacrifice of living space. We are starting to make this small apartment feel like home and each day we find some new way to make things more convenient, easier or comfortable. I thought it was time to show a few pictures of our new place.

Here is the living room/dining room/entrance to the kitchen. We don't have much on the walls yet, we are still working on that.

This is one side of the very small kitchen. I have decided that people that live in apartments must not typically cook a lot or at least not cook elaborate meals because the lack of counter space and baking equipment storage is killing me!
The other side of the kitchen. Aren't those cabinets beautiful?! The doors are not actually wood, they are plastic!
This is our bedroom. Really just our massive bed right now. We do have one dresser against the wall that you can't see and one night stand. Eventually we will add the bassinet and changing table to this room somewhere.


Looking from our bedroom toward the bathroom, we do have a pretty nice big closet. Chris actually made his dresser fit in the there. And this is the lovely bathroom. The counters are some kind of white and gold fake marble sort of stuff and the white cabinets, again plastic not wood, have a beautiful gold trim to match!
This is a very dark Sam's room. Not much to it so that fact that the picture stinks doesn't really matter.

And that is it. We live on the first floor so there is no deck or balcony. We have a small concrete slab right outside the sliding glass doors from our living room but with winter coming we don't anticipate using that for much. I plan on planting our Christmas tree right in front of those doors anyway so then we won't even be able to go out them!

All in all we are learning how to make the most of the space and working with it. It isn't much but with only one salary, a full mortgage and rent to pay this is what we can afford. The neighborhood is great with at least four parks within walking distance and lots of green space to explore. We will bundle up and head outside for as long as we can.

Okay, time to get dressed and head out on some errands! We are going to get our library card today. Very exciting!

We did more than just trick or treat

We had a great weekend in Bloomington and had too many pictures to put into one post.

One of the other Halloween firsts for Sam was carving a pumpkin.

Her first feel of pumpkin guts.

Followed by her first taste of pumpkin guts.

Which she promptly spit back out.

After it was all clean Chris went to work on creating the face.

I told him I wanted a crescent moon nose. He said that I should draw it...it didn't turn out quite like I had imagined!! HA!
While Chris was carving the pumpkin Sam had a snack and apparently went into a ranch dressing and carrott coma!!The finished product! With cheesy smiles from everyone!

Sunday morning...some cozy snuggle time!

When the weather warmed up a bit on Sunday we headed out to a park.
Okay, that should be a good picture fill for a while!!

Hope you all had a great Halloween and are now ready for all the Christmas decorations that will of course start popping up in stores if they have not already!!