In the States

Hey just have a few seconds while the kids are in bed to send a quick update. We are in the states now. We will be here for two weeks but will be sharing the time between 5 cities and 3 states. I don't plan on being on the computer often since we wont be in one place very long.

Hannah is now walking everywhere and really gets going. She thinks it is great and has almost abandoned crawling altogether.

The kids are enjoying Dr Pepper and a few days of spoiling by the grandparents.

I have to tell you about a few fun things that were said in the car during our 25 hour trip. Right after we got in the car (5 AM) we put in a great CD that was made for us by our wonderful friend Tim Rush. Well one of the first songs that is on the CD is an ABBA song. I told Josiah that when I was a child I would listen to a lot of ABBA because my parents had all their records. At the moment I said it Cory and I both looked at eachother and Cory said "Josiah do you even know what a record is?" Josiah ( a great sports enthusiast) answered "its when you get like a thousand trophies".

After a few minutes of silent travel (a rare thing when traveling with three children) Josiah worriedly asked me "Mom do they have peanut butter and Jelly in Texas?"

The trip was fairly uneventful. We did get stopped three times on the toll road for inspection. Mexicos new president is really cracking down on the drug problem in Mexico. He has put in place many special teams to fight the drug war. In the past we usually pass one or two check points and are usually just waived on. This time we got stopped at 3 of the 4 checkpoints that we passed. They opened up our car and even went through some suitcases. They like for everyone to step out of the car while they do the inspection. We explained that the three kids were buckled into their car seats and could we please just leave them. That was fine with them but they wanted Cory and me to go ahead and get out. At one stop I was talking to the other soldiers that were on break. They had a bunch of pictures of drugs that they had found in cars and trucks. They said that it is very common that about once a week they find a semi truck FULL of drugs. I could not believe the pictures. Well while they were entertaining me with the pictures the men that were searching our car helped themselves to the money that was sitting around in the car. Luckily (not for Chadd) one of our co wokers had previously been robbed at a checkpoint. Cory knew to take our money out of the car so all they were able to take was about $3 in change. No big deal just frustrating.
Well, the kids have not gone to sleep yet and Cory has a migrane so I better go take care of them. Thanks for reading.

Well, it has been a fun week. Hannah turned one on Thursday. She, of course, didn't really know that it was a special day. Josiah and Abigail really enjoyed celebrating for her. Josiah was so proud to have been the first to wish her a Happy Birthday (although she woke up in the middle of the night and Cory really was the first to wish her a Happy Birthday).
Josiah was really excited because he expected Hannah to wake up and be able to walk and talk. I guess I had told him a while back that she wouldn't be able to do those things until she was one. He took me literally.
The kids didn't want to leave for school until she had opened her presents so we had a quick present opening time.
At 2:30 (the exact time she was born) we sang her Happy Birthday. Josiah had the job of watching the clock and letting us know when it was 2:30.
In the afternoon we had cake and then played outside.
We plan on having a party with all of our friends but we still do not know when. They are currently painting the 34 houses in our condominium. They picked 4 colors and each house is to be painted one of the 4 colors according to the patterns they set out. We are in house #3. I guess they didn't get the colors right so they have stoped and are trying to work the colors out on our house. Well they started working on our house 5 days ago. Our house has been painted twice! I still am not sure that it is the right color. The color they chose for our house is really quite ugly. In our house we like to call it "Hannah has a dirty diaper color". I think a more proffesional name would be mustard/light brown. Once they get the paint figured out then we will talk about having a party.