June
Hello again friends! Well, we finally got around to doing
the June update before the end of July, so we hope you enjoy. This post may
forget some things we did since we are out of Wisconsin visiting family. Thus,
we don’t have our handy calendar to remind us of everything we did…so let’s see
how good our memory is on its own.
Now, for the rest of the story from May. Sunday, June 1
rolled around and we took our parents out to The Melting Pot fondue restaurant.
We’ve been there once before, but had recommended it so much to my parents that
we ended up going there. It was just as good as I had remembered it and we all
enjoyed a delectable evening, breading and cooking our own food while one of
our friends watched Tannin.
As for the Amtrak fiasco, we ended up getting arrangements
made. Olivia did her magic and found a very cheap flight for them back to Great
Falls, MT and then a shuttle service to bring them to Shelby, MT to get their
car from the Amtrak station. Well, as they say, if you want to make God laugh,
tell Him your plans. So…when they left Tuesday morning, they ended up missing
their connecting flight in Denver and had to stay overnight. Luckily, the
shuttle we had arranged was a guy who had agreed to drive them personally, and
so that didn’t fall through. In the end, they got home late Wednesday night,
grateful to be home again, lol. Sorry for the debacle we got you in. We love
you guys and are so grateful that you could take time out of your busy schedule
to visit us for a week; we thoroughly enjoyed our time with you!
Well, after they left, I had 2 weeks of busses left and
Olivia would start full time nannying around that same time. Life got a little
hectic, but I was able to get some side work, helping out an elderly lady with yard
work, filling the remaining 2 weeks with hard labor. The week busses let out, I
got a charter as well, driving girl scouts around for an entire week (you can
imagine how that went, lol. I was singing girl scout songs for the next week!).
So now, I was doing around 40 hours a week, still not matching Olivia who was
doing closer to 50-55 hours. In the end, it was a great blessing, despite the
stress of it all.
We started sleep training Tannin and he responded well, only
crying for about 15 minutes before he’d konk out. He’s now gotten to the point
where he’ll sleep for pretty much 8 hours straight with minimal intervention.
Now we’re just working on getting him to sleep past 6am…. We’re both feeling it
right now, but especially Olivia because she gets up with him when he refuses
to go back to sleep. So, please be praying for us with regard to that.
As to his growth, he’s over 25 lbs. now and getting a little
more confident with his walking. He crawls all around everything and is becoming
much faster. In fact, the way he crawls is how babies typically crawl right
before they stop crawling and start walking, so he’s making good progress. It’s
just kind of funny that within 2 weeks of crawling, he was already in the late
stages, getting ready to leave it behind. To close off the month, we left for Alabama on the 27th; however, 2 days before we left, we came home to a strange noise…. At first I thought it was the tub faucet leaking, so I went to tighten the knob. As I turned it, I got a drip on my head. Looking up, I saw that it wasn’t from the shower head. Above me, the entire tile was soaked, bowing due to the water weight. We called the maintenance team but they were busy at the moment, so we finally got ahold of the dean of marrieds. He was in the middle of a Frisbee golf game, but he dropped what he was doing and headed over as soon as he could. We tried to pinpoint where the problem was and ascertained that it had something to do with the plumbing between our ceiling and the floor above us. The shower in the bathroom above us was pouring water out of its drainage, flooding the bathroom on that level until it soaked through the floor in a breach somewhere and made its way through our ceiling into our tub…mostly. While it had originally been mostly contained in our tub, the water began to spread through our ceiling tiles until most of the bathroom was getting rained on. Tim, the dean of marrieds, started taking ceiling tiles out, only to have them collapse and drench him and everything around him. He started vacuuming out the shower on the floor above us to stop the flow and then posted signs on bathrooms that were connected to that branch of plumbing. Well, some took that to mean they couldn’t use the toilets…so they decided to shower. Suddenly we were back to the races, vacuuming up the sewage/drainage water. The maintenance team had come out, and just in time. It had already soaked one side of our apartment in an inch of water. While we had moved most of the stuff out of the bathroom and bedroom already (it was spreading there too), now I hurried to move things off the floor in the storage room. Thankfully, Tim was able to start vacuuming the water before it flooded much further. By the time it was said and done, it had flooded the bathroom outside our apartment, the dean of women’s office, and down the hall until it had reached one of the teacher’s offices! We mopped it up and tried to sterilize the floor as much as we could, but it seemed that sleeping in that room was out of the question as water was still dripping from the ceiling in the bedroom. Thankfully, we were graciously extended one of their guest rooms until we left that Friday. Thank you so much for being so accommodating during this time, NTBI! We’re not sure what we would have done without your hospitality.
Well, we finally left for what was supposed to be an 8 hour
drive but with a baby everything is longer…. After a 12 hour drive we spent the
night at our friends’, the Greens, place. They loved seeing our son and enjoyed
getting to know him a bit as we caught up with them. They’ve been such great
friends to us. Here’s a shout out to their son, Caleb Green. He was my best man
at our wedding and right now he’s in officer training. When we were at his
parents’ place, he wasn’t allowed any contact besides letters. So, whenever you
get the chance Caleb, we hope you see this and know that we missed you!
After our moment of reprieve from travelling, we headed out
once more and made the 2nd leg of our journey (another 12 hours) to
Birmingham to stay with Olivia’s uncle Scott and aunt Bekah for a few days. We
finished off the month there, but right before we reached their place, we stopped
in a small subdivision to meet up with Brock, Olivia’s biological dad. He was
ecstatic to see Tannin and we all had a great time. Then, we finished our
journey and arrived at our relatives’ place. Tannin felt a little overwhelmed that
first day; it was funny to watch. He went from being bored in his car seat to
being played with by 3 kids and 2 more adults! Talk about stimulus overload! At
first he loved it, but after a while, he was calling for mom and Olivia came to
the rescue. The next days were better as he became accustomed to being around
more people and opened up to them, talking in his loveable baby-talk.
Well, that’s all for June. The rest of our journey in
Alabama will have to wait for another time. Cheers!
The Reimers
