Monday, November 30, 2009

Last of Korea...

These will be my last pictures of Korea. Then we can finally get to life here in Minnesota. Some of the pictures are rather random but I still wanted to show them to you.

So, first our wonderful friends in Korea threw us and Chris (the man sitting on the step in the black coat) a going away party. We had a ton of fun that night BBQing and talking. We also surprised our friends that night and told them that we were expecting baby number 2 but they needed to keep it quiet until we got back to the USA.


One day, when I was sick and totally not feeling well, Gabriel took full advantage of my lack of awareness and got ahold of my kleenex box and proceeded to empty every last one of the onto my kitchen floor... stinker:) I caught him in the very end of his sneaky act!


This is Gabriel, just being cheeky!


We had our last full day in Seoul shortly before we left. It ended up not being very fun like we had planned, but our favorite part of the day was the beginning when we went to COEX mall, got Gabriel a Christmas present and found a TGI Fridays to eat at.


This is my husband with his first large alcoholic drink in 7 months... hence the crazy eyes....


Continuing our last day in Seoul, our little munchkin fell asleep on Josh's back in the wrap. I was rather surprised that considering the funky angle his head was at the entire time he actually slept for about an hour.


From COEX mall we had gone to Itaewon which ended up being a huge waste of time. We had seemed to have forgotten that Itaewon is a super crummy place for tourist and went and ended up walking down both sides of the street and were completely bored and frustrated. We did need a break after walking around Itaewon so we stopped at Baskin Robbins and got a cup of ice cream to share. We gave Gabriel his own spoon which he thought was pretty awesome and then kept stealing mine as well, doubling fister:)


Then from Itaewon we went to go see this palace. Only to have a super hard time finding it and then to find that it closed at 5PM instead of 7PM like we had read online, so we never got to go inside, this was all we saw of really any palace in Korea. Kinda sad since there are so many...


So that is the end of our pictures from Korea. Now I can put up Minnesota stuff and not feel guilty that there are a ton of pictures in my iPhoto begging to be put on my blog from Korea.

Saturday, November 28, 2009

early morning

This is what happens to your child when you need to get up at 6AM to catch the train to get to Seoul on time for Josh's dentist appointment.



Then we get to the train station a little early and have to wait for the train...



...and then Gabriel gets hungry because we had to leave right after he got up and starts digging in the backpack for his breakfast...


...but then of course we have to wait to feed him until we get on the train so Josh had to hold him and try to distract him long enough for the train to come...

aren't they just cute?

We had to go into Seoul four times for Josh to get all of his wisdom teeth pulled. The never put him to sleep for it so he was never really drugged but he needed to bite down on gauze for about 3 hours afterwards so he couldn't talk. That is why Gabriel and I had to go so I could tell the taxi's where to go and get our train tickets and what not. One time Josh got a different dentist then normal and the dentist was horrible. The dentist couldn't get his tooth out and it wasn't very numb even though they shot his mouth 4 times is novocain and Josh was in so much pain when we left. I felt so bad for him because he couldn't even take his pills until we got home so he had to sit in intense pain for over 2 hours and then more before the pills could kick in a little bit.

Friday, November 27, 2009

Happy Thanksgiving!!!


Happy Thanksgiving!!!

Gabriel drew this great little picture with the help of Mommy and Daddy and had lots and lots of fun coloring with the markers. Josh said that when he was a kid he did a turkey with his hand print every year so we decided to do that is Gabriel as well. We even did one last year when he was just 3 months old!

I know I promised many posts this week and I kind of fell behind. Wednesday around the time when I was going to add another post with pictures I get a call from ANA, the airline we flew here on, where they proceed to tell me that even though it was theirs and the airports fault that we missed our flight and I had to spend hours arguing with them before they switched our flight, they will not be reimbursing me for any of my phone calls I made. The phone calls were the ones I made to them arguing with them about their mistake and sat on hold with them for over an hour and a half before they even picked up... yet their not going to reimburse me for them and it happens to be lots and lots of money. I was so mad and argued with woman on the phone for quite some time before my pregnancy hormones got the better of me and I turned into a blubbering mess while speaking to her. I'm sure she thought I was completely pathetic for crying on the phone but that is ok by me because I think she and their company are completely pathetic for not evening attempting to take care of the customers and forcing them/us pay hundreds of dollars for their mistake. Just saying... I'm kind of mad about that one. I'm thinking I'm gonna have to write a letter, it might not do much but at least I might feel better!

Anyway, so for the rest of the day on Wednesday I pretty much was seething with anger because of them and didn't really feel like blogging anymore. Thanksgiving day was fun though and we got to go to Josh's sisters and have Thanksgiving dinner with that side of the family. Gabriel had fun playing with his little cousin Rowan and thought he was helping him out by pulling off his socks and rubbing his hair:) It was a fun day.

So today, Black Friday, I came back to blog like I was supposed to a few days ago. I didn't do all the crazy shopping this morning, just a tiny bit online for maternity clothes, so I had a small amount of energy to write this blog. So, I just want to say... HAPPY THANKSGIVING and HAPPY BLACK FRIDAY shopping and I will see you tomorrow with another post with some pictures!

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Colorful Korea! ... and my all time favorite picture!

When we left Korea the colors were very beautiful! Fall had definitely come and Korea was awash of very beautiful vibrant colors.



Fall is my favorite time of year so I was very happy that it had made it's entrance in Korea before we had come back home especially considering that Minnesota's fall had already come and gone by the time we got here.


We took these pictures one morning on the way to the train station so that Josh could get another one of his wisdom teeth pulled. At the dentist we were going to they would never pull two teeth at a time so we had to go in four different times, all very early in the morning, to get his teeth pulled. I still have a couple more pictures to come about that. Anyway, that is when I captured this picture...


Gross as it may be it cracks me up every single time I look at it! I love Gabriel!

Bugs?

Would anybody like some nice old beetlish/cockroach Korean soup for lunch?

Oh yummmmmm.... (cough, sneeze, gag) it's so delicious....

Monday, November 23, 2009

Holiday Hats!

Yesterday during Gabriel nap time Josh and I snuck off into the woods and... well, actually we dug through some of our things in my parents house looking for some Christmas stuff. Some of which was and elf hat and a santa hat that Josh had boughten the very first Christmas we were married. When Gabriel did wake up from his nap time he found a few more Christmas decorations up and the hats. Oh how he loved the hats!




We had fun putting the hats on him and he had fun getting his picture taken!






Finally Updated!

I have to say that I am beyond annoyed at computers and blog background websites at the moment. Nothing is really their fault, mostly I'm annoyed because you can spend literally hours looking for a background that is cute and never ever find one. I told you in the past I was looking for a cute Christmas one, but I found out that one does not exist or if it does it does not want me to find it. So after spending a very long time looking for a Christmas one I decided to go non-Christmas and that still took forever. Can't someone just make cute, simple, color coordinated backgrounds? *Sigh, oh well. I ended on my simple green one that literally took me all morning to find!

So, I know I told you a week ago that I was going to update my blog and if you checked back to see the new updates I'm sure you found that I haven't touched a thing until today. Sorry for my lack of productivity. I have quite a few things I have to show you. Mostly just some pictures so within the next few days (and this time I'm serious!) I should have a few more posts up with pictures of Gabriel, some last pictures from Korea, and life here in Minnesota. I will be following this particular post with another post full of some pictures I took of Gabriel last night! We had some fun with some Christmas hats :D

Alright. Now that I have changed my background far more often then should probably be allowed, I promise to stick with this one for awhile! Come back soon for pictures of Gabriel in his Christmas hats!

Thursday, November 12, 2009

all the little moments...

UPDATE: Does anyone know how to change the name for the other people that are following it so it says 'all the little moments' not 'life abroad' on their blogs or dashboard? I'm almost thinking it's on their end because I just changed the name of one of the blogs I was following for my blog list...but I don't know... any hinters?

ORIGINAL POST:
I finally changed the name of my blog! It took a long time, as in hours, trying to decide what re-name my blog and I finally came up with 'all the little moments'. I was actually set on a different one but nobody seemed to like it, it was 'the ever growing family', I still like it personally but I'm going to try this one for awhile. Don't get me wrong, I do like the new one, I was just the old one for quite a few weeks.

Because I spent the last like three hours asking multiple peoples opinions and trying to decide what to name this blog I'm probably not going to change anything else tonight. Maybe tomorrow I will put up a new picture of Gabe (since it's been awhile) and put up the title on top and heck, maybe I'll search again for a cute Christmas-like background even though last time I failed miserably after hours of searching. We will see. As for now I just have a new name! If you think of something that is fun or cute for a name for my blog I'm still open for suggestions!

P.S. here are some of the other suggestions from people if you are interested. Some of cute and some are funny!

1. Life a Board
2. Life as a Broad (LOL)
3. Precious Lights of Life
4. Baby Bears
5. One More Makes Four
6. Life With Babes
and some more that I can't remember

Wednesday, November 11, 2009

dreams

Last night I had a dreadful nights sleep. If you are a parent, I'm sure that you know that if you dream of your children it's seems so very real. Well last night I kept dreaming that Gabriel was in bed with us and that he was going to fall off or we were going to wake him, squish him, and wondering why in the world he was in our bed in the first place. I hate having these dreams, I never get any sleep because I wake up every 2 minutes worrying about him. Last night it was extra awful though because usually I snap out of it, but last night it just kept going and going which resulted in absolutely no sleep.


I even asked Josh probably about 10 times if Gabriel was in bed with us or if he was ok or if he had Gabriel on his side. Well the crummy thing is that when my husband is half asleep all if his answers are simply 'yes', which did not help my dilemma because he was confirming that Gabriel was in bed when he never actually was. Ugh. So when I got up at 1:30AM to go to the bathroom and looked in Gabriel's crib and saw him fast asleep I literally thought 'well how in the world did you get there!' AND the dreams still never stopped! Wow, I'm special. I think that every woman that is a mom probably has had similar dreams but man oh man, they sure leave you sleepless and tired in the morning!

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Surprise!

Remember that post about a month ago when I told everybody we were coming home and at the very beginning of the post I said 'Guess what? And no I'm not pregnant...'? Well guess what? I was! I was just being sneaky!


That's right, I am pregnant with baby #2! I'm about 8 weeks along at the moment, a little over actually. I did a few different due date calculators and the one that is in the middle is June 18th so that's the one I'm going with.

We found out a little over a month ago when I was 3-4 weeks but we wanted to tell our family in person so we waited to share the news until we got back.

As for how I'm feeling, surprising well. With Gabriel I was sick all the time and this time I'm hardly sick at all. I've had my moments of course and when I'm hungry or wait to long to eat I can get more nauseous but nothing awful. I'm super thankful for feeling the way I do with this one. I'm surprised that the round ligament pain has already started a little bit, but nothing too bad. It usually comes around night time when I stretch the wrong way or too quickly.

We are all super excited for the new addition to our family!

Monday, November 9, 2009

Being Back

So far we have been back in the USA for a little over a week. It seems like we have been back longer because of everything that has already happened and things we have done.


We have all had jet lag over the past week, it's really hard changing time by 15 hours when you have a 14 month old. Gabriel is doing rather well though, last night he slept mostly through the night. He woke up fussing a couple of times but I think it might have been because he was a little cold and I tried putting his blanket on top but he never keeps it on. I'm just thankful that as of now we are at least sleeping at the right time of day.

Gabriel is doing fabulously well with re-meeting family. I thought he would have many emotional breakdowns but I can't even recall one at the moment. It's like he slightly remembered them in his own little way and didn't go into crying fits when they held him like he did when Koreans would randomly hold him.

We are all completely enjoying seeing friends and family. We are staying at my parents house until we find our own apartment and we are very thankful to them. We saw Josh's family the day after we got back for Josh's mom's birthday celebration. I am currently in Brainerd where I am staying at my sisters and I have already visited my grandparents and my brother and sister-in-law and all of their adorable boys! Josh actually stayed at my grandparents this past weekend and went deer hunting with my dad, brother, and brother-in-law. He had shot one deer so far, it was apparently a good size fawn but I haven't seen it. He went back out hunting this morning to see if he could fill up his other tag (in non-deer hunting language that means shooting another deer). We had originally planned on leaving here last night but since he didn't get two over the weekend he is trying one more time this morning.

The other thing that we have been dealing with lately is culture shock. America is so different when it comes to so many things. Even Gabriel is experiencing a little bit, he has never seen so many white people before, and for that matter, old white people, hairy white people, and other baby white people. For the first couple of days he just kind of looked at people and stared. It was cute. I on the other hand forgot how funny some people look in America. Hehe! I know, I'm really mean, but America has some very funny looking people, though I kind of realized that the majority of funny looking people have loads and loads of facial hair... just sayin' is all, it's what I've noticed. On the other hand I'm sure some of them think I look funny too so it's all good. Maybe I'm just used to seeing Koreans and one, they can't grow facial hair, and two, their looks don't vary that much.

Other then the people themselves it's just weird to drive in a 'flat' land (Korea was ALL mountains), see different trees and see GRASS! Lots and lots of glorious grass! The fashion is also very different here and the attitude of the people if amazing different. It's interesting to say the least as we try to re-get used to everything in America.

There are also a lot of luxuries that we have now that we didn't have back in Korea. Like a toaster, a clothes dryer, a bathroom faucet that we can turn on when we want to, more then two dinner plates, hot water for more then one hour out of the day, a car, nice diapers, good food, I don't have to scoop my clean drinking water out of the filter anymore every time I wanted a drink, a soft bed, blankets that are big enough for two people, soft couches and carpet...the list can go on and on. It's like our own little heaven!

Monday, November 2, 2009

The Longest Day of My Life!

It's 4AM here in Minnesota and Josh and I are up waiting for Gabriel to fall back asleep. Unfortunately we have been waiting for awhile and it's just not happening... but we're still hoping. This is the second time we've put him down since he got up at 1:30AM, the first time was very unsuccessful, the second time, well we will just have to see.


We made it back to Minnesota though! It was a long and awful couple of days of traveling. Josh and I got up at 7AM on Friday morning and got everything ready to head to the airport. We ended up leaving English Village at 9:30AM and took the two hour car ride to the airport. When we got to the airport we had a little problem. When we ordered Gabriel's ticket they decided to send us a paper one and they only ship to addresses in the U.S. so they had to ship it to my parents home and then my parents had to ship it to us, but we never received it. So, when we got to the airport we showed them the receipt that we had paid and his itinerary but they wouldn't accept it and made us pay for him again. The problem was, besides having to pay an extra $150 that we already paid, was that they couldn't get his ticket to print, so we waited around the airport with our many bags for 2 hours before they gave us a makeshift ticket and we could then check all of our bags. From there things seemed to go pretty well in Incheon, we made it through immigration and security without a problem and made it to our gate with an hour to spare.

We then hopped on our plane and headed to Tokyo. Now, I had been worried about the layover in Tokyo ever since we bought our tickets. It was only a 45 minute layover and we had to switch planes of course. Now 45 minutes is cutting it close but it is plenty of time to normally catch a flight... your just not going to be sipping coffee or go to the bathroom in between flights. Well in the air we find out that there are traffic delays at the airport in Tokyo and our plane was going to land 20 minutes late... oh crap. Ok, well, it's still possible, it give us 25 minutes to find our gate and get on the plane. Unfortunately because of the traffic delays they did not have a gate for us to get off on so they landed us in the middle of the airstrip and we had to take a 10 minute shuttle ride to the terminal... CRAP!!! I was so worried and was literally trying to push people aside so we could be the first people off the bus, 15 minutes left, not fun at all.

When we finally got to the terminal there was a lady waiting for us to take us to our gate. She kept yelling 'you need to run, you need to run NOW!'. Because we were outside of the terminal for a whole 10 minutes they made us go through security again, I was rather irritated to be honest! Now, the interesting thing was, when I put my bag in the scanner, it was closed, I made sure, when I was running down the terminal to get to the gate it somehow opened and all the contents of my bag started to fall out behind me. Luckily there was some very nice people who followed me picking up my stuff and we never actually lost anything.

We finally made it to our gate with 5 minutes to spare. 'Thank you God' was all that was going through my head. The door to the plane was still open and all we had to do was hop on and fly away... but they wouldn't let us. They said that we couldn't board because our bags from the previous flight hadn't been transferred fast enough and they said we couldn't fly without our bags. My thoughts? BS people! They lose bags all the time so it's not like people always fly with their bags! But we argued and told them we didn't care if our bags arrived a day late, we just wanted on the plane, but no, we weren't allowed and we missed our flight because they were being dumb.

From there everything continued to go down hill. We sat at the airport for 3 hours trying to get them to put us (and another guy who missed his flight with us, he was threatening to sue the airline) on another flight but they kept saying that they couldn't. They said that there was no other flights... BS again people! There are flights flying out from Toyko all the time AND they even found one that they were supposedly going to get us on but then all the sudden their supervisor said we couldn't and we were all going to have to wait until the next day and take the same flight at the same time. Oh I was so mad. There were flights leaving all the time the next day and they weren't willing to put us on any of them.

I was sick of sitting in the airport getting nowhere with the people so I took up their offer to put us in a hotel for the night. It then took them 45 minutes to get us a hotel voucher and in the mean time I made it clear we needed a crib and I wanted to be reimbursed for food. Well, they said that it wasn't up to them to provide those things so if we wanted a crib at the hotel we were going to have to pay for it and any food purchases (or phone calls) were going to be on us. I was livid.

We made it to the hotel to find out it was this crappy little thing with two twin beds in it and I ended up paying for the crib so we could get some sleep. I won't even tell you about the food, so nasty! Actually, I will tell you a little, imagine the nastiest, greasiest pizza possible and then place 4 thick, uncooked slabs of bacon on top of it... throwing up yet? I almost did.

I then spent the next two hours on the phone (1.5 hours of that being on hold, not joking) trying to get ANA to put us on a different flight the next day. Josh even found a flight through them that still had seats available that left at 10:45 the next morning. I kept telling them that this was the flight we wanted and they kept saying that it was impossible. I had to ask them why and they said 'oh, well you need to take the flight that you were scheduled for and that is the 5:30 flight' ... well people, if I needed to take the flight I was scheduled for then YOU SHOULD HAVE LET ME ON THE PLANE WHEN IT WAS THERE! They couldn't seem to get that through their heads and they told me they would see what they could do and call me back in the morning. They never called me back. So, I called them back and literally spent 2 hours on the phone arguing with them and they just going in circles. I even asked for a supervisor 3-4 times and they wouldn't put me through. They said that they called the airport many times and couldn't get us on the flight because of policies and crap.

Then began the longest day of our lives. Literally. I hung up the phone on the girl after she wouldn't put me through to the supervisor for the billionth time I asked (yes, I turned into one of those people, but I feel like I was totally justified) and we hopped on the bus to the airport. This was all without breakfast because the hotel didn't offer any breakfast so we weren't very happy because we were sleep deprived and now very hungry.

We get to the airport and I go to the ANA counter and it turns out that everybody knew about me =D (hehehe) They tried telling me 'oh, well you know the situation, we can't get you on a different flight'. So, I told them in pretty much these exact words 'We missed our flight, it was NOT OUR FAULT and you haven't done anything for us except put us in a crummy hotel and make us pay hundreds of dollars in phone bills arguing with YOUR company about YOUR mistake. You have 2 hours until this 10:45AM plane leaves... get me on it, MAKE IT HAPPEN'. They argued a little bit more and I said it all again and then they finally did it! We found out then why they didn't want to switch us, it was because they had to bump us up to business class when we had paid for economy. I think the words that went through my head weren't exactly pleasant... it's a good thing they didn't come out my mouth:) It might have been along the lines of 'Up yo...' maybe I shouldn't say that:)

So we made it on our flight, finally! The flight went pretty well, Gabriel didn't cry too much and he took 2 naps. We flew to Chicago where we had a little bit of trouble getting to our next flight because in Toyko they didn't give us boarding passes to our second flight so we had to go check in again and then the line for security was forever long. We ended up being the last people to board our flight there as well but we made it! We were even early arriving in Minneapolis!

It was the longest day of our lives, literally. We got up at 6AM in Toyko on Saturday morning, our plane left at 10:45AM and we landed in Minnesota at 11AM on Saturday Minnesota time. The day got even longer when we found out that time change happened that night so instead of a normal 24 hour day, ours was 39 hours. I think needless to say, I'm so glad that Saturday is over with!

I'll write more later about how things have been since we gotten back. Pretty far it's been ok, except it's now going on 5AM and I'm still up:) Actually baby boy is sleeping now, he fell asleep about 30 minutes ago... except I just heard him cry a little, anyway, I wanted to finish this blog. So, I am now going to bed for the second time tonight, or morning... whatever, something like that, I'm sleep deprived!