The results are in!

Thanks for submitting your comments on the blogiversary post. They made me laugh (not necessarily at my own funniness, just the oddity of the situations) and remember the good ol' days when we were in Poland and when Anna was young...er.

So without further ado, and from a numerical process generated on random.org, the contest winner is Lara! Congratulations, Lara! Lend me your address and I'll mail you your delightful prize.

And now onto other posts, namely our magical, white Christmas!

4 days left!

Thanks for your comments on the blogiversary post, everyone. It's been fun to reminisce. But keep them coming. You only have 4 days left!

And also, MERRY CHRISTMAS, everyone!

Happy Blogiversary!

I realized a few days ago that our blog has now been in existence for exactly one year. And that merits something a little extra special, don't you think?

So in honor of The Life and Times, and in the vainest way possible, I'd like to announce a little contest — prize and all.

The rules: Submit a comment with your favorite post(s) from the past year, telling me why it/they were so memorable (ha), and I will pick a winner at random. The contest will end two weeks from today at 12:00 a.m. on Monday, December 29th.

The reward: A delightfully unique prize sent via regular mail.

This is a chance for all of you public fans to cash in on your hard work and for all of you phantom readers (I like to call you "blalkers" (blog stalkers, get it?)) out there to make yourselves known . . . and also cash in on your hard work. See? Everybody wins. My ego gets fed and everyone else gets a chance at an exciting, and perhaps random, prize. (You'll put up with my obnoxiousness for a chance to get a prize, right? That's what I thought.)

To get you thinking, here is a short list of a few of my favorite blog moments:
1. Our Polish Christmas, where I went into intricate detail about each traditional dish served at a Polish Christmas meal and where Trevor told our friend's grandmother that he, likewise, wished for a "man child" to enter her home in the coming year.
2. The one where Anna stole an egg from the fridge without me knowing and I found her rubbing it on her cheek.
3. The one about toothpaste that produced more comments than any other post.
4. Our Ukranian Adventure, a minute-by-minute account of one of the many times we had to flee the country.
5. And the only post Trevor has written, about his crazy trip to Ukraine and how he got beat up on the way home from the store.

And that's just to name a few. There are SO many more! So get crackin'.

Retribution

This is what I get for leaving Steph alone with Anna for 20 minutes . . . and for breaking Steph's necklace and dumping out her perfume when I was three.

Presenting . . . the demon child.




It's just not right.

We just bought the first DVD ever made.

Most of you know that Trevor likes movies and good deals as much as he enjoys breathing, so he's been taking the two- and three-dollar movie sale at Big Lots by storm. I recently joined him on one outing and we came away with a copy of Little Women. (I picked this one, obviously, as Little Women is a classic novel and a fairly good film, if my memory serves me correctly, and Trevor's illiterate. Just kidding. This is a joke he often uses on himself, and this is my way of guilting him into actually reading our blog.)

Anyway, we opened up the DVD case to find a little card tucked in with the disc. Here's what we read:

Care Tips and Disc Removal

To remove disc from its case, press the "push here" button on hub located at the center of disc. Using your other hand, gently remove disc by its outer edge. Never remove disc by prying its outer edge.

The tips continue, but you get the idea. It was so strange that it made me laugh to see these instructions included with the DVD, almost like I was Christopher Reeve seeing the penny in Somewhere in Time, and it transported me back (instead of forward, like in the movie) to 1994.

If that doesn't make you laugh, a shot of the DVD menu will. Get a load of this:


What is this, 1905?

Anyway, we had a good chuckle over the sheer novelty of it all. I watched the movie and then proceeded to tell Trevor, nearly verbatim, about that Friends episode where Rachel reads Joey's copy of The Shining and he reads her copy of Little Women. Another classic. Can't you just hear Joey now?

Joey: Beth is really, really sick. Jo's there, but I don't think there's anything she can do.
Rachel: Joey?
Joey: Yeah?
Rachel: You want to put the book in the freezer?

So view both for a good laugh AND a good cry. And go to Big Lots. You won't be sorry.

Things commonly heard coming from this little girl:

(I know she's fuzzy, but she's cute.)

1. "Sorry, honey." "Oh, excuse me, honey." (I guess that just shows you how much I call her honey, but it's super cute coming from a 2 year old. The more frequently she assumes the role of Old Lady Anna, the better.)
2. "Washcloff"
3. "Lesterday"
4. "Please I want some more broccoli please, Mom, please." (This is what she says after she has already said "Get me some more broccoli" and I tell her to ask nicely. I don't know how we got the angel child that LOVES broccoli, but she really does. She could eat a cupful every day.)
5. "Me does it." (Translation: "I do it." I love to see how she's learning conjugation and tenses and all of that fun vocabulary development, but this one is just WAY off.)
6. "That feels tickle."
7. To be sung: "A sunbeep, a sunbeep, Jesus wants me for a sunbeep."
8. "Louder 'Rosies.'" Anna loves to sing songs with us, and she most often requests "Ring Around the Rosies" and does so by ordering us to sing it louder. Every time. Also, at her urging, we ALWAYS sing these five songs — in order — before bedtime: "Ring Around the Rosies," "You are My Sunshine," "I am a Child of God" (which she calls "Of God" = cute), "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" and the ABCs. Sometimes "My Bonny Lies Over the Ocean" gets thrown into the mix as well. She's such a creature of habit. Or she's 2. Either one.
9. So this one isn't something we hear often since we only heard it once (how's that?), but it was too good to not post. Trevor was reading to Anna and they came across a picture of a cow. Trevor pointed to the udder and asked, "What's this?" Anna said, "A pig's body." Not too bad, if you ask me.

This picture is seriously making me laugh out loud.

Funny Brits

I should be ashamed of this, but while perusing today's news, the headline "Riddle of the Czech Beauty Without a Belly Button" caught my eye. I clicked, I read, and the article wasn't as interesting as I thought.

But then what delighted me was reading the comments at the end of the article. These Brits are rather amusing, for the most part.

Take Riv from High Wycombe:

"I too was short-changed a navel at birth; although to this day I have no idea why. I suspect being born three months premature via caesarean section may have meant the tissue was pliable enough to gently set into a mild indentation. Any doctors out there who can confirm? I used to tell people I was grown in a vat... Still, no belly-button fluff."

"A vat." Funny stuff. Or Darren Jalland, from Larbert, Scotland:

"I lost my belly button after abdominal surgery five years ago. I've found it very useful on training session icebreakers when we are asked for an unusual fact about ourselves, although I often have to prove it."

Some comments were educational, telling about all sorts of procedures people have had which resulted in the loss of their belly button or other famous people who are sans navel.

Others were a bit gross. Conor from Dublin:

"My dogs have no belly buttons, because their mothers gently chewed the wound from the umbilical chord, and licked them while they were healing. She continued doing so until there was virtually no scar from birth."

But Bill Hunt's comment made me yell "WHAT?" after I read it, which is saying a lot. I'm a pretty mild-mannered person.

"Sixty years ago I was house-surgeon to a London surgeon, a real Lancelot Spratt character. He thought the umbilicus was a nasty dirty place and when operating on anyone's abdomen he would, without permission or consultation, cut it out. My job was to invent some story to tell the patient why it had been necessary. How times have changed."

Is it just me?

Or are the word verification things when you post comments getting easier?

For some reason, it seems like they were a lot more difficult to decipher back a while ago. Every time I came face to face with one of them, it used to really freak me out, thinking that if I messed up only one letter Blogger was going to identify me as a bot or something and shut down my computer.

But maybe others have struggled like me and called Blogger to complain. Either that or I have mastered word verification discernment and now they seem like a piece of cake. What do you think?

On Broadway

So the before and after pics of our apartment aren't ready yet. The afters are proving to be rather elusive, but I'll be sure to post them once everything's in its place. To tide you over, I thought I would at least post some pictures of our cute building, which happens to be situated on Broadway Boulevard in Glendale. (I can't TELL you how long I've been waiting to use this title. Such a geek...)

Here's the building from one angle. (FYI, I stood in the parking lot of the Montessori school/Korean church that's next door to take this picture.)

And here it is from another. I know it's hard to see because of all of the trees, but they make things look pretty. Our door is straight ahead in the middle.

And here's our front door. Or, rather, our only door. I LOVE the pink-blossomed tree that frames the doorway. Isn't it beautiful? It makes me happy every time I walk in and out of our door. This picture also shows you more of the garden/courtyard area in the front, which is home to a lemon tree (cool) and a very tame squirrel.

I also like that I get to see palm trees around the city (they're still sort of exotic to me) and signs like this painted on the sidewalk:

You know you've moved further South when...

...extra mild salsa is nowhere to be found.

Call me a pansy, but I like to taste the vegetables rather than the hot when I eat salsa. So I usually buy extra mild. The store I was at had mild, so I bought that. But I thought it telling that extra mild wasn't even an option.

Shouting

Ever since Anna was young, since like 5 months ago, we've always had fun teaching her different emotions. A favorite post from June featured her expressing a few on command. (Gotta love being a parent.)

And a few weeks ago, we had some more fun that happened to involve sidewalk chalk. I drew the faces and, when my back was turned, Anna added the "vocal illustrations," I guess you could say. Or the orange and pink lines spewing forth from their mouths. I love how random yet deliberate they seem to be. She must be gifted.

Opposites can be deceiving...

(... and appearances attract? Interesting...)

Trevor and I often joke about how we're a picture-perfect example of opposites attracting. He's very outgoing and I'm more reserved. He's skinny and I'm . . . rounder. I'm neat, he's messy. The list could go on, but you get the idea.

So you might not find it surprising to learn that the ways we squeeze the toothpaste are also opposite. But what's interesting is that the ways we do it strangely don't seem to fit our personality types — and thus the title of this post. Trevor neurotically squeezes from the end (and gets angry when I don't), and I like to casually squeeze from the middle.

I think it's more efficient and nearly effortless to squeeze from the middle several days in a row and then take a minute every week or two to squeeze the toothpaste up to the top. He purports that you can squeeze from the bottom in one simple motion just like you can from the middle and then that way there's always toothpaste at the top, but that's a load of trash. It's so not as easy. It's awkward, if anything.

A female friend of mine sides with me, so I'm left wondering — is the age-old debate a gender thing? Is it a matter of coordination? Or are Trevor and I still just opposites in a crazy, messed-up way?

Thoughts?

Happy Halloween.

It's fun to finally celebrate Halloween. We didn't do anything for Halloween last year because we were in Poland, where the stores still offered lots of candy and decorations but I didn't see anyone buying (the candy or the imported holiday...). Before Poland, Anna wasn't really coherent for the first two Halloweens of her life. But this year, we knew she'd love it. Candy... costumes... squishy pumpkin innards... what's not to like?

We carved our pumpkin on Monday. Before I show you how it turned out, I have a little explaining to do. In the Scoresby family, we have a tradition of making Apple Uglies. Every October we take caramel apples and give them faces made out of candy. It's a delightful, delectable tradition. The best part is ODing on sugar and chatting it up with the fam.

It's not hard to make them ugly, but to set them apart you really need some flair. Like a giant set of starburst teeth on my apple from Girls Trip to NY October 2006.


(Thanks for the pirated pictures, Jen.) See, that's how dedicated to this tradition we are. We make it a point to do apple uglies even when we're on vacation. Here's Steph's beauty...


...and Jen's and Sean's, respectively. (Are those supposed to be arms, Jen? I can't remember, but I love them.)

Anyway, since Trevor is MIA these days, as he's at school for literally 16 hours a day, I couldn't rationalize making caramel apples for myself. So I decided to kill two birds with one stone and make a Pumpkin Ugly. I tried. I really did. I went for odd-shaped, googly eyes, an obligatory unibrow, a funky hairline and sideburns, a big nose, and buck teeth.

Sadly, it looks pretty run of the mill. He even looks angry. That's not what I was going for at all. But I guess that's what you get for doing it freehand and not having any artistic talent.


On Tuesday, we dressed Anna up in the only costume I could muster after having just moved, the adorable Polish folk dress you'll remember from this July post, and took her to our ward Halloween party on Tuesday. Many people called her a gypsy and one lady said she looked like a Swiss mountain girl — which isn't too far off, geographically — but strangely no one guessed Polish folk girl.


Here are a couple pictures of Trevor and Anna at the festivities. Trevor's face in the second will give you a good holiday scare.



I couldn't resist taking a picture of this adorable little gorilla girl. She toddled around the cultural hall all night and I just wanted to squeeze her... and also maybe see if she'd give me a grunt or two...


We ate chili and cornbread and then the kids trick-or-treated around to different rooms. Anna kept saying "tricky treat" (cute!) and calling her acquired candy her "trick-or-treats" (also cute!). I of course hid her bag of candy after she went to bed, like a good parent, and thought (hoped) she'd forget about it in the morning.

She didn't. One of the first things out of her mouth was, "Mom, where my trick-or-treats go?" I didn't answer for a while so I wouldn't have to lie, and then when she demanded an answer, I said, "That's an interesting question... Hey, do you want to play a game?" It totally worked.

So I've been eating her Halloween candy and giving her some here and there when I feel like it — like a good parent.

Isn't Halloween the best?

Dear Stomach,

I just want to tell you I'm sorry. When I first thought about eating the "few"-day old stir fry for dinner, something told me not to. When I first tasted the chicken and thought there was a hint of strange there, something told me not to eat it. But that something wasn't my brain, that's for sure. My brain said, "We're poor. Eat the leftovers. Don't let them go to waste." I should have listened, Stomach. I should have listened.

I guess you started to feel a little queasy when we got to Target. By the time I was ready to check out, you were really upset. And then by the time I had hauled the stuff from the car to the apartment and put Anna to bed, you were demanding my full attention.

And then I remembered something. A friend of mine, who was with us in Poland last year, spent the previous summer in Kiev. She didn't have a kitchen in her apartment and had to live off street food for a couple months. She said she once got a kebab that told her, after several bites, that it wasn't quite right. Too old or too undercooked, I don't remember. But feeling incredibly sick, she ate some yogurt and was miraculously cured.

So I decided to eat one of the fancy-pants yogurts that I got at the store today: Rachel's Plum Honey Lavender, which also claimed to have "calming" effects. (Heaven knows no one needed them more than me, at this point.) It was delicious, but sadly I was focused less on the taste and more on its ability to coat my stomach with a thick white layer of calm down.

I felt better almost instantly. Thank you, Yogurt. Even so, Stomach, I know you still haven't fully gotten over the effects of my unwise decision, but I hope you will accept the yogurt as a peace offering and that you'll eventually come around to forgiving me.

But I learned my lesson. Listen to whatever sixth sense was telling me to avoid the food in the first place, because eating fancy yogurt for medicinal purposes isn't saving anyone money.

Love,
Ashley

Reasons 762-768 why Anna is adorable

762. "Ring Around the Rosies" is one of Anna's new favorite songs. The first time we sang it repeatedly on Grandma and Grandpa Banks' trampoline, Anna sang "Ashley, Ashley" instead of "ashes, ashes."
763. Every time she has gas, she lets everyone within a 20 foot radius know by shouting "Oh, gas!" Sometimes she'll even motion toward the point of origin, in case some of us missed it. And sometimes, she'll play tricks on us. On occasion when she does have gas, she'll get a sneaky look on her face and say, "Mom gas?" I'll deny it and then she'll laugh and say, "Yeah, Anna gas."
764. Her pronunciation is quite good for a two-year-old, but some of her words are so cute that I avoid teaching her the real way t0 say them. Some examples:

cucumber = cummer

glove = glub (love this one)
bandaid = bandy (and this one)
probably = plobaly
Summertime = Sumtermine

765. She loves to say cheers, and she'll do it with anything: drinks, grapes, the carrots in our soup tonight. I have no idea where she learned this.
766. When someone around her burps or if she does it herself, Anna asks to clarify, "Say burp?" I love that it's something said. "Yes, I said burp. Burp."
767-768. These pictures I just ran across again in iPhoto are reason enough.

We finally moved!

After a two-day road trip, which included Anna throwing up three times to effectively break in the new car seat, we are here. Anna and I drove down to LA with Trevor's parents and his brother Devan last Thursday and Friday. We unloaded the U-haul Friday afternoon and evening and spent yesterday shopping and installing so we have more places to put all of our stuff. Every wall is lined with boxes, and I'm pretty sure it's going to be that way for a long time. But it's good to be with Trevor and it's good to have our own place with our own stuff. Get excited for the before and after photos to come.

In many ways, I feel like I've been constantly moving for the past two months, living out of suitcases at my parents' house and packing up all of our belongings, little by little, to prepare for the out-of-state move. But on the other hand, I feel like I've been moving for the last year. International moves are hard and I also feel like we were always on the go in Poland, fleeing the country for one reason or another.

So with that said, I'm ready to be done. I'm ready for my day at the beach and subsequent day at the spa NOW.

Too bad there's still like 500 boxes left to unpack.

Annasaurus Rex returns... from Poland

A few weeks ago, just after we recently returned from Poland, my large family had a huge gathering. It seemed like there were millions of kids running around the house and Anna was pretty shy/terrified for the first hour or so. (We joked that it was probably because she wasn't used to so many people speaking English to her. That took some adjusting.)

But then she seemed to warm up a little after a while, enough to leave my side and go play with the cousins who are sort of close to her age. I was excited by this, knowing that she needed friends her age and, coincidentally, friends who spoke English (neither of which she had in Poland.)

And then, after she had been gone for a while, we saw this:



Actually, we heard it loooong before we saw what was going on, and I had trouble believing it was Anna. She kept it up for quite a while, long enough for me to get over the shock that this sound was being emitted by my normally calm daughter and long enough still for me to run for the camera.

But after a few surprised laughs from us all and a few more minutes of the madness, someone started to complain about how loud and shrill her scream was becoming. I told them to keep quiet because she was getting some much-needed social interaction. This far outweighed the temporary ring in our ears, to me. And if this is the only way my daughter can make friends, I'll take it.

Ah, sisters.

(a picture from many moons ago)

So one night a couple weeks ago, my sister, Stephanie, got home from work and I was explaining where the food was for dinner, as my mom was gone and had left me in charge. After I directed her to the hamburger patties on the stove, I held up a bag of hamburger buns behind her and our exchange went a little something like this:

Me: "And here are some buns, if you want," [and then putting my hand to my backside] "or there are these, if you like. Either way."
Steph: "Oh yeah? Do they both taste good?"
Me: "Depends. Both are soft and white, so whatever suits your fancy."

I don't think you can get away with having a conversation like that with anyone besides a sister or an extremely close female friend. (Call me biased, but I don't think it would work with boys at all.) Anyway, this moment made me smile. I felt even luckier that I have TWO sisters I can be cheeky with.

Things I learned on my trip to LA

Last weekend I found some cheap plane tickets and decided to pay a visit to Trevor (sans Anna), since I hadn't seen my spouse in WAY too long—like, more than a month! That's not okay. And since we still have a couple more weeks to go before the big move, I thought a little quality time together would help us make it through the last lap of this, our Being Apart Marathon.

Anyway, it was SO good to see Trevor, it was good to check out the new apartment and measure a few things so I know how much of our stuff to bring down, and plus, I even learned a few things:

1. Traveling without a child can be a peaceful, relaxing experience. I actually took a book on the plane. And I took a nap — a NAP! — on the flight home.
2. I don't need to carry snacks with me everywhere I go. Although I discovered some leftover fruit snacks in my purse that would have helped tide me over if I did get a little irritable, I didn't even need them.
3. I'm still not used to the California landscape. I've been there a few times, and I was only there for 4 days this trip, but still. It looks weird to me, no matter how much I've seen it on TV. The palm trees are tall and they stick straight up out of nothing, there are a few green areas, but basically it looks kind of dry and deserty. At least LA did. But don't get me wrong. Read on.
4. I'm excited to live there. I'm excited to explore new places, find fun places to eat, and discover great places to shop. And since I know they've got to be there, I'm also excited to set out on adventures to find greener areas (this is starting to sound laughable coming from a Utahan). But it's going to be a great adventure and I can't wait.
5. However, I am not excited to drive there. When Trevor asked if I wanted to drive one night, I told him no because it had been a while since I had driven a stick (remember how we lived in another country last year?) and I didn't want to jog my memory on crazy streets I didn't know. So that's going to take some getting used to.
6. Since so much of the business of flying is done online these days (reservations, e-tickets, checking in, etc.), sometimes I feel like the prep I've done for the trip is fake. At times I feel like I'm going to get up to the gate and hand them my flimsy boarding pass and then they'll laugh at me and tell me that it's not even a real ticket. It sort of seems like it shouldn't be this easy to travel several hundred miles.
7. Before the trip, I couldn't wait for some alone time. Being a single mom is rough, although our families have been super supportive while Trevor has been in LA. But with that said, I missed Anna terribly, of course. We all knew it would happen.

Anyway, that's all. It was a great trip, but it's good to be back to my baby. And it's even better knowing that we're going to be done moving soon (since I feel like we've been perpetually moving for two months now) and we'll all be reunited with Trevor again soon. Very soon.

The old ball and chain

Data entry gone awry.

We got two letters in one envelope a while ago from a very reputable company, with the first saying something like, "The enclosed letter was returned by the U.S. Postal Service and marked as undeliverable."

This is how the original letter was addressed:

The best things about being home

Strangely, the transition from Poland to home has been rather easy. I thought it would be weird to drive a car again, after a year of abstention, or to understand what strangers say to me. But it's not. It feels totally and completely normal. So I guess home will always be home. It's where my thought's escaping, where the music's playing, and also where the heart is, I suppose.

Anyway, blabbity blab, here's a list of some of the best things about being here, in no particular order:

1. Seeing family.

Anna, Natalie (Trevor's sister), and Grandma Ban-k-s (which is how Anna says it)

eating lemons, like a true Banks

the lower face of Trevor's brother Devan and our new nephew Brayden...

...and his twin-sister Xiomara! So cute!

nephew Jedrik, Anna, and Trevor's brother Matt
cousins Emme, Anna, and Grace

some of the Scoresby grandkids

2. The small luxuries. Like making brownies a couple weeks ago and reaching for a wisk before I realized that I could instead enjoy the ease and convenience of a modern electric mixer. Or pre-measured butter or shortening. Or not converting my favorite recipes into metric measurements. Or taking a shower in a shower that's bigger than a telephone booth. Or giving Anna a bath in a bathtub instead of a telephone booth-sized shower.

3. Eating grapes again! I've already discussed this topic to death on here and I'm trying to cut down on the speeches I seem to give every time I eat a bunch, but I still love them so they're worth mentioning here, yet again.

4. Having an occasion to capture this:


5. Making a pie (with my mother closely supervising) for the very first time. It was peach; it was delicious.

6. Catching Anna redhanded. (Sorry, I couldn't resist the pun.)

Don't you love the look of complete shame and regret on her face?

7. Enjoying the out-of-doors as Anna plays in her "pool." Interestingly, baby pools are hard to come by this late in the season...


8. Getting to feed the two cows in our backyard. For the first time ever, I got to feed the cows tonight (only because my parents are out of town and my sister forgot). We've had cows off and on, growing up, and tonight I got to walk in the pasture, among the poo, and feel for just a second like I was going to be trampled. I also unnecessarily used a pitch fork to haul the hay, just because I wanted to feel authentic.

9. Taking Anna to Farm Country. I think I've seen this exact photo, except with different people, on like, a hundred other blogs. But where you display farm animals, there small children will be also. Our cows are cooler, by the way.


10. Having all of our packing done. (Now that I write this, I'm reminded of a few more boxes I still need to go through. But we're so very close to being done that I'm leaving it. Moving sucks.)

11. Seeing friends again. Like the ones who were in our old ward, like old neighbors from my childhood, and like the ones I honestly haven't talked to since 6th grade. Good times all around, folks.

New continent, new hair color

Maybe I was inspired by the many women in Poland who died their hair varying shades of shockingly red red, or maybe I was just tired of the non-color that my hair had become. It was too light to be brown, too brown to be blond, too ugly to be liked. I had gone blonder in the past, but the time had come for a new kind of change. I wanted to try out being an official brunette. The result? A little bit of brown, a little bit of red, and a whole lot of fun.

before

Eating a cookie at Enrichment in Poland. Nice.

and after

There's also the weird curly/straight difference here, so maybe that's going to throw things off the assessment. Plus, you may not be able to take your eyes off my gimpy eye. (What can I say, it's still a tiny bit light sensitive...even 4 years after the virus extravaganza.) So good luck. Let me know what you think.

The Trip Home: Long Waits, Airport Gates, and an Impromptu Stay at Jen's

Here's the next installment of our trip-home saga, as promised. (I know you've all been on the edge of your seats...for like a month, because that's how long it has taken me to get around to this.)

So we got to the airport at about 10:30 a.m. on Monday the 11th. Our flight was delayed 2 hours, so we became well-acquainted with that place, hanging out at our gate from about 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. We did get free drinks and sandwiches, though. Cha-ching.

The best part of all was getting our six million 50-lb. bags checked. FINALLY. We had been hauling them around long enough. I was elated to see them move along the conveyor belt, but Anna was distraught. She kept saying, "No bye bags. No bye!" We truthfully had to turn her stroller around so that she couldn't see them leaving her. We decided that it was tough to see those bags go, bags that had been her friends and travel companions for 10 long months. But we'd see them again, Anna. All in good time.

Another fun story. While we were waiting and waiting and waiting to board our flight, Anna decided to check out another toddler who was toddling nearby. (Actually, it was the other way around. Anna's not quite one for going out of her way to introduce herself, at this point.) Anyway, a teenage girl and her mom were looking after the little boy and Trevor decided to initiate some chit chat. In Polish, he asked the girl how old the little boy was. She stared at him each of the three times he asked, with the feeling in the air getting more and more awkward each time. And then she said, "Oh, I don't speak Polish." So Trevor switched over to English and the chat continued. I had a silent celebration in my head, thinking to Trevor, "Ha! Now you know what I felt like this past year." I was secretly glad that he was going to have to get used to English again, now that we were headed back to the States.

Here is cute little Anna, waiting at the airport gate before we left Warsaw.

Fun with clay on the plane. (After all of the clay colors were good and mixed (read ruined), I think Trevor played with the clay more than Anna did. 9 hours is long for adults too, I guess.)

We were SO excited to see Jen and Sean at the airport in New York! Jen came armed with sandwiches, grapes, chocolates, and a book and a crossword puzzle card to celebrate mine and Trevor's anniversary. At this point in the day (it was 1 a.m. Poland time), Trevor and I realized that we had not said ONE word about our anniversary. We had talked about it a week or so before, but everything had been so chaotic leading up to our departure that it hadn't even crossed our minds for days. Happy 4 years to us.

Since we missed our connecting flight to Salt Lake because of the 2-hour delay, we stayed the night at Jen and Sean's. I'm so glad we got to spend some time with them. It was hard stretching our already-exhausting travels over two days instead of one really long one, but it was so fun to hang out.

This documents the first time Anna's nails were painted. And now she can't stop. She's constantly showing everyone her pretty nails, whether they're painted or not. You created a monster, Jen.

I love the lack-of-a-chin look going on here (for Anna).

Anna also loved Jen's hair. (I believe she even referred to her aunt as "Brown" a few times.)

Love the tongue.

Goodbye, New York.

We finally arrived in Salt Lake, completely knackered and jet lagged to high heaven, at 11 p.m. Tuesday night. It was good to be back.