Brady's 2nd Birthday!

This sweet TWO YEAR OLD of ours kind of got the shaft on his special day b/c his birthday just so happened to fall on the same day as the moving truck arrived!!!! And if you'll remember from one of prior posts, our household goods weren't originally supposed to arrive until July 6th at the earliest. So this came as quite a pleasant surprise to us! Despite the chaos of the day, we still tried to have a little birthday fun. But thankfully, Brady is still to little to even know what a birthday is, so he didn't know any different! ;)  

We were all up bright & early getting ready for the moving truck to arrive, and the girls helped me greet Brady with the birthday song when he woke up. Then we headed downstairs for birthday donuts! My favorite part of the donut video is Shelby saying "There's my boy" at the very end..enjoy! :)

And now for some pictures! First up is everyone anxiously watching the moving truck pull in front of our new house! 

{happy to see their boxes of books arrived!} 

{Daddy unpacking the kitchen while kiddos watched copious amounts of television} 

{we took the kids outside to play then came in for birthday cupcakes, hence the red & sweaty faces!} 

{please note what our kitchen counter looked like on moving day...this is giving me hives just looking at it again!} 

After putting the kids to bed, Derek & I stayed up until midnight unpacking our kitchen & getting everything organized in there so it would be a functional space the next day. {Sidenote: We ended up not getting to bed until almost two am b/c we realized the upstairs AC wasn't working after we finished the kitchen. Thankfully, the kids never even noticed anything was wrong, and Derek was able to fix the AC on his own first thing the next morning with the help of YouTube & a $50 part...I don't know that I've ever been proud!} But in our unpacking of the kitchen, we randomly found a 2 birthday candle from when one of the girls turned 2. So we of course had to sing Brady the birthday song again the next day with his 2 candle! :)

There wasn't any time for sentimental feelings on Brady's birthday, but I'll reminisce now! Here's a look at all three of his birthdays! We love you to pieces, Bubby!!

 {Birth Day! I am still wearing the clothes I wore for my C-section pre-op appointment b/c Brady came FAST! My poor mom was sitting in the waiting area with the girls for what should have been a quick in & out appointment--they had quite the surprise when they came in!}

 {Brady's first birthday in Ormond Beach, FL}

And now he's TWO!!!

The Journey to San Antonio

When we made the drive from San Antonio to Las Vegas two years ago, I was incredibly pregnant and just days away from my due date. Needless to say, we were just trying to get from Point A to Point B as quickly as we possibly could in case Brady decided to come early. This time around, we were able to take the trip a little slower and enjoy some sightseeing along the way. We did the drive in 4 days stopping in Flagstaff, AZ; Albuquerque, NM; and Midland, TX before arriving to our new home on the fourth and final day of the journey.

Here we all are in front of our front door in Las Vegas before we started the trek back to Texas!

And just for memory's sake, here were the four of us on the Fourth of July in 2016--our first & last picture in front of our Las Vegas front door as a family of four. Brady came the next day!

Now, back to the drive.....I wish I could have been doing what Hadley was!

We stopped in Arizona to see the world's best preserved meteor crater, which was pretty neat & a great way to break up our drive.

We also made a pitstop at Petrified Forest National Park later that same day, which we all really loved. On our way out of the park, we drove through part of Painted Desert, which was gorgeous to see. If we didn't already have plenty more hours left in the car ahead of us, it would have been fun to drive through more of that. But you couldn't have paid me to endure more time in the car than absolutely necessary at that point. ;)

Please note Hadley in the picture below..real life, people! We all did a grumpy face picture after that, which cheered us all up! :)

We also stopped at a UFO Museum when we passed through Roswell, New Mexico. It was very weird to say the least, but we still had a good time!

Everyone did so well on the entire trip. Our kids are rockstars in hotels. Derek & I often laugh about how hard it was when we would take Shelby to a hotel as a baby. We had just one baby in a hotel & it was SO HARD, now we stroll in with three & it's a cake walk. We will never forget our trip to New Orleans for some conference Derek had during his intern year of residency when Shelby was maybe 6 months old, and she would just not sleep in the hotel no matter what we did. Sometime in the middle of the night when we had not an ounce of fight left in us, we packed up our hotel room & loaded up the car. We made the drive back to Biloxi in the dead of night and rolled into our driveway at 4am. We laugh now, but it was NOT FUNNY then.

This picture below is of all three kiddos snuggled up on our last night of hotel life watching Disney Jr. while we waited for Daddy to finish our laundry in the hotel laundry room. When we moved to SA the first time, one of the hardest parts was the fact that we were without a washer & dryer for soooo long. Since we're still traumatized by that, we wanted to make sure we made it to our new house with as much clean laundry as possible in case our HHG delivery was delayed or split up like it had been on our previous two moves.

Shelby enjoyed following along with our drive in her kids' atlas. Some of our most memorable parts of the drive are what we saw as made our way across the country. It's so amazing to watch the landscape change before your eyes. We were so sad as we left the mountains behind, and we were all in awe of the countless and seemingly endless oil rigs as we were made our way through Texas. The other thing I will not forget is all of the rain on our last day of the drive! These Vegas kids of ours don't see rain too often, ha! And poor Brady since he's so little, by the time he would see rain again he had forgotten what it was! Anyhow, it started raining HARD when we were driving and then there was a steady rain for maybe almost an hour. Brady was so confused at first pointing at all the raindrops on his window. After we kept telling him it was just rain, he proceeded to yell "Rain! Rain! Rain!" continuously. ;)

On our final leg of the drive, we pulled into our driveway around 3:30 in the afternoon {thankfully the rain had stopped!} and met our realtor to get the keys to our new home! We were so relieved to have finally arrived!! And waiting for us on the driveway was Brady's very first birthday present from his Grandma & Granddad, which proved to be so much fun riding around on in a big, empty house!

Our Last Days in Las Vegas {A Very Belated Moving Update}

Good grief, this post is incredibly overdue! As I was looking through pictures for this post, these last  few days in Las Vegas seem like an eternity ago b/c so much has happened since then! But in reality this was just a few short weeks ago!

We met our sweet friends at the park one morning shortly before we moved, and they totally took us by surprise and showed up with donuts {they know our love language!}, gifts, and goodies to keep everyone occupied on the long drive. So incredibly thoughtful of them! Goodbyes are so hard.

And it deserves to be noted that this was seriously the smoothest move in our family's history by a landslide! I know I mentioned it before, but it bears repeating that the packers showed up ON TIME on the first day {Tuesday} and had our house entirely packed out by 1:30 in the afternoon even though they had us scheduled for two days of packing. Seriously unheard of! We weren't scheduled to be loaded onto the moving truck until Thursday, but since the packers were done early the loaders swung by our house for a bit on Wednesday afternoon to "pre-game" for the next morning--laying out everything to protect the floors, wrapping up our couches, etc. The loaders showed up bright & early on Thursday morning {before 7am!}, and they were gone before 2pm! And there were only TWO guys loading the truck!! I have no idea how they did it, but they were seriously amazing! We totally lucked out, and those same two amazing guys who loaded us in Las Vegas drove the truck to San Antonio themselves and ended up delivering our household goods a day earlier than they originally quoted us--A DAY EARLY! Typically, you're given a window of time that your stuff should be delivered within, and then you can usually plan to tack a few days {or weeks} onto that...but this time, our HHG showed up EARLY! I'm telling you, we lucked out BIG TIME! We are still in complete awe at what a smooth process it was for us this time around!

This first picture below was taken on Wednesday afternoon when the loaders showed up to prep for the next morning. Shelby was at piano, and I brought Brady & Hadley outside to see the truck. Brady just kept saying "big truck" over and over and over again.

We spent our very last night in Las Vegas in our pool together--so many sweet memories were made here!

 

The picture below was taken on our last morning in Las Vegas as we were waiting on our property manager to show up for our final walk-through in our house before we could hit the road for San Antonio. We had the last of our things loaded up in the cars, and then our property manager ended up being an HOUR late! It wouldn't have been such a big deal, but the house was completely empty and we were all just ready to go. The girls kept themselves busy outside playing with rocks and pinecones. ;)

Hopefully it won't be so long before I get the next post up, but whenever it is I'll have pictures from our drive from Las Vegas to San Antonio!