New Home, New Car, and New Experiences

My friend Bethany Reese has inspired me to create a blog so that the family and friends who aren't on Facebook are able to hear about what we've been up to and also see pictures of our many adventures.

We have recently moved to South Carolina, where Andy is working at the Bosch manufacturing plant in Anderson as a part of his two year-JMP program. We will be spending a full year here, until January 2012 and our last rotation has yet to be scheduled. Could be Germany or anywhere else in the United States. We are leasing a 3-bedroom house on a quiet street in Anderson. Brady and I often travel the 45 minutes to Greenville to attend Gymboree or other activities with our playgroups.





We have also purchased a new car! I am now the proud owner of a Kia Sedona. It is much roomier than my old SUV and we have great cargo space, which will make traveling so much easier. Last year, going to the beach, we had the trunk filled to the ceiling and on both sides of Brady up to the ceiling and we joked that we couldn't have more kids because there would be nowhere to put them. The only drawback that we have noticed so far, which we might not have if I hadn't made a trip home to Pittsburgh a week after we bought it, is that the power sliding side doors have a tendency to freeze when the weather is cold and water gets into the door after it's been opened after a snow. There is no manual override because the doors are on a track that must use the power option, so when this problem arose, my car had to sit in the garage at Casa Trapuzzano in Wash Pa until they water that had frozen in the door, finally melted. We also are the proud owners of South Carolina license plates, but as you can see, we are still holding strong with our Pitt Panthers plate frame.







In other news, two weeks ago, Brady and I tagged along with Andy to Detroit because he was headed to a conference for 5 days. We knew this would be a good opportunity to visit with our friends the Reese family. This also presented the opportunity for Brady to take his first trip on an airplane, so we could gauge how it would be on a possible flight to Germany without being nearly as long. We drove 2 hours to Atlanta (where we took advantage of their many Cheesecake Factories), and got on our departing flight around 9:25PM. This is right around bedtime for Brady, so we thought that he might sleep, but in the back of our mind were worried about his always-on-the-go personality, given that he wanted to walk up and down the terminal before we boarded. The flight did not go well. He immediately found the latch to the tray table and kept moving it so that the tray would fall down. He crawled from Andy's lap to mine and back again about a hundred times. The moment we touched down and started taxiing, of course he fell asleep! He was so asleep that he didn't wake up when we took him off the plane and put him in his stroller, which is very rare. Andy joked that Brady could stay at Nana and Dubby's house while we spend 6 months in Germany because the two hour flight was more than enough for him with Brady. The flight back was a completely different experience. The flight out of Detroit also left around bedtime, but was not full, s Brady was able to have his own seat (and yes, he got the window seat). Once we were in the air, he was content to stand on the ground and use the seat as a play bench.