Stellar

The past two days have been wonderful. Fulfilling, uplifting, refreshing, and lots of other adjectives. We are so lucky!


Yesterday, we had a lovely shower for our growing family. It was at our house and hosted by my family. My parents flew up from California and took care of all the details, large and small. Thanks, Mom and Dad!


We all had fun setting up together yesterday morning and got a fun surprise when Sacha's mom walked in mid-morning! We had originally gotten our dates confused and thought she and Sacha's dad wouldn't be able to make it. Little did we know that Cathe was determined to make it and she did, even though she had to get up at 5:30 am to drive down here, and then even earlier than that this morning to make it home. It meant so much to us to have her here.


Thanks to my parents' planning and generosity, and Apa's gift with flowers, and all our friends' love and support, we had a great, great party. Many of our friends know each other by this point, so it seemed like people enjoyed catching up and eating the delicious food. It means so much to us to have such a group of friends and family. Thanks, everybody! We have tons of photos, but I'm not sure who's okay with being on the internet and who's not, so I'm just posting a few...


Today was the icing on the cake. For months, Sacha and I have been trying to figure out a way to spend some time together before baby #2 arrives. We took a week-long 'babymoon' before M was born and are so glad we did. It was a nice memory to have in the early days of sleep deprivation (wait, I don't think they've actually ended) and even now.

Since M still gets up in the night, we decided a day trip was about as much as we could hope for this time, and my parents agreed to stay an extra day in town to hang out with him. They showed up early this morning and M was so happy to see them that he barely noticed when we left. They went to the coffee shop down the street, to the park twice, did some flips with Grandpa, read some books and napped with Grammy, and generally had a big old time.

Oh, and what did we do? We went to the beach! Some friends let us use their beach house as a home base, so we drove about an hour and a half to get there and spent some relaxing time in their lovely cottage. Then, we drove into town and had a yummy lunch of fish and chips and then a brownie and a chai across the street.


After that, we hit the beach, which turned out to be absolutely freezing with massive wind. It was perfectly nice in town, so this was perplexing, but we persisted. We wanted to do what we did before Mateo was born - write the new baby's name in the sand as a little welcome note :) We'll post a photo after her birthday happens! In the meantime, this will have to do. Doesn't she look beautiful?


We have a good friend in town who's been trying to wrangle Mateo into giving up the name secret for months now, so we just wanted to let her know that if she can find the right beach, all she has to do is drive out there to find out the name. Might be good to do it before the tide comes in. It's down there somewhere...


Anyway, we had a lovely day and capped it off with a long nap back at the cottage before hitting the road for home. We haven't spent that much time alone together since before Mateo was born and we had the best time. We still have such a good time together. It was a day of connecting and recharging and storing up some good memories for the long nights to come!