Las Vegas: Grand Canyon

Ross and I took a quick vacation a few weeks ago to Las Vegas. During the summer we decided a vacation would be great and thought about California or Las Vegas. If we went to California, we'd go to the beach, but the beach did not sound fun at 5 months pregnant, so we opted for Las Vegas. Neither of us had been to Las Vegas before and we'd always talked about going and thought why not. We figured it would be a while before we would get to go on vacation again and also treated this as an early 5-year anniversary present to ourselves. Our 5-year anniversary will be next April, just about 2 months after Molly will be born...not the perfect time for a vacation!

I really wanted to go to the Grand Canyon while in Las Vegas. It's about a 4.5 hour drive from Las Vegas and I thought that we couldn't pass up that opportunity. We were so close, relatively speaking! We didn't want to spend a whole entire day driving and Ross found an airplane tour we could take that would fly us over the Hoover Dam and the Grand Canyon in a total of 4 hours. We thought this was a great idea and decided to go for it.

A shuttle service picked us up at our hotel Sunday at noon and took us to an airport about 30 minutes outside of Las Vegas where we got checked in and had to wait a bit for our flight. The plane we flew on was a small, 20-seater plane. Ross and I were in the very back row and I was very happy to see how big the plane windows were. I was afraid they might be small like regular plane windows, but they were a very good size.

The plane took off and right away I could tell we were in for a long flight, even though it was supposed to last only 1 hour. There was quite a bit of turbulence and I was scared right off the bat. It almost felt like the plane was just going to drop out of the air at times. It was definitely not a smooth, steady flight like a commercial airline. We flew over the Hoover Dam and Lake Mead then made our way to the Grand Canyon.

It was so neat to see the Grand Canyon from the air, however my stomach didn't quite agree with that. The turbulence got to me and I ended up throwing up in the little airplane barf bag. I'm so glad that thing was there! I've always wondered what it would be like to throw up in one of those things and now I know! That was not fun at all, but I did feel a little better after the fact, but the way back was still rough. Ross didn't feel so great himself, but was able to keep everything in! It did make me feel better that the girl sitting in front of Ross threw up, too. :)

Overall, it was worth it to me. I loved seeing the Grand Canyon and it was from such a different perspective that I would have gotten had we driven there. Enjoy my pictures!

Cross Country

My nephew, Trevor, is 12 1/2 years old and in seventh grade this year. They live in the Joplin, MO, area and he goes to Webb City Jr. High. This year he decided to try out for the cross country team. In jr. high, the cross country running distance is 1.5 miles and in high school it's 3.2 miles. Trevor started training for this sport right when school started. He stayed (and still stays) after school each day to get his running in.

Before the first meet, he had to "try out" for the team in a sense. He had to run the full 1.5 miles without stopping to walk and he did it, so he made the team! When I received his cross country meet schedule I was really excited to see that he had two meets in Nixa, MO, which is just about 10-15 minutes away from my house. All of the other meets are much closer to Joplin and I would not be able to attend to them...they would interrupt nap time. :)

So a few weeks ago, I met up with my mom, sister, and second nephew, Cody, and Lucy and I headed to Nixa one Thursday afternoon to watch Trevor run. It was a warm afternoon and I loaded up my stroller and bag with snacks and toys to keep Lucy occupied during the meet. I thought we might be late due to the traffic we ran into on the way there, but ended up being early instead. We got to watch the seventh and eighth grade girls run the course before watching Trevor. This worked out great for us so we could then see exactly where the course was and could figure out where we should stand to see Trevor run as much as possible. Cross country isn't like track in which you keep running around a track. Instead, it's in a field with a course that's a big loop and unless you are running alongside the runners, you can only really see them in one or two places.

We saw Trevor start the race, then headed across the field to catch him a few more times before heading back to the finish line. It was really fun seeing him and all the others running by. He did a good job and finished right at 13 minutes. I think that's great - that's about an 8.5 minute mile or so...definitely faster than I could run! His last meet is next week in Nixa again, and I plan on going. Good job, Trevor! I'm proud of you!

A Bar Without A High Chair???

We had a few good laughs when out to dinner with some friends recently. We were out with a couple from our church who have two little girls - one is three years old and the other ten months old. Lucy loves playing with Amelie, the three-year-old. In fact, over the last few days she's just started saying, "Amenie" lately. (And no, that wasn't a typo, she's saying AmeNie instead of AmeLie. So cute!)

Anyway, last Friday we planned to go to dinner with Nick and Jamie and the kids. We go out with them a lot and usually find kid-friendly places in which to eat...a place that is somewhat loud and a place that we can get our food quickly because we know our kids won't last very long at a restaurant. We first decided to go to a new restaurant, FD Grillhouse. We looked at their menu online and it looked good and seemed like it might be a kid-friendly place. Ross and I got there a little before 6pm and saw that there were several people outside who were waiting to be seated. I put our name in and they said we'd have about a 30-minute wait. We figured that would not go over well with the kids and that it might be longer than 30 minutes and we'd have to wait longer to get our food, etc. Ross called Nick to tell him what we found and we all agreed that we should go somewhere else.

We ended up eating at The Grotto, a place we frequent. (I usually call it The Grosso because it's not my favorite place to eat, but it is growing on me.) Anyway, this is a kid-friendly place. It's not too fancy, somewhat loud, and we can get our food fairly quickly. We got our order in and got settled at our table and enjoyed our dinner and discussion. Towards the end of dinner, Nick and Jamie told us about their recent quick trip to St. Louis where they went to a Cardinal's baseball game. Before the game, they ate at a sports bar that was near the stadium. Nick and Jamie had eaten at this place years before and remember it having good food. But, since it was a "bar" they wondered if it would be okay for kids to eat there. Nick called ahead to ask this question and was glad he did. He found out that this place did not have a kids' menu and didn't even own a highchair! We had a good laugh about this! And joked about how every place should have a highchair for people like us. (On a side note, they said the restaurant was totally cool and made some kid-size chicken fingers just for them,)

Anyway, we had a good time laughing about the lack of a highchair and a kid's menu...and that they basically took two little kids to a bar.

THINK PINK!

The Wiseman house will be predominantly PINK next February! We found out this week that we are having a little girl! But, the best thing about finding this out was learning that this little baby has a four-chamber heart, everything in tact in the brain, two lungs, two kidneys, two arms, two legs, and ten little fingers and ten little toes.....as far as they can tell a healthy little baby!

We went in for the ultrasound at 8:30am. I woke up around 6am that morning (not my usual 7:15am) because I was excited, nervous, and thinking about how I needed to drink a bunch of water before going in as this ultrasound required a full bladder. I usually have a small glass of orange juice in the morning and that's it until I've been up for a while and then I'll drink water. I was so worried I wouldn't be able to drink enough or I'd drink too much and be completely uncomfortable needing to go to the bathroom during the ultrasound.

It turned out being just fine and we got to see everything we needed during the ultrasound. It was so neat! This is what we saw when the ultrasound began:

We could see the baby just as plain as day, so neat! Going into the day I think I wanted the baby to be a girl, but not too much more than a boy. Since we already have a girl, a boy would have been fun to see what he looked like. Part of me was probably nervous and afraid the baby would be a boy, but my first thought when seeing the image above was that boy or girl didn't matter, I was looking at a sweet little baby that would be just perfect for us. It was very exciting, though, when the ultrasound tech said GIRL! The baby was moving, punching, and kicking a lot and at one point we got a bottom shot of her. With that shot, the tech said that yes definitely looks like a girl!

They gave us several different images of the baby and I have some of them posted below. Enjoy the first pictures of our little Molly Mae Wiseman :)