Bird face.

Henry is a really cute baby. Below you will find photographic evidence of that fact.
This is the face I get to see whenever a camera is out. He just can't help smiling (most of the time).

He's so good to let us play around. He's mischievous and curious about EVERYTHING, and he's so good natured.

He's such a cute little girl. These faces could melt the heart of the worst criminal. He melts the hearts of strangers all day every day here in New York.

Last but not least, this is his new smile. I'm sort of sad to see the open mouth smile less and less, but this "trying not to smile" smile is a pretty good alternative. We call it "the bird face".


Cute video of Henry eating rice cereal. Sorry you have to hear it. You can put it on mute if you want, same effect.

Extremely

Couple facts about me before I get all crazy on you.

1. I've been buying newspapers and trying to save money using coupons since probably January of 2008.
2. I've been largely unsuccessful at saving money by using coupons. Though, for your information, I am much better at saving money in general than I was in 2009.
3. I started following Freebies2Deals in January when I saw the lady who writes the blog on one of my daytime television favorites.
4. I've been much better at using coupons at Target (who knew Target had their own coupons?!) with manufacture coupons trying to save $$ since I found out you could use multiples like that.
5. The TV show Extreme Couponing has sort of taken over my life (and Josh's) and we've been mildly obsessed with trying to get deals like they do on that show, though it's pretty much like a once in a year/stroke of luck to get purchases of $1,200 down to less than $20.00.
6. I live in New York City
7. Brooklyn is awesome because nobody here coupons, so there are no crazy Utah County rules and there are grocery stores here that simply double coupons because THEY DO!
8. Also, on Thursdays, inserts with coupons go out to all the apartments and houses around here and probably 20% of people pick them up.

Alright, so based on these facts, I decided to start couponing. It's brilliant because there is a grocery store that doubles coupons approximately 2 miles away (which approximates to about 20 mi in Utah but whatever) and they double any coupons less than $1.00. That means, my $0.50 coupons double to $1.00, my $0.75 to $1.50 and my $0.99 to $1.98. It's madness! Madness I want to get into. So combine my awesome doubling grocery store with the dozens of inserts left on the street I have been collecting and using coupons like a lunatic. It's pretty great.

Now I know you're thinking I shouldn't be stealing people's inserts. Let the record show, I do wait 24 hours after they've been distributed before I gather them up, giving all men and women working crazy work shifts the opportunity to gather their insert. AND I am polite enough not to clear out a whole street. If I happen to find a pile of 5 or 6, I usually leave 1 or 2. Usually I end up with 8-13 sets of coupons to cut. It's cool.

So, here is my coupon crazy picture. Granted, these were purchased in multiple purchases at different stores and I got "rewards" (catalinas is their actual name) for future purchases that I added back in to what I spent to get these totals. But still, it's cool. So here we go.

Total retail price: 244.22 Price I paid: 30.53

Includes 1 bottle Excedrin Migraine, 3 Dove deodorants, 2 Dove face/body wash, 22 3-Musketeer candy bars, 12 bars of Hershey's chocolate, 14 boxes of cereal, 4 boxes of Fiber One brownies (we already opened the 4th, sorry), 1 jar French's Mustard, 2 bags Wacky Mac, 2 boxes Ronzoni pasta, 8 bottles Method cleaner, 2 travel sized Degree deodorant, 2 Suave deodorant, and 1 5-pack Zyrtec.

I saved 87% on these items. Pretty impressive, if I must say so. Ya'll know about my shopping addiction and now I have a way to channel that energy into a bit-healthier-but-definitely-much-safer-on-my-bank-account way of shopping. So I'm only mildly crazy. And, for all you naysayers saying I'm a hoarder etc etc I AM NOT YET. When I start buying 100 bottles of hot sauce and couscous because it's free (or like, 1 cent), you can call me out.

Ramble ramble

Alright, I don't blog very well. Or very much. Sorry. I think it all started when we got a Mac for our main house computer. I luuuurve mac's, but the whole uploading pictures and resizing and saving them to a different folder and then trying to find them again somewhere is a bit more than I've tried to figure out. So now, pictures take longer to upload to the blog and they're huge and un-resized and I don't edit them and take forever between uploading pics from my camera because those take forever because iphoto is so slow. Does anyone have a good idea on how to make my life easier? I would and should switch over to Picasa, but I feel like iPhoto should be better because it's an apple product. Sigh.

We are in New York still. Let me explain the situation we're in. It's going to sound really negative and such, but my disclaimer is this: we are having an amazing time in New York. I love it and in no way regret the decision to move out here. On the contrary, this is the best summer I've ever had. It's magical.

Here we go.

Josh was offered a job/internship with the New York Health Department on April 22nd. His contact, V, wanted him to start on June 1st, then she changed her mind and said May 15th. That was a bit soon for us, so we set about scrambling to get us out there sooner and negotiated a May 23rd start date. Assuming the May 23rd start date was set, we sublet our apartment and packed up things and moved a 2 week vacation to Seattle to a 9 day, 2 weeks later trip, and quit/took leave from our Utah jobs on May 12 for vacation. Came home May 16th and finished packing our place and packed our car to get out of town. All the while, Josh was emailing back and forth with V, the lady who offered him the internship with her department, trying to figure out details for the project so he could get it to count for his Masters' program internship. She didn't have many details because the project was still "getting approved" but he was in the budget so please still come.

May 17th Josh emailed to get details about starting in 5 days. V responded that it didn't look like he was going to be able to start then, because HR was still working on approving a project. Then that project didn't get approved, so she submitted a second "mystery" project.

Meanwhile, we packed up and moved to our Brooklyn apartment. It's tiny, but oh so fun. We have 1 bedroom with a teensy closet, a kitchen, and a bathroom.

Back to V and the internship. 2 weeks and multiple emails of "hurry and fill this out, it's the last thing before you start" later Josh got a "processing" interview where they made him fill out tons of paper work and all kinds of documentation that he moved to New York (did they think we were commuting from Utah?) and he was a student and what was his position (no idea?) blah blah blah and he left with, "now we'll just get this processed and your department will contact you to negotiate a start date. WHAT?!

Now, 14 days later, still waiting for a start date. It is extremely frustrating. We really want the experience to work out, because it's a wonderful experience for Josh to have on his med school application, and Josh really likes homeless research, and it'd be fantastic to do here in the big apple. It's just getting ridiculous that we're waiting around for this, and we're approaching a month until our leave date because our housing contract here ends August 10th. Last Friday was supposed to be our "if Josh doesn't have a start date for July 1st by this day then we're leaving" day, but we want it to work out so badly that we're extending it to this Friday. So, folks, we can give you an answer on whether we're returning early to Utah or not by next Tuesday. Yikes.

So, after this disastrously long blog, let me state again that this has been a fantastic summer. We've done 80% of the list of things we really wanted to do in NYC, and we're planning on doing the remaining 20% when my friend, Amanda, comes to visit next week. I started couponing. We've eaten authentic NY Cheesecake and had delicious Caribbean chicken and waffles and ridden the subways everywhere and had an amazing time. We are so blessed that we have the savings to get out here and do everything we want to, so that even if the internship doesn't work out, the epic summer vacation in New York City did.

Boston: 2 trips in 2 weeks

2nd day in New York we decided to get outta town and get our minds of the fact that Josh's job wasn't starting yet (with no start date in sight, whole other story) and we were in a strange tiny little place and out of our comfort zones. So we went to our little home away from home, Boston, to visit Nat. Unfortunately, I lost the camera in the unpacking the night before, so we went without a camera. Luckily, Nat had hers and she blogged all about it here. We watched TV and enjoyed air conditioning, and a variety of good eats. We also got to visit Natalie's work which is, quite possibly, the coolest work place ever. The building they lease office space from stocks food/drinks on every one of the 20 floors with different/unique things on every one of them. There is a "make your own fountain drink" on the 4th floor where you mix your own flavors with soda water, there's an ice cream machine on another floor, etc. It's fantastic. We left with our purses a little heavier.

June 8-11th we went back to see Natalie before her trek to the HOLY LAND because we wanted to! It's great having nothing but time, because we get to do whatever we want whenever we want! Luckily, this time I did have my camera so we took plenty of pictures. We also got to cross of plenty destinations on our list of things we want to do this summer.



I love history. I feel like I could've really enjoyed majoring in it. Maybe in 10 years? Also, love this picture below. It looks like we should be on a Hollister bag, no? Maybe a Hollister wanna-be for families.

And lastly, I just figured out how to do this on Picasa. Now you will see these collages everywhere this summer.

The Arrival

Technically, our arrival in New York took place on Day 4 of vacation/road trip, but it was no longer a road trip since we were arriving "home". We crossed bridges and paid tolls and didn't see Manhattan on our first day. It was a unique experience arriving here for the first time. Here are the reasons why.

1. Exiting the freeway, the streets were immediately filled with Orthodox Jews. I can't recall ever seeing one in my life, so it was a crazy experience. Now, when I say filled, I mean like, flooding the streets and overflowing the playgrounds (little baby orthodox Jews), cars filled, kind of full. It was insane. I want to know how they get their sideburns like that.
2. There is an invisible line in Brooklyn where there cease to be Orthodox Jews.
   
3. The other side of that line is all black people. More blacks than I've ever seen in my entire life. In our neighborhood we're probably outnumbered 20:1. It was shocking.Street cleaning and the parking situation is crazy.
   

So anyway, we found a parking spot (six feet away from fire hydrant, not a good idea) and unloaded our stuff to the ground shaking music of a double parked car in front of our building at 8 PM on a Wednesday night. Pretty fun. But we made it.

Henry found a bed in the closet and Josh and I unpacked as much as we could for the evening. Then we went to bed awaiting the day ahead of us.

Day 4: Hershey, PA

Day 4 of our trip started uneventful in Somerset, PA. We slept in and had a delicious free breakfast at the hotel. I had a fresh made waffle from on of those machines they have in the Cannon center and it was FANTASTIC.

After breakfast we got on the road, destination: Hershey, PA. I wanted to a) see Penn State med school (where josh interviewed last go round and is applying again) aka Hershey medical school, b) see where Hershey chocolate is made and c) smell for myself if the city really smells like chocolate. It does. Pictures below.


These two are pictures we took on the one free ride that described how Hershey chocolate got its' start.



Henry after we left. He loved it.
After Hershey where it was a million degrees hot, next stop was Philadelphia where there were two food destinations, as seen on Man vs. Food. We had an authentic philly cheese steak from Tony Luke's and finished off at The Franklin Fountain with a gigantic sundae called the Mt. Vesuvius. The best part, besides the hot fudge on that sundae, was that our last destination was in historic downtown Philly, so we got to see some awesome old buildings. It was Josh's first real experience with old Americana history, and my first religious experience with it since I just finished american history. We loved it.

Day 3: Trek to NYC: Chicago

Chicago is the city of Joshua's birth. He's never been there before. It just so happened, that our hotel in Davenport was maybe 3 hours out of Chicago, and we didn't get outta town until 8 that morning. So, we decided we had to hit up Josh's homeland and see Wrigley field so we could cross that off the bucket list.

About 30 minutes before me arrived Henry started letting us know he was hungry. By the time we got to Wrigley, he wasn't very happy. I pumped so we could get food into him as fast as possible to shorten the crying time. Unfortunately, Henry also had a masterful blow out down the right side of his leg, in his car seat. Josh walked around feeding Henry (yes you read that right) because there wasn't any where to sit with him without getting mess everywhere. It was a wonderfully memorable experience, changing Henry's diaper in the parking lot of Wrigley field. Then we got these pictures so it was all worth it.

Sooo...I'm not sure the neighborhoods surrounding Wrigley field count as "Chicago", but we reeeeeally loved it there. The streets were clean, the people were nice, and the weather was gorgeous. I want to go to there for forever. We really got to see the streets all nice and such on our drive to Gino's East. Gino's East is Terri and Randy (Josh's parents) favorite pizzeria from the days when they lived in Chicago. In fact, Josh had actually eaten the pizza before because you have buy it frozen and his parents have done that before on very special occasions. SO we went there, me with not very high expectations because the pizza sauce is on top (weird) and it's deep dish (yuck) and the crust is not normal (double weird). Let me tell you now.

I WAS WRONG.
It is so good.
I can't stop thinking about the gooey cheesiness.
Yum I would go back tomorrow if there were a Gino's East within a day drive.




So, that's that. It was delish. Also funny because there were 3 families in the restaurant (including us), and three of us had babies around the 4-6 month range. Pretty unique.

Day 2: Trek to NYC

Day two we left Cheyenne, WY at 4:45 am, stopped across the street for some gas and food, then got on the road at 4:55. We stopped once or twice but in general tried to hurry up and get some road under our belts cause we only did 8 hours the day before. Nebraska was underwhelming and boring. This is the only picture I have that may be in Nebraska. Henry got sorta impatient and this was how we kept him entertained. Notice the toy hanging off the end of the umbrella? It saved Josh's shoulder.

Near the end of the day we made a stop in Iowa. The people there are a classy type, classy enough that Henry was overdressed in just a onesie. It was INSANELY WINDY there. It was also very sunny and actually warm, where it was freezing cold in Wyoming. Henry got a tiny little sunburn. It was so sad.





This whole time I decided we'd stop at Choice hotels, because they had a special for buy 2 nights get a third free. Bummer part is, you have to book online or by calling the phone number hotline, so every day I called the line when we were about 2 hours away from a destination. Long back story for this bit. I called and made a reservation in Davenport, IA when we were about 3 hours away. Then an hour away from destination, it started raining about the hardest I've ever seen. THEN it became absolutely the craziest storm I've ever seen. Hail and pouring rain, and suuuuuper fast winds. I didn't think we were going to get to Davenport. The storm let up enough for us to get to the hotel and in our room, swim a little bit, then get Henry to bed. Then the storm started up again and we watched the torrential rains from our window. The sky was orange. I was working on 4 hours of sleep from the night before, and a 2 hour nap in the car, so I was exhausted and fell asleep and slept through the tornado sirens that woke Josh up about 2 AM. Obviously we didn't take it very seriously though because we kept sleeping, and a tornado missed us by 20ish miles or something. Later we found out this was the same storm that produced the tornado that killed 80+ people in Kansas. That was our near brush with death, but we were thrilled to be done with the most boring part of the trip. Also, I was exhausted and not in the mood for waking up early, so we slept in and made plans to leave Iowa around 7.

Day 3 tomorrow!

Day 1 of the trek to NYC

Alright alright. So the original plan to get outta Provo was to wake up and leave at 3 AM. But, with packing/cleaning until 11:30 the night before, I was not prepared to wake up and leave that early. Instead, we set our alarms (5 of them) for 5:45, woke up on time, and got out the door by 6:45. First stop was Grandma's for a surprise goodbye (not really a surprise) and to pick up a paycheck. It was sad, but both Grandma and Mom couldn't wait to get us out the door on the way.





The drive into Wyoming I had 2 sleeping boys. We made our first pit stop and got these gorgeous pictures of Henry with the blue skies. I couldn't get over how close the clouds were in Wyoming! It felt like if we were in a tall building we could've touched the clouds. It was gorgeous. I wouldn't mind living in Wyoming someday.

The first day we really only drove for 8 hours. We landed in Cheyenne, WY for the night. Henry got his own bed (awesome) during awake time, and slept in his pack and play in the bathroom during the night. We ordered Chinese takeout for dinner. FYI-If you ever have the option to get Ginger Chicken, DON'T DO IT. We're still trying to get the taste out of memory.





Best part about being in the car 12+ hours a day? Swimming. We took Henry for the first time in his life. He was freaked out at first, but by the end, really liked it. He didn't even mind when water got in his eyes because of his vigorous arm pumping/inadvertant water splashing.

So that night we tried to get to bed early but really just went to sleep around 10 and set our alarms for 4 am.

TO BE CONTINUED......

5 Months and month 4 in retrospect

Hurray for more than one reason. #1- Henry is 5 months old! Though this is happy, it's also sad. My favorite baby is growing up. But he's adorable.
Hurray #2- My new card reader came! So look forward to a series of new blogs coming up.

Month 4 was great. I'm pretty late in the game for really getting a feel for Henry's personality, because I feel like it really started to show this month. Rex is a very happy baby. He's quick to smile when he sees me or Josh, and he's great about smiling back at strangers. Everyone finds him so charming, and though I think it has a lot to do with his adorable big bald head and chubby legs, I think it's the smile back that gets 'em. Henry isn't really a laugher which is sorta sad, but at the same time, I love his smile so much. And it's kind of fun to really work to get a laugh out of him. He started laughing when I make silly faces. It is ADORABLE. Henry is extra ticklish in the armpits and hips, so pretend gnawing on those ensure a baby giggle.

Henry likes to stand. It's near impossible to get him to sit like a real boy and he screams when we prop him up with pillows. He either likes to lay or stand. He also started liking tummy time. He is SO CLOSE to rolling over from his back to his stomach, and every once in awhile rolls from tummy to back. He's content to just hang out for tummy time though and look at whoever's feet are closest. He also reaches and reaches for things. He's fascinated by cups and glasses and definitely knows what to do whenever one is near his mouth. He tries to grab food and silverware from out of our hands. We actually decided to let him try some rice cereal! It was definitely more liquid than cereal, but he liked it and ate it all up. Pictures below.

Now that's all for month 4. I'm looking forward to month 5 and hoping Henry gets used to this humid heat here. For now, he'll be sleeping in his tiny bedroom (closet floor) in our 1 bedroom 3rd floor walk up in Brooklyn, NY. Cheers!

I FORGOT! Henry also started grabbing his feet. All the time. He grabs them, pulls off his socks, sucks on his toes, and it is one of the cutest things I've ever seen. I shouldn't deny you pictures of that.



ps. In case you're worried about poor H's gums, we got tiny baby spoons today. So he doesn't have to eat off giant sharp metal ones.