In my last blog post I wrote about Riley's birthday in January. We moved to DC in May. This blog will sum up the very few things that went down between those months. No shocker to anyone, we had lots of cancelled plans in those months and not all that much happened outside of our apartment.
Even with cancelled plans and quarantine we still had a baby at home who kept growing and developing no matter what was going on in the world.
Before we knew the world was coming to an end we did have a fun February. We celebrated our good friend Jonathan's birthday. Since we had been traveling a ton for the previous 6 months we hadn't been able to have our typical game nights with the Shumways. So Jonathan's birthday request was to play Pandemic Legacy with us while eating pizza and pizookies. Such a fun night! The game Pandemic is a typical board game, but Pandemic Legacy is a game that evolves as you play it and can only be played through one time. There are twelve different rounds in the game and we ended up finding a vaccine and calming the pandemic in our game right as the real life pandemic was picking up.
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| For the amount of time we spent with them we sure don't have the pictures to show it. They are our favorite people ever! |
Riley celebrated her second Valentines day. I wasn't quite up to getting cute Vday pics a month postpartum so I had to make up for that this year! Not exactly a professional photo shoot, but I was happy with them!
Riley and I went to put in our vote for the Democratic presidential nominee. It didn't exactly turn out how we wanted, but here's hoping the next election does.
I gave a talk at church in February and I mentioned Benson and Boyd in it. Through that story this lady put together that I was a Messerly and that she knew my parent's. She knew all the old timers in Eureka and said she was able to put all the Medley kids down for a nap once, which is quite the feat.
Riley discovered what all the toilet paper buzz was all about.
Trying out new foods can by scary. It's much more fun when your dad feeds it to you like a baby bird.
I got an email from Zillow telling me there was a house that might fit what I'm looking for, little did I expect that email to lead to use signing a three year contract a few weeks later. We were really worried about doing all this with only a quick FaceTime tour as our walk through, but it just all felt like it was meant to be. Even as we looked at a few other options in a similar area for a similar price, I always came back to this house. We moved forward with faith and we have definitely reaped many blessings! It's nice writing this blog after having lived in this house for a few months. I was definitely trying to be hopeful, but back in March and April I was really nervous about the contract we had signed. There were a few hiccups at first, but we love this house and the location could not be better for us.
Riley got a weird fever one day. It was sad to see her feeling so off, but kind of a little wonderful because she wanted to cuddle all day. She laid down on my chest and just fell asleep. That hasn't happened since she was probably 4 months old. You work so hard to get your child to fall asleep on their own in their crib, but then you end up missing the days when they would so easily fall asleep in your arms.
Our balcony was our salvation during the quarantine. Having that little outside space that was ours saved our sanity day after day.
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| Turns out "Stinky Feet" can be played just as well over FaceTime. |
We became really invested in the lives of these squirrels during quarantine. Did you know squirrels make nests? We watched this squirrel bring cotton ball after cotton ball to prepare it's nest. We think the other squirrel is it's baby and that's why it built the nest.
I had already been searching for fun hobbies to fill my spare time alone at home. With quarantine it felt all the more necessary. I remembered that Naomi Medley had painted an adult paint by number and so I ordered one. It has definitely required A LOT more time than I had thought, but I honestly do enjoy having kind of a mindless way to keep my hands busy, but also relax.
Quarantine is hard on us all...
Easter! Riley is just as confused as everybody as to why the fake grass is a thing.
Riley had a sort of adoptive Grandmother figure in the ward and she gave us these little pancake molds for Easter. They made some seriously giant pancakes, but it felt fun and festive.
After having home church for a few weeks we were encouraged to reach out to our primary class. We taught the Sunbeam class so I sent them all this picture and reminded them that God loved them. It really love this artist, Yongsung Kim, and we have a different one of his painting hanging in our house, but I kind of wish it was this one!
Collecting sticks. The best part of quarantine for me was that Ben's rotation was drastically altered and he ended up doing a virtual type of rotation. That meant even though a lot of the day he was in video calls he was around a lot more than usual. He would take Riley on walks around the apartment to get her out of the house each day and it was wonderful! Those walks are not carefree walks! You had to make sure there was no dog poop, broken glass, cigarette butts, or other miscellaneous items in Riley's path. You also had to watch her like a hawk whenever she had a rock in her hand. That girl LOVES putting stuff in her mouth.
Ben graduated in May! Wooooo! It honestly doesn't really feel like med school is over...I know that it's a big change for Ben, but for me this feels just like the last two years when he started doing rotations in med school. We were going to have family come in town to celebrate, but that didn't end up happening. That was sort of a bummer, but we definitely didn't mind not having to sit through a super long and boring ceremony. I'm just now realizing they were going to have an online graduation thing, but I'm pretty sure we've missed that by now. Ben obviously didn't care too much about it.
While the ending turned out to be a little anticlimactic graduating medical school is a huge task! Ben gave up a lot of free time, weekends, and sleep to accomplish this goal. Lots and lots of sleep. I could NEVER be a med student, it's absolutely the worst, but Ben did it while also being a great husband, Elder's Quorum President, minister, and dad. He's the best!
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| Miss Independent |
On May 4th we broke our quarantine to go to Saul's birthday party. It was just us and the Shumways, we had to get together with them again before we left for forever. :(
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| Why won't you ever ask for directions?? |
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| Our favorite people! They now have a new baby that we hope to meet someday! |
Mother's Day! I don't really remember all that much about Mother's Day, but I'm sure it was a good day. All I remember is wanting to get a cute picture of me and Riley...I think we accomplished that!
We went sofa shopping once stores started opening up. We went through the whole store trying to contain Riley and then on our way out we found this! So then we had to do another lap in the car.
And some videos to enjoy!
