Saturday, October 5, 2013

A 33% increase


JooYeon and I are well into our fifth year in Athens and continue to love it here. Our house is large enough to host guests, but small enough so that Ellie has a good sense of ownership over each room. :) Ellie's newest development is an extreme need for cleanliness (although not necessarily obvious from the following picture); we're not quite sure where she gets that from. :)



We had a short, but lovely, visit from Heather and Anna on their way back from visiting Grandma Showalter out in Virginia. Bob (Heather's husband) has had to work long hours at the Air Force dental clinic, which means that Heather is getting a lot of one-on-one time with Anna in New Mexico. That was fairly similar to our first year with Ellie, although now I have a few more evenings free for family time.




Even Stevie Wonder paid a rare visit to Athens, OH recently.


Ellie's been in good spirits most of the time lately--and very talkative--although the whole process of molars coming in seemed to be a bit painful.





We continue to be blessed by Grandparent spoilage. Mom revamped Ellie's Birthdaymobile into an Activity Center.




The Korean church continues to be productive, with another baby due this month.


Both Grandma and JooYeon have dug deep into the wells of creativity to come up with lots of cool arts and crafts projects for Ellie.




And our biggest news is that JooYeon is pregnant with our second child. This time around, the first trimester was quite rough (Ellie's pregnancy was uncannily easy). Thankfully, we've progressed into the second and Joo is doing much better most days.

I've been working hard to complete my dissertation in a timely fashion, and the news of the second child kicked me into an even higher gear. I'll be defending my proposal in a week and a half and hope to finish everything up some time next Spring. I've truly enjoyed the journey through graduate school, but it will be nice to have a sense of completion to it all.