Brie rocking out...

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She's enjoying the music until she realizes she's being watched!

Maddy going down a playground slide...

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Surprisingly, Maddy ran right up to the top and didn't need too much encouragement to go down the slide.  I don't think she was expecting the curve though.  She did go to the top again, but wouldn't go down the slide for a second time, even with Mat encouraging her.

Our first week...

here has been interesting. For the first while we were living without any furniture. It's been fantastic to have our couch and chairs to sit on again. It's been since Thursday, but I am still amazed that Mat was able to maneuver our couch basically on his own. I tried to help, but I am a weakling and I think more in his way than helpful. He was somehow able to leverage and maneuver it around to get it up our steps and in through the doorway here.

Anyway, Mat has enjoyed his first week of work. He has all ready been out doing some monitoring of some fish in a river up here which required some canoeing in the evening and the next morning. So he enjoyed some wildlife watching and nice light on the river.

Brie and I are busy searching for another place to rent and taking Maddy for walks around the small town we live in. We are lucky that there is a school nearby so we got to walk on their property. That will change starting tomorrow when spring break is over and the kids are back in school. Maddy's been a trooper with having us take her everywhere, including the bathroom!

We've been on some hikes to some waterfalls and then some woodland hikes that end up out on the beach.  We are enjoying getting to know this area.  On our walks we are seeing some spring wildflowers blooming that all ready bloomed in western North Carolina, like coltsfoot, trilliums, and toothwort.  The landscape is completely different than anywhere we've lived before, it will be interesting to learn it's ecology.    (Side note:  I do have to say there are some similarities to Delta in it's smallness and that we are actually living in a dairy farm area.)

The Move

We weren't quite ready to leave, but it was time to hit the road because according to Mat "a class 5 death storm was heading our way." (I thought he was exaggerating a tad bit, but it turned out to be true.) All our stuff was finally out of the house and Mat's mom and sister were very kind and said that they would come back on Sunday and clean our house. We arranged for someone to come clean the windows, because they really needed some time to clean that we did not have.

My view for the drive.  I was watching to see if the canoe was blowing around or off the car.  Luckily, we didn't have any issues.  Anyway, we broke up the trip to upstate NY into 2 days.  We stayed the night in a lovely Motel 6 somewhere near Harrisburg, PA.  Motel 6 hotels allow for dogs without any issue and so that seems to be where we stay quite frequently.

We arrived in Pulaski in the early afternoon and had some calzones at a local pizza place.  Then we drove up to where we are currently staying.   Mat started work on Monday and the moving truck arrived today.  We now have a couch.  Amazing how good it feels to sit on a chair or couch versus the floor!

6 months of Brie

We celebrated this milestone by taking a break from packing up our house to go to Brie's 6 month appointment last Wednesday.

Her stats:

Head: 17 inches - 75th percentile
Weight: 15 pounds 10 ounces - 50th percentile
Length: 26 1/2 inches - 75th percentile

We have been feeding her a little bit of food.  So far, just bananas, sweet potatoes and avocados.  Mat is feeding her in the below video.

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catching up...

I haven't posted in awhile.  Mat's been busy working and I've been busy figuring out moving details.  It's coming right up and everything is coming together nicely.  I don't want to say that too loud and jinx it though!  A freight company is dropping off a trailer this next Tuesday that we'll fill with our stuff and they will deliver it to our rental in NY.  Then we'll take a couple days to drive our cars, dog and baby up.

It's a beautiful time in Asheville right now with some trees and flowers blooming and the grass is so green from all the spring rain.

Brie had her FIRST food last Wednesday before we went to dinner club.  A bit of mashed up banana.  She really did not seem that excited about it.  But on Sunday night we had some friends over and we had some sweet potato fries that had been cooked on the grill in tinfoil, so they were soft.  She LOVED them and could not get enough.  Last night we fed her some avocado and she LOVED that as well.

Brie's hanging out in the yard waiting for our friends to arrive and supervising Mat's charcoal grill preparations.

Glimpses of Brie's day

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Life is good. Brie is adorable. We are happy.

And it's spring time. A lovely time of year that we will get to experience twice. Right now in Asheville and again in upstate New York.

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