Happy Birthday to My Little Man!

My little guy celebrated his one year birthday yesterday. Since we are still up to our elbows with moving boxes, we kept it very low key--a couple of hats, balloons, and a nice ice cream cake from Cold Stone Creamery (P.S. -- no hat in this picture, because as it turns out, he hates hats).

Happy Birthday, Little Man!

We've learned so much about you since when you came out kicking and screaming a year ago.

Like how you absolutely adore and idolize you sister, even when she is tormenting you or when she does the silliest things...

...or how you will put just about anything and everything in your mouth...

...or what a happy little guy you would become and how much you love to giggle and laugh!

We love you, B! We are so very grateful that you came into our lives a year ago, and look forward to watching your personality develop!

Desperately seeking normal

I traveled back to Little Rock this week to transition my old job to the new guy that they just hired to replace me. Despite the fact that I have not been in the Little Rock office for almost three months, I slipped right back into the environment, joking around with my old colleagues and clients. I walked to the same old bathroom that I had been walking to for years, got my lunch at the same old cafeteria. It was as if I had never left. The only difference, though, is that instead of driving back to Maumelle at the end of the day, I kept going north towards Bentonville back to my new "home." I put this in quotes because this is a place where everything still feels utterly unfamiliar, where we are living in a temporary apartment, literally out of our suitcases and paper boxes.

In the past few months, I've felt like I've been straddling a familiar world and an unfamiliar world. Like, despite the fact that I'm still with my company and understand how to navigate it (familiar world), I'm serving a new client and still trying to understand their MO (unfamiliar world). Or, when I met up with a bunch of girlfriends that I knew from Little Rock (the familiar world), for a girl's weekend in California (the unfamiliar world).

Plus, I've been traveling a lot these past few months, for both work and personal reasons. There have been times, while in midst of my morning grog, I've wondered where the heck I was--is this Atlanta? Michigan? Am I back in Little Rock or Bentonville? It has been very disorienting. There has been no pattern, no routine, no predictability in my life. I've felt off. Like when, in a dream, you find yourself in a big fancy ball and you are wearing nothing but a pair of old underwear. You feel out of sorts and out of place, but  for some reason, no one notices it. You feel off, yet everything is normal.

Which is why I am looking so forward to closing on our home tomorrow, for the movers to come on Friday, and for us to finally move out of our ghetto temporary apartment and settle down. I used to believe that I would have no problem living out of apartments and hotels, but now I'm desperately seeking a bit of normalcy in my life.