Surviving the winter

It's been tough to find time to blog lately, specially since I joined facebook... Kind of difficult to keep both sites updated, specially during the winter when not much is happening. I just uploaded a few new pictures to Picasa: http://picasaweb.google.com/macandchen

Some of them were from our last couple of days in Altea, the rest were taken the last couple of weeks capturing some major milestones:

- Marc has started to eat cereal, I can't say he's enjoying it much, but hey, he'll get there.


- Marc is trying to walk, yep, he's only 4 months and a half, but he's already decided that he can skip the sitting up and crawling stages. Therefore we bought a doorway jumper for him which he really digs, good stuff!

What else? Last week we were missing Spanish food so much that we placed an order in latienda.com. We got the shipment yesterday: Jamon Iberico, Lomo, Chorizo and Paella rice. It was awesome to try them out yesterday for dinner and remember the good times we spent back home in Altea.

We miss everybody tremendously! Love!

Vacation is over...

All right, it happened again.... after half and hour typing, $tupid blogger ate my post... Talking about frustration....

Anyways, just wanted to let everybody know that we made it back safe and almost on-time to Chicago, those of you reading the news about Madrid-Barajas airport know that this is already quite an accomplishment!

Vacation was GREAT, one of the best trips ever, what did we do, you may wonder. Next to nothing! We barely left Altea in the whole time we were in Spain, we just focused on relaxing and enjoying time with family and friends, that simple!

Now we are back in Chicago and missing family and friends every single second, missing the long walks by the sea, missing the awesome home cooked food, missing the long conversations over good coffee.

Marc and Lily had a great time and so did my family. Having Marc around illuminated the whole Christmas! They all love him and he got many many presents from family, friends, neighbors... he was a tiny little celebrity, everybody wanted to meet him, play with him...

May the new year bring only the best to all you guys! We love you and miss you a lot!

We will be writing individual posts for the highlights of the trip over the next few days.

Cheers from sunny Altea

Life is good, but even better when the sun shines, weather is warm and you can enjoy long walks and runs by the Mediterraneum sea... These are the times when I wonder what the heck I´m doing in Chicago... Oh well, other than a long cold and snowy winter, Chicago has many perks to offer, so we won´t complain much.

I don´t have much time to write and we don´t have internet connection at home, I´m actually writting from my Ana and Jose´s plac (my sister and brother in law). Things have been great since we arrived, so much love and attention. Everybody wanted to meet Marc and Lily, they also were happy to see me, but only after Marc and Lily :)

Feels great to be surrounded by family and friends!

The trip was quite an adventure, it almost deserves its own posting... 6 hours delay in O´Hare due to snow, change of tickets in Madrid for our Madrid-Alicante flight, etc, etc... The best thing is that Marc slept really good in the plane and behaved great all the time, he seems to be quite a traveller!!!!!!!

Enough for today, time to go for dinner with friends now, it´s tough to be us :P

Love to all and best wishes for Christmas!

14 weeks stats (Marc is a big boy)

Difficult to find time to blog and stuff to blog about lately, we've been preparing our trip, reading what other folks went through during their first flight with a baby and stuff like that.

This week Marc had his scheduled checkup with his pediatrician, due to our upcoming trip to Spain she also pushed her 4 month vaccination forward a few weeks. Marc did pretty good with the injections all things considered, it still breaks your heart when you see his reaction, we were playing with him while the nurse was getting everything ready and he was pretty relaxed, then when it was needle time he made this surprised what-the-bleep-did-just-happen and started crying...

Here come his current stats:

- weight: 15 lbs 1 oz (almost 7 kg)
- height: 25 inches (63.5 cm)

in both cases he's in the 75 percentile, certainly a big boy.

Marc is 3 months old...

I won't repeat again how fast time passes by... but the truth is Marc is already 3 months old.

He has grown a lot over the last few weeks, next week we'll have his next pediatrician appointment and are starting to wonder what his weight and length will be... his 3 months old clothes are starting to be too short for him. During his next visit he'll get more shots, his doctor suggested to get those prior to our flight to Spain, probably a good idea, I usually get sick after that trip (how ironic that I almost never get a cold in Chicago, but almost always I get one while back home in sunny Altea)... I certainly hope Marc doesn't...

Anyways, 3 months indeed, it's now starting to be almost impossible to believe that Marc has not been always around. Everybody was right, yes, life changes once you have a baby. It did not change in the way that some mentioned though:

- we still don't feel the urge to move to the suburbs.
- we still don't feel that a condo does not provide enough space, even though right now even Lily's sister is living with us.
- we don't feel that we are giving away everything, we still go out, we still go shopping, we still meet friends often, we still take care of ourselves...

Life changes indeed, priorities change, responsibility increases and you worry more about the future than you used to before, but so far is a change for the better. We both are in our 30s, we've both enjoyed our years of going out often, and we both feel that it was probably time to move onto the new phase in life.

Other than that, not much to report.... Thanksgiving was nice, lots of food and good time spent with good people. Day after was nice too as it gave Lily the opportunity to have a break and go shopping with Danna, while I took Marc to meet Lucho and Betty (friends from Argentina who now live in Austin, TX) who were in Chicago for a few days.

The best thing though is that the countdown continues barely 1 and 1/2 weeks until our Christmas trip, we can barely wait.....