Exploration continues

Last weekend we took our first major trip with Jakob. The five hour trip to Storm Lake, Iowa, was met with many ups and downs. We found out a few things about Jakob and ourselves. Like his father, after sitting in the car for an extended period of time, Jakob is done and needs to get out and move around. The further into northern Iowa we went, the less opportunities we had to pull off, and Jakob definitely let us know about it! :) Marc used the new Garmin Jakob gave him for Father's Day and it was great to have it along!

On the way up, Jakob continues to "talk" with us about the things he sees and how he feels. It's pretty amazing that in the mixture of "ma-ma!" and "da-da!" both which are said with authority, he inserts noises and other funny words. After checking in to the luxurious Super 8, (if Jakob had been older, we would have stayed here: www.kingspointeresort.com) we headed to the camp site to visit with Kim's family.

On Saturday, Jakob had the first of two weekend baths at the hotel. After that in the morning, we spent the day hanging out with Kim's family and taking photos at the Lighthouse nearby. We're pretty sure Jakob will one day enjoy some aspect of aviation like flying, BASE jumping, hang gliding or parachuting. Any time the wind picks up and blows on him he totally gets excited. On top of the lighthouse was no exception and he loved it.

On Sunday, we left and headed back home. On the way, we were able to stop off in Omaha, Nebraska, and hang out with our friends Scotte and Annie Hansen. Marc was at Christian Campus House at Northwest with Scotte and they've remained friends ever since. We walked around the Old Market and enjoyed a late lunch at the Spaghetti Works. Great time!

This week, things had been pretty low key. Marc met our friends Matt and Jennifer Brunk at the airport to bring them home after a great trip to Italy and Kim got things ready for a garage sale over at the Heil home. Then last night (Thursday), Jakob stunned us. He let go of our hands as we helped him stand and stood on his own for about 15-20 seconds. He continued to do this throughout the night for our friends who were over for small group.

Again, walking is probably about one week away. We are in alignment with this also because his crawling and exploration skills continue to reach new heights each day. See www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlJbhrdluMo for confirmation.

This weekend we will be celebrating Marc's father's retirement and Marc is off on Monday for a nice day of vacation. Next weekend, Marc is off both Thursday and Friday from work so we'll have a nice four day weekend ahead of us. There will probably be a few movies involved. Oh, and FYI, take a pass on "The Happening." Not great. Medium rental at best.

In a few weeks, after Marc returns from a conference in New Orleans, we will celebrate our 10-year anniversary and Marc has a few things planned that are classified right now. We'll share them later.

The days keep getting better and better! We haven't done so in a while, but thank you all for visiting our blog on a regular basis. Also, those of you who use the RSS feed to your email, we'd like to thank you too.

More soon.