It's a boy!

Rebecca went in for the ultrasound yesterday and we found out that we are expecting another boy. Julia was a little disappointed at first (she really wanted a little sister), but now she says she is very excited about having another brother. Once our home internet is back to working we will post some more details and pictures.

Phone Troubles

We got our first phone bill from Verizon. It was just over $200 for what we thought was a $15.95/month plan. Yes we did have to pay for the first two months on this bill and some set up fees, but even still with the Verizon usage fee and the NY state taxes our monthly bill would be over $50/month. Again, we thought we were only going to have to pay $15.95/month!!! So this past weekend we called to cancel our phone line and planned to do our phone service through MagicJack, an internet phone company (only $39 for a whole year with local and long distance calls included). So we have a new phone number. If you call our old number there should be a voice message with our new number.

Unfortunately our friends at Verizon decided to turn our internet off when they disconnected our phone line. Given that MagicJack only works through the internet, we have been without a phone for the past couple of days. Verizon did apologize and promised to have our internet back working by November 4th.

Taughannok Falls State Park

Last Monday Joshua's clinic was closed so we got him for an extra day! We decided to enjoy the splendors of the area, going to Taughannok Falls State Park, a pretty site about an hour and a half away near Ithaca.

On the drive there

At the beginning of the hike to the falls

On the flats

You can't really tell by the pictures, but the Fall leaves are really stunning

It was only a 3/4 mile hike, but it wore us out!

At the base of the falls

Two handsome men at the lookout point above the falls

It was really cold!

One of the Finger Lakes

New York so far

Well, we are officially New York state residents now. It began with an extremely long overnight plane trip from Washington to Syracuse, where we were thankfully picked up by some kind church members and went straight to a glamorous Motel 6 to wait out the couple of days for our apartment to be ready.

In these pictures Julia and Ethan seem pretty happy for having spent so much time in four different airports and on three different planes (11+ hours). Real troopers. Julia did get sick once and her stuffed doggie ended up having to take a bath in an airport sink. Hopefully we will never have to go through an ordeal like that again.

We got really lucky on the apartment, as we selected it online and weren’t sure of what to expect. We are on the main level, so no stairs, and the apartment has two large bedrooms with substantial closet space. The neighborhood seems same and we are less than a mile from our Church. It only took us a day to move all of our stuff in from storage, but about a month to do all of the unpacking.

Our glamorous pink couch and the rest of our secondhand furniture made us feel right at home in our new apartment!

Here is the view from our back porch

We also met a new little critter friend outside our door the other day, and Julia decided to dress up in her bat costume to make him feel more at home.

There’s a great farmer’s market in Syracuse and we’ve gone to it almost every Saturday we’ve been here. Joshua usually has to keep me in check—I tend to go crazy with the fresh produce. You can't tell from this picture but it is really a huge market. There are about six or seven of these rows and probably over 100 vendors.

In preparation for one of the apple festivals we made apple pancakes. They turned out really good. We always thought we were spoiled growing up with good apples in Washington. The apples here in New York though are great. We've definitely been following the "apple a day" adage.

It has been raining here a lot. On top of that this last week we have all been battling colds. So, we have been spending a lot of days entertaining ourselves indoors.

Dancing and Singing