1.) Balloon Fiesta is the coolest thing ever! We watched both from our house and at the fairgrounds this year. It was really cold, but a lot of fun to go through looking at the different balloons and how they set them up.
2.) Green Chile is AMAZING. New Mexican Food has a different kind of taste entirely because of it. The salsa is traditionally made with red chilies. The best Green Chile Stew is at Golden Pride and for only $4.50 you get more of it than you can handle. Jalapeños are a commodity you must request at most restaurants even with nachos. On the flip side you get a free sopapilla at the end of your meal in any New Mexican Restaurant! Yummy goodness with honey!
3.) I need to know Spanish here even more than I did in Texas! I am horrible at pronouncing Spanish names and butcher them daily at work. People laugh at my attempts or get mad when I can't understand their accent. I never knew Roybal, Cerillo, and Trujillo were such common last names.
4.) Thunderstorms aren't as big and scary as they are in Texas. I have yet to see a really really bad storm yet whereas in Dallas we'd see one every three weeks in the summer. Lightning storms are more common here. Because you can see so far into the distance we can see lightning storms that may be 50 or 60 miles away. This freaked me out at first because I thought it strange that they weren't coming our way.
5.) It's crazy cold here!!! Lows are normally in the 20s during the winter and highs are in the 30s. My windshield does not like the cold and frosts over like crazy so we've been trying every remedy. We've finally found a chemical spray in the auto isle that works well...only problem is it fogs up the windshield. Good old fashioned scraping is still a necessity. On the flip side at least my car doesn't stall out when it's cold anymore!
6.) There are only 4 roads that lead across the Rio Grande River. This really screws things up at 5 PM when you're headed home from work. And if an accident shuts just one route down be prepared for your 30 min. commute to turn into 1 hour or more.
7.) Lovelace is a hospital you should never ever ever go to unless the other hospitals have burned down or the roads are impassible. Upon my “lovely” ER visit to them (I say “lovely” because it was really 101 of what not to do to a patient!) I heard so many horror stories I'm never going back ever. Presbyterian downtown is a bigger hospital that has much better care.
8.) Roadrunners are the cutest bird ever!!! I wish I could keep one as a pet, but Paul for some reason doesn't think it would be a good idea. They are really fast and somewhat friendly if they suspect you have food.
9.) Hiking is fun! Living in Dallas I never got the opportunity to go hiking, but it's very rewarding to climb up 11,000 feet. This summer we're going to try camping when we go to Colorado Springs.
10.) People expect you to know exactly where they're from! I have people all day long at work who just spout off zip codes with no city attached. I'm getting pretty good at knowing which are Rio Rancho, Albuquerque, and Santa Fe, but the other zip codes I think to myself “I'm not psychic tell me what city you live in!!” It also threw me off at first that the state only has the area code 505 (with a few people being in the new area code 575).
Monday, December 21, 2009
Sunday, December 13, 2009
"We're going to Lovelace baby!"
Isn't it cute? Guess whose ornament this is? :-)
I found a few decorations that may interest some members of the Sadowski family namely Cindy, Jeff, and Paul. LOL I'm not mean I promise!! :-)
Cute pictures right? Gotta love the memories!
This week also began the Christmas party season. I went to our church small group's Christmas party on Friday night without Paul because he had a choir rehearsal. I got home from work with an hour till the party and had planned on making green bean casserole only I couldn't get the can opener to open any cans!! I literally tried everything. I even looked on youtube as to how to use a Oxo manual can opener. Nothing worked. So finally with only 15 min. till the party I gave up and bought brownies. Turns out 90% of the people had the same idea cause we had a lot of desert and no sides. But it was a fun party overall just a lot of sweets! Today we went and bought me a can opener I can use! lol
Then Saturday was filled with putting up Christmas decorations and torturing Paul with Christmas music! We ate pizza with Jeff, July, and Skye while watching Monty Python and the Holy Grail, which is still incredibly stupid. July and I decided you need to be stoned to get the humor! lol
Sunday Paul had a performance at a Methodist Church near downtown for a Christmas choir concert he's been rehearsing for the past few weeks. It was a great performance even if Paul lost his place during the solo (I love you!!!) lol. Afterwards we went to Pappadeaux and ate yummy stuffed crab and crawfish etouffee for a pre-6 month aniversary celebration. The real date is Dec. 20th but we are going to be super busy this week and weekend!
Welcome to Holland
God has a funny way of working on you sometimes. I had a shouting match with God on Friday on my way home from work. Somedays I'm fine, other days I'm a mess. Sometimes random moments set me off and Friday was one of those days. I pretty much told God as I've done several times since October that I was mad that we had to say good-bye to our child, I didn't understand why we had been given this child only to have Sam taken away 9 weeks later, and that I wanted our child back. As shouting matches with God usually go it only made me more angry and upset about it all and didn't resolve anything.
Like I said God has a funny way of working in the areas you don't want him to touch sometimes. I want to be bitter and blame myself for what I did or didn't do because somehow losing Sam was my fault even though we'll never know the reasons why. Despite the fact that I know our child is with God in heaven and I should be happy about that I still am bitter about the memories we will never have with Sam. Every Monday I think about what stage Sam should have been at (16 weeks this Monday) and every Friday I think about how long it has been since we lost Sam (7 weeks this Friday). So many parents get these memories but we don't even have a sonogram. I want to be mad at God and I can't find reasons to rejoice in this. So you can imagine hearing about rejoicing in God always, a very simple message I've heard time and time again, was not what I wanted to hear today. Monseigneur Ron's message today at Mass was exactly that about one of the readings Philippians 4:4-7:
Brothers and sisters: Rejoice in the Lord always. I shall say it again: rejoice! Your kindness should be known to all. The Lord is near. Have no anxiety at all, but in everything,by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving,make your requests known to God. Then the peace of God that surpasses all understanding will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.
I've read Philippians a thousand times and every time I get something new out of it. The interesting thing I got from these verses today was that no where in Paul's writings does he say "If you pray hard enough God will grant your every wish" as if God is some magical deity only set upon making us happy. Instead he reminds us that "...the peace of God that surpasses all understanding will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus." God promises us peace to guard our hearts which is better than what we were originally wanting in the first place. As Paul (my hubby not Paul the apostle lol) pointed out after Mass rejoicing doesn't mean we put on a false sense of happiness rather it means we are giving thanks for the blessings that come from any event. I don't expect to suddenly be done with being sad about saying good-bye to Sam. Rather I firmly believe any event good or bad has blessings God gives us through the experience. We just haven't found God's blessing in being without Sam yet.
The article he referred to in his homily was a Dear Abbey Column about a mother who likened have a child with Down-Syndrome to having planned this wonderful vacation in Italy only to be told you're stuck in Holland. This mother has gone on to do some incredible things to create tolerance and love for mentally and physically handicapped adults and children including working with Sesame Street to portray abilities they do have. Her point, in case you don't want to read the article, is that Holland has its beauty too. Although we may not want what God has given us we are still blessed.
I feel like since October I've been vacationing in Holland instead of Italy and I haven't liked it at all. We had been so excited about Italy and to suddenly be visiting Holland, well, sucks at times. I've been bitter, angry, sad, and everything in between. I see everyone else going to Italy, and while I know some of them have unfortunately been to Holland several times before arriving in Italy, it doesn't lessen the pain. I know Italy is possible someday maybe, but there are no guarantees. Apart of me will always be stuck in Holland with Sam. Children are not just something you up and replace. I want something positive to come out of this though I don't know what yet. I know to find the positive blessing in all of this I need to let God work in my heart about letting go of the bitterness and anger, something I'm not always good at doing.
So here is the article I hope it does as much for you as it did for me. I think we have all be in Holland at one point with events in our lives. God calls us to rejoice in all things including vacationing in a place you did not pay to go to. There are still blessings to be found and if we open ourselves up to letting go of the bitterness and anger God will show them to us. Easier said than done right?
Welcome To Holland
by Emily Perl Kingsley
I am often asked to describe the experience of raising a child with disability - to try to help people who have not shared that unique experience to understand it, to imagine how it would feel. It's like this......
When you're going to have a baby, it's like planning a fabulous vacation trip - to Italy. You buy a bunch of guide books and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum. The Michelangelo David. The gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It's all very exciting.
After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The stewardess comes in and says, "Welcome to Holland."
"Holland?!?" you say. "What do you mean Holland?? I signed up for Italy! I'm supposed to be in Italy. All my life I've dreamed of going to Italy."
But there's been a change in the flight plan. They've landed in Holland and there you must stay. The important thing is that they haven't taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease. It's just a different place.
So you must go out and buy new guide books. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met.
It’s just a different place. It's slower-paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you've been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around.... and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills....and Holland has tulips. Holland even has Rembrandts.
But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy... and they're all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life, you will say "Yes, that's where I was supposed to go. That's what I had planned."
And the pain of that will never, ever, ever, ever go away...because the loss of that dream is a very very significant loss.
But... if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn't get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things ... about Holland.
Like I said God has a funny way of working in the areas you don't want him to touch sometimes. I want to be bitter and blame myself for what I did or didn't do because somehow losing Sam was my fault even though we'll never know the reasons why. Despite the fact that I know our child is with God in heaven and I should be happy about that I still am bitter about the memories we will never have with Sam. Every Monday I think about what stage Sam should have been at (16 weeks this Monday) and every Friday I think about how long it has been since we lost Sam (7 weeks this Friday). So many parents get these memories but we don't even have a sonogram. I want to be mad at God and I can't find reasons to rejoice in this. So you can imagine hearing about rejoicing in God always, a very simple message I've heard time and time again, was not what I wanted to hear today. Monseigneur Ron's message today at Mass was exactly that about one of the readings Philippians 4:4-7:
Brothers and sisters: Rejoice in the Lord always. I shall say it again: rejoice! Your kindness should be known to all. The Lord is near. Have no anxiety at all, but in everything,by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving,make your requests known to God. Then the peace of God that surpasses all understanding will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.
I've read Philippians a thousand times and every time I get something new out of it. The interesting thing I got from these verses today was that no where in Paul's writings does he say "If you pray hard enough God will grant your every wish" as if God is some magical deity only set upon making us happy. Instead he reminds us that "...the peace of God that surpasses all understanding will guard your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus." God promises us peace to guard our hearts which is better than what we were originally wanting in the first place. As Paul (my hubby not Paul the apostle lol) pointed out after Mass rejoicing doesn't mean we put on a false sense of happiness rather it means we are giving thanks for the blessings that come from any event. I don't expect to suddenly be done with being sad about saying good-bye to Sam. Rather I firmly believe any event good or bad has blessings God gives us through the experience. We just haven't found God's blessing in being without Sam yet.
The article he referred to in his homily was a Dear Abbey Column about a mother who likened have a child with Down-Syndrome to having planned this wonderful vacation in Italy only to be told you're stuck in Holland. This mother has gone on to do some incredible things to create tolerance and love for mentally and physically handicapped adults and children including working with Sesame Street to portray abilities they do have. Her point, in case you don't want to read the article, is that Holland has its beauty too. Although we may not want what God has given us we are still blessed.
I feel like since October I've been vacationing in Holland instead of Italy and I haven't liked it at all. We had been so excited about Italy and to suddenly be visiting Holland, well, sucks at times. I've been bitter, angry, sad, and everything in between. I see everyone else going to Italy, and while I know some of them have unfortunately been to Holland several times before arriving in Italy, it doesn't lessen the pain. I know Italy is possible someday maybe, but there are no guarantees. Apart of me will always be stuck in Holland with Sam. Children are not just something you up and replace. I want something positive to come out of this though I don't know what yet. I know to find the positive blessing in all of this I need to let God work in my heart about letting go of the bitterness and anger, something I'm not always good at doing.
So here is the article I hope it does as much for you as it did for me. I think we have all be in Holland at one point with events in our lives. God calls us to rejoice in all things including vacationing in a place you did not pay to go to. There are still blessings to be found and if we open ourselves up to letting go of the bitterness and anger God will show them to us. Easier said than done right?
Welcome To Holland
by Emily Perl Kingsley
I am often asked to describe the experience of raising a child with disability - to try to help people who have not shared that unique experience to understand it, to imagine how it would feel. It's like this......
When you're going to have a baby, it's like planning a fabulous vacation trip - to Italy. You buy a bunch of guide books and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum. The Michelangelo David. The gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It's all very exciting.
After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The stewardess comes in and says, "Welcome to Holland."
"Holland?!?" you say. "What do you mean Holland?? I signed up for Italy! I'm supposed to be in Italy. All my life I've dreamed of going to Italy."
But there's been a change in the flight plan. They've landed in Holland and there you must stay. The important thing is that they haven't taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease. It's just a different place.
So you must go out and buy new guide books. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met.
It’s just a different place. It's slower-paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you've been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around.... and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills....and Holland has tulips. Holland even has Rembrandts.
But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy... and they're all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life, you will say "Yes, that's where I was supposed to go. That's what I had planned."
And the pain of that will never, ever, ever, ever go away...because the loss of that dream is a very very significant loss.
But... if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn't get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things ... about Holland.
Thursday, December 10, 2009
For Mom :-)
So the video above is a 1950s Christmas song comparable to "Grandma Got Ran Over by a Reindeer". I figured since Mom is planning an Italian themed Christmas what better music to go with it?
Plus I had a stinky day yesterday (one girl was sick, phones were busy, and four days of mail to enter) so I needs a pick me up! Enjoy! ;-)
Saturday, December 5, 2009
Thanksgiving fun
Thanksgiving was a lot of fun because Mom was able to come in. Paul and I have joked we've only been married for 5 months and in those five months we've seen my two sisters in September, my Dad in October, my Mom in November, and now in December we'll be in Dallas for Christmas where we'll see everyone. Not that I'm complaining I love seeing family we just find it funny! ;-)
So we had a low key Thanksgiving with turkey, fruit salad, green bean cassarole (I made it! lol), and of course pecan pie! After watching the cute dog show on NBC Mom and I decided to take a nap. Paul, being the mischievous guy he is, took a picture. Revenge is sweet my friend...just wait! Mwahahaha!
Later that day we decided to go out the "volcanoes" (they're not real volcanoes just mounds of dried lava flow) to look out over the city. Paul took some great pictures here's just a few:
Thank you Becca and Katie for the scarves! They have come in very handy considering how crazy cold it is here!!! Yesterday the low was 12 degrees and the high was only 32! :-(
Day two of Mom's visit consisted of going to the Jemez Mountains and Bandiler (indian ruins) since it was a little warmer and sunny.
At a rest stop Paul found a huge tree!!! I know the trees in the Sequoia National Park are way bigger, but it was just cool.
After a picnic lunch at Battleship Rock in the the Jemez Mountains (thanks to the picnic pack mom got us that has everything we need from a bottle opener to plastic plates and utensils!!) we traveled on to Bandiler. The wait to get parking was 30 minutes because everyone had the same idea we did since it was such a nice day, but it wait was worth it! It was so much fun just jumping in and out of the cave ruins.
Day two we don't have any pictures of cause we went up to Santa Fe but it was way too cold to stay outside long! We saw the New Mexico History Museum which was really awesome. We also ate yummy New Mexican food at a restaurant near the capital Paul had been to before. We took the train up to Santa Fe and on the way back the three cars we standing room only for 90 min. which was crazy!
Thanksgiving was such a fun visit with Mom and I'm glad we went everywhere we did even if it was crazy cold in Santa Fe!
So we had a low key Thanksgiving with turkey, fruit salad, green bean cassarole (I made it! lol), and of course pecan pie! After watching the cute dog show on NBC Mom and I decided to take a nap. Paul, being the mischievous guy he is, took a picture. Revenge is sweet my friend...just wait! Mwahahaha!
Later that day we decided to go out the "volcanoes" (they're not real volcanoes just mounds of dried lava flow) to look out over the city. Paul took some great pictures here's just a few:
Day two of Mom's visit consisted of going to the Jemez Mountains and Bandiler (indian ruins) since it was a little warmer and sunny.
At a rest stop Paul found a huge tree!!! I know the trees in the Sequoia National Park are way bigger, but it was just cool.
Day two we don't have any pictures of cause we went up to Santa Fe but it was way too cold to stay outside long! We saw the New Mexico History Museum which was really awesome. We also ate yummy New Mexican food at a restaurant near the capital Paul had been to before. We took the train up to Santa Fe and on the way back the three cars we standing room only for 90 min. which was crazy!
Thanksgiving was such a fun visit with Mom and I'm glad we went everywhere we did even if it was crazy cold in Santa Fe!
New Blog!
So I decided as a way to keep my out-of-town family and friends in the loop a blog might be a good way to do it! I actually originally started this in May before the move, but life got so crazy (and I got lazy!!!) so it was never updated. I promise to make it my resolution to do a better job this time. We'll see!! :-)
The blog is named "Pepe and Pookie's Grand Adventure in the Land of Enchantment" for a reason. Paul's nickname for me is Pookie and I've nicknamed him Pepe because he's kind of love sick like Pepe Le Pew from the cartoons! New Mexico's nickname is the Land of Enchantment (you'll see it on a lot of license plates) so I figured it was a fitting title cause we have some crazy adventures!!
The blog is named "Pepe and Pookie's Grand Adventure in the Land of Enchantment" for a reason. Paul's nickname for me is Pookie and I've nicknamed him Pepe because he's kind of love sick like Pepe Le Pew from the cartoons! New Mexico's nickname is the Land of Enchantment (you'll see it on a lot of license plates) so I figured it was a fitting title cause we have some crazy adventures!!
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