Adventures...

This past weekend was full of adventures, but no pictures. I've got to start remembering to take my camera places. Do forgive me, it's long with no pictures. I won't be offended if you don't read it all....

FYI: The small, blank boxes you will see are where I did try to insert a photo from the web, but it was unsuccessful. Blogger won the battle this evening.

Well, Friday and Saturday were actually unadventurous. Just catching up on sleep, getting out for a walk, and then watching the Aggies lose, but we did have friends over which made it better.

Sunday we decided to go to the Texas State Fair. My mom came with us to enjoy the day. As teachers, we get a free ticket, and since Trey and I never made it last year we decided this was the year! Plus, I really wanted to go to the car show since we're now definitely going to have to purchase a new car in the next few months.

We decided to take DART down there. DART has a nice rail line that has a stop just a few minutes drive from our house, where you take a train downtown, change trains and it drops you off right at the main entrance of the fair. It's $4 for a day pass while parking at the fair is usually around $20, so we thought it would be a great deal and much easier than fighting traffic. So we thought....
Two and a half hours after arriving at the station, we finally arrived at the fair. It turns out that everyone else and their mother had this fine idea to ride the train. While I'm so happy people in Dallas are open to trying mass transit because I'm a huge fan of railways, this experience didn't exactly make me a fan of trying it ever again. The problem really seemed to be that so many people were taking the trains, they were completely overloaded. I had one small breakdown while waiting for the second train after the third train had passed us by. I blame my hormones. Usually, I can talk myself down from getting mad, but sometimes that does not happen right now.
Once we finally arrived, we were so worn out from our 'adventure', we just ate a corny dog, went to the car show, ate a funnel cake, and called it a day.

Adventure #2 involved car seats, strollers, cribs, and other baby paraphernalia! Trey and I both had Monday off work, so we decided to start hitting up the baby stores to do our preliminary research on just how much the upstart on this bambino is going to cost.
Turns out it could cost us a lot.....
Plus, there are so many options out there, it's borderline ridiculous. Do we want the baby bouncer that vibrates and plays music or the one that also includes a mosquito net that zips around the whole contraption so that you can use it outside?!? I told Trey the neighbors were going to chide us because our kid won't be wrapped in mosquito netting when we take it outside. We're so mean!
We realized quickly our homework needed to be scheduling interviews with friends who are already parents to find out what they liked best and why so we can start weeding out the unnecessary items from the store.
The other huge conundrum is strollers and car seats. These things come as a 'travel set' or are sold on their own. The travel set includes a car seat that matches the stroller and they come with a car base. It's a deal since you basically get a package deal, but all of these things are HUGE! This kid may be the smallest member of our family, but its stuff will not be! The car seats were all really long and the strollers included in the travel sets are like mini-tanks. We have the option to buy just the car seat with a simple, non-descript frame stroller that it sits in. There are positives and negatives to this, as well. The positive is that it's smaller and not so tankish, but the negative is you can only use it as long as the kid fits in an infant carrier which is maybe a year if we're lucky. We'd definitely have another stroller purchase in our future if we went that route.

Trey and I joked about how we now understand why moms drive huge cars. It's not because of the kids but all the stuff they need! So.. we are currently on a stroller/ car seat fact finding mission that will be compatible with our lifestyle and the size of vehicle we would like to have.

Trey and I have resigned ourselves to the fact that we'll figure it out, but it may not be cheap.

But, all in all it was fun to actually go look at things! I saw bedding I liked, and so much of the stuff is so cute! It made me even more excited for this change in our lives.

If you made it this far, I'm proud of you! Thanks for sticking with me :)