- This month has been simply good. Our days are getting longer. Snow is melting. We’re seeing more sun. It’s been so refreshingly nice. Another super awesome thing about our March is that we have had a ton of visitors and have been loving it! The first week of the month we had my parents and sister visiting. Two days after they left my mother-in-law came to town for a week. We had a short break and now my sister-in-law and her kiddos are up visiting. Booking a trip to Alaska is no small thing and we are so grateful to have visitors!
- One of the main reasons my parents and sister came to visit was to see the Iditarod! The Iditarod is a dog sled race that covers over a thousand miles. Dog sledding and mushing are a traditional cultural sport up here (I hesitate to call it a sport because really it was a way of life for past generations) and the Iditarod was created in part to keep this tradition alive. We were able to see the ceremonial start in downtown Anchorage and we also saw the restart that takes place in Willow. The finish is in Nome and it would be amazing to see (but flights there during that time are expensive and we didn’t have the time). For anyone who is interested, there is a really cool documentary on the Iditarod on Netflix called The Great Alone.
- Ben has been getting a different kind of treatment for his health issues and he’s been responding more positively to it. He’s not out of the water yet, but we have a lot of hope that these treatments will get his blood back to normal.
- Well, the cat’s out of the bag so I might as well tell you guys too: We’re moving back to the lower 48 sometime during the summer! Ben was accepted into a PhD program so we’re heading…back to Flagstaff! Ha! When we moved up to Alaska we wondered if it’d for the long haul, but only a couple months into our stay here, Ben felt the call to continue his schooling and to apply to programs once again. He will be studying Applied Linguistics and we’re grateful he was awarded an assistantship so he’ll be teaching on campus again. As far as moving back goes, I’m really excited! We loved that area and I’ll be grateful to be closer/have more access to family.
- This week is Greta Jean’s birthday and I cannot believe she’s already one! Her first year has flown by and I feel like I didn’t get to soak her up in the same way I was able to with Wendy. It’s harder when you’ve got two kiddos vying for your attention! Oh, but what a sweet, patient, loving little baby she is! She cracks us up all the time and gives us the best snuggles. When I hold her, she always hooks her arm around mine (I’m pretty sure so that everyone knows we are BFFs:). When Wendy has done something unfair, Greta will hurry over to me with a little whine but as soon as I acknowledge the injustice, Greta will go right back to playing (she just wants to be understood!). And we recently made the connection that while she has accurately been calling me Mama, she has been calling Ben “Baba” or “Bob” for short. Gosh, we love that little cheeseball 🙂
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