Iowa Visit

This week we made the first of what are sure to be many trips to Iowa to visit my family. This visit was also special because it was the first time that AJ met his great-grandparents on my side, my Grandma and Grandpa Leniton, and it was our chance for AJ to meet his Aunt Nicki and Uncle Brett before they move to Santiago, Chile on July 7th to teach at an international school for two years. We are so excited for them!

The highlights of the trip were Great-Grandpa Leniton's first diaper change EVER (after four kids and eight grandkids), asking my grandma for parenting advice, having our four-generation family picture taken, and seeing my mom, Grandma Julie, with AJ again. I especially love hearing her sing to him. Joe's family recently had all of their old home videos converted to DVD, and my mom was commenting that she was so sad that our family didn't make any home movies when my siblings and I were little. Seeing my mom with a baby recreated some of what that must have been like for us.

Father's Day

We celebrated Father's Day with Joe and his family with a cookout in the Liss family backyard. This was the perfect inaugural Father's Day for Joe, because he often spent Father's Day as a kid doing cookouts in the backyard, so it was all very nostalgic. It was neat to see the three generations of Liss males together, and I snapped a photo to commemorate the day (see attached).

Joe is the kind of guy who does not like extravagant presents that require spending more than $20, so AJ and I went in on a Bob Marley lullabye CD for daddy. Joe was initally pretty pumped about it since he listened to a lot of Bob Marley in high school and college, but our amateur critic's review after one song was that Bob Marley would not be proud to have his name associated with the watered-down elevator music that was on the CD. It definitely involves a xylophone. We should have gone with the traditional socks-and-undershirts present or a tie...