Early 3rd Trimester

Here are some recently taken 3rd trimester photos. It's hard to know how to pose for these kind of photos, what often happens is I find myself awkwardly standing in front of the camera, asking Cam, "What should I do?" "I feel weird posing."  And he says, "I don't know, ya, do that." So I've included some other models in these pictures to take the pressure off of myself. The models include Kindle (our little French black kitty) and Lion (big U.S. kitty), this way they can share in the 3rd trimester photo shoot as well. By the way, the cats are handling pregnancy pretty well. Although they do have a fascination with climbing up on my belly that I tend to get rather frustrated with. We have heavy cats, so I've made a "no belly rule" they sometimes decide to follow. Most of the time it goes like this: Lion or Che jump on what's rest of my lap, then they try to sneak up on my belly, I say no and push them down...30 seconds later they try again. Repeating this pattern until I get so frustrated Cam has to come over and take them off my lap (while laughing of course, b/c I'm not able to get them off myself due to lack of ab muscles and sitting up power...I'm sure I look like a turtle lying on her back just getting more and more pissed off). 

Slew of Plan Options

The question persists...how and when will Ceph and Stam actually get to France???

Now, although this may seem like a simple enough question, turns out that it's actually quite difficult for us to answer! So instead of giving you one solid answer, I'm going to give you some of the possible answers we are trying to choose from.

Here we go:

Plan 1) We leave tomorrow (hope we get on a flight) - pack like mad people, b/c our stuff is scattered everywhere - leave the laundry room that we were doing construction on, in complete chaos - cats travel with us if it's warm enough (if not warm enough there's a whole different slew of options to choose from, including having my folks send them to us when it's warmer) - no sleep for 3 days - high irritation levels from both Ceph and Stam

Plan 2) Leave on Sunday, Monday, or Tuesday (hope we get on a flight) - finish home renovations (parents happy) - pack - cats travel with us if it's warm enough

Plan 3) We permanently move into my parents house in Chicago, only pretending we ever went to France - redo my parents entire house - Ceph begins getting a beer belly b/c she loves drinking beer after doing construction stuff (so cliché, but true)

Plan 4) We sit on our thumbs and twirl for an entire year, then move back to CO

Plan 5) I run for President, so I can have at least one cool story to tell people when we come back

So those are a taste of the first few options of plans...now for the France part. Once we get to France we need to get to the house somehow.

We could:

a) rent a car (cat friendly option, wallet friendly if traveling with cats--not so much if not traveling with cats)--13 hour drive

b) take the train (less cat friendly option, good option without the cats, bad with the cats)--6-8 hour ride

c) take another plane (more cat friendly, less wallet friendly)--1 hour flight

d) walk from Paris to Castex (it should only take us about 6 months to walk down there...I mean it's totally doable...)

This is just a taste of the many options that we are trying to figure out logistically. In other words...we probably won't know when we will go to France until we arrive in France. Who knew it could be so complicated? What plans sound good to you? Can you think of any better plans? If so, let us know!

Journey Begun...er, Journey on Hold

Hello Family and Friends!




Welcome to Stam and Ceph's travel blog. It's hard to tell where a journey like the one we are on ends and where it begins...but I'm thinking we'll start with our 18 hour car ride through the states of CO, WY, NE, IA and IL with our 2 jungle kitties.







Thanks to modern pharmaceuticals we were able to sedate the cats for the entire trip...it only took 3 doses of sedatives each! Don't worry, that's OK to do...we checked before hand. Effectively, the cats did pretty well on the trip, though we didn't really give them a chance to be bad. It was easy to tell when they were waking up, the meowing would start, their eyes would widen, and the marathon running laps through out the car would begin (somehow the cats always manage to land directly on Cam's nuts every loop they made). Unfortunately, our cats just don't dig traveling. But as many of you know, I have a theory about dealing with things you don't really like...keep trying them until you do like them! It worked for me and tomato soup, so I'm thinking the cats just need more exposure. (That's my theory and I'm sticking to it as long as we have no other choice). :)

Currently we are hanging at my folks house in Naperville, IL. The cats have been getting acquainted with my parents's animals. Che has decided to make sure they all know he's the big cat on campus, while Lion has decided to be Mr. Salty Pants and hiss at everything that walks by. But I think it's just going to take some TIME (key word) for them to get used to a new place and new company surrounding them.

And TIME (key word is key now) is something we will have quite a bit of right now. We just had Cam's visa appt. with the French consulate today, and we didn't even consider the fact that when you apply for a visa you physically give them your passport because the consulate needs to stick the visa to the actual passport. So now the French consulate has Cam's passport and we aren't going anywhere for the moment. They say it will take no less than 2 weeks to process the visa, but they are still searching for the registration-of-our-marriage paperwork that I handed in back in September. Bureaucracy can really be the pits sometimes! So looks like we'll be camping out at my folks for at least another 2 weeks (if not more) before we actually go to France. But it is really nice to hang with my folks, they are so awesome about this whole thing...we couldn't do it without their support.

So the next couple weeks of our journey will entail getting better acquainted with Chicago and Naperville, and catching up on writing, reading, job searches, and each other. And Skyping the hell out of all of you! So get Skype now if you don't have it and look us up...sdwhall@hotmail.com.