Stam & Ceph's Newest Adventure

So, looking at our last blog entry I see it has been almost an ENTIRE YEAR since we wrote! Somehow time has passed quickly in the slow moving region of Ariège. A lot has happened in our lives since this time last year, so here we go...

I (Steph) am still working in the towns of Muret and St. Gaudens (France), teaching adults English. It's an enjoyable profession. I have had the opportunity to meet many quality people that are excited about learning, which is a refreshing break from teaching Public Speaking where I had to convince my students that learning was important! ;) I recently went to Helsinki, Finland for a work conference/project with the European Union. It was an incredible opportunity to be a part of the progressive development of intercultural communication within the EU. The project consisted of creating a resource website in which teachers and trainers could find teaching tools to further intercultural communication training in the classroom. Exactly my kind of project. :)

Cam's work life has changed quite a bit since last year. He is now an official computer programmer! He's been super busy working away on several projects, and amazing me with his incredible knack for learning anything he sets his mind to! He's having a ball, and it's really been fun to see his progression in his new career path.

Here's a few pics of Helsinki...

The veggie garden is back, bigger than ever, for the summer! Cam decided to enlarge are already very large garden to accomodate for...us two. Whatever the reasoning, we have a VERY big veggie garden this summer. We planted approximately 200 potato plants, a plethora of tomatoes, beets, carrots, spinach, onions, garlic, shallots, cabbage, peppers, pumpkins, cucumbers, artichokes, rhubarb (thanks to Bettye and Diane), rasberries, strawberries, blueberries, zucchini and a couple types of lettuce. Whew! We should be set for a summer filled of weeding and eating delights!

Garden pics:


As you can probably tell from this last photo...my physique has changed quite a bit since last year too. Hmmm, what's the news...

We're having a baby! Cam and I are expecting a little baby (girl) around October 2nd. Preparing for parenthood has been an adventure in and of itself, we can only imagine what the real deal will be like. We are super excited about this new adventure, it makes moving to France seem like nothing. :) So far a challenge has been figuring out how to work our new (used) super stroller that transforms into 3 different things. Talk about confusing. But we've also been trying to enjoy the down time we have by climbing, traveling just a bit, and playing with our super funny kitties. They're going to be in for a big shock when the little one joins the family! :)

More Pregger Photos:
To finish off this blog post, I'm posting a picture of our last construction project. After having finally finished the hardwood floors in the house (great job Camicito), our next project was building a systems board (wooden climbing wall) in the garage. It's a very nice addition to the garage that Cam is super psyched on. I can't use it during pregnancy, but I'm all about it when the little one arrives. She'll have something to train on too! :)

Birthday Girl 09

 

 

  

  

  

Holiday Recap - Tea Party

 

  

  

 

  

  

  

  

  

 

 

Holiday Recap - Wii Sports

 

  

  

  

  

  

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.