Greetings from Pittsburgh!

I am very aware of the fact that I am not a very good blogger and you all have quite possibly given up on me, so if for no other reason than keeping track of our own life, here is a Williams family update.

we had a rough month of illness that began the day after my last post, but did manage to sell our house again! After six weeks of no viable prospective buyers we decided to attempt to sell it on our own. I created a little website, sent an email out to our network in Roanoke and had a buyer the very next morning! This all happened a week before our scheduled move!

With the support of many dear friends (who I already miss dearly) we were able to get our house packed up, and hired a moving company to do the really hard work. we arrived in pittsburgh on wednesday night, July 8th and began the challenging process of settling into a new home and city with a toddler and a budding toddler in the mix. Add to this another round of sickness - stomach viruses this time, and we feel a little bit in over our heads. As of now, grimes and susannah are the only victims, and we pray that Evan and I can stay healthy because this is a particularly nasty one.

The little bit of exploring we have done has been fantastic - we love our location (very diverse neighborhood of squirrel hill) have great access to two huge parks with more playgrounds than we could ever play on, pools, skating rinks, and miles and miles of hiking trails. we already feel like this spot is a great fit - not to mention we can walk EVERYWHERE! Evan and I were at the grocery store today picking up sick person food and there were stollers pouring into the grocery store!

we are hoping to have a few days of "at home" vacation once everyone recovers and before I start working (more on that later) and grimes starts work and school. we will hopefully take lots of pictures and show you more of this neat city. for now, here are two recent (kind of) pictures of the kids.

long time no talk

Sorry for the long silence. life has been pretty busy. we are in the process of moving to pittsburgh. the kids are great. here are a few pictures from the last few months. we got a new computer and it took a while to figure out how to upload our pictures.

we were scheduled to move july 1st, but found out tonight that our buyers defualted on the contract so we don't know what that means.

we'll keep you posted. . .

January

susannah loves her brother. sometimes a little more than he appreciates. this is just one example of her struggling to give Evan his space - she climbed into the tub with him!

Evan's first hike in the backpack.

DC Trip highlights

make your own pizza at generous george's

this is the first time susannah actually requested that her picture be taken and attemted her biggest smile. notice all the pizza she ate - as we were driving into DC she started complaining that her "belly button" hurt. then she wanted to go home and use the bathroom, meaning she thought she was going to throw up. I guess it was good pizza.

grimes and I decided to take our chances and head into the city. the kids had a great time visiting the national tree and a number of the monuments at night. susannah insisted we run the whole way too!

Christmas

here are some shots from around christmas time - a little late, as usual : )