Lots of changes

So there have been lots of schedule changes lately.  The 7 week TDY that Mark was supposed to leave on soon has been cancelled (thank GOD!!).  They’ll go sometime later, but at least they’ll be home for Thanksgiving. 

Mark’s mom is coming out Oct 6-13th and Mark was supposed to leave while she was here, but now that he’s not, his mom and I are very happy campers.  It was not at all fun having Mark and my parents here, and then have Mark leave and then my parents leave.  That wasn’t my idea of fun to go from all to nothing so quickly, so I wasn’t looking forward to the same thing happening again, but I had gotten my mind around the fact that it probably would happen and was mentally preparing myself.  I was trying to focus on the fact that my MIL was willing to drop everything and come to Italy to help me out for a week, which I am really thankful for.  Now she’ll get to see both of her sons while she’s here and Abbie, which I’m fairly certain we are all pretty excited about.  Mark’s older brother, Ryan, has been studying at the Vatican for over a year and hasn’t seen the rest of the family since last July, so I know Donna is excited to see him too.  And I’m really excited for her to see Abbie.  I feel as though it’s important for her to see Abbie as much as possible.  I’m not sure why, but I feel like it’s different for Donna than it is for other family members.  She was the only one to cry when we told her we were pregnant and Abbie is her first grandchild.  And I feel like Abbie is kind of the girl she never had since she had 3 boys.  So I’m not sure who’s more excited for her to spend time with Abbie, me or Donna.  Okay, probably Donna.  =)  But I’m pretty excited about it too!

Because Mark isn’t going on a TDY now, our original plan of going to Ireland is back on!!  Mark was smart enough to not cancel the leave he’d requested, so we’re headed to Ireland Nov 11-20!  I have our car reserved and booked our flights already.  We’re flying on Ryanair, which is a super cheap airline that flies throughout Europe.  Our actual tickets were only like 106Euros, round trip, for all 3 of us, but then when we got done paying for luggage and priority boarding I think it ended up being about 242Euros.  Still not too bad.  And our car rental is through Avis and was like $120 with taxes and everything for all 9 days.  Now if I can just find good deals on places to stay we’ll be doing good!

The iPhone’s that Mark got us for my birthday got here and we’re having lots of fun playing with them.  We have to wait for the unlock code to be produced for the software version our phones have on them, but we can still use them when we’re around wireless connections.  They’re pretty neat and we’ve had a lot of fun figuring out all the capabilities they have.  I can’t wait to actually use it as my phone!  We’ve been using Pandora radio on it which has been WONDERFUL!  I’ve missed American music.  Now we can plug it in to our Bose iPod stereo and we have TONS of awesome radio stations.  They even have this one called the toddler station, and it plays lots of good songs!!  I think I like it more than Abbie does!  It plays lots of Disney music, soft rock that’s kid appropriate, musical music (like from The Sound of Music), etc.  I love it!  Right now I’m listening to country since Italians don’t have any country radio stations.