A New Week. A New State.

Today finds us in Longview, Texas just a hop, skip and jump away from the Louisiana border. Thus far I have viewed the driving portion of our journey as merely a means to an end; we needed to get to Atlanta and to do that we had to drive through Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. However, today starts with a feeling of anticipation and excitement as we venture into Louisiana, both because it is a state I have never visited and because we are now over half way to Atlanta.
Thankfully, Mercy slept well the last two nights in complete contrast to the two nights before that when she felt the need to sleep very close to me and nurse all night long. We think that she is going through her six-month growth stage because she seems to look longer every time we change her out of her sleepers into her day clothes. She also had a milestone moment yesterday when she drank milk out of a sippy cup. I know that to most of the world this seems totally anticlimactic, but to those of us who are breastfeeding moms, this is brilliant! She doesn't like bottles but with the new found acceptance of the sippy cup, Mom (that's me) can get a break. As well, we're pretty sure that she's ready for solid food because whenever one of us holds her in our lap while we're eating, she starts sucking on her tongue and reaching out to grab whatever we have. We're trying to put off starting solids but I think we're going to have to break on this one.
We noticed yesterday that as we left Abilene and started heading further east, trees began to appear at first just in little clumps along the road and eventually sprouted into entire forests. It's amazing how Texas seems to be divided right in the middle with the east showing mainly plains and the west bearing quite dense forests. I'm really looking forward to the drive today to see how the landscape changes as we head further east. We've been in the desert so long that I can't wait to see some serious green. Thankfully, the weather has been amazing and we've been able to drive without much thought to preparations for any sort of conditions. Longview, where we spent the night last night, had some fog roll in, but that should burn off by late morning. Hopefully, we'll have some more pictures to put up after today's journey. I pray that we make it as far east as we can before the day's over.