Searching my roots

Yesterday I went to my Dad's house for a barbecue and he mentioned Google'ing our last name, Opbroek. So I was sitting around today playing on my laptop and tried it. I found a lot of websites that were in Dutch. Some were small family websites with photos and I could see a family resemblence in some of them. So I started looking up other family names and tried Pistulka which is my paternal Grandmother's maiden name. I found a website that not only was dedicated to the Pistulka family and tracing the family tree, but I got to see scans of the manifests from the ship they were on and then from New York City. I found out that my great grandfather Anton Pistulka was between 1.5 and 2.5 months old when he arrived her from Bohemia. I also learned that of the 7 children in his family 5 married Opbroek's. How weird. Anyways I have frittered hours away checking out all these things and I am going to have to email the person who runs the website and give information on myself and my siblings/cousins so we can add another generation to the family tree. So you might try looking up your family names. You never know what you will find.

Here is the link to a picture of my Grandma http://www.pistulka.com/index_files/Page344.htm

We applied for our passports

Scott and I applied for our passports. Unfortunately we are not going anywhere exotic or exiting, like Australia or China. We are just going on a cruise to Mexico this August for our 15th wedding anniversary. It now takes 10 weeks to process the passport application so I am glad that we did not put it off. Now that I have it in process though I have grand travel plans, in my head at least. I dream of going all over to places I have never seen. Ahhhh, someday. At the very least we will travel to Rome in another 10 years. Scott and I both want to see Rome over any other place and so we opened a money market account and we have automatic deposits from our checks. So I told Scott that if we don't make it to Rome before our 25th wedding anniversary then we will use the MM account for a trip to Rome. Of course passports are only good for 10 years so we would have to renew it for the trip to Rome. Definitley need to make use of the passport again before that.

A positive attitude!

We had an IEP (individual education plan) meeting at Riley's school this morning. She is starting speech therapy to help her pronounce the letters s and z properly. Since both Scott and I attended speech for the same thing I guess the odds were stacked against her. The three of us met first thing this morning with the speech therapist and Riley's teacher. Riley was so excited she was literally bouncing in her seat. During her evaluation Mrs. Fitzgerald, the speech therapist, told her they would have tons of fun together playing games and reading books. Well, she surely convinced Riley because she can hardly wait. After they went over Riley's education plan Mrs. Fitzgerald asked how we felt about it and Riley yelled "super". LOL! Mrs. Fitzgerald also mentioned that Riley's other speech problem seems to be caused by an "air intake problem". She said that it's very rare and she has never dealt with that before. It can be a medical problem so we have to take her to the doctor and determine if that is the cause. I felt like an idiot that it never occured to me, but her words are being broken up because she is pausing to get air. I had thought she just needed to slow down a bit. So we will be taking her to the doctor and proceeding from there. At the end of the conference we had to sign a ton of papers including one stating that we were working on Riley graduating from high school. Talk about long term goals. Riley also had to sign all of the papers which made her feel very important.