A few images from Friday… Wally and I got up and played a game of memory over breakfast.
I had tea out of this cup, one of a set I had Crackpots make for me. I love them.
We made this Thankful Turkey, listing out some things Wally is thankful for.
Both kids fell asleep in my lap.
Posted in Life, Our Family | 2 Comments »
So I bought Genevieve a baby book finally and started filling it in, and there’s the pages on “The World Around Me” with popular movies, TV, songs, musicians, etc.
OK, I could not answer ANY of those things. NONE. I had to Google them. Then felt led to make sure that Miss G knows how geeky her parents are by noting in the margin that we had to look them up. As if, when she’s a teenager and reading through this book, she’s not going to have already figured out what losers her parents are.
Even funnier was that it asked for the price of a postage stamp, because Randy and I have NO IDEA. I found a bunch of old stamps in my mom’s office, none of them current, and when I have to mail a letter, I just slap on two stamps and figure it’s enough.
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how fun is this? The snow yesterday got me in a holiday mood. Momentarily. I dug out the Christmas CDs, but haven’t played them yet, how’s that?
1. Wrapping paper or gift bags? Fabric reusable gift bags, which I typically collect from the recipients before heading home.
2. Real tree or Artificial? Fake all the way. real ones make me sick. (allergies) Plus, we replaced our tree a few years ago with one with the lights built-in. OMG. Love.
3. When do you put up the tree? Sometime after Thanksgiving. We always plan for the weekend after Thanksgiving, but last year, it was the weekend before Christmas before we got it up. Then again, last year kind of sucked, so there is that.
4. When do you take the tree down? After Epiphany. Sometimes well after. Once the holiday is over, I quickly lose my momentum, and am happy to leave the tree up for months.
5. Do you like eggnog? Not so much, but the Soy nog is really good.
6. Favorite gift received as a child? I got a stereo with a CD player when I was in high school. I loved it. Also, I got a pottery wheel (a kid’s one) when I was in 2nd grade and I also loved that. It didn’t make the move with us to Ankeny, and I’ve always been sad about that.
7. Hardest person to buy for? Anybody with a penis.
8. Easiest person to buy for? The little kids.
9. Do you have a nativity scene? Yes. At least two of the characters (Joseph and the angel) have had their porcelain heads glued back on. Before I had kids.
10. Mail or email Christmas cards? I am philosophically against Christmas cards.
11. Worst Christmas gift you ever received? Anything with cats on it from my mother in law.
12. Favorite Christmas Movie? I don’t really have one. I do like It’s a Wonderful Life. Mostly because I like Donna Reed and Jimmy Stewart, plus black and white movies.
13. When do you start shopping for Christmas? After Christmas the year before.
14. Have you ever recycled a Christmas present? No, but I have kept some in the closet for a year (in case we need to whip it out for any reason) and then given it to Goodwill before the next Christmas.
15. Favorite thing to eat at Christmas? Peanut Butter Blossom cookies. And Oreos dipped in almond bark. Actually, I’m a big fan of our Christmas Tree Decorating Snack Buffet, a tradition I brought over from my family. (Well, ok, it was just me and my dad who ever did this, but whatever…) We get summer sausage, cheese, crackers, little smokies, OJ with ginger ale, and eggnog and snack while putting up the tree.
16. Lights on the tree? Yes they are built in.
17. Favorite Christmas song? Mele Kelemaka. Andrews Sisters with Bing. And the Time Life Treasury of Christmas CDs.
18. Travel at Christmas or stay at home? Stay Home. We do Christmas Eve with Randy’s family and stay home by ourselves Christmas Day.
19. Can you name all of Santa’s reindeers? Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donner, Blitzen, Rudolph. I listen to way too much Christmas music.
20. Angel on the tree top or a star? We used to have an angel, but she died. We used to also have a ribbon, but it’s kind of ugly after 10 years of use, and Wally asked to have a star this year, so we’ll probably make a big star.
21. Open the presents Christmas Eve or morning? Morning.
22. Most annoying thing about this time of the year? I hate people when they are shopping for Christmas stuff. They are obnoxious and it’s always crowded and people are so rude and mean and it makes me have a bad mood and then I am rude and mean.
23. What theme or color are you using? I think our theme is “Christmas Stuff We’ve Inherited From Other People That Sarah Doesn’t Absolutely Hate.” It used to be “early marriage,” but after 11 years, I don’t think we can use that one any more.
24. Favorite for Christmas dinner? We always have roast, because it requires little preparation. toss it and some veggies in the crock pot and let it cook all day.
25. What do you want for Christmas this year? The new elephant design GypsyMama wrap. Dharma and Greg to be released in the US.
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Found this in my drafts…
Sunday Scribblings for this week.
What is awesome about me?
- I am crazy productive, multi-tasking girl.
- I can talk at length about nearly any given subject.
- I am a voracious reader, most of the time.
- I am a good writer. (though rusty)
- I am not afraid to learn new things, to try new things.
All of these things have a downside, as well.
Posted in Self-Reflection, Writing | 1 Comment »
So here’s what I still have left to do:
Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Comments »
I thought I’d posted these last week.
There’s more on Flickr, just click any of the photos above.
Posted in Genevieve, Our Family, Wally | 1 Comment »
So we took Miss G in for her newborn hearing screening on Friday. She failed. Left ear passed (but barely), right ear completely failed. We are supposed to take her back in for a rescreen in 2 months. I’m really OK with that. I’m hyperaware of hearing loss issues, what with the genetic hearing loss in my family (which I am not genetically related to, so it’s OK), but even if she did have a hearing concern, we wouldn’t really do anything about it now anyway, so waiting two months to rescreen is fine with me.
I also want to get Wally screened, so I can rule out Hearing Problems. He continues to be difficult to understand, and he has trouble distinguishing between words that sound similar - or even sometimes words that don’t sound all that particularly similar. Sometimes he doesn’t hear us when we’re talking to him. Now, that could be selective hearing, and there are many other possibilities for the other things we’ve noticed, but I’d feel better definitively ruling out hearing problems.
But we can’t go thru the AEA after age 3. We have to go thru the school district. Ahem. I am reluctant to get involved with the school district in any way. So we’re considering just using an audiologist yet this year since we hit our deductible and it’ll be largely paid for. I just don’t know. I’d really rather do it for free…but not if it’s going to cause us trouble, you know?
Posted in Health, Our Family | 8 Comments »
OK, I don’t often post about new things I buy because that seems so shallow, but heck, this whole blog is pretty shallow, so here we go.
1. New shoes. I last bought myself shoes when I was pregnant with Wally. Yes, over five years ago. If you know me, you’ve seen them. They’re the only pair of shoes I own, except for dancing shoes and the odd pair of dress shoes. They’re Keen clogs. I love them. Particularly for the “I have young children” phase of life - there’s no laces. They just slip on. And, amazingly, they work fine even in winter, I’ve never gotten wet socks from them.
But they’re a little worn out - they look like crap and the bottoms are starting to wear through. So I decided to buy myself another pair. Not wanting to be open to new experiences, I wanted another pair EXACTLY like my current pair. Which is an old model and nobody has it. But my friend Kelly, internet stalker and shopper extraordinaire, located a pair for me, which I bought about a month ago.
They’re still in the box, though. For one, there’s no reason to wear fancy clean new shoes when I have only one pair of jeans I can wear these days and mostly I have to wear sweats or sports pants. For two, I’m going to save the new shoes for spring - I’ll wear the old shoes thru the fall and winter when it’s all icky out, and bust out the new ones in the spring.
2. A new phone system for our home. Yay! We had to buy this on Amazon, after spending the last 4 months searching local stores for what we needed, which is apparently in such low demand that nobody carries it. We needed an interference-free cordless phone system with an answering machine with three mailboxes. Not three phone lines - one phone line with a three-mailbox answering machine. At least four phones. Preferably, the ability to check messages from each phone.
Our old system, which was just one phone and the three-mailbox machine, was about five years old. The phone was pretty junky, such that it would only work within a two-foot radius from the base, thus really negating any benefits of being cordless. My cordless office phone stopped working about six months ago, and the only other phone in the house stopped working about four months ago. I’m not sure what sort of bad phone ju-ju we had going there, but it’s really nice to have working phones again!! Plus, I can use them as room monitors - I can monitor any phone’s room from any other phone. This means, I can stop using our baby monitor (also old and starting to malfunction) as my Uber Sophisticated Door Monitoring System and I can just use the phones.
What’s silly is how happy these two things have made me.
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I love Jackie Chan movies. Particularly because they all end with bloopers, and I do love a good blooper. Particularly his bloopers because they’re pretty funny. He is crazy.
Randy watches Rent a lot when he’s in the basement working. I know, not exactly a movie you would ever picture him watching, right? Funny thing - the ENTIRE time he watches it, be gripes about the various things in it he hates. Constantly.
I’m surprised at how much I like boy movies these days. We’re watching a better class of boy movies, I think. Not so much jackie chan and Steven Segal, but more comic book movies. The Matrix was good for something, at least - SO MANY comic book movies. The new Batman movies, X-Men (I wish my mutation let me do cool tricks instead of just being a PITA), Ironman, Spiderman, Transformers, etc. It’s amazing how much I really do like those movies.
But you know a movie I’ve recently watched about 100 times because it’s on STARZ right now and I happen to be up in the middle of the night a lot lately? (Actually, more so when I was still PG.) Mystery, Alaska. Not just a sports-little-guy-against-the-big-guys flick, this movie has a lot of positive portrayals of marriage, and sticking with a marriage, and riding out the tough times and realizing what a good thing you have, etc. And it’s funny.
Posted in Movies / Television | 1 Comment »
Um, I have a wool sweater that I picked up at Goodwill a while back, intending to make it into diaper covers. Instead, it didn’t felt at all (it’s 100% wool, but obviously treated to be washable, thus making it less desireable for covers), and it was just my size, so I adopted it.
And it keeps me warm, of course, but the real benefit is that it doesn’t show breastmilk leaks. I wear a cotton Tshirt under it (and my camisole under that) and the cotton T can get all damp (or dripping) from leaking but I never have to worry about it showing through the sweater, because the sweater does not get wet like cotton does. I love it. Love it love it love it. Everyone with a winter baby needs one.
And, can I just say, i really like spring/summer babies better? I could be outside with Wally so much but with this one, I’m just dreading winter even more than usual. Next time, I’m ordering another warm weather baby.
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